Modelling and analyzing adaptive self-assembling strategies with Maude

Building adaptive systems with predictable emergent behavior is a challenging task and it is becoming a critical need. The research community has accepted the challenge by introducing approaches of various nature: from software architectures, to programming paradigms, to analysis techniques. We recently proposed a conceptual framework for adaptation centered around the role of control data. In this paper we show that it can be naturally realized in a reflective logical language like Maude by using the Reflective Russian Dolls model. Moreover, we exploit this model to specify, validate and analyse a prominent example of adaptive system: robot swarms equipped with self-assembly strategies. The analysis exploits the statistical model checker PVeStA

Dissonant Harmonies: Modelling and Conceptualising Improvising Social Groups

Improvisation has attracted increasing attention within organisational and managerial studies as a method to improve efficiency and innovation without adequately understanding the conditions prerequisite for improvisation’s operation. This paper examines how the jazz repertoire theory, and New Cultural studies of jazz address improvisation within jazz ensembles, showing neither adequately explaining improvisation. The paper draws on Bourdieu’s concepts, fleshed out in Wacquant’s ethnography research of habitus acquisition among pugilists to propose a model of the symbiotic ensemble providing the conditions essential for improvisation. Symbiotic ensembles are composed of synergetic musicians, all of relatively equal musical and social status, who have commonly accrued an embodied musical improvising habitus through their musical and life trajectories, from first learning an instrument, transitioning to improvisation, performing in various ensemble settings whereby they acquire influences and become vectors transmitting musical concepts among disparate musical ensembles

Self-organizing peer-to-peer social networks

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 The Authors.Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems provide a new solution to distributed information and resource sharing because of its outstanding properties in decentralization, dynamics, flexibility, autonomy, and cooperation, summarized as DDFAC in this paper. After a detailed analysis of the current P2P literature, this paper suggests to better exploit peer social relationships and peer autonomy to achieve efficient P2P structure design. Accordingly, this paper proposes Self-organizing peer-to-peer social networks (SoPPSoNs) to self-organize distributed peers in a decentralized way, in which neuron-like agents following extended Hebbian rules found in the brain activity represent peers to discover useful peer connections. The self-organized networks capture social associations of peers in resource sharing, and hence are called P2P social networks. SoPPSoNs have improved search speed and success rate as peer social networks are correctly formed. This has been verified through tests on real data collected from the Gnutella system. Analysis on the Gnutella data has verified that social associations of peers in reality are directed, asymmetric and weighted, validating the design of SoPPSoN. The tests presented in this paper have also evaluated the scalability of SoPPSoN, its performance under varied initial network connectivity and the effects of different learning rules.National Natural Science of Foundation of Chin

The use of information theory in evolutionary biology

Information is a key concept in evolutionary biology. Information is stored in biological organism's genomes, and used to generate the organism as well as to maintain and control it. Information is also "that which evolves". When a population adapts to a local environment, information about this environment is fixed in a representative genome. However, when an environment changes, information can be lost. At the same time, information is processed by animal brains to survive in complex environments, and the capacity for information processing also evolves. Here I review applications of information theory to the evolution of proteins as well as to the evolution of information processing in simulated agents that adapt to perform a complex task.Comment: 25 pages, 7 figures. To appear in "The Year in Evolutionary Biology", of the Annals of the NY Academy of Science

Human-in-the-loop online multi-agent approach to increase trustworthiness in ML models through trust scores and data augmentation

Increasing a ML model accuracy is not enough, we must also increase its trustworthiness. This is an important step for building resilient AI systems for safety-critical applications such as automotive, finance, and healthcare. For that purpose, we propose a multi-agent system that combines both machine and human agents. In this system, a checker agent calculates a trust score of each instance (which penalizes overconfidence in predictions) using an agreement-based method and ranks it; then an improver agent filters the anomalous instances based on a human rule-based procedure (which is considered safe), gets the human labels, applies geometric data augmentation, and retrains with the augmented data using transfer learning. We evaluate the system on corrupted versions of the MNIST and FashionMNIST datasets. We get an improvement in accuracy and trust score with just few additional labels compared to a baseline approach.This work was supported by Lenovo as part of LenovoBSC 2020 collaboration agreement, by the Spanish Government under contracts PID2019-107255GB-C21 and PID2019-107255GB-C22, and by the Generalitat de Catalunya under contract 2017-SGR-1414 and under grant 2020 FI-B 00257.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Perspectives of the interaction between composer, student performer, and music educator: commissioned works in selected school ensembles

The purpose of this study was to examine and describe the process entailed in commissioning a new work for a high school music ensemble with a focus on the interpersonal relationships that exist among the student performers, their director, and the composer during a composer residency. With a multiple case study design, I examined the commissioned works projects of five cohorts that included one composer, three student performers, and one commissioning conductor. Each of the composers and commissioning conductors selected for participation in the study possessed extensive experience with commissioned works projects in school settings enabling them to draw on their past experience, as well as their experience working together on a commissioned work. The student performers were selected for the study based on their participation in a commissioned work project that included a composer residency with the commissioning conductor and commissioned composer associated with each cohort. Data was collected through interviews with the members of each cohort. Interview questions focused on understanding how each agent (student performer, music teacher, composer) contributes to the process of producing a new work through commission, how the interpersonal relationships between the agents function throughout the process, and how the outcomes of the process impact the agents’ experiences. The data gathered in the interviews was analyzed in light of these three foci and then re-examined to uncover themes common to multiple agents. Finally, the data was evaluated to determine how this information might shape future commissioning projects. I believe that the results of my investigation point to a greater understanding of the processes involved with the commissioning of a work, as well as the interpersonal relationships that exist within those processes. The results of my investigation formed a foundation for the construction of a concluding narrative providing step-by-step details that might be informative for music educators considering embarkation upon a commissioned work project

Simulating activities: Relating motives, deliberation, and attentive coordination

Activities are located behaviors, taking time, conceived as socially meaningful, and usually involving interaction with tools and the environment. In modeling human cognition as a form of problem solving (goal-directed search and operator sequencing), cognitive science researchers have not adequately studied “off-task” activities (e.g., waiting), non-intellectual motives (e.g., hunger), sustaining a goal state (e.g., playful interaction), and coupled perceptual-motor dynamics (e.g., following someone). These aspects of human behavior have been considered in bits and pieces in past research, identified as scripts, human factors, behavior settings, ensemble, flow experience, and situated action. More broadly, activity theory provides a comprehensive framework relating motives, goals, and operations. This paper ties these ideas together, using examples from work life in a Canadian High Arctic research station. The emphasis is on simulating human behavior as it naturally occurs, such that “working” is understood as an aspect of living. The result is a synthesis of previously unrelated analytic perspectives and a broader appreciation of the nature of human cognition. Simulating activities in this comprehensive way is useful for understanding work practice, promoting learning, and designing better tools, including human-robot systems