Intention Reconciliation by Collaborative Agents

Research on resource-bounded agents has established that rational agents need to be able to revise their commitments in the light of new opportunities. In the context of collaborative activities, rational agents must be able to reconcile their intentions to do team-related actions with other, conflicting intentions. The SPIRE experimental system allows the process of intention reconciliation in team contexts to be simulated and studied. Prior work with SPIRE examined the effect of team norms, environmental factors, and agent utility functions on individual and group outcomes for homogeneous groups of agents. This paper extends these results to situations involving heterogeneous groups in which agents use different utility functions. The paper provides new illustrations of the ways in which SPIRE can reveal unpredicted interactions among the variables involved, and it suggests preliminary principles for designers of collaborative agents.Engineering and Applied Science

The Influence of Social Norms and Social Consciousness on Intention Reconciliation

Research on resource-bounded agents has established that rational agents need to be able to revise their commitments in light of new opportunities. In the context of collaborative activities, rational agents must be able to reconcile their intentions to do team-related actions with other, conflicting intentions. The SPIRE experimental system allows the process of intention reconciliation in team contexts to be simulated and studied. Initial work with SPIRE examined the impact of environmental factors and agent utility functions on individual and group outcomes in the context of one set of social norms governing collaboration. This paper extends those results by further studying the effect of environmental factors and the agents' level of social consciousness and by comparing the impact of two different types of social norms on agent behavior and outcomes. The results show that the choice of social norms influences the accuracy of the agents' responses to varying environmental factors, as well as the effectiveness of social consciousness and other aspects of agents' utility functions. In experiments using heterogeneous groups of agents, both sets of norms were susceptible to the free-rider effect. However, the gains of the less responsible agents were minimal, suggesting that agent designers would have little incentive to design agents that deviate from the standard level of responsibility to the group.Engineering and Applied Science

Can University/Community Collaboration Create Spaces for Aboriginal Reconciliation? Case Study of the Healing of The Seven Generations and Four Directions Community Projects and Wilfrid Laurier University

In this article, the authors attempt to illustrate how two Aboriginal community-based projects were conceptualized and developed through the collaborative efforts of four individuals who believed in the merits of a project aimed at survivors and intergenerational survivors of the residential school system as well as Aboriginal people in trouble with the law. Drawing upon a small body of literature on university/community collaboration, the authors illustrate the importance of meaningful collaboration between universities and communities in order to enhance a mutually beneficial relationship conducive to community-engaged scholarship. Through an examination of the case study of the Healing of The Seven Generations Project and the Four Directions Aboriginal Restorative Justice Project, the authors hope to illustrate to fellow Aboriginal colleagues in Canada the merits, strengths and challenges of university/community collaboration. Ultimately, what the authors hope to share through this article is an example of how university/community collaboration can create spaces whereby Aboriginal people have become agents of their own healing

Business for the Glory of God

The grand narrative of the Bible could be broken into three distinct parts- Creation, Fall, and Redemption. The main focus of this paper will go through the distinct parts of Creation and the Fall, but the focus will be on Redemption specifically in the realm of work and how it relates to business marketing. In Creation, God created us in His image meaning we were gifted with the ability to create and to form relationships. We express God’s image through the dominion mandate, which is God’s command to us to be stewards of the earth through the act of work. After the Fall, work and business became distorted. Work, a thing created to glorify God, now had great potential to harm others. The Fall triggered humans to leverage their creativity and relationships, in business specifically, to manipulate others and to serve themselves rather than to serve God and others. Instead of perpetuating the effects of the Fall, business, specifically marketing, can be a catalyst for Redemption

Intention Reconciliation in the Context of Teamwork: An Initial Empirical Investigation

