29,959 research outputs found
Mixed Initiative Systems for Human-Swarm Interaction: Opportunities and Challenges
Human-swarm interaction (HSI) involves a number of human factors impacting
human behaviour throughout the interaction. As the technologies used within HSI
advance, it is more tempting to increase the level of swarm autonomy within the
interaction to reduce the workload on humans. Yet, the prospective negative
effects of high levels of autonomy on human situational awareness can hinder
this process. Flexible autonomy aims at trading-off these effects by changing
the level of autonomy within the interaction when required; with
mixed-initiatives combining human preferences and automation's recommendations
to select an appropriate level of autonomy at a certain point of time. However,
the effective implementation of mixed-initiative systems raises fundamental
questions on how to combine human preferences and automation recommendations,
how to realise the selected level of autonomy, and what the future impacts on
the cognitive states of a human are. We explore open challenges that hamper the
process of developing effective flexible autonomy. We then highlight the
potential benefits of using system modelling techniques in HSI by illustrating
how they provide HSI designers with an opportunity to evaluate different
strategies for assessing the state of the mission and for adapting the level of
autonomy within the interaction to maximise mission success metrics.Comment: Author version, accepted at the 2018 IEEE Annual Systems Modelling
Conference, Canberra, Australi
Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges
Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are
clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's
smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come
equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as
accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has
enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm,
such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime
control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior
sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process,
since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information
about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or
maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes
more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for
defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the
current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research
challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN
Understanding and Predicting Delay in Reciprocal Relations
Reciprocity in directed networks points to user's willingness to return
favors in building mutual interactions. High reciprocity has been widely
observed in many directed social media networks such as following relations in
Twitter and Tumblr. Therefore, reciprocal relations between users are often
regarded as a basic mechanism to create stable social ties and play a crucial
role in the formation and evolution of networks. Each reciprocity relation is
formed by two parasocial links in a back-and-forth manner with a time delay.
Hence, understanding the delay can help us gain better insights into the
underlying mechanisms of network dynamics. Meanwhile, the accurate prediction
of delay has practical implications in advancing a variety of real-world
applications such as friend recommendation and marketing campaign. For example,
by knowing when will users follow back, service providers can focus on the
users with a potential long reciprocal delay for effective targeted marketing.
This paper presents the initial investigation of the time delay in reciprocal
relations. Our study is based on a large-scale directed network from Tumblr
that consists of 62.8 million users and 3.1 billion user following relations
with a timespan of multiple years (from 31 Oct 2007 to 24 Jul 2013). We reveal
a number of interesting patterns about the delay that motivate the development
of a principled learning model to predict the delay in reciprocal relations.
Experimental results on the above mentioned dynamic networks corroborate the
effectiveness of the proposed delay prediction model.Comment: 10 page
Active Perception by Interaction with Other Agents in a Predictive Coding Framework: Application to Internet of Things Environment
Predicting the state of an agent\u27s partially-observable environment is a problem of interest in many domains. Typically in the real world, the environment consists of multiple agents, not necessarily working towards a common goal. Though the goal and sensory observation for each agent is unique, one agent might have acquired some knowledge that may benefit the other. In essence, the knowledge base regarding the environment is distributed among the agents. An agent can sample this distributed knowledge base by communicating with other agents. Since an agent is not storing the entire knowledge base, its model can be small and its inference can be efficient and fault-tolerant. However, the agent needs to learn -- when, with whom and what -- to communicate (in general interact) under different situations.This dissertation presents an agent model that actively and selectively communicates with other agents to predict the state of its environment efficiently. Communication is a challenge when the internal models of other agents is unknown and unobservable. The proposed agent learns communication policies as mappings from its belief state to when, with whom and what to communicate. The policies are learned using predictive coding in an online manner, without any reinforcement. The proposed agent model is evaluated on widely-studied applications, such as human activity recognition from multimodal, multisource and heterogeneous sensor data, and transferring knowledge across sensor networks. In the applications, either each sensor or each sensor network is assumed to be monitored by an agent. The recognition accuracy on benchmark datasets is comparable to the state-of-the-art, even though our model has significantly fewer parameters and infers the state in a localized manner. The learned policy reduces number of communications. The agent is tolerant to communication failures and can recognize the reliability of each agent from its communication messages. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on learning communication policies by an agent for predicting the state of its environment
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