Online Automated Synthesis of Compact Normative Systems

Peer reviewedPostprin

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

Governance of Autonomous Agents on the Web: Challenges and Opportunities

International audienceThe study of autonomous agents has a long tradition in the Multiagent System and the Semantic Web communities, with applications ranging from automating business processes to personal assistants. More recently, the Web of Things (WoT), which is an extension of the Internet of Things (IoT) with metadata expressed in Web standards, and its community provide further motivation for pushing the autonomous agents research agenda forward. Although representing and reasoning about norms, policies and preferences is crucial to ensuring that autonomous agents act in a manner that satisfies stakeholder requirements, normative concepts, policies and preferences have yet to be considered as first-class abstractions in Web-based multiagent systems. Towards this end, this paper motivates the need for alignment and joint research across the Multiagent Systems, Semantic Web, and WoT communities, introduces a conceptual framework for governance of autonomous agents on the Web, and identifies several research challenges and opportunities

Computational Theory of Mind for Human-Agent Coordination

In everyday life, people often depend on their theory of mind, i.e., their ability to reason about unobservable mental content of others to understand, explain, and predict their behaviour. Many agent-based models have been designed to develop computational theory of mind and analyze its effectiveness in various tasks and settings. However, most existing models are not generic (e.g., only applied in a given setting), not feasible (e.g., require too much information to be processed), or not human-inspired (e.g., do not capture the behavioral heuristics of humans). This hinders their applicability in many settings. Accordingly, we propose a new computational theory of mind, which captures the human decision heuristics of reasoning by abstracting individual beliefs about others. We specifically study computational affinity and show how it can be used in tandem with theory of mind reasoning when designing agent models for human-agent negotiation. We perform two-agent simulations to analyze the role of affinity in getting to agreements when there is a bound on the time to be spent for negotiating. Our results suggest that modeling affinity can ease the negotiation process by decreasing the number of rounds needed for an agreement as well as yield a higher benefit for agents with theory of mind reasoning.</p