Chopra

Usenix OSDI'23 Poster

I am a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University. Through my work on multiagent systems, my interests and contributions span from AI to programming and software engineering and from services to networks and distributed systems.

My work addresses the engineering of sociotechnical systems, that is, systems involving interactions between autonomous principals. It stems from the question: What are good software representations for autonomy? It is founded in the insight: Good representations support decision making by users by capturing the meaning of their interactions.

Meaning encompasses notions such as protocols, norms, accountability, business contracts, and ethics. Meaning is vital to the governance of sociotechnical systems.

I refer to the collection of problems, ideas, and methods in my work as Interaction-Oriented Software Engineering. Technically, IOSE is a methodology for constructing loosely-coupled, decentralized, multiagent systems. Among IOSE's contributions are languages for specifying interactions between agents and programming models for implementing agents as endpoints representing the parties.

IOSE is the world's first software approach for engineering meaning-based decentralized applications. For an introduction to IOSE, see this tutorial we gave at PLDI'20 (tutorial notes).

Communication meaning is all I have pursued in my career and it has been an incredibly rewarding intellectual pursuit.

Contact me, if IOSE intrigues you, and especially if you have a strong technical background and want to do a Master's or PhD dissertation on connected themes.

[1] Aditya K. Khadse, Samuel H. Christie V, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Protocol-based engineering of microservices. In Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Engineering Multiagent Systems (EMAS), volume 14378 of LNCS, pages 61-77, London, May 2023. Springer. [ bib | .pdf ]
[2] Amit K. Chopra and Samuel H. Christie V. Communication meaning: Foundations and directions for systems research. In Proceedings of the 22st International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pages 1-6, London, May 2023. IFAAMAS. [ bib | .pdf ]
[3] Samuel H. Christie V, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Kiko: Programming agents to enact interaction protocols. In Proceedings of the 22st International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pages 1-10, London, May 2023. IFAAMAS. [ bib | .pdf ]
[4] Amit K. Chopra, Samuel H. Christie V, and Munindar P. Singh. Multiagent foundations for distributed systems: A vision. In Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2021), volume 13190 of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, pages 62-71, London, May 2022. Springer. [ bib | DOI | .pdf ]
[5] Samuel H. Christie V, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Mandrake: Multiagent systems as a basis for programming fault-tolerant decentralized applications. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (JAAMAS), 36(1):1-30, April 2022. [ bib | DOI | .pdf ]
[6] Amit K. Chopra. Interaction-oriented software engineering: Programming abstractions for autonomy and decentralization. AI Communications, 35(4):381-391, 2022. [ bib | .pdf ]
[7] Samuel H. Christie V, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Pippi: Practical protocol instantiation. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pages 281-289, Auckland, 2022. IFAAMAS. [ bib | .pdf ]
[8] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Accountability as a foundation for requirements in sociotechnical systems. IEEE Internet Computing, 25(6):33-41, September 2021. [ bib | DOI | .pdf ]
[9] Samuel H. Christie V, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Deserv: Decentralized serverless computing. In Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), pages 51-60, Virtual, September 2021. IEEE Computer Society. [ bib | DOI | .pdf ]
[10] Samuel H. Christie V, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Hercule: Representing and reasoning about norms as a foundation for declarative contracts over blockchain. IEEE Internet Computing, 25(4):67-75, July 2021. [ bib | DOI | .pdf ]
[11] Amit K. Chopra, Samuel H. Christie V, and Munindar P. Singh. Interaction-oriented programming: An application semantics approach for engineering decentralized applications. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of DistributedComputing (PODC), pages 575-576, Online, July 2021. ACM. [ bib | DOI | .pdf ]
[12] Samuel H. Christie V, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Mandrake: Multiagent systems as a basis for programming fault-tolerant decentralized applications. In Pre-proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS), pages 1-18, London, May 2021. [ bib | http ]
[13] Samuel H. Christie V, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Bungie: Improving fault tolerance via extensible application-level protocols. IEEE Computer, 2021. in press. [ bib | .pdf ]
