Contract Formation through Preemptive Normative Conflict Resolution

Publisher PD

Agent-Driven Representations, Algorithms, and Metrics for Automated Organizational Design.

As cooperative multiagent systems (MASs) increase in interconnectivity, complexity, size, and longevity, coordinating the agents' reasoning and behaviors becomes increasingly difficult. One approach to address these issues is to use insights from human organizations to design structures within which the agents can more efficiently reason and interact. Generally speaking, an organization influences each agent such that, by following its respective influences, an agent can make globally-useful local decisions without having to explicitly reason about the complete joint coordination problem. For example, an organizational influence might constrain and/or inform which actions an agent performs. If these influences are well-constructed to be cohesive and correlated across the agents, then each agent is influenced into reasoning about and performing only the actions that are appropriate for its (organizationally-designated) portion of the joint coordination problem. In this dissertation, I develop an agent-driven approach to organizations, wherein the foundation for representing and reasoning about an organization stems from the needs of the agents in the MAS. I create an organizational specification language to express the possible ways in which an organization could influence the agents' decision making processes, and leverage details from those decision processes to establish quantitative, principled metrics for organizational performance based on the expected impact that an organization will have on the agents' reasoning and behaviors. Building upon my agent-driven organizational representations, I identify a strategy for automating the organizational design process~(ODP), wherein my ODP computes a quantitative description of organizational patterns and then searches through those possible patterns to identify an (approximately) optimal set of organizational influences for the MAS. Evaluating my ODP reveals that it can create organizations that both influence the MAS into effective patterns of joint policies and also streamline the agents' decision making in a coordinate manner. Finally, I use my agent-driven approach to identify characteristics of effective abstractions over organizational influences and a heuristic strategy for converging on a good abstraction.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113616/1/jsleight_1.pd

The ontological question in International Relations: towards a generic description of the unit, with reference to the case of the Islamic caliphate

Over recent years evidence has appeared in the literature on International Relations theory of a desire for a clearer specification of the collective actor. Discussion surrounding collective actors and their relationship to structure connects three important areas of scholarly debate about global politics: the question of the relative weight given to ideational and material considerations; the agent-structure problem; and, the levels of analysis question. Formerly, the easy assumption was made that states were the actors in global politics. This axiom served to restrict and define the field of International Relations, but was always more of an arbitrary decision than a rigorous conclusion. In more recent times a range of circumstances has caused scholars to question this simple schema. Other ways of dividing up the world have gained influence. ... This thesis will examine whether some useful resources for the task may be found outside International Relations. Potentially fruitful areas lie in the work on social reality led by John Searle, in sociological ontology, a good representative being Margaret Gilbert's work, and in evolutionary theory. Scholars have begun to apply ideas from these fields to International Relations. This thesis adds to that work. It emphasises the relationship of Searle's thinking to the workings of evolution, and seeks to apply this insight to global political ontology and to a particular, practical question of grand strategy, involving a challenge to the global system of states

Formal Aspects in Security and Trust

his book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Formal Aspects in Security and Trust, FAST 2005, held in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK in July 2005. The 17 revised papers presented together with the extended abstract of 1 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. The papers focus on formal aspects in security and trust policy models, security protocol design and analysis, formal models of trust and reputation, logics for security and trust, distributed trust management systems, trust-based reasoning, digital assets protection, data protection, privacy and ID issues, information flow analysis, language-based security, security and trust aspects in ubiquitous computing, validation/analysis tools, web service security/trust/privacy, GRID security, security risk assessment, and case studies