Incorporating Helpful Behavior into Collaborative Planning

This paper considers the design of agent strategies for deciding whether to help other members of a group with whom an agent is engaged in a collaborative activity. Three characteristics of collaborative planning must be addressed by these decision-making strategies: agents may have only partial information about their partners' plans for sub-tasks of the collaborative activity; the effectiveness of helping may not be known a priori; and, helping actions have some associated cost. The paper proposes a novel probabilistic representation of other agents' beliefs about the recipes selected for their own or for the group activity, given partial information. This representation is compact, and thus makes reasoning about helpful behavior tractable. The paper presents a decision-theoretic mechanism that uses this representation to make decisions about two kinds of helpful actions: communicating information relevant to a partner's plans for some sub-action, and adding domain actions that are helpful to other agent(s) into the collaborative plan. This mechanism includes a set of rules for reasoning about the utility of helpful actions and the cost incurred by doing them. It was tested using a multi-agent test-bed with configurations that varied agents' uncertainty about the world, their uncertainty about each others' capabilities or resources, and the cost of helpful behavior. In all cases, agents using the decision-theoretic mechanism to decide whether to help outperformed agents using purely axiomatic rules.Engineering and Applied Science

Group Decision Making and Temporal Reasoning

The more capable and autonomous computer systems become, the more important it is for them to be able to act collaboratively, whether in groups consisting solely of other computers or in heterogeneous groups of computers and people. To act collaboratively requires that systems have effective group decision-making capabilities. This thesis makes four important contributions to the design of group decision-making mechanisms and algorithms for deploying them in collaborative, multi-agent systems. First, it provides an abstract framework for the specification of group decision-making mechanisms that computer agents can use to coordinate their planning activity when collaborating with other agents. Second, it specifies a combinatorial auction-based mechanism that computer agents can use to help them decide, both individually and collectively, whether to engage in a collaborative activity. Third, it extends the theory of Simple Temporal Networks by providing a rigorous theoretical analysis of an important family of temporal reasoning problems. Fourth, it provides sound, complete and polynomial-time algorithms for solving those temporal reasoning problems and specifies the use of such algorithms by agents participating in the auction-based mechanism.Engineering and Applied Science

Virtual Environments for Training: From Individual Learning to Collaboration with Humanoids

The next generation of virtual environments for training is oriented towards collaborative aspects. Therefore, we have decided to enhance our platform for virtual training environments, adding collaboration opportunities and integrating humanoids. In this paper we put forward a model of humanoid that suits both virtual humans and representations of real users, according to collaborative training activities. We suggest adaptations to the scenario model of our platform making it possible to write collaborative procedures. We introduce a mechanism of action selection made up of a global repartition and an individual choice. These models are currently being integrated and validated in GVT, a virtual training tool for maintenance of military equipments, developed in collaboration with the French company NEXTER-Group

Coordination approaches and systems - part I : a strategic perspective

This is the first part of a two-part paper presenting a fundamental review and summary of research of design coordination and cooperation technologies. The theme of this review is aimed at the research conducted within the decision management aspect of design coordination. The focus is therefore on the strategies involved in making decisions and how these strategies are used to satisfy design requirements. The paper reviews research within collaborative and coordinated design, project and workflow management, and, task and organization models. The research reviewed has attempted to identify fundamental coordination mechanisms from different domains, however it is concluded that domain independent mechanisms need to be augmented with domain specific mechanisms to facilitate coordination. Part II is a review of design coordination from an operational perspective

Integration of professional judgement and decision-making in high-level adventure sports coaching practice

This study examined the integration of professional judgement and decision-making processes in adventure sports coaching. The study utilised a thematic analysis approach to investigate the decision-making practices of a sample of high-level adventure sports coaches over a series of sessions. Results revealed that, in order to make judgements and decisions in practice, expert coaches employ a range of practical and pedagogic management strategies to create and opportunistically use time for decision-making. These approaches include span of control and time management strategies to facilitate the decision-making process regarding risk management, venue selection, aims, objectives, session content, and differentiation of the coaching process. The implication for coaches, coach education, and accreditation is the recognition and training of the approaches that“create time” for the judgements in practice, namely“creating space to think”. The paper concludes by offering a template for a more expertise-focused progression in adventure sports coachin

Holistic engineering design : a combined synchronous and asynchronous approach

To aid the creation and through-life support of large, complex engineering products, organizations are placing a greater emphasis on constructing complete and accurate records of design activities. Current documentary approaches are not sufficient to capture activities and decisions in their entirety and can lead to organizations revisiting and in some cases reworking design decisions in order to understand previous design episodes. Design activities are undertaken in a variety of modes; many of which are dichotomous, and thus each require separate documentary mechanisms to capture information in an efficient manner. It is possible to identify the modes of learning and transaction to describe whether an activity is aimed at increasing a level of understanding or whether it involves manipulating information to achieve a tangible task. The dichotomy of interest in this paper is that of synchronous and asynchronous working, where engineers may work alternately as part of a group or as individuals and where different forms of record are necessary to adequately capture the processes and rationale employed in each mode. This paper introduces complimentary approaches to achieving richer representations of design activities performed synchronously and asynchronously, and through the undertaking of a design based case study, highlights the benefit of each approach. The resulting records serve to provide a more complete depiction of activities undertaken, and provide positive direction for future co-development of the approaches

Can Comparative Risk Be Used to Develop Better Environmental Decisions?

