The Future of Cognitive Strategy-enhanced Persuasive Dialogue Agents: New Perspectives and Trends

Persuasion, as one of the crucial abilities in human communication, has garnered extensive attention from researchers within the field of intelligent dialogue systems. We humans tend to persuade others to change their viewpoints, attitudes or behaviors through conversations in various scenarios (e.g., persuasion for social good, arguing in online platforms). Developing dialogue agents that can persuade others to accept certain standpoints is essential to achieving truly intelligent and anthropomorphic dialogue system. Benefiting from the substantial progress of Large Language Models (LLMs), dialogue agents have acquired an exceptional capability in context understanding and response generation. However, as a typical and complicated cognitive psychological system, persuasive dialogue agents also require knowledge from the domain of cognitive psychology to attain a level of human-like persuasion. Consequently, the cognitive strategy-enhanced persuasive dialogue agent (defined as CogAgent), which incorporates cognitive strategies to achieve persuasive targets through conversation, has become a predominant research paradigm. To depict the research trends of CogAgent, in this paper, we first present several fundamental cognitive psychology theories and give the formalized definition of three typical cognitive strategies, including the persuasion strategy, the topic path planning strategy, and the argument structure prediction strategy. Then we propose a new system architecture by incorporating the formalized definition to lay the foundation of CogAgent. Representative works are detailed and investigated according to the combined cognitive strategy, followed by the summary of authoritative benchmarks and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize our insights on open issues and future directions of CogAgent for upcoming researchers.Comment: 36 pages, 6 figure

Specifying and verifying communities of Web services using argumentative agents

This thesis includes two main contributions: the first one is specifying the use of argumentative agents in the design and development of communities of Web services; the second is using a formal technique to verify communication protocols against given properties for these communities. Web services that provide a similar functionality are gathered into a single community, independently of their origins, locations, and ways of doing. Associating Web services with argumentative agents that are able to persuade and negotiate with others organizes these Web services in a better way so that they can achieve the goals they set in an efficient way. A community is led by a master component, which is responsible among others for attracting new Web services to the community, retaining existing Web services in the community, and identifying the Web services in the community that will participate in composite scenarios. Besides FIPA-ACL, argumentative dialogue games are also used for agent interaction. In this thesis, we use tableau-based model checking algorithm to verify our argumentative agent-base community of Web services negotiation protocol. This algorithm aims at verifying systems designed as a set of autonomous interacting agents. We provide the soundness, completeness, termination and complexity results. We also simulate our specification with Jadex BDI programming language and implement our verification with a modified and enhanced version of CWB-NC model checker. Keywords. Multi-agent systems, BDI agent architecture, model checking, agent oriented programming, FIPA-ACL, dialogue game, agent-based negotiation protocol, Jadex, CWB-NC

The Alvar Aalto Silo project and the re-urbing of Meri-Toppila, Oulu:ecosystem design in the calibration of an urban area through flagship architecture

Abstract. The aim of this Diploma Thesis is to present a model implementation of “Urban Calibration”, meaning : a series of design, policy and strategic decision-making actions located in a depressed city sector applied in order to configure its development into an acceptable range of progress and innovation. In order to materialise a prospective implementation model of Urban calibration, the following study will present a real life work in progress case, The Aalto Silo project in the Meri-Toppila neighbourhood, Oulu,Finland; as a vehicle to explore following topics: Adaptive Management, Ecosystem Design and Urban Narrative. Moreover, a tentative definition of the term “Re-Urbing”, as the projectual process of reactivating a deprived city area will be addressed

Case-Based Argumentation in Agent Societies

Hoy en día los sistemas informáticos complejos se pueden ven en términos de los servicios que ofrecen y las entidades que interactúan para proporcionar o consumir dichos servicios. Los sistemas multi-agente abiertos, donde los agentes pueden entrar o salir del sistema, interactuar y formar grupos (coaliciones de agentes u organizaciones) de forma dinámica para resolver problemas, han sido propuestos como una tecnología adecuada para implementar este nuevo paradigma informático. Sin embargo, el amplio dinamismo de estos sistemas requiere que los agentes tengan una forma de armonizar los conflictos que surgen cuando tienen que colaborar y coordinar sus actividades. En estas situaciones, los agentes necesitan un mecanismo para argumentar de forma eficiente (persuadir a otros agentes para que acepten sus puntos de vista, negociar los términos de un contrato, etc.) y poder llegar a acuerdos. La argumentación es un medio natural y efectivo para abordar los conflictos y contradicciones del conocimiento. Participando en diálogos argumentativos, los agentes pueden llegar a acuerdos con otros agentes. En un sistema multi-agente abierto, los agentes pueden formar sociedades que los vinculan a través de relaciones de dependencia. Estas relaciones pueden surgir de sus interacciones o estar predefinidas por el sistema. Además, los agentes pueden tener un conjunto de valores individuales o sociales, heredados de los grupos a los que pertenecen, que quieren promocionar. Las dependencias entre los agentes y los grupos a los que pertenecen y los valores individuales y sociales definen el contexto social del agente. Este contexto tiene una influencia decisiva en la forma en que un agente puede argumentar y llegar a acuerdos con otros agentes. Por tanto, el contexto social de los agentes debería tener una influencia decisiva en la representación computacional de sus argumentos y en el proceso de gestión de argumentos.Heras Barberá, SM. (2011). Case-Based Argumentation in Agent Societies [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/12497Palanci