[14] Amit K. Chopra, Samuel H. Christie V, and Munindar P. Singh. An evaluation of communication protocol languages for engineering multiagent systems. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 69:1351-1393, 2020. [ bib | .pdf ]
[15] Samuel H. Christie V, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Multiagent protocol refinement. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS). IFAAMAS, 2020. 258-266. [ bib | .pdf ]
[16] Samuel H. Christie V, Daria Smirnova, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Protocols over Things: A decentralized programming model for the Internet of Things. IEEE Computer, 53(12):60-68, 2020. [ bib | .pdf ]
[17] Munindar P. Singh and Amit K. Chopra. Clouseau: Generating communication protocols from commitments. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 7244-7252, New York, 2020. AAAI Press. [ bib | .pdf ]
[18] Munindar P. Singh and Amit K. Chopra. Computational governance and violable contracts for blockchain applications. IEEE Computer, pages 53-62, January 2020. Supplementary material: pdfs/violable-supplementary.pdf. [ bib | .pdf ]
[19] Munindar P. Singh and Amit K. Chopra. Requirements engineering as science in the small. In Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results, pages 45-48, Montréal, 2019. ACM. [ bib | .pdf ]
[20] Akin Günay, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Supple: Multiagent communication protocols with causal types. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pages 781-789, Montreal, 2019. IFAAMAS. [ bib | .pdf ]
[21] Samuel H. Christie V, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Compositional correctness for multiagent interactions. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pages 1159-1167, São Paolo, July 2018. IFAAMAS. [ bib | .pdf ]
[22] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Sociotechnical systems and ethics in the large. In Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society, pages 48-53, New Orleans, 2018. [ bib | .pdf ]
[23] Akin Günay and Amit K. Chopra. Stellar: A programming model for developing protocol-compliant agents. In Preproceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems, volume 11375 of LNCS, pages 117-136, Stockholm, 2018. Springer. [ bib | .pdf ]
[24] Georgi M. Kanchev, Pradeep K. Murukannaiah, and Amit K. Chopra. Crowd-informed goal models. In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Requirements Engineering, pages 47-53. IEEE, 2018. [ bib | .pdf ]
[25] Thomas C. King, Akin Günay, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Tosca: Operationalizing commitment over information protocols. In Proceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 1-9, Melbourne, August 2017. [ bib | .pdf ]
[26] Munindar P. Singh and Amit K. Chopra. The internet of things and multiagent systems: Decentralized intelligence in distributed computing. In Proceedings of the 37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICCS), pages 1738-1747, Atlanta, June 2017. Blue Sky Track. [ bib | .pdf ]
[27] Amit K. Chopra, Samuel H. Christie V, and Munindar P. Singh. Splee: A declarative information-based language for multiagent interaction protocols. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pages 1054-1063, São Paolo, May 2017. IFAAMAS. [ bib | .pdf ]
[28] Georgi M. Kanchev, Pradeep K. Murukannaiah, Amit K. Chopra, and Pete Sawyer. Canary: Extracting requirements-related information from online discussions. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Requirements Engineering, pages 31-40, Lisbon, 2017. IEEE. [ bib | .pdf ]
[29] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Custard: Computing norm states over information stores. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pages 1096-1105. IFAAMAS, May 2016. [ bib | .pdf ]
[30] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. From social machines to social protocols: Software engineering foundations for sociotechnical systems. In Proceedings of the 25th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016), pages 903-914, Montreal, 2016. [ bib | .pdf ]
[31] Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Composing and verifying commitment-based multiagent protocols. In Proceedings of the 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), pages 10-17, Buenos Aires, July 2015. [ bib | .pdf ]
[32] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Generalized commitment alignment. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pages 453-461. IFAAMAS, May 2015. [ bib | .pdf ]
[33] Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Social contexts and social pragmatics. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), Istanbul, May 2015. In press. [ bib | .pdf ]
[34] Georgi M. Kanchev and Amit K. Chopra. Social media through the requirements lens: A case study of google maps. In Proceedings of 1st International Workshop on Crowd-Based Requirements Engineering, pages 7-12, Ottawa, 2015. IEEE. [ bib | .pdf ]
[35] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Cupid: Commitments in relational algebra. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 2052-2059, January 2015. [ bib | .pdf ]
