Organization of Multi-Agent Systems: An Overview

In complex, open, and heterogeneous environments, agents must be able to reorganize towards the most appropriate organizations to adapt unpredictable environment changes within Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Types of reorganization can be seen from two different levels. The individual agents level (micro-level) in which an agent changes its behaviors and interactions with other agents to adapt its local environment. And the organizational level (macro-level) in which the whole system changes it structure by adding or removing agents. This chapter is dedicated to overview different aspects of what is called MAS Organization including its motivations, paradigms, models, and techniques adopted for statically or dynamically organizing agents in MAS.Comment: 12 page

Token Economy – Towards Building a Sustainable Blockchain Token Ecosystem Framework

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementIn the context of the internet’s historical trajectory, blockchain technology represents a significant paradigm shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. Web 2.0, the current world of the interactive and social web, is an internet siloed by centralized organizations that provide services in exchange for personal data. Web 3.0, on the other hand, is based on cryptographic blockchain technology and enables an economic institutional infrastructure that is natively available on the web, hands ownership back to the creators and users and operates without an intermediary. Blockchain tokens enable digital scarcity and a novel internet-native value transfer mechanism. Tokens can have a magnitude of different use cases ranging from serving as unit of account (currency), promoting usage incentive, as tool for governance, representation of ownership or as a funding instrument. The research field of token creation is still in its very infant stage and a lot of blockchain project launches still happen without proper structure and long term strategy – leading to suboptimal and short lasting results. Based on the Design Science Research methodology, this dissertation attempts to design a holistic conceptual framework that can serve as a base for a decision aid for organizations when creating a blockchain token ecosystem. This artifact will finally be evaluated by domain experts to ensure proper correctness

Governance in the Blockchain Economy: A Framework and Research Agenda

Blockchain technology is often referred to as a groundbreaking innovation and the harbinger of a new economic era. Blockchains may be capable of engendering a new type of economic system: the blockchain economy. In the blockchain economy, agreed-upon transactions would be enforced autonomously, following rules defined by smart contracts. The blockchain economy would manifest itself in a new form of organizational design—decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO)—which are organizations with governance rules specified in the blockchain. We discuss the blockchain economy along dimensions defined in the IT governance literature: decision rights, accountability, and incentives. Our case study of a DAO illustrates that governance in the blockchain economy may depart radically from established notions of governance. Using the three governance dimensions, we propose a novel IT governance framework and a research agenda for governance in the blockchain economy. We challenge common assumptions in the blockchain discourse, and propose promising information systems research related to these assumptions

AI and blockchain adoption in corporate governance

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonPurpose The purpose of this doctoral thesis sets out to explore and elaborate on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain adoption in corporate governance from ethical perspectives. Positioned within the corporate governance domain, this study adopts an explicit business perspective to study corporate governance change with emerging AI and blockchain technological tools in general and focuses on the ethical use of technologies specifically. As such, this empirical investigation aims to help organizations understand the ethical benefits and ethical dilemmas of using AI and blockchain in businesses and draw plans on how to govern these technologies ethically for the benefit of the business and society. Design/Methodology/Approach: This study adopts specific techniques and a pragmatic, step-by-step netnography approach to investigate online traces from social media sites and extends these online explorations with online semi-structured interviews. The research design of this investigation follows step-by-step procedures that are methodologically sound to ensure rigor in this investigation to enhance the trustworthiness of this study. In total, this research collects an abundance of data: 34 LinkedIn Posts with Comments; 12 Webinars; 22 YouTube Videos; 19 Videos; 10 Podcasts, and 17 semi-structured interview videos. The video, audio, and interview data have been transcribed into textual data total of 453065 words for thematic analysis using NVivo software. Enough time has been allocated to the iterative process of data collection and data analysis. The analysis moves back and forth to the point when theoretical saturation is achieved. The data structure extracts from data in this study illustrate the analytic claims that match the analysis and data together, to ensure a good fit between described method and reported analysis are consistent. Findings: This study develops a thematic framework that constitutes the corporate governance transformation with the ethical use of AI and blockchain technology. This framework provides a holistic understanding of why corporate governance needs to change, especially with the emergence of blockchain and AI technologies, what changes will corporate governance encounter, and how corporate governance can imperatively respond to the ethical use of these technologies. Specifically, it explicitly provides comprehensive understanding of the ethical benefits and ethical concerns of using AI and blockchain technologies in corporate governance, and reveals how companies can govern the use of these technologies ethically. In general terms, the findings of this study support the notion of corporate governance change to transform business models and processes to leverage the new capabilities of AI and blockchain technologies, to priories creativity, speed, and accountability, to replace the old business model, to foster agile or collaborative governance to deal with uncertainty, agility, adaptiveness, and cooperation in the digital world, to foster a network and platform strategies to drive success. This study goes beyond the extant corporate governance scholarship to assess the technological impact to capture values for companies in ethical ways to sustain future growth. Additionally, the notion of corporate governance is further specified and significantly expanded by this study to assess the adoption of AI and blockchain as new corporate governance tools or mechanisms, to enhance ethical benefits when used properly, and mitigate ethical dilemmas with proper checks and balances, safeguards in place, to help organizations stay relevant in this digital transformation and be ethical and sustainable. This study empirically corroborates that in theory, the use of blockchain and AI can enhance ethical practice by detecting fraud and anomaly activities, due to the unique capabilities of blockchain and AI technologies. Further, this research adds depth and specificity by identifying the ethical concerns of using blockchain and AI in corporate governance. The study empirically reveals the ethical concerns of privacy issues, unethical use of data, job transformation and replacement, and algorithm bias that companies will encounter when they use these technologies. In addition, the findings of this study suggest how companies can ethically govern the use of these technologies in socially responsible ways as they transform digitally. Originality/Value: The emergent thematic framework is constructed from the empirical and analytical procedures specifically and purposely designed for this study. This study makes theoretical contributions to knowledge and enriches the extant works of literature, and also provides practical contributions to the ethical use of disruptive technologies, future workforce, and regulations. However, the study was conducted within certain theoretical, methodological, empirical, and pragmatic conditions, which might constitute particular limitations and constraints. Therefore, the last section of this thesis elucidates and suggests the directions for future research

FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be

Everyone’s Going to be an Architect: Design Principles for Architectural Thinking in Agile Organizations

Organizational agility is a prominent aim for companies to thrive in today’s volatile business environments. One common building block of agility are (semi-) autonomous teams for continuously fulfilling and surpassing customers’ needs. However, these teams still need to see the enterprise’s ‘big picture’ of strategic objectives, business processes, and IT landscape to prevent organizational inertia or technical debt. This requires architectural thinking to inform these ‘non’-architects’ decision-making. To aid companies towards achieving sustainable agility, we propose six design principles as underlying logic on how to realize architectural thinking in agile organizations. The results are based on insights from interviews with sixteen employees and consultants with expertise on architecture management and organizational agility across several industries. Our work closes a gap in the agility literature, which so far mainly focused on non-generalizable blueprints for agile setups without showing their underlying logics, or approaches and role set-ups for enterprise-level architecture management