Detection and resolution of normative conflicts in multi-agent systems : a literature survey

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Goal Directed Conflict Resolution and Policy Refinement

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Online Automated Synthesis of Compact Normative Systems

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Towards a Systematic Repository of Knowledge About Managing Collaborative Design Conflicts

Increasingly, complex artifacts such as cars, planes and even software are designed using large-scale and often highly distributed collaborative processes. A key factor in the effectiveness of these processes concerns how well conflicts are managed. Better approaches need to be developed and adopted, but the lack of systematization and dissemination of the knowledge in this field has been a big barrier to the cumulativeness of research in this area as well as to incorporating these ideas into design practice. This paper describes a growing repository of conflict management expertise, built as an augmentation of the MIT Process Handbook, that is designed to address these challenges.

Detecting Ontological Conflicts in Protocols between Semantic Web Services

The task of verifying the compatibility between interacting web services has traditionally been limited to checking the compatibility of the interaction protocol in terms of message sequences and the type of data being exchanged. Since web services are developed largely in an uncoordinated way, different services often use independently developed ontologies for the same domain instead of adhering to a single ontology as standard. In this work we investigate the approaches that can be taken by the server to verify the possibility to reach a state with semantically inconsistent results during the execution of a protocol with a client, if the client ontology is published. Often database is used to store the actual data along with the ontologies instead of storing the actual data as a part of the ontology description. It is important to observe that at the current state of the database the semantic conflict state may not be reached even if the verification done by the server indicates the possibility of reaching a conflict state. A relational algebra based decision procedure is also developed to incorporate the current state of the client and the server databases in the overall verification procedure

Detecting Low Rapport During Natural Interactions in Small Groups from Non-Verbal Behaviour

Rapport, the close and harmonious relationship in which interaction partners are "in sync" with each other, was shown to result in smoother social interactions, improved collaboration, and improved interpersonal outcomes. In this work, we are first to investigate automatic prediction of low rapport during natural interactions within small groups. This task is challenging given that rapport only manifests in subtle non-verbal signals that are, in addition, subject to influences of group dynamics as well as inter-personal idiosyncrasies. We record videos of unscripted discussions of three to four people using a multi-view camera system and microphones. We analyse a rich set of non-verbal signals for rapport detection, namely facial expressions, hand motion, gaze, speaker turns, and speech prosody. Using facial features, we can detect low rapport with an average precision of 0.7 (chance level at 0.25), while incorporating prior knowledge of participants' personalities can even achieve early prediction without a drop in performance. We further provide a detailed analysis of different feature sets and the amount of information contained in different temporal segments of the interactions.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Tracking a table tennis ball for umpiring purposes using a multi-agent system

Tracking a table tennis ball for umpiring purposes is a challenging task as, in real-match scenarios, the ball travels fast and can become occluded or merged with other background objects. This paper presents the design of a multi-view based tracking system that can overcome the challenges of tracking a ball in real match sequences. The system has been tested on a complete table tennis rally and the results are very promising. The system is able to continuously track the ball with only marginal variations in detection. Furthermore, the initialization of the multi-camera system means it is both a portable and cost-effective solution for umpiring purposes

Contract Formation through Preemptive Normative Conflict Resolution

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