COalitions in COOperation Networks (COCOON):Social Network Analysis and Game Theory to Enhance Cooperation Networks

Sie, R. L. L. (2012). COalitions in COOperation Networks (COCOON): Social Network Analysis and Game Theory to Enhance Cooperation Networks (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). September, 28, 2012, Open Universiteit in the Netherlands (CELSTEC), Heerlen, The Netherlands.IdSpace, SIK

To whom and why should I connect? Co-author Recommendation based on Powerful and Similar Peers

Sie, R. L. L., Drachsler, H., Bitter-Rijpkema, M., & Sloep, P. B. (2012). To whom and why should I connect? Co-author Recommendation based on Powerful and Similar Peers. International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL), 4(1), 121-137. doi:10.1504/IJTEL.2012.048314The present article offers preliminary outcomes of a user study that investigated the acceptance of a recommender system that suggests future co- authors for scientific article writing. The recommendation approach is twofold: network information (betweenness centrality) and author (keyword) similarity are used to compute the utility of peers in a network of co-authors. Two sets of recommendations were provided to the participants: Set one focused on all candidate authors, including co-authors of a target user to strengthen current bonds and strive for acceptance of a certain research topic. Set two focused on solely new co-authors of a target user to foster creativity, excluding current co- authors. A small-scale evaluation suggests that the utility-based recommendation approach is promising, but to maximize outcome, we need to 1) compensate for researchers’ interests that change over time, and 2) account for multi-person co-authored papers

Tasks for Agent-Based Negotiation Teams:Analysis, Review, and Challenges

An agent-based negotiation team is a group of interdependent agents that join together as a single negotiation party due to their shared interests in the negotiation at hand. The reasons to employ an agent-based negotiation team may vary: (i) more computation and parallelization capabilities, (ii) unite agents with different expertise and skills whose joint work makes it possible to tackle complex negotiation domains, (iii) the necessity to represent different stakeholders or different preferences in the same party (e.g., organizations, countries, and married couple). The topic of agent-based negotiation teams has been recently introduced in multi-agent research. Therefore, it is necessary to identify good practices, challenges, and related research that may help in advancing the state-of-the-art in agent-based negotiation teams. For that reason, in this article we review the tasks to be carried out by agent-based negotiation teams. Each task is analyzed and related with current advances in different research areas. The analysis aims to identify special challenges that may arise due to the particularities of agent-based negotiation teams.Comment: Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 201

Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action

Outlines a community education movement to implement Knight's 2009 recommendation to enhance digital and media literacy. Suggests local, regional, state, and national initiatives such as teacher education and parent outreach and discusses challenges

Coalition based approach for shop floor agility – a multiagent approach

Dissertation submitted for a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, speciality of Robotics and Integrated Manufacturing from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e TecnologiaThis thesis addresses the problem of shop floor agility. In order to cope with the disturbances and uncertainties that characterise the current business scenarios faced by manufacturing companies, the capability of their shop floors needs to be improved quickly, such that these shop floors may be adapted, changed or become easily modifiable (shop floor reengineering). One of the critical elements in any shop floor reengineering process is the way the control/supervision architecture is changed or modified to accommodate for the new processes and equipment. This thesis, therefore, proposes an architecture to support the fast adaptation or changes in the control/supervision architecture. This architecture postulates that manufacturing systems are no more than compositions of modularised manufacturing components whose interactions when aggregated are governed by contractual mechanisms that favour configuration over reprogramming. A multiagent based reference architecture called Coalition Based Approach for Shop floor Agility – CoBASA, was created to support fast adaptation and changes of shop floor control architectures with minimal effort. The coalitions are composed of agentified manufacturing components (modules), whose relationships within the coalitions are governed by contracts that are configured whenever a coalition is established. Creating and changing a coalition do not involve programming effort because it only requires changes to the contract that regulates it

Digital Government Systems: Tackling The Legacy Problem Through A Game-Based Approach To Business Requirements Analysis

Government agency reliance on legacy systems is problematic: they are costly to maintain, difficult to integrate with and they hinder innovation. However, the replacement of legacy systems is not a straightforward endeavor, and it often results in technology substitution that is not accompanied by business process change. The focus of this dissertation is on the phenomenon of legacy system replication wherein the requirements for applications replacing outdated technologies mimic legacy features and reflect status quo operational processes that have been historically shaped by the legacy system itself. This problem is referred to throughout the dissertation as the “legacy problem.” The dissertation investigates its roots and proposes an approach to overcome it. Specifically, a mixed method research approach is taken, including a survey of public sector practitioners to explore the extent of the legacy problem, and a series of semi-structured interviews with government information technology and management professionals to delve into the dynamics of legacy system replacement projects. Findings indicate that the legacy problem often stems from a lack of critical analysis of business requirements and the desire to minimize the risks associated with organizational change, which often result in missed opportunities for digital government innovation. As a consequence, the dissertation proposes a candidate approach to deal with the legacy problem in the development of a requirements game (RE-PROVO) which supports requirements discussions structured around the themes of legacy (or heritage) preservation and innovation. The game is evaluated by local government practitioners through several iterations and their feedback is analysed to gauge the potential utility of the approach. The results indicate that with a streamlined user interface and accentuated game elements RE-PROVO can be a valuable and effective tool for requirements analysis in legacy system replacement projects

