I am a research student in the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

The current title of my research is Chained Negotiation for Distributed Notification Services. Basically I am looking at adding negotiation abilities to a distributed notification service. Notification services provide asynchronous communication between various components of a distributed system. There are many examples of such systems, such as Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), IBM MQSeries and Java Message Service (JMS). To the best of our knowledge, none of these support negotiation over Quality of Service (QoS).

Negotiating over Quality of Service allows consumers to supply preferences over how they want information delivered, while still allowing the content provider to specify their preferences. Automated negotiation enables a mutually acceptable set of Quality of Service values to be found. We have designed and implemented a negotiation engine intended for use with a notification service. This is currently being further developed to support chained negotiation

In conventional negotiation (which we call direct negotiation), the client and supplier exchange proposals in order to acquire something. In chained negotiation, one or more intermediaries (middlemen) lie between the client and supplier. These middlemen can provide value-added services on top of an existing service, or can make using an existing service more efficient for a group of clients. In the case of a notification service, this enables notifications to be redistributed amongst suppliers with the same subscriptions rather than transmitting redundant data.