Producing Enactable Protocols in Artificial Agent Societies

This paper draws upon our previous work [7, 16] in which we proposed the organisation of services around the concept of artificial agent societies and presented a framework for representing roles and protocols using LTSs. The agent would apply for a role in the society, which would result in its participation in a number of protocols. We advocated the use of the games-based metaphor for describing the protocols and presented a framework for assessing the admission of the agent to the society on the basis of its competence. In this work we look at the subsequent question: what information should the agent receive upon entry?. We can not provide it with the full protocol because of security and overload issues. Therefore, we choose to only provide the actions pertinent to the protocols that the role the agent applied for participates in the society. We employ branching bisimulation for producing a protocol equivalent to the original one with all actions not involving the role translated into silent (τ) actions. However, this approach sometimes results in non-enactable protocols. In this case, we need to repair the protocol by adding the role in question as a recipient to certain protocol messages that were causing the problems. We present three different approaches for repairing protocols, depending on the number of messages from the original protocol they modify. The modified protocol is adopted as the final one and the agent is given the role automaton that is derived from the branching bisimulation process

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

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.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

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

Assessment, development and experimental evaluation of self-regulatory support in online learning

Online learning requires a higher level of self-regulation than face-to-face learning. Learners are likely to differ in their cognitive, metacognitive, affective or motivational resources to meet this demand. Individual differences in self-regulation is one major factor contributing to success or failure in online learning, other factors include characteristics of the online learning environment and the complexity of the learning content itself. Lack of self-regulation is likely to affect learners’ engagement with the course content, may result in sub-optimal learning outcomes, including failure to complete the course. A virtual learning assistant has been designed and developed to support online learners. This research aims at ascertaining the effectiveness of providing adaptive assistance in terms of (a) compensatory and (b) developmental effects. Online learners involved in the empirical part of this study (N = 157) were randomised into one of two experimental conditions. For the intervention group, the online learning assistant provided personalised in-browser notifications. This feature was disabled for the learners in the control condition. Results indicate that the adaptive assistance did not result in noticeable developmental shifts in learners’ self-regulation as assessed via conventional self-report measures. However, learners allocated to the intervention group spent less time online per day in first three weeks of being exposed to the adaptive assistance, reduced their time commitment to entertainment websites during first two weeks, and increased their engagement with educational web resources during the first ten days. In addition to the time-varying effects, these compensatory (behavioural) shifts were moderated by learners’ individual differences in personality. The outcome of this study suggests that the utilisation of a virtual learning assistant that provides adaptive assistance can be effective in compensating for not yet developed self-regulatory skills, and subsequently help facilitating success in learning on short online courses

Sustainability in design: now! Challenges and opportunities for design research, education and practice in the XXI century

Copyright @ 2010 Greenleaf PublicationsLeNS project funded by the Asia Link Programme, EuropeAid, European Commission

Making Certain: Information and Social Reality

This dissertation identifies and explains the phenomenon of the production of certainty in information systems. I define this phenomenon pragmatically as instances where practices of justification end upon information systems or their contents. Cases where information systems seem able to produce social reality without reference to the external world indicate that these systems contain facts for determining truth, rather than propositions rendered true or false by the world outside the system. The No Fly list is offered as a running example that both clearly exemplifies the phenomenon and announces the stakes of my project. After an operationalization of key terms and a review of relevant literature, I articulate a research program aimed at characterizing the phenomenon,its major components, and its effects. Notable contributions of the dissertation include: • the identification of the production of certainty as a unitary, trans-disciplinary phenomenon; • the synthesis of a sociolinguistic method capable of unambiguously identifying a) the presence of this phenomenon and b) distinguishing the respective contributions of systemic and social factors to it; and • the development of a taxonomy of certainty that can distinguish between types of certainty production and/or certainty-producing systems.The analysis of certainty proposed and advanced here is a potential compliment to several existing methods of sociotechnical research. This is demonstrated by applying the analysis of certainty to the complex assemblage of computational timekeeping alongside a more traditional infrastructural inversion. Three subsystems, the tz database, Network Time Protocol, and International Atomic Time, are selected from the assemblage of computational timekeeping for analysis. Each system employs a distinct memory practice, in Bowker’s sense, which licenses the forgetting inherent in the production of the information it contains. The analysis of certainty expands upon the insights provided by infrastructural inversion to show how the production of certainty through modern computational timekeeping practices shapes the social reality of time. This analysis serves as an example for scholars who encounter the phenomenon of the production of certainty in information systems to use the proposed theoretical framework to more easily account for, understand, and engage with it in their work. The dissertation concludes by identifying other sites amenable to this kind of analysis, including the algorithmic assemblages commonly referred to as Artificial Intelligence.Doctor of Philosoph

