GUARDIANS final report

Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for firefghters. The large dimensions together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The Guardians robot swarm is designed to assist fire fighters in searching a large warehouse. In this report we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots searching and assisting fire fighters. We explain the swarming algorithms which provide the functionality by which the robots react to and follow humans while no communication is required. Next we discuss the wireless communication system, which is a so-called mobile ad-hoc network. The communication network provides also one of the means to locate the robots and humans. Thus the robot swarm is able to locate itself and provide guidance information to the humans. Together with the re ghters we explored how the robot swarm should feed information back to the human fire fighter. We have designed and experimented with interfaces for presenting swarm based information to human beings

Internet collaboration and service composition as a loose form of teamwork

This paper describes Web service composition as a form of teamwork, where the Web services are team members in a loose collaboration. We argue that newer hierarchical teamwork models are more appropriate for Web service composition than the traditional models involving joint beliefs and joint intentions. We describe our system for developing and executing Web service compositions as team plans in JACK Teams,((TM) 1) and discuss the relationships between this approach and service orchestration languages such as Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS). We discuss briefly how the use of Al planning can also be incorporated into this model, and identify some of the research issues involved. Incorporating Web service compositions into a mature Belief Desire Intention (BDI) agent team framework allows for integration of Web services seamlessly into a powerful application execution paradigm that supports sophisticated reasoning

Economic Autonomy of Regions in the New Reality

The article expands on the concept of new reality (new normal) for Russia, which includes the increased role of individuals and larger economic autonomy of territories in their interaction with the federal center. The rationale is based on the hypothesis that, in the new reality, the improved wellbeing of people and elimination of economic disparities between the territories can be ensured by expanding their economic autonomy, because it leads to the increase in their intellectual, industrial and technological capacity. In this study, the author used the basic provisions of the classical economic theory, the theory of behavioral economics, interdisciplinary approach, and the method of statistical groupings. The article presents the trends in the economic autonomy of the territories, which include a decrease in the number of donor regions and differentiation of territories in terms of their socio-economic indicators. It substantiates the assumption that the differentiation of territories puts constrains on their socio-economic development and may lead to the emergence of a «regional peripheral economy,» the attribute of which is the dependence of the periphery from the center, reduced local initiative, and slowdown of technological development. The article identi es the need to use the mindset of people, their psychological attitudes in the economic development, the «second invisible hand of the market» and «soft power» in order to move beyond the «regional peripheral economy.» The conducted study demonstrates that the expansion of economic autonomy of the territories is not the increased self-isolation of regions and municipal entities, but consists in the need to retain a signi cant part of the income from the production of goods and services created by local people, so that it could be autonomously used by regional and municipal authorities and directed to improving the wellbeing of territory’s residents.The author proposes to prepare a regulatory and legal document in order to ensure and strengthen the economic autonomy of the territories, and makes speci c proposals on the principles of its content and structure.This article has been prepared with the financial support of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Project No. 15–14–7-2

Uncovering the Equity Impacts of Urban Land Use Planning

A growing number of cities are preparing for climate change impacts by developing adaptation plans. However, little is known about how these plans and their implementation affect the vulnerability of the urban poor. We critically assess initiatives in eight cities worldwide and find that land use planning for climate adaptation can exacerbate socio-spatial inequalities across diverse developmental and environmental conditions. We argue that urban adaptation injustices fall into two categories: acts of commission when interventions negatively affect or displace poor communities and acts of omission when they protect and prioritize elite groups at the expense of the urban poor