COMPARING HABITATS Reframing comparison in the “post-disciplinary” era

peer reviewe

Building a More Inclusive Workplace for Religious Minorities

The current secular models are putting strain on religious diversity in the context of the workplace. With religious diversity growing in European societies and the visible expression of religious beliefs and behaviors, tensions have arisen linked to the rise of xenophobia. The scientific literature shows that religious minorities are discriminated in the workplace, especially Muslim women that wear Islamic veils. Nonetheless, the people pertaining to these religious minorities have agency, and they can overcome this discrimination. This paper presents the results of a systematic literature review of scientific articles published in SCOPUS and Web of Science using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA). The review focuses on the management of religious diversity in labor contexts, especially regarding Muslim women wearing Islamic veils. The results identify some successfully implemented actions that contribute to more inclusive workplaces for religious minorities, especially for Muslim women wearing Islamic veils. Some of these actions are implemented from the employee perspective and include networking and mentoring, while others are implemented from a company perspective and are related to the creation of management styles that place people in the center. The crucial role that politics plays is also briefly discussed

Geo-Design:

Geo-Design. Advances in bridging geo-information technology and design brings together a wide variety of contributions from authors with backgrounds in urban planning, landscape architecture, education and geo-information technology presenting the latest insights and applications of geodesign. Geo-Design is here understood as a hybridization of the concepts “Geo” – representing the modelling, analytical and visualisation capacities of GIS, and “Design” – representing spatial planning and design, turning existing situations into preferred ones. Through focusing on interdisciplinary design-related concepts and applications of GIS international experts share their recent findings and provide clues for the further development of geodesign. This is important since there is still much to do. Not only in the development of geo-information technology, but especially in bridging the gap with the design disciplines. The uptake on using GIS is still remarkably slow among landscape architects, urban designers and planners, and when utilised it is often restricted to the basic tasks of mapmaking and data access. Knowledge development and dissemination of applications of geodesign through research, publications and education, therefore, remain key factors. This publication draws upon the insights shared at the Geodesign Summit Europe held at the Delft University of Technology in 2014. All contributions in the book are double blind reviewed by experts in the field

Supporting engineering design using knowledge based systems technology with a case study in electricity distribution network design

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis explores the architectural requirements of engineering design support systems based on knowledge based systems technology. The exploration is based on an understanding of the nature of designing as a professional activity and on the extent to which designers' competence can be modelled. Attention is focused on certain salient aspects of designers' competent behaviour. The theoretical study leads to the specification of requirements to be satisfied by a knowledge based system which will support designers in their professional setting and to the proposal of some knowledge based system components which will meet the requirements identified. The theoretical aspect of the thesis is complemented by a case study based on a designer of high voltage electricity distribution networks. The case study illustrates the theoretical component of the thesis and the methodological basis for the work. The practical realizability of the components of the knowledge based systems architecture proposed are demonstrated using the results of the analysis of the knowledge elicited in the case study without prejudicing the general applicability of the ideas. An object-oriented knowledge engineering software development environment is used to demonstrate how some components of the design situation represented can be implemented.Financial support provided by Brunel University

The Effects of Strategy Instruction with a CDO Procedure in General Education Settings

The purpose of this study was to evaluate a revision strategy for middle school students in a three general education classrooms. Three teachers and 23 sixth-graders in an elementary school in an urban school district in the Northeast participated in this study. Classroom teachers were trained in the revision strategy and provided instruction to their respective students. Although all students received instruction, data was collected on four pairs of students from each class (2 high-achieving, 2 average achieving, 2 low achieving, and 2 students with learning disabilities). This study examined the effects of a Compare-Diagnose-Operate (CDO) procedure (using the acronym FIX) embedded within a self-regulation strategy (SRSD) to allow students the opportunity to internalize the elements of revising. The strategy emphasized the need for students to (a) examine their draft, focusing specifically on the essential elements or parts of an essay, (b) identify problems in their essay between what they wanted to write versus what was actually written, and (c) act on, or execute necessary changes to the draft in response to specific problems they had identified. Improvement in students' writing and revising skills was based on number of meaningful changes, quality of changes between first and second drafts, and holistic quality of the students' revised essays. The effects of teaching the revising strategy were assessed using a multiple-probe design with multiple probes at baseline. The results of this study showed that all students regardless of achievement level benefited from instruction. Students showed significant gains in the number of meaningful changes made from baseline to postinstruction. In addition, holistic quality ratings doubled for students across all achievement levels. The findings emphasize the importance of providing strategy instruction in the classroom and the need for future research in this area