[36] Amit K. Chopra, Fabiano Dalpiaz, Fatma Basak Aydemir, Paolo Giorgini, John Mylopoulos, and Munindar P. Singh. Protos: Foundations for engineering innovative sociotechnical systems. In Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, pages 53-62, 2014. [ bib | .pdf ]
[37] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. The thing itself speaks: Accountability as a foundation for requirements in sociotechnical systems. In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Law, page 22. IEEE, 2014. Full paper accepted but we published only an extended abstract. Full paper available here. [ bib | .pdf ]
[38] Elda Paja, Amit K. Chopra, and Paolo Giorgini. Trust-based specification of sociotechnical systems. Data and Knowledge Engineering, 87:339-353, September 2013. [ bib | .pdf ]
[39] Amit K. Chopra, Alexander Artikis, Jamal Bentahar, Marco Colombetti, Frank Dignum, Nicoletta Fornara, Andrew J. I. Jones, Munindar P. Singh, and Pinar Yolum. Research directions in agent commmunication. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technologies, 4(2):20:1-20:23, 2013. [ bib | .pdf ]
[40] Pablo Noriega, Amit K. Chopra, Nicoletta Fornara, Henrique Lopes Cardoso, and Munindar P. Singh. Regulated MAS: Social perspective. In Normative Multi-Agent Systems, volume 4 of Dagstuhl Follow-Ups, pages 93-133. Schloss Dagstuhl, 2013. [ bib | .pdf ]
[41] Munindar P. Singh, Matthew Arrott, Tina Balke, Amit K. Chopra, Rob Christiaanse, Stephen Cranefield, Frank Dignum, Davide Eynard, Emilia Farcas, Nicoletta Fornara, Fabien Gandon, Guido Governatori, Hoa Khanh Dam, Joris Hulstijn, Ingolf Krüger, Ho-Pun Lam, Michael Meisinger, Pablo Noriega, Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu, Kartik Tadanki, Harko Verhagen, and Serena Villata. The uses of norms. In Normative Multi-Agent Systems, volume 4 of Dagstuhl Follow-Ups, pages 191-229. Schloss Dagstuhl, 2013. [ bib | .pdf ]
[42] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Interaction-oriented software engineering: Concepts and principles. arXiv:1211.4123 [cs.SE], November 2012. [ bib | http ]
[43] Amit K. Chopra. The meaning of requirements and adaptation. arXiv:1209.1551v1 [cs.SE], 2012. [ bib | http ]
[44] Amit K. Chopra. True peer review. arXiv:1209.2807v1 [cs.DL], 2012. [ bib | http ]
[45] Elisa Marengo, Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Amit K. Chopra, Viviana Patti, and Munindar P. Singh. Commitment with regulations: Reasoning about safety and control in REGULA. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pages 467-474, 2011. [ bib | .pdf ]
[46] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Specifying and applying commitment-based business patterns. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, pages 475-482, 2011. [ bib | .pdf ]
[47] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. The evolution of interoperability. In Proceedings of 9th International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies, volume 7169 of LNCS, pages 90-94. Springer, 2011. [ bib | .pdf ]
[48] Amit K. Chopra, Elda Paja, and Paolo Giorgini. Socio-Technical trust: An architectural approach. In Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER), volume 6998 of LNCS, pages 104-117. Springer, 2011. [ bib | .pdf ]
[49] Amit K. Chopra. Requirements-driven adaptation: Compliance, context, uncertainty, and systems. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Requirements at Runtime, pages 32-36. IEEE, 2011. [ bib | .pdf ]
[50] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Colaba: Collaborative design of cross-organizational business processes. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Systems, Services, and Systems of Systems, pages 36-43. IEEE, 2011. [ bib | .pdf ]
[51] Amit K. Chopra. Social computing: Principles, platforms, and applications. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Social Computing, pages 26-29. IEEE, 2011. [ bib | .pdf ]
[52] Amit K. Chopra and Paolo Giorgini. Requirements engineering for social applications. In Proceedings of the 5th International i* Workshop, volume 766 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org, 2011. 138-143. [ bib | .pdf ]
[53] Amit K. Chopra, Nir Oren, Sanjay Modgil, Nirmit Desai, Simon Miles, Michael Luck, and Munindar P. Singh. Analyzing contract robustness through a model of commitments. In Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, volume 6788 of LNCS, pages 17-36. Springer, 2010. Invited paper. [ bib | .pdf ]
[54] Amit K. Chopra, Fabiano Dalpiaz, Paolo Giorgini, and John Mylopoulos. Reasoning about agents and protocols via goals and commitments. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pages 457-464, 2010. [ bib | .pdf ]
[55] Amit K. Chopra, Fabiano Dalpiaz, Paolo Giorgini, and John Mylopoulos. Modeling and reasoning about service-oriented applications via goals and commitments. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE), volume 6051 of LNCS, pages 113-128. Springer, 2010. [ bib | .pdf ]