This thesis investigates the design of atria for daylighting in large scale buildings. Athree dimensional test building with a central atrium was constructed and various parameters of the atrium altered. The impact of these changes was studied through computer simulations of annual daylight distribution by implementing state of theart software. Daylight autonomy is simulated for an annual climate file for Stockholm, Sweden. In the thesis, notion is made of basic daylighting concepts, the importance of bringing daylight into buildings is argued, and the daylighting criteria of three environmental certification tools introduced. Furthermore, a detailed comparison is made on several well known daylight simulation tools. A newly developed, state of the art, daylight simulation tool called Honeybee, is used in the simulation process. The tool utilizes the calculation engines of wellknown daylight simulation software Radiance and Daysim, which apply backward ray-tracing to reach accurate results. Honeybee is coupled to the graphical algorithmeditor Grasshopper for Rhinoceros 3D, which allows for an efficient way of parametric modelling. The comparison of five different daylight simulation tools showed that Honeybee outweighs the capabilities of many of them by offering a wast range of simulation capabilities and also giving the user exceptional control of result data within multiple zones of the test building. The results of the daylight study have been compiled into a document which purpose is to serve as early stage design guidelines of atria for architects. Many factors have been shown through simulation to have a dramatic impact on daylighton an annual basis, and several suggestions have been made on how to maximize the quantity of daylight within buildings containing atria

Designing democratic institutions for collaborative economic development: a European perspective

Collaborative approaches to local economic development have developed in a number of European countries. However collaborative working presents a new problem for policy makers and public management researchers. The problem is to design an institutional framework for the governance of economic development that provides for anchorage in the democratic system without loosing the benefits of flexible policy design and delivery. This is particularly important in a European context. The European Union has recognised the need for citizens to be more engaged in the governance of public policy at all scales - from local neighbourhoods to the transnational level. This chapter addresses the problem by examining the basic questions that any form of democratic governance design needs to address, and relating this to the case of economic development. The core democratic design questions are: How can legitimacy be secured? In what ways can relevant publics give consent to decisions? Through what means can the institution be held to account? The chapter discusses these three democratic imperatives and shows that different responses to these produce three archetypical governance designs - club, agency and polity. We then explore the way in which the problems of democratic governance have been solved empirically through longitudinal case studies of the expansion of Mainport Rotterdam and the management of economic, environmental, residential and transportation agendas in the Ghent canal area of the Flanders region of Belgium. The analysis shows that although different national and regional political contexts matter, the typology of archetypes offers a way of understanding the overall democratic orientation of a particular governance design as well as offering a basis from which policy makers can create their own solutions

Advances towards a General-Purpose Societal-Scale Human-Collective Problem-Solving Engine

Human collective intelligence has proved itself as an important factor in a society's ability to accomplish large-scale behavioral feats. As societies have grown in population-size, individuals have seen a decrease in their ability to activeily participate in the problem-solving processes of the group. Representative decision-making structures have been used as a modern solution to society's inadequate information-processing infrastructure. With computer and network technologies being further embedded within the fabric of society, the implementation of a general-purpose societal-scale human-collective problem-solving engine is envisioned as a means of furthering the collective-intelligence potential of society. This paper provides both a novel framework for creating collective intelligence systems and a method for implementing a representative and expertise system based on social-network theory.Comment: Collective Problem Solving Theory and Social-Network algorith

Scaffolding Reflection: Prompting Social Constructive Metacognitive Activity in Non-Formal Learning

The study explores the effects of three different types of non-adaptive, metacognitive scaffolding on social, constructive metacognitive activity and reflection in groups of non-formal learners. Six triads of non-formal learners were assigned randomly to one of the three scaffolding conditions: structuring, problematising or epistemological. The triads were then asked to collaboratively resolve an ill-structured problem and record their deliberations. Evidence from think-aloud protocols was analysed using conversational and discourse analysis. Findings indicate that epistemological scaffolds produced more social, constructive metacognitive activity than either of the two other scaffolding conditions in all metacognitive activities except for task orientation, as well as higher quality interactions during evaluation and reflection phases. However, participants appeared to be less aware of their activities as forming a strategic, self-regulatory response to the problem. This may indicate that for learning transfer, it may be necessary to employ an adaptive, facilitated reflection on learners' activities