Adding X-security to Carrel: security for agent-based healthcare applications

The high growth of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in Open Networks with initiatives such as Agentcities1 requires development in many different areas such as scalable and secure agent platforms, location services, directory services, and systems management. In our case we have focused our effort on security for agent systems. The driving force of this paper is provide a practical vision of how security mechanisms could be introduced for multi-agent applications. Our case study for this experiment is Carrel [9]: an Agent-based application in the Organ and Tissue transplant domain. The selection of this application is due to its characteristics as a real scenario and use of high-risk data for example, a study of the 21 most visited health-related web sites on the Internet discovered that personal information provided at many of the sites was being inadvertently leaked for unauthorized persons. These factors indicate to us that Carrel would be a suitable environment in order to test existing security safeguards. Furthermore, we believe that the experience gathered will be useful for other MAS. In order to achieve our purpose we describe the design, architecture and implementation of security elements on MAS for the Carrel System.Postprint (published version

A Semantic-Agent Framework for PaaS Interoperability

Suchismita Hoare, Na Helian, and Nathan Baddoo, 'A Semantic-Agent Framework for PaaS Interoperability', in Proceedings of the The IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Big Data Computing, Toulouse, France, 18-21, July 2016. DOI: 10.1109/UIC-ATC-ScalCom-CBDCom-IoP-SmartWorld.2016.0126 © 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, 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 component of this work in other works.Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) is poised for a wider adoption by its relevant stakeholders, especially Cloud application developers. Despite this, the service model is still plagued with several adoption inhibitors, one of which is lack of interoperability between proprietary application infrastructure services of public PaaS solutions. Although there is some progress in addressing the general PaaS interoperability issue through various devised solutions focused primarily on API compatibility and platform-agnostic application design models, interoperability specific to differentiated services provided by the existing public PaaS providers and the resultant disparity owing to the offered services’ semantics has not been addressed effectively, yet. The literature indicates that this dimension of PaaS interoperability is awaiting evolution in the state-of-the-art. This paper proposes the initial system design of a PaaS interoperability (IntPaaS) framework to be developed through the integration of semantic and agent technologies to enable transparent interoperability between incompatible PaaS services. This will involve uniform description through semantic annotation of PaaS provider services utilizing the OWL-S ontology, creating a knowledgebase that enables software agents to automatically search for suitable services to support Cloud-based Greenfield application development. The rest of the paper discusses the identified research problem along with the proposed solution to address the issue.Submitted Versio

Constructivist Ambient Intelligent Agent for Smart Environments

International audienceBuilding a smart home is a multi-disciplinary and challenging problem. Our goal is to build an agent that can propose context aware services to the users. High variability of users' needs and the uniqueness of every home are difficult to handle using "Classical AI". We propose an alternative approach inspired by Developmental Artificial Intelligence and Constructivism Theory. Being constructivist means that the agent builds its knowledge in situ through user's interactions. This continuous interaction process enables the user to customize or bring up the system to meet his personal needs. We have made a first experiment by learning schemas from a simulated two-weeks home scenario. This preliminary experiment gives us indications that Constructivism is a promising approach for ambient intelligence

Regulating competence-based access to agent societies

Advances in ubiquitous computing have resulted in changes to the way we access and use everyday applications, e.g. reading mail and booking tickets. At the same time, users interact with these applications in a variety of ways, each with different characteristics, e.g., different degrees of bandwidth, different payment schemes supported and so on. These are highly dynamic interactions, as some of the applications might become unavailable (either temporarily or permanently) or their behaviour may change. As the user has to deal with a large number of proactive and dynamic applications every day, he will need a personal assistant that possesses similar characteristics. The agent paradigm meets this requirement, since it exhibits the necessary features. As a result, the user will provide its personal agent assistant with a goal, e.g. I need a smartphone which costs less than three hundred pounds, and the agent will have to use a number of applications offering information on smartphones so that it finds the requested one. This, in turn, raises a number of issues regarding the organisation and the degrees of access to these services as well as the correctness of their descriptions. In this work, we propose the organisation of applications around the concept of artificial agent societies, to which access would be possible only by a positive evaluation of an agent's application. The agent will provide the Authority Agent with the role it is applying for and its competencies in the context of a protocol, i.e., the messages that it can utter/understand. The Authority Agent will then check to see if the applicant agent is a competent user of the protocols; if yes, entry is granted. Assuming that access is granted, the next issue is to decide on the protocol(s) that agent receives. As providing the full protocol will cause security and overload problems, we only need to provide the part required for the agent to play its role. We show how this can be done and how we can repair certain protocols so that they are indeed enactable once this role decomposition is performed

