Arguing and negotiating in the presence of social influences

Postprin

Collaboration in the Semantic Grid: a Basis for e-Learning

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking, and aid navigation of resources before, after, and while a collaboration occurs. While the primary focus of the project has been supporting e-Science, this paper also explores the similarities and application of CoAKTinG technologies as part of a human-centred design approach to e-Learning

KEMNAD: A Knowledge Engineering Methodology for Negotiating Agent Development

Automated negotiation is widely applied in various domains. However, the development of such systems is a complex knowledge and software engineering task. So, a methodology there will be helpful. Unfortunately, none of existing methodologies can offer sufficient, detailed support for such system development. To remove this limitation, this paper develops a new methodology made up of: (1) a generic framework (architectural pattern) for the main task, and (2) a library of modular and reusable design pattern (templates) of subtasks. Thus, it is much easier to build a negotiating agent by assembling these standardised components rather than reinventing the wheel each time. Moreover, since these patterns are identified from a wide variety of existing negotiating agents(especially high impact ones), they can also improve the quality of the final systems developed. In addition, our methodology reveals what types of domain knowledge need to be input into the negotiating agents. This in turn provides a basis for developing techniques to acquire the domain knowledge from human users. This is important because negotiation agents act faithfully on the behalf of their human users and thus the relevant domain knowledge must be acquired from the human users. Finally, our methodology is validated with one high impact system

Theory of Regulatory Compliance for Requirements Engineering

Regulatory compliance is increasingly being addressed in the practice of requirements engineering as a main stream concern. This paper points out a gap in the theoretical foundations of regulatory compliance, and presents a theory that states (i) what it means for requirements to be compliant, (ii) the compliance problem, i.e., the problem that the engineer should resolve in order to verify whether requirements are compliant, and (iii) testable hypotheses (predictions) about how compliance of requirements is verified. The theory is instantiated by presenting a requirements engineering framework that implements its principles, and is exemplified on a real-world case study.Comment: 16 page

Argument-based agreements in agent societies

In this paper, we present an abstract argumentation framework for the support of agreement processes in agent societies. It takes into account arguments, attacks among them, and the social context of the agents that put forward arguments. Then, we de¿ne the semantics of the framework, providing a mechanism to evaluate arguments in view of other arguments posed in the argumentation process. We also provide a translation of the framework into a neural network that computes the set of acceptable arguments and can be tuned to give more or less importance to argument attacks. Finally, the framework is illustrated with an example in a real domain of a water-rights transfer market. & 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reservedThis work is supported by the Spanish government Grants CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-00022, TIN2008-04446 and TIN2009-13839-C03-01 and by the GVA project PROMETEO 2008/051.Heras Barberá, SM.; Botti Navarro, VJ.; Julian Inglada, VJ. (2012). Argument-based agreements in agent societies. Neurocomputing. 75(1):156-162. doi:10.1016/j.neucom.2011.02.022S15616275

A Computational Argumentation Framework for Agent Societies

Starting from the idea that the social context of agents determines the way in which agents can argue and reach agreements, this context should have a decisive influence in the computational representation of arguments. In this report, we advance research in the area of computational frameworks for agent argumentation by proposing a new argumentation framework (AF) for the design of open MAS in which the participating software agents are able to manage and exchange arguments between themselves taking into account the agents¿ social context. In order to do this, we have analysed the necessary requirements for this type of framework 1 and taken into account them in the design of our framework. Also, the knowledge resources that the agents can use to manage arguments in this framework are presented in this work. In addition, if heterogeneous agents can interact in the framework, they need a common language to represent arguments and argumentation processes. To cope with this, we have also designed an argumentation ontology to represent arguments and argumentation concepts in our framework.Heras Barberá, SM.; Botti Navarro, VJ.; Julian Inglada, VJ. (2011). A Computational Argumentation Framework for Agent Societies. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1103