Artificial Collective Intelligence Engineering: a Survey of Concepts and Perspectives

Collectiveness is an important property of many systems--both natural and artificial. By exploiting a large number of individuals, it is often possible to produce effects that go far beyond the capabilities of the smartest individuals, or even to produce intelligent collective behaviour out of not-so-intelligent individuals. Indeed, collective intelligence, namely the capability of a group to act collectively in a seemingly intelligent way, is increasingly often a design goal of engineered computational systems--motivated by recent techno-scientific trends like the Internet of Things, swarm robotics, and crowd computing, just to name a few. For several years, the collective intelligence observed in natural and artificial systems has served as a source of inspiration for engineering ideas, models, and mechanisms. Today, artificial and computational collective intelligence are recognised research topics, spanning various techniques, kinds of target systems, and application domains. However, there is still a lot of fragmentation in the research panorama of the topic within computer science, and the verticality of most communities and contributions makes it difficult to extract the core underlying ideas and frames of reference. The challenge is to identify, place in a common structure, and ultimately connect the different areas and methods addressing intelligent collectives. To address this gap, this paper considers a set of broad scoping questions providing a map of collective intelligence research, mostly by the point of view of computer scientists and engineers. Accordingly, it covers preliminary notions, fundamental concepts, and the main research perspectives, identifying opportunities and challenges for researchers on artificial and computational collective intelligence engineering.Comment: This is the author's final version of the article, accepted for publication in the Artificial Life journal. Data: 34 pages, 2 figure

Specification and Analysis of Open-Ended Systems with CARMA

Carma is a new language recently defined to support quantified specification and analysis of collective adaptive systems. It is a stochastic process algebra equipped with linguistic constructs specifically developed for modelling and programming systems that can operate in open-ended and unpredictable environments. This class of systems is typically composed of a huge number of interacting agents that dynamically adjust and combine their behaviour to achieve specific goals. A Carma model, termed a “collective”, consists of a set of components, each of which exhibits a set of attributes. To model dynamic aggregations, which are sometimes referred to as “ensembles”, Carma provides communication primitives based on predicates over the exhibited attributes. These predicates are used to select the participants in a communication. Two communication mechanisms are provided in the Carma language: multicast-based and unicast-based. A key feature of Carma is the explicit representation of the environment in which processes interact, allowing rapid testing of a system under different open world scenarios. The environment in Carma models can evolve at runtime, due to the feedback from the system, and it further modulates the interaction between components, by shaping rates and interaction probabilities

Agent environments for multi-agent systems IV: 4th international workshop, E4MAS 2014 - 10 years later, Paris, France, May 6, 2014, revised selected and invited papers

International audienceTen years ago, researchers in multi-agent systems became more and more aware that agent systems consist of more than only agents. The series of workshops on Environments for Multi-Agent Systems (E4MAS 2004-2006) emerged from this awareness.One of the primary outcomes of this endeavor was a principled understanding that the agent environment should be considered as a primary design abstraction, equally important as the agents. At AAMAS 2014 in Paris, researchers in the E4MAS domain organized a workshop on E4MAS – 10 Years Later with the following aims: (1) to reflect on the past 10 years of research and engineering on agent environments for multi-agent systems; (2) to investigate to what extent the challenges identified a decade ago have been tackled; (3) to outline challenges for future research on a short and longer term. This book reports the results of the workshop and subsequent efforts. We start with a roadmap paper that consolidates knowledge from past research and from these insights defines a path for future research in the field. The roadmap focusses on three particularly relevant topics of modern software intensive systems from the viewpoint of agent environments for multi-agent systems: the large scale of systems, the openness of systems to deal with parts that enter and leave the system dynamically, and humans in the loop that interact with the system. After the roadmap follow 13 contributions that span a wide variety of topics grouped in four parts. The first part presents three papers on the connection between agents, environments, and humans. The second part contains a set of interesting papers on environments for complex and stigmergic systems. The third part presents four papers on virtual and simulated environments. Finally, the fourth part concludes with two papers on open agent environments and interoperability. All papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed. We are grateful to all those who contributed to the successful organization of E4MAS 2014, in particular, the Program Committee, the AAMAS Committee, and the local organizers. We hope that the papers of this volume will stimulate further research in agent environments for multi-agent systems and contribute to enhancing engineering practice

COIN@AAMAS2015

COIN@AAMAS2015 is the nineteenth edition of the series and the fourteen papers included in these proceedings demonstrate the vitality of the community and will provide the grounds for a solid workshop program and what we expect will be a most enjoyable and enriching debate.Peer reviewe

Engineering Complex Computational Ecosystems

Self-organising pervasive ecosystems of devices are set to become a major vehicle for delivering infrastructure and end-user services. The inherent complexity of such systems poses new challenges to those who want to dominate it by applying the principles of engineering. The recent growth in number and distribution of devices with decent computational and communicational abilities, that suddenly accelerated with the massive diffusion of smartphones and tablets, is delivering a world with a much higher density of devices in space. Also, communication technologies seem to be focussing on short-range device-to-device (P2P) interactions, with technologies such as Bluetooth and Near-Field Communication gaining greater adoption. Locality and situatedness become key to providing the best possible experience to users, and the classic model of a centralised, enormously powerful server gathering and processing data becomes less and less efficient with device density. Accomplishing complex global tasks without a centralised controller responsible of aggregating data, however, is a challenging task. In particular, there is a local-to-global issue that makes the application of engineering principles challenging at least: designing device-local programs that, through interaction, guarantee a certain global service level. In this thesis, we first analyse the state of the art in coordination systems, then motivate the work by describing the main issues of pre-existing tools and practices and identifying the improvements that would benefit the design of such complex software ecosystems. The contribution can be divided in three main branches. First, we introduce a novel simulation toolchain for pervasive ecosystems, designed for allowing good expressiveness still retaining high performance. Second, we leverage existing coordination models and patterns in order to create new spatial structures. Third, we introduce a novel language, based on the existing ``Field Calculus'' and integrated with the aforementioned toolchain, designed to be usable for practical aggregate programming