Rong N. Chang | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Agentic Service-Oriented Computing: A Manifesto for the Next Frontier of Service-Oriented Computing

The rapid emergence of LLM-powered autonomous and semi-autonomous agents is reshaping software systems from static, request-response components into goal-directed, adaptive, and tool-using computational actors. As these agents move from isolated cognitive prototypes into complex distributed workflows, they confront challenges that the Service-Oriented Computing community has studied for more than two decades: composition, interoperability, quality of service, lifecycle management, governance, security, and trust. Yet much of today's agentic AI ecosystem is developing these foundations ad hoc, without the engineering rigour required for dependable enterprise and societal deployment. This paper introduces Agentic Service-Oriented Computing (ASOC) as a new research and practice area concerned with engineering agents as services, orchestrating services through autonomous and semi-autonomous agents, and governing ecosystems of agents and services under constraints of trust, cybersecurity, compliance, performance, and accountability. We articulate six foundational principles of ASOC (harness-ability, composability, lifecycle engineering, trustworthiness by design, goal-driven orchestration, and observability/accountability) and organise a five-dimensional research agenda spanning: (i) agentic services foundations and lifecycle engineering; (ii) composition, orchestration, and interoperability; (iii) governance, observability, and accountability; (iv) security, trust, and risk management; and (v) evaluation, certification, and Agentic QoS. We argue that the Services Computing community is especially well positioned to provide the conceptual and engineering spine for this emerging field, transforming agentic AI from fragmented demonstrations into dependable, service-based systems worthy of human and organisational trust.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2017

Cognitive Inference of Demographic Data by User Ratings

Cognitive inference of user demographics, such as gender and age, plays an important role in creating user profiles for adjusting marketing strategies and generating personalized recommendations because user demographic data is usually not available due to data privacy concerns. At present, users can readily express feedback regarding products or services that they have purchased. During this process, user demographics are concealed, but the data has never yet been successfully utilized to contribute to the cognitive inference of user demographics. In this paper, we investigate the inference power of user ratings data, and propose a simple yet general cognitive inference model, called rating to profile (R2P), to infer user demographics from user provided ratings. In particular, the proposed R2P model can achieve the following: 1. Correctly integrate user ratings into model training. 2.Infer multiple demographic attributes of users simultaneously, capturing the underlying relevance between different demographic attributes. 3. Train its two components, i.e. feature extractor and classifier, in an integrated manner under a supervised learning paradigm, which effectively helps to discover useful hidden patterns from highly sparse ratings data. We introduce how to incorporate user ratings data into the research field of cognitive inference of user demographic data, and detail the model development and optimization process for the proposed R2P. Extensive experiments are conducted on two real-world ratings datasets against various compared state-of-the-art methods, and the results from multiple aspects demonstrate that our proposed R2P model can significantly improve on the cognitive inference performance of user demographic data.

cs.IR↗