From Agent Game Protocols to Implementable Roles

kostas.stathis-at-cs.rhul.ac.uk Abstract. We present a formal framework for decomposing agent interaction protocols to the roles their participants should play. The framework allows an Authority Agent that knows a protocol to compute the protocol’s roles so that it can allocate them to interested parties. We show how the Authority Agent can use the role descriptions to identify problems with the protocol and repair it on the fly, to ensure that participants will be able to implement their role requirements without compromising the protocol’s interactions. Our representation of agent interaction protocols is a game-based one and the decomposition of a game protocol into its constituent roles is based upon the branching bisimulation equivalence reduction of the game. The work extends our previous work on using games to admit agents in an artificial society by checking their competence according to the society rules. The applicability of the overall approach is illustrated by showing how to decompose the NetBill protocol into its roles. We also show how to automatically repair the interactions of a protocol that cannot be implemented in its original form.

Competence Checking for the Global E-Service Society Using Games

We study the problem of checking the competence of communicative agents operating in a global society in order to receive and offer electronic services. Such a society will be composed of local sub-societies that will often be semi-open, viz., entrance of agents in a semi-open society is conditional to specific admission criteria. Assuming that a candidate agent provides an abstract description of their communicative skills, we present a test that a controller agent could perform in order to decide if a candidate agent should be admitted. We formulate this test by revisiting an existing knowledge representation framework based on games specified as extended logic programs. The resulting framework finds useful application in complex and inter-operable web-services construed as semi-open societies in support of the global vision known as the Semantic Web

Professionalising care into compliance: The challenge for personalised care models

One of the most basic understandings of nursing is that a nurse is a caregiver for a patient who helps to prevent illness, treat health conditions, and manage the physical needs of patients. Nursing is often presented as a caring profession, which provides patient care driven by ideals of empathy, compassion and kindness. These ideals of care have further been foregrounded through the development and implementation of stress on patient centred care (PCC) and/or person-centred practice (PCP). Although the idealisation of nursing as a caring profession is common, and one certainly seen as integral by nurses and written into the heart of regulatory documentation, we contend that the actual delivery of care is being undercut by the very regulatory climate that strives to professionalise care. As we outline, with specific reference to the context of Australian Nursing, this transformation delivers a commodified, even McDonaldized, model of patient management rather than care. It seems that even with its explicit stress on PCC and PCP, Australian Nursing cannot live up to its own care ideals. Having outlined this problem, the paper then demonstrates the ways in which PCC is thwarted at the coal face of nursing practice and that there must be an institutionalised change to be able to provide genuine patient-centred care

Regulating competence-based access to agent societies

Advances in ubiquitous computing have resulted in changes to the way we access and use everyday applications, e.g. reading mail and booking tickets. At the same time, users interact with these applications in a variety of ways, each with different characteristics, e.g., different degrees of bandwidth, different payment schemes supported and so on. These are highly dynamic interactions, as some of the applications might become unavailable (either temporarily or permanently) or their behaviour may change. As the user has to deal with a large number of proactive and dynamic applications every day, he will need a personal assistant that possesses similar characteristics. The agent paradigm meets this requirement, since it exhibits the necessary features. As a result, the user will provide its personal agent assistant with a goal, e.g. I need a smartphone which costs less than three hundred pounds, and the agent will have to use a number of applications offering information on smartphones so that it finds the requested one. This, in turn, raises a number of issues regarding the organisation and the degrees of access to these services as well as the correctness of their descriptions. In this work, we propose the organisation of applications around the concept of artificial agent societies, to which access would be possible only by a positive evaluation of an agent's application. The agent will provide the Authority Agent with the role it is applying for and its competencies in the context of a protocol, i.e., the messages that it can utter/understand. The Authority Agent will then check to see if the applicant agent is a competent user of the protocols; if yes, entry is granted. Assuming that access is granted, the next issue is to decide on the protocol(s) that agent receives. As providing the full protocol will cause security and overload problems, we only need to provide the part required for the agent to play its role. We show how this can be done and how we can repair certain protocols so that they are indeed enactable once this role decomposition is performed