Towards Flexible Teamwork

Many AI researchers are today striving to build agent teams for complex, dynamic multi-agent domains, with intended applications in arenas such as education, training, entertainment, information integration, and collective robotics. Unfortunately, uncertainties in these complex, dynamic domains obstruct coherent teamwork. In particular, team members often encounter differing, incomplete, and possibly inconsistent views of their environment. Furthermore, team members can unexpectedly fail in fulfilling responsibilities or discover unexpected opportunities. Highly flexible coordination and communication is key in addressing such uncertainties. Simply fitting individual agents with precomputed coordination plans will not do, for their inflexibility can cause severe failures in teamwork, and their domain-specificity hinders reusability. Our central hypothesis is that the key to such flexibility and reusability is providing agents with general models of teamwork. Agents exploit such models to autonomously reason about coordination and communication, providing requisite flexibility. Furthermore, the models enable reuse across domains, both saving implementation effort and enforcing consistency. This article presents one general, implemented model of teamwork, called STEAM. The basic building block of teamwork in STEAM is joint intentions (Cohen & Levesque, 1991b); teamwork in STEAM is based on agents' building up a (partial) hierarchy of joint intentions (this hierarchy is seen to parallel Grosz & Kraus's partial SharedPlans, 1996). Furthermore, in STEAM, team members monitor the team's and individual members' performance, reorganizing the team as necessary. Finally, decision-theoretic communication selectivity in STEAM ensures reduction in communication overheads of teamwork, with appropriate sensitivity to the environmental conditions. This article describes STEAM's application in three different complex domains, and presents detailed empirical results.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for an online appendix and other files accompanying this articl

National and urban public policy agenda in tourism. Towards the emergence of a hyperneoliberal script?

Following the 2007–2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), some national governments have been pursuing a counter-reform of the public sector characterised by further policy centralisation and the ‘hollowing out’ of regional authorities. Public expenditure and sovereign public debt reductions have become the pretext for the implementation of hyperneoliberal development agendas aimed at the attraction of inward capitals and a further ‘competitive’ repositioning of major cities within a global market. Tourism and the visitor economy have been used as leverage for the attraction of capital and skilled people in the long-term development strategies of cities. This article illustrates how crises have led the way in the recent restructuring of the public sector and of destination management organisations (DMOs) in particular. Findings from national and urban development strategies recently implemented in New Zealand suggest a strong, market-driven agenda that follows a hyperneoliberal script

Reading Stoneridge Carefully: A Duty-based Approach to Reliance and Third Party Liability Under Rule 10b-5

The Supreme Court\u27s decision in the Stoneridge case has largely been interpreted as a imposing a strict, pro-defendant reliance requirement. This article offers an alternative reading that takes the Court\u27s analysis more seriously than its overheated dicta, one that makes remoteness a serious and meaningful inquiry that can produce balanced and fair responses to the concern that seemed to motivate the search for restraint: fear of disproportionate liability. It explores the nature of the dispropotion, and suggests ways--using the Court\u27s own explanatory tools--for deciding when third party involvement is close enough to the fraud so that fear of disproportion lessens. Among other things, this approach leads clearly to a rejection of the so-called attribution approach for liability. Recognizing that a statutory solution may be better than judicial patchwork, it also offers a coupling of expanded liability with a more rational and sensible proportionate liability regime than now exists

Conversation and behavior games in the pragmatics of dialogue

In this article we present the bases for a computational theory of the cognitive processes underlying human communication. The core of the article is devoted to the analysis of the phases in which the process of comprehension of a communicative act can be logically divided: (1) literal meaning, where the reconstruction of the mental states literally expressed by the actor takes place; (2) speaker’s meaning. where the partner reconstructs the communicative intentions of the actor; (3) communicative effect, where the partner possibly modifies his own beliefs and intentions; (4) reaction, where the intentions for the generation of the response are produced: and (5) response, where an overt response is constructed. The model appears to be compatible with relevant facts about human behavior. Our hypothesis is that, through communication, on actor tries to exploit the motivational structures of a partner so that the desired goal is generated. A second point is that social behavior requires that cooperation be maintained at some level. In the case of communication, cooperation is, in general, pursued even when the partner does not adhere to the actor’s goals, and therefore no cooperation occurs at the behavioral level. This important distinction is reflected in the two kinds of games we introduce to account for communication. The main concept implied in communication is that two agents overtly reach a situation of shared mental states. Our model deols with sharedness through two primitives: shared beliefs and communicative intentions