A research group on E-Commerce Negotiations has been established at the department of computer science. The objective of this research group is two-fold: to implement a Hybrid Negotiation System on already proposed Hybrid Negotiation Model (opus.ub.uni-hohenheim.de/volltexte/2009/334/pdf/DissertRehman.pdf) and then to perform experiments on human-agent negotiations using the implemented system. In order to implement the Hybrid System, the focus of research will be on communication and decision making in E-commerce Negotiations. Group will also work on the software architectural issues of the hybrid system.

Negotiation is a process by which two or more parties discuss issues of common but competing interests with an aim of reaching a joint decision. In recent years, Electronic Negotiations have become popular due to the advancement of the Internet and electronic commerce technologies. Such negotiations remove the obstacles of space and time between negotiators, carry less transaction costs, and can take place more frequently than face-to-face negotiations. Electronic business negotiations are enabled by different electronic negotiation models: automated negotiation models for software agents and negotiation support models for human negotiators. A hybrid negotiation model for bilateral multi-issue negotiations between a human negotiator and a negotiation agent has been proposed.

To achieve the objectives of this research group, MS students are invited to become an active member of this group to work in the area of Distributed Artificial Intelligence and Semantic Web. Hybrid Negotiation System will be implemented using latest technologies such as Intelligent Software Agents and Semantic Web technology (XML, OWL for ontology design etc.). Semantic Web will be the technology particularly for enabling communication between a human and an agent. As a part of this group you will have chance to design and implement Software Agents, to work on semantic web technology for managing and enabling electronic communication, and on related topics. Natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) will be two focus areas for enabling human-agent communication.