An investigation of healthcare professionals’ experiences of training and using electronic prescribing systems: four literature reviews and two qualitative studies undertaken in the UK hospital context

Electronic prescribing (ePrescribing) is the process of ordering medicines electronically for a patient and has been associated with reduced medication errors and improved patient safety. However, these systems have also been associated with unintended adverse consequences. There is a lack of published research about users’ experiences of these systems in UK hospitals. The aim of this research was therefore to firstly describe the literature pertaining to the recent developments and persisting issues with ePrescribing and clinical decision support systems (CDS) (chapter 2). Two further systematic literature reviews (chapters 3 and 4) were then conducted to understand the unintended consequences of ePrescribing and clinical decision support (CDS) systems across both adult and paediatric patients. These revealed a taxonomy of factors, which have contributed to errors during use of these systems e.g., the screen layout, default settings and inappropriate drug-dosage support. The researcher then conducted a qualitative study (chapters 7-10) to explore users’ experiences of using and being trained to use ePrescribing systems. This study involved conducting semi-structured interviews and observations, which revealed key challenges facing users, including issues with using the ‘Medication List’ and how information was presented. Users experienced benefits and challenges when customising the system, including the screen display; however, the process was sometimes overly complex. Users also described the benefits and challenges associated with different forms of interruptive and passive CDS. Order sets, for instance, encouraged more efficient prescribing, yet users often found them difficult to find within the system. A lack of training resulted in users failing to use all features of the ePrescribing system and left some healthcare staff feeling underprepared for using the system in their role. A further literature review (chapter 5) was then performed to complement emerging themes relating to how users were trained to use ePrescribing systems, which were generated as part of a qualitative study. This review revealed the range of approaches used to train users and the need for further research in this area. The literature review and qualitative study-based findings led to a follow-on study (chapter 10), whereby the researcher conducted semi-structured interviews to examine how users were trained to use ePrescribing systems across four NHS Hospital Trusts. A range of approaches were used to train users; tailored training, using clinically specific scenarios or matching the user’s profession to that of the trainer were preferred over lectures and e-learning may offer an efficient way of training large numbers of staff. However, further research is needed to investigate this and whether alternative approaches such as the use of students as trainers could be useful. This programme of work revealed the importance of human factors and user involvement in the design and ongoing development of ePrescribing systems. Training also played a role in users’ experiences of using the system and hospitals should carefully consider the training approaches used. This thesis provides recommendations gathered from the literature and primary data collection that can help inform organisations, system developers and further research in this area

Towards an integrative framework of leadership development in the South African banking industry

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)The thesis is a qualitative, multi-site case study of leadership development within the South African retail banking sector. It responds to the call for qualitative research to explore and give voice to the South African and other developing contexts within the predominantly Western-centric literature. It poses questions on the day-to-day organisational and lived realities of leadership and its development within this context. It is an enquiry of the forms and realities of aligning, designing and integrating leadership development, which leads to deliberation on the possibility of integrative frameworks. This follows from the thesis drawing together the reviews of the state of leadership and leadership development and how the thematic of alignment and integration is approached therein and within the human resource, management and organisational literature. Through this it develops an argument that the mainstream assumptions and programme-based approach to leadership development, including the remedial attempts to address this, do not provide the space to theoretically and empirically attend to, and engage with, the realities, complexities, contingencies and contestations at the individual, team, organisational, sector, national and global levels. The thesis explores this within the South African retail banking sector. This is done through qualitative interviews on, and thematic analysis of, the various mandates, purposes, funding and ways of configuring and managing leadership development within the banks’ Leadership Development Centres and the Banking Sector Education and Training Authority’s (BankSeta) International Executive Development Programme (IEDP) which is hosted at a local Business School. The thesis explores how leadership development is formalised, shaped, configured and managed as a function, purpose, programme and developmental process within the above sites, and how these are navigated, negotiated, enacted and embodied over time by the various stakeholders. It draws out the thematic of layered journeys; that is, the evolving and ongoing organisational, programmatic, pedagogic, personal and individualised journeys within the banks, BankSeta and the Business School. The journeys illustrate how leadership development evolves, opens up and differentiates over time at the different sites and levels as well as foregrounds the realities, complexities, contingencies and contestations therein. Through these journeys one appreciates the varied forms, perspectives, basis, sites, agency and spaces for designing and integrating leadership development and how these evolve, including how the standardisation, tailoring and customisation evolves. The deliberate, emergent, contingent and relational nature of designing and integrating, and the journey’s thematic, point to the limits of the mainstream assumptions and programme-based approach to leadership development. The thesis suggests a critical theoretical stance as an alternative as it provides space to critically attend to, engage with, and undertake the journey, task and process of aligning, designing, integrating and managing leadership development. It proposes ways to locate this task and process within the integrative theoretical models of leadership and the fields of instructional design, curriculum design and design of artefacts as well as the literature on the evolving human resources function, the identity work therein, and on space and place. It then suggests an organising model that can serve both as a guide for developing an open, modular platform and an analytical framework. In this way, the thesis contributes to the question and task of integrative frameworks of leadership development. Keywords: context, post-Apartheid, banking, leadership, leadership development, alignment, design, customisation, integration, pedagogy, journey, programme, function, centre, modular, platformGR201

