Online Automated Synthesis of Compact Normative Systems

Peer reviewedPostprin

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

A fuzzy-based approach for classifying students' emotional states in online collaborative work

(c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Emotion awareness is becoming a key aspect in collaborative work at academia, enterprises and organizations that use collaborative group work in their activity. Due to pervasiveness of ICT's, most of collaboration can be performed through communication media channels such as discussion forums, social networks, etc. The emotive state of the users while they carry out their activity such as collaborative learning at Universities or project work at enterprises and organizations influences very much their performance and can actually determine the final learning or project outcome. Therefore, monitoring the users' emotive states and using that information for providing feedback and scaffolding is crucial. To this end, automated analysis over data collected from communication channels is a useful source. In this paper, we propose an approach to process such collected data in order to classify and assess emotional states of involved users and provide them feedback accordingly to their emotive states. In order to achieve this, a fuzzy approach is used to build the emotive classification system, which is fed with data from ANEW dictionary, whose words are bound to emotional weights and these, in turn, are used to map Fuzzy sets in our proposal. The proposed fuzzy-based system has been evaluated using real data from collaborative learning courses in an academic context.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The Complexity of Data-Driven Norm Synthesis and Revision

Norms have been widely proposed as a way of coordinating and controlling the activities of agents in a multi-agent system (MAS). A norm specifies the behaviour an agent should follow in order to achieve the objective of the MAS. However, designing norms to achieve a particular system objective can be difficult, particularly when there is no direct link between the language in which the system objective is stated and the language in which the norms can be expressed. In this paper, we consider the problem of synthesising a norm from traces of agent behaviour, where each trace is labelled with whether the behaviour satisfies the system objective. We show that the norm synthesis problem is NP-complete

Minimality and Simplicity in the On-line Automated Synthesis of Normative Systems

Much previous research has investigated explicit, machine-process-able norms as a means to facilitate coordination in open multi-agent systems. This research can typically be classified as considering either offline design (norms are synthesised at design time) or online design. Online synthesis techniques aim to construct norms for a system while that system is actually running. A promising recent approach to on-line norm synthesis has been proposed but it suffers from serious drawbacks: (i) it needs too much information; (ii) it ignores issues of compactness in terms of minimality (ensuring that norms are not superfluous) and simplicity (ensuring that agents can process norms with little computational effort). To overcome these drawbacks, we propose an optimistic approach which, even though it uses less information, is able to explore more norms and synthesises sets of norms which are more compact. We present experimental evidence of the quality of our approach. Copyright © 2014, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.Peer Reviewe

Minimality and simplicity of rules for the internet-of-things.

Rule-based systems have been increasing in popularity in recent years. They allow for easier handling of both simple and complicated problems utilising a set of rules created in various ways (e.g., manually, or (semi-) automatically, via, say, machine learning or decision trees) depending on the situation. Despite their usefulness however, there are still improvements to be made. Knowledge representation technologies have been available for a long time and provide the means to represent domains formally and correlate entities in those domains. They also allow for ontological reasoning that can take advantage of such connections between entities. These techniques can be useful when applied on rule-based systems in order to improve the quality of rules and, hence, overall system performance. We describe and implement an approach to refine rules used in Internet-of-Things scenarios using knowledge representation and reasoning. The proposed solution uses ontological reasoning on the preconditions and postconditions of rules as it aims to reduce the total amount of rules in a system and simplify them

Dagstuhl Reports : Volume 1, Issue 2, February 2011

Online Privacy: Towards Informational Self-Determination on the Internet (Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 11061) : Simone Fischer-Hübner, Chris Hoofnagle, Kai Rannenberg, Michael Waidner, Ioannis Krontiris and Michael Marhöfer Self-Repairing Programs (Dagstuhl Seminar 11062) : Mauro Pezzé, Martin C. Rinard, Westley Weimer and Andreas Zeller Theory and Applications of Graph Searching Problems (Dagstuhl Seminar 11071) : Fedor V. Fomin, Pierre Fraigniaud, Stephan Kreutzer and Dimitrios M. Thilikos Combinatorial and Algorithmic Aspects of Sequence Processing (Dagstuhl Seminar 11081) : Maxime Crochemore, Lila Kari, Mehryar Mohri and Dirk Nowotka Packing and Scheduling Algorithms for Information and Communication Services (Dagstuhl Seminar 11091) Klaus Jansen, Claire Mathieu, Hadas Shachnai and Neal E. Youn

The Development of Social Simulation as Reflected in the First Ten Years of JASSS: a Citation and Co-Citation Analysis

Social simulation is often described as a multidisciplinary and fast-moving field. This can make it difficult to obtain an overview of the field both for contributing researchers and for outsiders who are interested in social simulation. The Journal for Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) completing its tenth year provides a good opportunity to take stock of what happened over this time period. First, we use citation analysis to identify the most influential publications and to verify characteristics of social simulation such as its multidisciplinary nature. Then, we perform a co-citation analysis to visualize the intellectual structure of social simulation and its development. Overall, the analysis shows social simulation both in its early stage and during its first steps towards becoming a more differentiated discipline.Citation Analysis, Co-Citation Analysis, Lines of Research, Multidisciplinary, Science Studies, Social Simulation

Index to Library Trends Volume 38

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