Immersive theatre as a strategy for raising eco-awareness

The failure of existing efforts in tackling environmental and man-made catastrophes reiterates the need for transformative understandings about eco-issues. However, the ecoproblem is a massively and complexly distributed phenomenon, which needs to be localized for the public’s consciousness before their perceptions about it and resilience against it can be mobilized. As such, this dissertation studies how immersive theatre can be used as a transformative strategy to raise eco-awareness. Reflecting on the theories and literatures in the fields of ecocriticism, performance studies and immersive theatre, and the working practices of current immersive performances, this study develops a relational model which situates the bodies of spectators at the collapsing aesthetic, territorial and anthropocentric boundaries in the eco-discourse. It argues that based on the affective and emancipating natures of immersive theatre, the tactics of creating intimate encounters in the performance, guiding spectators to perform reciprocal agencies, and allowing a capacity for weakness and negative feelings may culminate to both enhance the immersive experience of the spectators and open up a space for eco-awareness to emerge. These immersive tactics treat the bodies of the spectators as aesthetic sites of sensory exchanges and empathetic imaginations, from which personal connections and perceptual transformations may be enabled. Addressing intercorporeality and intersubjectivity, an eco-conscious immersive theatre may then collapse the boundaries between onlookers and stakeholders, human and non-human through highlighting one’s immersiveness in both the theatre and the ecosphere. To exemplify the above, Rimini Protokoll’s World Climate Change Conference (2014) and Riverbed Theatre’s Hypnosis (2017) will be studied as the major cases of the dissertation. They will be analyzed with the guidance of knowledge from the fields of ecocriticism and immersive theatre, and concepts such as immersion, affect and emancipatio

The Kenosis of Sociology, or Sociology and Answerability: Essays Toward a Weak Program in the Sociology of Morality

This dissertation surveys sociological approaches to morality. First, I distinguish the strong programs of Marx and Durkheim, which subordinate moralitys form and content to social scientific conceptual analysis, from Max Webers weak program, which attempts to preserve the independence of moral action from domination by expert social science. Siding withwhile critiquingWebers weak program, I turn to three more recent academic disputes, each of which proposes a concept as a potential candidate for resolving the ongoing dilemma of sociologys relationship to morality. These concepts are character, anxiety, and practice. I discuss each of them in the contexts of particular academic disputes: 1) the situation vs. character dispute in moral philosophy and social psychology; 2) the status anxiety vs. moral concern dispute carried on between studies in moral regulation and communitarianism in the 1980s and 90s; 3) the contrasting views of practice developed by Pierre Bourdieu and Alasdair MacIntyre. Each concept is subjected, in these disputes, to a kind of crucible, and each, in some way, fails the test. In each failure I suggest a remainder, a kind of residual categoryin Parsons sense but without his scientistic judgement. With a nod to Bakhtin, but without binding myself to dialogics, I have called that remainder answerability, and give a variety of definitions that differ/defer from any operationalized concept. Taking my basic theme from Adornos critique of identity thinking, I argue that answerability constitutes a minimal criterion that can performatively structure a weak program in the sociology of morality, applying symmetrically to the sociological vocation and the question of morality. Definitional deferrals indicate, in addition to the influence of Adornobut also Derrida, and Butlers notion of the subjects failed but necessary accounting for oneselfthat the sociology of morality exceeds the Habermasian model of ongoing conversation. Answerability refers to more than criticizable validity claims. It points to avenues of experience, expression, and reflexivity that may not find their way into rational discourse. It points, with Gillian Rose, to political action in the gap between law and morality, is and ought

An Optimisation-based Framework for Complex Business Process: Healthcare Application

The Irish healthcare system is currently facing major pressures due to rising demand, caused by population growth, ageing and high expectations of service quality. This pressure on the Irish healthcare system creates a need for support from research institutions in dealing with decision areas such as resource allocation and performance measurement. While approaches such as modelling, simulation, multi-criteria decision analysis, performance management, and optimisation can – when applied skilfully – improve healthcare performance, they represent just one part of the solution. Accordingly, to achieve significant and sustainable performance, this research aims to develop a practical, yet effective, optimisation-based framework for managing complex processes in the healthcare domain. Through an extensive review of the literature on the aforementioned solution techniques, limitations of using each technique on its own are identified in order to define a practical integrated approach toward developing the proposed framework. During the framework validation phase, real-time strategies have to be optimised to solve Emergency Department performance issues in a major hospital. Results show a potential of significant reduction in patients average length of stay (i.e. 48% of average patient throughput time) whilst reducing the over-reliance on overstretched nursing resources, that resulted in an increase of staff utilisation between 7% and 10%. Given the high uncertainty in healthcare service demand, using the integrated framework allows decision makers to find optimal staff schedules that improve emergency department performance. The proposed optimum staff schedule reduces the average waiting time of patients by 57% and also contributes to reduce number of patients left without treatment to 8% instead of 17%. The developed framework has been implemented by the hospital partner with a high level of success