The future of Cybersecurity in Italy: Strategic focus area

This volume has been created as a continuation of the previous one, with the aim of outlining a set of focus areas and actions that the Italian Nation research community considers essential. The book touches many aspects of cyber security, ranging from the definition of the infrastructure and controls needed to organize cyberdefence to the actions and technologies to be developed to be better protected, from the identification of the main technologies to be defended to the proposal of a set of horizontal actions for training, awareness raising, and risk management

Investigating TCP performance in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have become increasingly important in view of their promise of ubiquitous connectivity beyond traditional fixed infrastructure networks. Such networks, consisting of potentially highly mobile nodes, have provided new challenges by introducing special consideration stemming from the unique characteristics of the wireless medium and the dynamic nature of the network topology. The TCP protocol, which has been widely deployed on a multitude of internetworks including the Internet, is naturally viewed as the de facto reliable transport protocol for use in MANETs. However, assumptions made at TCP’s inception reflected characteristics of the prevalent wired infrastructure of networks at the time and could subsequently lead to sub-optimal performance when used in wireless ad hoc environments. The basic presupposition underlying TCP congestion control is that packet losses are predominantly an indication of congestion in the network. The detrimental effect of such an assumption on TCP’s performance in MANET environments has been a long-standing research problem. Hence, previous work has focused on addressing the ambiguity behind the cause of packet loss as perceived by TCP by proposing changes at various levels across the network protocol stack, such as at the MAC mechanism of the transceiver or via coupling with the routing protocol at the network layer. The main challenge addressed by the current work is to propose new methods to ameliorate the illness-effects of TCP’s misinterpretation of the causes of packet loss in MANETs. An assumed restriction on any proposed modifications is that resulting performance increases should be achievable by introducing limited changes confined to the transport layer. Such a restriction aids incremental adoption and ease of deployment by requiring minimal implementation effort. Further, the issue of packet loss ambiguity, from a transport layer perspective, has, by definition, to be dealt with in an end-to-end fashion. As such, a proposed solution may involve implementation at the sender, the receiver or both to address TCP shortcomings. Some attempts at describing TCP behaviour in MANETs have been previously reported in the literature. However, a thorough enquiry into the performance of those TCP agents popular in terms of research and adoption has been lacking. Specifically, very little work has been performed on an exhaustive analysis of TCP variants across different MANET routing protocols and under various mobility conditions. The first part of the dissertation addresses this shortcoming through extensive simulation evaluation in order to ascertain the relative performance merits of each TCP variant in terms of achieved goodput over dynamic topologies. Careful examination reveals sub-par performance of TCP Reno, the largely equivalent performance of NewReno and SACK, whilst the effectiveness of a proactive TCP variant (Vegas) is explicitly stated and justified for the first time in a dynamic MANET environment. Examination of the literature reveals that in addition to losses caused by route breakages, the hidden terminal effect contributes significantly to non-congestion induced packet losses in MANETs, which in turn has noticeably negative impact on TCP goodput. By adapting the conservative slow start mechanism of TCP Vegas into a form suitable for reactive TCP agents, like Reno, NewReno and SACK, the second part of the dissertation proposes a new Reno-based congestion avoidance mechanism which increases TCP goodput considerably across long paths by mitigating the negative effects of hidden terminals and alleviating some of the ambiguity of non-congestion related packet loss in MANETs. The proposed changes maintain intact the end-to-end semantics of TCP and are solely applicable to the sender. The new mechanism is further contrasted with an existing transport layer-focused solution and is shown to perform significantly better in a range of dynamic scenarios. As solution from an end-to-end perspective may be applicable to either or both communicating ends, the idea of implementing receiver-side alterations is also explored. Previous work has been primarily concerned with reducing receiver-generated cumulative ACK responses by “bundling” them into as few packets as possible thereby reducing misinterpretations of packet loss due to hidden terminals. However, a thorough evaluation of such receiver-side solutions reveals limitations in common evaluation practices and the solutions themselves. In an effort to address this shortcoming, the third part of this research work first specifies a tighter problem domain, identifying the circumstances under which the problem may be tackled by an end-to-end solution. Subsequent original analysis reveals that by taking into account optimisations possible in wireless communications, namely the partial or complete omission of the RTS/CTS handshake, noticeable improvements in TCP goodput are achievable especially over long paths. This novel modification is activated in a variety of topologies and is assessed using new metrics to more accurately gauge its effectiveness in a wireless multihop environment