[56] Fabiano Dalpiaz, Amit K. Chopra, Paolo Giorgini, and John Mylopoulos. Adaptation in open systems: Giving interaction its rightful place. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, volume 6412 of LNCS, pages 31-45. Springer, 2010. [ bib | .pdf ]
[57] Raian Ali, Amit K. Chopra, Fabiano Dalpiaz, Paolo Giorgini, John Mylopoulos, and Vitor E. Silva Souza. The evolution of Tropos: Contexts, commitments and adaptivity. In In Proceedings of the 4th International iStar Workshop, volume 586 of CEUR-WS, pages 15-19, 2010. [ bib | .pdf ]
[58] Nirmit Desai, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Amoeba: A methodology for modeling and evolution of cross-organizational business processes. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 19(2):6:1-6:45, 2009. [ bib | .pdf ]
[59] Munindar P. Singh, Amit K. Chopra, and Nirmit Desai. Commitment-based service-oriented architecture. IEEE Computer, 42(11):72-79, 2009. [ bib | .pdf ]
[60] Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Amit K. Chopra, Nirmit Desai, Viviana Patti, and Munindar P. Singh. Choice, interoperability, and conformance in interaction protocols and service choreographies. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pages 843-850, Budapest, 2009. IFAAMAS. [ bib | .pdf ]
[61] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Multiagent commitment alignment. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pages 937-944. IFAAMAS, 2009. [ bib | .pdf ]
[62] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Elements of a business-level architecture for multiagent systems. In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Programming Multi-Agent Systems, volume 5919 of LNCS, pages 15-30. Springer, 2009. [ bib | .pdf ]
[63] Munindar P. Singh and Amit K. Chopra. Correctness properties for multiagent systems. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies, volume 5948 of LNCS, pages 192-207. Springer, 2009. [ bib | .pdf ]
[64] Munindar P. Singh and Amit K. Chopra. Programming multiagent systems without programming agents. In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Programming Multiagent Systems, (ProMAS 2009), pages 1-14, 2009. invited paper. [ bib | .pdf ]
[65] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Constitutive interoperability. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pages 797-804, 2008. [ bib | .pdf ]
[66] Amit K. Chopra. Commitment alignment: Semantics, Patterns, and Decision Procedures for Distributed Computing. PhD thesis, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 2008. [ bib | .pdf ]
[67] Nirmit Desai, Amit K. Chopra, Matthew Arrott, Bill Specht, and Munindar P. Singh. Engineering foreign exchange processes via commitment protocols. In Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, pages 514-521, Los Alamitos, 2007. IEEE Computer Society Press. [ bib | .pdf ]
[68] Nirmit Desai, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Representing and reasoning about commitments in business processes. In Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 1328-1333, 2007. [ bib | .pdf ]
[69] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Interoperation in protocol enactment. In 5th International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies, volume 4897 of LNCS, pages 36-49. Springer, 2007. [ bib | .pdf ]
[70] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Choice and interoperation in protocol enactment. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, page 29, 2007. [ bib ]
[71] Nirmit Desai, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Business process adaptations via protocols. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, pages 103-110, 2006. [ bib | .pdf ]
[72] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Producing compliant interactions: Conformance, coverage, and interoperability. In 4th International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies, volume 4327 of LNCS, pages 1-15. Springer, 2006. [ bib | .pdf ]
[73] Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Contextualizing commitment protocols. In Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pages 1345-1352, 2006. [ bib | .pdf ]
[74] Nirmit Desai, Ashok U. Mallya, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Interaction protocols as design abstractions for business processes. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 31(12):1015-1027, December 2005. [ bib | .pdf ]
[75] Nirmit Desai, Ashok U. Mallya, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. OWL-P: A methodology for business process development. In 7th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Information Systems, volume 3529 of LNCS, pages 79-94. Springer, 2005. [ bib | .pdf ]
[76] Munindar P. Singh, Amit K. Chopra, Nirmit Desai, and Ashok U. Mallya. Protocols for processes: Programming in the large for open systems. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 39(12):73-83, December 2004. [ bib | .pdf ]
[77] Amit Chopra and Munindar P. Singh. Nonmonotonic commitment machines. In Frank Dignum, editor, Proceedings of the 2003 AAMAS Workshop on Agent Communication Languages, volume 2922 of LNAI, pages 183-200. Springer, 2003. [ bib | .pdf ]