With growing opportunities for individually motivated agents to work collaboratively to satisfy shared goals, it becomes increasingly important to design agents that can make intelligent decisions in the context of commitments to group activities. In particular, agents need to be able to reconcile their intentions to do team-related actions with other, conflicting intentions. We present the SPIRE experimental system that allows the process of intention reconciliation in team contexts to be simulated and studied. SPIRE enables us to examine the influence of team norms and environmental factors on team members faced with conflicting intentions, as well as the effectiveness of different intention-reconciliation strategies. We discuss results from pilot experiments that confirm the reasonableness of our model of the problem and illustrate some of the issues involved, and we lay the groundwork for future experiments that will allow us to derive principles for designers of collaboration-capable agents.Engineering and Applied Science

Automated Federation Of Virtual Organization In Grid Using Select, Match, Negotiate And Expand (SMNE) Protocol [QA76.9.C58 C518 2008 f rb].

Sekelompok sumber perkomputeran yang teragih dan berlainan jenis dalam persekitaran grid akan membentuk organisasi maya dan berkongsi sumber komputer. A group of distributed and heterogeneous resources in a grid environment may form a Virtual Organization (VO) to enable resource sharing

Design of MARQUIS2: study protocol for a mentored implementation study of an evidence-based toolkit to improve patient safety through medication reconciliation.

BackgroundThe first Multi-center Medication Reconciliation Quality Improvement Study (MARQUIS1) demonstrated that implementation of a medication reconciliation best practices toolkit decreased total unintentional medication discrepancies in five hospitals. We sought to implement the MARQUIS toolkit in more diverse hospitals, incorporating lessons learned from MARQUIS1.MethodsMARQUIS2 is a pragmatic, mentored implementation QI study which collected clinical and implementation outcomes. Sites implemented a revised toolkit, which included interventions from these domains: 1) best possible medication history (BPMH)-taking; 2) discharge medication reconciliation and patient/caregiver counseling; 3) identifying and defining clinician roles and responsibilities; 4) risk stratification; 5) health information technology improvements; 6) improved access to medication sources; 7) identification and correction of real-time discrepancies; and, 8) stakeholder engagement. Eight hospitalists mentored the sites via one site visit and monthly phone calls over the 18-month intervention period. Each site's local QI team assessed opportunities to improve, implemented at least one of the 17 toolkit components, and accessed a variety of resources (e.g. implementation manual, webinars, and workshops). Outcomes to be assessed will include unintentional medication discrepancies per patient.DiscussionA mentored multi-center medication reconciliation QI initiative using a best practices toolkit was successfully implemented across 18 medical centers. The 18 participating sites varied in size, teaching status, location, and electronic health record (EHR) platform. We introduce barriers to implementation and lessons learned from MARQUIS1, such as the importance of utilizing dedicated, trained medication history takers, simple EHR solutions, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and the input of patients and families when improving medication reconciliation

Learning and Decision-Making for Intention Reconciliation

Rational, autonomous agents must be able to revise their commitments in the light of new opportunities. They must decide when to default on commitments to the group in order to commit to potentially more valuable outside offers. The SPIRE experimental system allows the study of intention reconciliation in team contexts. This paper presents a new framework for SPIRE that allows for mathematical specification and provides a basis for the study of learning. Analysis shows that a reactive policy can be expected to perform as well as more complex policies that look ahead. We present an algorithm for learning when to default on group commitments based solely on observed values of group-related tasks and discuss the applicability of this algorithm in settings where multiple agents may be learning.Engineering and Applied Science

Reconciling Knowledge in Social Tagging Web Services

Sometimes we want to search for new information about topics but we can not find relevant results using our own knowledge (for example, our personal bookmarks). A potential solution could be the use of knowledge from other users to find what we are searching for. This solution implies that we can achieve some agreement on implicit semantics used by the other users. We call it Reconciliation of Knowledge. The aim of this paper is to show an agent-based method which lets us reconcile two different knowledge basis (associated with tagging systems) into a common language, obtaining a new one that allows the reconcilitiation of (part of) this knowledge. The agents use Formal Concept Analysis concepts and tools and it has been implemented on the JADE multiagent platform.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2009-0949