What A.K.I.R.A. is
A.K.I.R.A. — Artificial Knowledge Interface for Reasoning Applications — is an open-source development environment for building virtual worlds populated by agents that exhibit high-level behaviour. Conceived as an AI research framework, AKIRA aims to bring under one unified architecture the many aspects that classical AI usually tackles in isolation: knowledge representation, reasoning, perception, action, embodied cognition.
Architecture
At the core of AKIRA is a C++ multithreaded runtime that executes agents as parallel instances coordinated by a server. Around the core:
- AKIRA Schema Language — a MACRO/script-based language to define new agents without dropping down to C++
- AKIRA XML Transmission Protocol — a message protocol between the server and agents / external clients
- Two integrated soft-computing engines: Fuzzy Logic and Fuzzy Cognitive Maps
- An original cognitive model, the result of the collaboration with ISTC-CNR in Rome (Castelfranchi / Pezzulo group)
The goal was to give researchers a tool where they could model an agent with its own degree of intelligence and its own computational requirements, and have it interact with the world through the AKIRA server.
Recognitions and scientific context
- 2nd prize in its category at the Open Source Contest (2005)
- Adopted as a reference framework in the European MindRACES project (FP6, 2004–2007)
- Experimental base for several international publications (LNAI, IJCAI, SAB, EPIROB, Multiagent and Grid Systems)
noze’s role
AKIRA was co-designed and developed by noze together with Giovanni Pezzulo (ISTC-CNR), with Gianguglielmo Calvi and Stefano Noferi on the noze side. The project was one of the first Italian attempts to build a schema-based cognitive architecture as Open Source, and laid the methodological groundwork for much of what noze did later on agents, anticipatory systems and distributed reasoning.
License
AKIRA is distributed under the Akira Open Source License v1.0 — a copyleft license drafted by noze itself in 2003, modeled after the Mozilla / Apple Public Source License: source code always available, modifications must ship under the same license, patent-retaliation clause, ability to combine the product with code released under other OSI-compatible Open Source licenses. The licensor is noze S.r.l.
Project status
The historical site akira-project.org is still online as an archive. The last public release is 0.9.1. The framework is no longer in active development, but it remains a reference for anyone wanting to study a schema-based cognitive architecture written in C++.