A trust-aware framework for service selection and service quality review in e-business ecosystems

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Information Technology.As e-Business has moved from a niche market to a decisive contributor for the success of most companies, some issues need to be solved in order to assist the continued success of e-Business. The challenge, to deploy fully autonomous business service agents which undertake transactions on behalf of their owners, often fails due to lack of trust in the agent and its decisions. Four aspects can overcome this challenge. Firstly, intelligent agents need to be equipped with self-adjusting reputation, trustworthiness and credibility evaluation mechanisms to assess the trustworthiness of potential counterparts prior to a business transaction. Secondly, such evaluation mechanisms must be transparent and easy to comprehend so agent owners develop trust in their agents’ decisions. Thirdly, the calculations of an agent must be highly customisable so that the agent owner can apply his personal experiences and security requirements to govern the decision making process of the intelligent agent. And finally, agents must communicate via standardised and open protocols in order to facilitate interaction between services deployed across different architectures and technologies. This thesis proposes the DEco Arch framework which integrates behavioural trust element relationships into various decision making processes found in e-Business ecosystems. We apply fuzzy-logic based soft computing techniques to increase user confidence and therefore enhance the adoption of the proposed assessment and review methodologies. A proof-of-concept implementation of the DEco Arch framework has been developed to showcase the proposed concepts in a case study and to conduct empirical experiments to evaluate the robustness and practicability of the proposed methodologies

Patient needs in advanced Renal Cell Carcinoma: What are patients’ priorities and how well are we meeting them?

Treatment options and duration of therapy for patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC) have increased. Many patients now spend in excess of 2 years on active therapy. These patients’ needs, and the ability of health services to respond to them, are poorly understood. Ten patients living with mRCC for more than 2 years and treated with at least one targeted agent were selected at random from three hospitals in the United Kingdom (UK). One interviewer who was not involved in their care conducted in-depth interviews. Interview transcripts were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to identify issues of greatest importance to patients, and to understand how well patients felt their needs were being addressed. Perceived delay in initial diagnosis was a major theme. Being told the truth about treatment side effects upfront was important, but was often at odds with perceived delivery. ‘Dealing with side effects’, understanding dose and its effects and not letting ‘negative thoughts get in’ were highlighted as important, but were highly personal to patients and areas where patients struggled. Concordance was observed with delivery of ‘a clear next step’ for treatment, timely access to drugs and guidance on a drug ‘holiday’. Patient experience of mRCC and its treatment requires a tailored approach. This research suggests there are key opportunities for service improvement and improved communication throughout the pathway to better meet the needs of patients, including non-clinical support to build personal resilience

Realising Team-Working in the Field: An Agent-based Approach

Multi-agent systems technology is applied to enable co-operation between mobile workers in the field, minimising user intervention and increasing reachability. A component-based approach is taken to simplify the management of deployed co-operation services. A Personal Assistant running on a mobile device is introduced to show how an intelligent and autonomous agent can increase the utility of users during workforce co-operation processes. Finally, a real world trial of the technology by network installation and maintenance engineers in the UK is described. Some technical issues revealed during the trial are discussed, as is the impact of the technology on the business process

TeamWorker: An agent-based support system for mobile task execution

Traditional workflow management systems are considered insufficiently flexible to support autonomous job management via close team working. This paper proposes a multi-agent system approach to enhancing existing workflow management systems to enable team-based job management in the field of telecommunications service provision and maintenance. This paper adopts a component-based approach and explains how applications can be developed by customising the generic components provided by a multi-agent systems framework

Developing and Implementing Self-Direction Programs and Policies: A Handbook

Provides a guide to designing, implementing, and evaluating service delivery models that allow public program participants to manage their own care services and supports. Outlines elements of employer and budget authorities, enrollment, and counseling

Consumer Direction of Personal Assistance Services in Medicaid: A Review of Four State Programs

Discusses eligibility for and use of Consumer Direction of Personal Assistance Services, which give beneficiaries control over the hiring, scheduling, training and paying of personal care attendants, in California, Colorado, New York, and Virginia