Designing Modular Architectures in the Framework AKIRA

AKIRA is an open source framework designed for parallel, asynchronous
and distributed computation, on the basis of some general architectural
principles which are inspired by modular organization in biological
systems. We introduce the motivation behind its design, the components
of the framework and some examples of use: 1) a case study in a simple
number domain, in which its capabilities such as context sensitiveness
are highlighted; 2) an architecture for visual search tasks, in which
a goal oriented behavior emerges from the cooperation and competition
of many feature-specific modules, organized hierarchically; 3) a schemabased
agent architecture, inspired by an ethological model of the praying
mantis, including drives, schemas, routines and realizing visual and motor
behavior in a realistic simulated environment.