Women in Artificial intelligence (AI)

This Special Issue, entitled "Women in Artificial Intelligence" includes 17 papers from leading women scientists. The papers cover a broad scope of research areas within Artificial Intelligence, including machine learning, perception, reasoning or planning, among others. The papers have applications to relevant fields, such as human health, finance, or education. It is worth noting that the Issue includes three papers that deal with different aspects of gender bias in Artificial Intelligence. All the papers have a woman as the first author. We can proudly say that these women are from countries worldwide, such as France, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Australia, Bangladesh, Yemen, Romania, India, Cuba, Bangladesh and Spain. In conclusion, apart from its intrinsic scientific value as a Special Issue, combining interesting research works, this Special Issue intends to increase the invisibility of women in AI, showing where they are, what they do, and how they contribute to developments in Artificial Intelligence from their different places, positions, research branches and application fields. We planned to issue this book on the on Ada Lovelace Day (11/10/2022), a date internationally dedicated to the first computer programmer, a woman who had to fight the gender difficulties of her times, in the XIX century. We also thank the publisher for making this possible, thus allowing for this book to become a part of the international activities dedicated to celebrating the value of women in ICT all over the world. With this book, we want to pay homage to all the women that contributed over the years to the field of AI

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Incentive-driven QoS in peer-to-peer overlays

A well known problem in peer-to-peer overlays is that no single entity has control over the software, hardware and configuration of peers. Thus, each peer can selfishly adapt its behaviour to maximise its benefit from the overlay. This thesis is concerned with the modelling and design of incentive mechanisms for QoS-overlays: resource allocation protocols that provide strategic peers with participation incentives, while at the same time optimising the performance of the peer-to-peer distribution overlay. The contributions of this thesis are as follows. First, we present PledgeRoute, a novel contribution accounting system that can be used, along with a set of reciprocity policies, as an incentive mechanism to encourage peers to contribute resources even when users are not actively consuming overlay services. This mechanism uses a decentralised credit network, is resilient to sybil attacks, and allows peers to achieve time and space deferred contribution reciprocity. Then, we present a novel, QoS-aware resource allocation model based on Vickrey auctions that uses PledgeRoute as a substrate. It acts as an incentive mechanism by providing efficient overlay construction, while at the same time allocating increasing service quality to those peers that contribute more to the network. The model is then applied to lagsensitive chunk swarming, and some of its properties are explored for different peer delay distributions. When considering QoS overlays deployed over the best-effort Internet, the quality received by a client cannot be adjudicated completely to either its serving peer or the intervening network between them. By drawing parallels between this situation and well-known hidden action situations in microeconomics, we propose a novel scheme to ensure adherence to advertised QoS levels. We then apply it to delay-sensitive chunk distribution overlays and present the optimal contract payments required, along with a method for QoS contract enforcement through reciprocative strategies. We also present a probabilistic model for application-layer delay as a function of the prevailing network conditions. Finally, we address the incentives of managed overlays, and the prediction of their behaviour. We propose two novel models of multihoming managed overlay incentives in which overlays can freely allocate their traffic flows between different ISPs. One is obtained by optimising an overlay utility function with desired properties, while the other is designed for data-driven least-squares fitting of the cross elasticity of demand. This last model is then used to solve for ISP profit maximisation

Fuelling the zero-emissions road freight of the future: routing of mobile fuellers

The future of zero-emissions road freight is closely tied to the sufficient availability of new and clean fuel options such as electricity and Hydrogen. In goods distribution using Electric Commercial Vehicles (ECVs) and Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles (HFCVs) a major challenge in the transition period would pertain to their limited autonomy and scarce and unevenly distributed refuelling stations. One viable solution to facilitate and speed up the adoption of ECVs/HFCVs by logistics, however, is to get the fuel to the point where it is needed (instead of diverting the route of delivery vehicles to refuelling stations) using "Mobile Fuellers (MFs)". These are mobile battery swapping/recharging vans or mobile Hydrogen fuellers that can travel to a running ECV/HFCV to provide the fuel they require to complete their delivery routes at a rendezvous time and space. In this presentation, new vehicle routing models will be presented for a third party company that provides MF services. In the proposed problem variant, the MF provider company receives routing plans of multiple customer companies and has to design routes for a fleet of capacitated MFs that have to synchronise their routes with the running vehicles to deliver the required amount of fuel on-the-fly. This presentation will discuss and compare several mathematical models based on different business models and collaborative logistics scenarios