Regulating competence-based access to agent societies

Advances in ubiquitous computing have resulted in changes to the way we access and use everyday applications, e.g. reading mail and booking tickets. At the same time, users interact with these applications in a variety of ways, each with different characteristics, e.g., different degrees of bandwidth, different payment schemes supported and so on. These are highly dynamic interactions, as some of the applications might become unavailable (either temporarily or permanently) or their behaviour may change. As the user has to deal with a large number of proactive and dynamic applications every day, he will need a personal assistant that possesses similar characteristics. The agent paradigm meets this requirement, since it exhibits the necessary features. As a result, the user will provide its personal agent assistant with a goal, e.g. I need a smartphone which costs less than three hundred pounds, and the agent will have to use a number of applications offering information on smartphones so that it finds the requested one. This, in turn, raises a number of issues regarding the organisation and the degrees of access to these services as well as the correctness of their descriptions. In this work, we propose the organisation of applications around the concept of artificial agent societies, to which access would be possible only by a positive evaluation of an agent's application. The agent will provide the Authority Agent with the role it is applying for and its competencies in the context of a protocol, i.e., the messages that it can utter/understand. The Authority Agent will then check to see if the applicant agent is a competent user of the protocols; if yes, entry is granted. Assuming that access is granted, the next issue is to decide on the protocol(s) that agent receives. As providing the full protocol will cause security and overload problems, we only need to provide the part required for the agent to play its role. We show how this can be done and how we can repair certain protocols so that they are indeed enactable once this role decomposition is performed.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Compliance flow: an intelligent workflow management system to support engineering processes

This work is about extending the scope of current workflow management systems to support engineering processes. On the one hand engineering processes are relatively dynamic, and on the other their specification and performance are constrained by industry standards and guidelines for the sake of product acceptability, such as IEC 61508 for safety and ISO 9001 for quality. A number of technologies have been proposed to increase the adaptability of current workflow systems to deal with dynamic situations. A primary concern is how to support open-ended processes that cannot be completely specified in detail prior to their execution. A survey of adaptive workflow systems is given and the enabling technologies are discussed. Engineering processes are studied and their characteristics are identified and discussed. Current workflow systems have been successfully used in managing "administrative" processes for some time, but they lack the flexibility to support dynamic, unpredictable, collaborative, and highly interdependent engineering processes. [Continues.