37 research outputs found
Introduction to normative multiagent systems
This article introduces the research issues related to and definition of normative multiagent systems. It also describes the papers selected from NorMAS05 that are part of this double special issue and relates the papers to each other
Responsible Autonomy
As intelligent systems are increasingly making decisions that directly affect
society, perhaps the most important upcoming research direction in AI is to
rethink the ethical implications of their actions. Means are needed to
integrate moral, societal and legal values with technological developments in
AI, both during the design process as well as part of the deliberation
algorithms employed by these systems. In this paper, we describe leading ethics
theories and propose alternative ways to ensure ethical behavior by artificial
systems. Given that ethics are dependent on the socio-cultural context and are
often only implicit in deliberation processes, methodologies are needed to
elicit the values held by designers and stakeholders, and to make these
explicit leading to better understanding and trust on artificial autonomous
systems.Comment: IJCAI2017 (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Automating decision making to help establish norm-based regulations
Norms have been extensively proposed as coordination mechanisms for both
agent and human societies. Nevertheless, choosing the norms to regulate a
society is by no means straightforward. The reasons are twofold. First, the
norms to choose from may not be independent (i.e, they can be related to each
other). Second, different preference criteria may be applied when choosing the
norms to enact. This paper advances the state of the art by modeling a series
of decision-making problems that regulation authorities confront when choosing
the policies to establish. In order to do so, we first identify three different
norm relationships -namely, generalisation, exclusivity, and substitutability-
and we then consider norm representation power, cost, and associated moral
values as alternative preference criteria. Thereafter, we show that the
decision-making problems faced by policy makers can be encoded as linear
programs, and hence solved with the aid of state-of-the-art solvers
Conceptual framework for ubiquitous cyber-physical assembly systems in airframe assembly
Current sectoral drivers for the manufacturing of complex products - such as airframe assembly -require new manufacturing system paradigms to meet them. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for cyber-physical systems driven by ubiquitous context-awareness by drawing together a unique and coherent vision that merges several extant concepts. This framework leverages recent progress in agent-based systems, exible manufacturing, ubiquitous computing, and metrology-driven robotic assembly in the Evolvable Assembly Systems project. As such, although it is adapted for and grounded in manufacturing facilities for airframe assembly, it is not specifically tailored to that application and is a much more general framework. As well as outlining our conceptual framework, we also provide a vision for assembly grounded in a review of existing research in the area
Monitoring Social Expectations in Second Life
Online virtual worlds such as Second Life provide a rich medium for unstructured human interaction in a shared simulated 3D environment. However, many human interactions take place in a structured social context where participants play particular roles and are subject to expectations governing their behaviour, and current virtual worlds do not provide any support for this type of interaction. There is therefore an opportunity to adapt the tools developed in the MAS community for structured social interactions between software agents (inspired by human society) and adapt these for use with the computer-mediated human communication provided by virtual worlds.
This paper describes the application of one such tool for use with Second Life. A model checker for online monitoring of social expectations defined in temporal logic has been integrated with Second Life, allowing users to be notified when their expectations of others have been fulfilled or violated. Avatar actions in the virtual world are detected by a script, encoded as propositions and sent to the model checker, along with the social expectation rules to be monitored. Notifications of expectation fulfilment and violation are returned to the script to be displayed to the user. This utility of this tool is reliant on the ability of the Linden scripting language (LSL) to detect events of significance in the application domain, and a discussion is presented on how a range of monitored structured social scenarios could be realised despite the limitations of LSL
Homo Socionicus: a Case Study of Simulation Models of Norms
This paper describes a survey of normative agent-based social simulation models. These models are examined from the perspective of the foundations of social theory. Agent-based modelling contributes to the research program of methodological individualism. Norms are a central concept in the role theoretic concept of action in the tradition of Durkheim and Parsons. This paper investigates to what extend normative agent-based models are able to capture the role theoretic concept of norms. Three methodological core problems are identified: the question of norm transmission, normative transformation of agents and what kind of analysis the models contribute. It can be shown that initially the models appeared only to address some of these problems rather than all of them simultaneously. More recent developments, however, show progress in that direction. However, the degree of resolution of intra agent processes remains too low for a comprehensive understanding of normative behaviour regulation.Norms, Normative Agent-Based Social Simulation, Role Theory, Methodological Individualism
Online Automated Synthesis of Compact Normative Systems
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