Organization based multiagent architecture for distributed environments

[EN]Distributed environments represent a complex field in which applied solutions should be flexible and include significant adaptation capabilities. These environments are related to problems where multiple users and devices may interact, and where simple and local solutions could possibly generate good results, but may not be effective with regards to use and interaction. There are many techniques that can be employed to face this kind of problems, from CORBA to multi-agent systems, passing by web-services and SOA, among others. All those methodologies have their advantages and disadvantages that are properly analyzed in this documents, to finally explain the new architecture presented as a solution for distributed environment problems. The new architecture for solving complex solutions in distributed environments presented here is called OBaMADE: Organization Based Multiagent Architecture for Distributed Environments. It is a multiagent architecture based on the organizations of agents paradigm, where the agents in the architecture are structured into organizations to improve their organizational capabilities. The reasoning power of the architecture is based on the Case-Based Reasoning methology, being implemented in a internal organization that uses agents to create services to solve the external request made by the users. The OBaMADE architecture has been successfully applied to two different case studies where its prediction capabilities have been properly checked. Those case studies have showed optimistic results and, being complex systems, have demonstrated the abstraction and generalizations capabilities of the architecture. Nevertheless OBaMADE is intended to be able to solve much other kind of problems in distributed environments scenarios. It should be applied to other varieties of situations and to other knowledge fields to fully develop its potencial.[ES]Los entornos distribuidos representan un campo de conocimiento complejo en el que las soluciones a aplicar deben ser flexibles y deben contar con gran capacidad de adaptación. Este tipo de entornos está normalmente relacionado con problemas donde varios usuarios y dispositivos entran en juego. Para solucionar dichos problemas, pueden utilizarse sistemas locales que, aunque ofrezcan buenos resultados en términos de calidad de los mismos, no son tan efectivos en cuanto a la interacción y posibilidades de uso. Existen múltiples técnicas que pueden ser empleadas para resolver este tipo de problemas, desde CORBA a sistemas multiagente, pasando por servicios web y SOA, entre otros. Todas estas mitologías tienen sus ventajas e inconvenientes, que se analizan en este documento, para explicar, finalmente, la nueva arquitectura presentada como una solución para los problemas generados en entornos distribuidos. La nueva arquitectura aquí se llama OBaMADE, que es el acrónimo del inglés Organization Based Multiagent Architecture for Distributed Environments (Arquitectura Multiagente Basada en Organizaciones para Entornos Distribuidos). Se trata de una arquitectura multiagente basasa en el paradigma de las organizaciones de agente, donde los agentes que forman parte de la arquitectura se estructuran en organizaciones para mejorar sus capacidades organizativas. La capacidad de razonamiento de la arquitectura está basada en la metodología de razonamiento basado en casos, que se ha implementado en una de las organizaciones internas de la arquitectura por medio de agentes que crean servicios que responden a las solicitudes externas de los usuarios. La arquitectura OBaMADE se ha aplicado de forma exitosa a dos casos de estudio diferentes, en los que se han demostrado sus capacidades predictivas. Aplicando OBaMADE a estos casos de estudio se han obtenido resultados esperanzadores y, al ser sistemas complejos, se han demostrado las capacidades tanto de abstracción como de generalización de la arquitectura presentada. Sin embargo, esta arquitectura está diseñada para poder ser aplicada a más tipo de problemas de entornos distribuidos. Debe ser aplicada a más variadas situaciones y a otros campos de conocimiento para desarrollar completamente el potencial de esta arquitectura

Evaluating Recommender Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning: A Quantitative Survey

The increasing number of publications on recommender systems for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) evidence a growing interest in their development and deployment. In order to support learning, recommender systems for TEL need to consider specific requirements, which differ from the requirements for recommender systems in other domains like e-commerce. Consequently, these particular requirements motivate the incorporation of specific goals and methods in the evaluation process for TEL recommender systems. In this article, the diverse evaluation methods that have been applied to evaluate TEL recommender systems are investigated. A total of 235 articles are selected from major conferences, workshops, journals, and books where relevant work have been published between 2000 and 2014. These articles are quantitatively analysed and classified according to the following criteria: type of evaluation methodology, subject of evaluation, and effects measured by the evaluation. Results from the survey suggest that there is a growing awareness in the research community of the necessity for more elaborate evaluations. At the same time, there is still substantial potential for further improvements. This survey highlights trends and discusses strengths and shortcomings of the evaluation of TEL recommender systems thus far, thereby aiming to stimulate researchers to contemplate novel evaluation approaches.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

Evaluating Recommender Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning: A Quantitative Survey

The increasing number of publications on recommender systems for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) evidence a growing interest in their development and deployment. In order to support learning, recommender systems for TEL need to consider specific requirements, which differ from the requirements for recommender systems in other domains like e-commerce. Consequently, these particular requirements motivate the incorporation of specific goals and methods in the evaluation process for TEL recommender systems. In this article, the diverse evaluation methods that have been applied to evaluate TEL recommender systems are investigated. A total of 235 articles are selected from major conferences, workshops, journals, and books where relevant work have been published between 2000 and 2014. These articles are quantitatively analysed and classified according to the following criteria: type of evaluation methodology, subject of evaluation, and effects measured by the evaluation. Results from the survey suggest that there is a growing awareness in the research community of the necessity for more elaborate evaluations. At the same time, there is still substantial potential for further improvements. This survey highlights trends and discusses strengths and shortcomings of the evaluation of TEL recommender systems thus far, thereby aiming to stimulate researchers to contemplate novel evaluation approaches.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad