Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Agent-oriented constructivist knowledge management

In Ancient Times, when written language was introduced, books and manuscripts were often considered sacred. During these times, only a few persons were able to read and interpret them, while most people were limited in accepting these interpretations. Then, along with the industrial revolution of the XVIII and XIX centuries and especially boosted by the development of the press, knowledge slowly became available to all people. Simultaneously, people were starting to apply machines in the development of their work, usually characterized by repetitive processes, and especially focused in the production of consuming goods, such as furniture, clocks, clothes and so on. Following the needs of this new society, it was finally through science that new processes emerged to enable the transmission of knowledge from books and instructors to learners. Still today, people gain knowledge based on these processes, created to fulfill the needs of a society in its early stages of industrialization, thus not being compatible with the needs of the information society. In the information society, people must deal with an overloading amount of information, by the means of the media, books, besides different telecommunication and information systems technology. Furthermore, people’s relation to work has been influenced by profound changes, for instance, knowledge itself is now regarded as a valuable work product and, thus, the workplace has become an environment of knowledge creation and learning. Modifications in the world economical, political and social scenarios led to the conclusion that knowledge is the differential that can lead to innovation and, consequently, save organizations, societies, and even countries from failing in achieving their main goals. Focusing on these matters is the Knowledge Management (KM) research area, which deals with the creation, integration and use of knowledge, aiming at improving the performance of individuals and organizations. Advances in this field are mainly motivated by the assumption that organizations should focus on knowledge assets (generally maintained by the members of an organization) to remain competitive in the information society’s market. This thesis argues that KM initiatives should be targeted based on a constructivist perspective. In general, a constructivist view on KM focuses on how knowledge emerges, giving great importance to the knowledge holders and their natural practices. With the paragraph above, the reader may already have an intuition of how this work faces and targets Knowledge Management, however, let us be more precise. Research in Knowledge Management has evolved substantially in the past 30 years, coming from a centralized view of KM processes to a distributed view, grounded in organizational and cognitive sciences studies that point out the social, distributed, and subjective nature of knowledge. The first Knowledge Management Systems (KMSs) were centrally based and followed a top-down design approach. The organization managers, supported by knowledge engineers, collected and structured the contents of an organizational memory as a finished product at design time (before the organizational memory was deployed) and then disseminated the product, expecting employees to use it and update it. However, employees often claimed that the knowledge stored in the repository was detached from their real working practices. This led to the development of evolutionary methods, which prescribe that the basic KM system is initially developed and evolves proactively in an on-going fashion. However, most of the initiatives are still based on building central repositories and portals, which assume standardized vocabularies, languages, and classification schemes. Consequently, employees’ lack of trust and motivation often lead to dissatisfaction. In other words, workers resist on sharing knowledge, since they do not know who is going to access it and what is going to be done with it. Moreover, the importance attributed to knowledge may give an impression that these central systems take away a valuable asset from his or her owner, without giving appreciable benefits in return. The problems highlighted in the previous paragraph may be attenuated or even solved if a top-down/bottom-up strategy is applied when proposing a KM solution. This means that the solution should be sought with aim at organizational goals (top-down) but at the same time, more attention should be given to the knowledge holders and on the natural processes they already use to share knowledge (bottom-up). Being active agency such an important principle of Constructivism, this work recognizes that the Agent Paradigm (first defined by Artificial Intelligence and more recently adopted by Software Engineering) is the best approach to target Knowledge Management, taking a technological and social perspective. Capable of modeling and supporting social environments, agents is here recognized as a suitable solution for Knowledge Management especially by providing a suitable metaphor used for modeling KM domains (i.e. representing humans and organizations) and systems. Applying agents as metaphors on KM is mainly motivated by the definition of agents as cognitive beings having characteristics that resemble human cognition, such as autonomy, reactivity, goals, beliefs, desires, and social-ability. Using agents as human abstractions is motivated by the fact that, for specific problems, such as software engineering and knowledge management process modeling, agents may aid the analyst to abstract away from some of the problems related to human complexity, and focus on the important issues that impact the specific goals, beliefs and tasks of agents of the domain. This often leads to a clear understanding of the current situation, which is essential for the proposal of an appropriate solution. The current situation may be understood by modeling at the same time the overall goals of the organization, and the needs and wants of knowledge holders. Towards facilitating the analysis of KM scenarios and the development of adequate solutions, this work proposes ARKnowD (Agent-oriented Recipe for Knowledge Management Systems Development). Systems here have a broad definition, comprehending both technology-based systems (e.g. information system, groupware, repositories) and/or human systems, i.e. human processes supporting KM using non-computational artifacts (e.g. brain stormings, creativity workshops). The basic philosophical assumptions behind ARKnowD are: a) the interactions between human and system should be understood according to the constructivist principle of self-construction, claiming that humans and communities are self-organizing entities that constantly construct their identities and evolve throughout endless interaction cycles. As a result of such interactions, humans shape systems and, at the same time, systems constrain the ways humans act and change; b) KM enabling systems should be built in a bottom-up approach, aiming at the organizational goals, but understanding that in order to fulfill these goals, some personal needs and wants of the knowledge holders (i.e. the organizational members) need to be targeted; and c) there is no “silver bullet��? when pursuing a KM tailoring methodology and the best approach is combining existing agent-oriented approaches according to the given domain or situation. This work shows how the principles above may be achieved by the integration of two existing work on agent-oriented software engineering, which are combined to guide KM analysts and system developers when conceiving KM solutions. Innovation in our work is achieved by supporting topdown/bottom-up approaches to KM as mentioned above. The proposed methodology does that by strongly emphasizing the earlier phases of software development, the so-called requirement analysis activity. In this way, we consider all stakeholders (organizations and humans) as agents in our analysis model, and start by understanding their relations before actually thinking of developing a system. Perhaps the problem may be more effectively solved by proposing changes in the business processes, rather than by making use of new technology. And besides, in addition to humans and organizations, existing systems are also included in the model from start, helping the analyst and designer to understand which functionalities are delegated to these so-called artificial agents. In addition to that, benefits as a result of the application of ARKnowD may be also attributed to our choice of using the proper agent cognitive characteristics in the different phases of the development cycle. With the main purpose of exemplifying the use of the proposed methodology, this work presents a socially-aware recommender agent named KARe (Knowledgeable Agent for Recommendations). Recommender Systems may be defined by those that support users in selecting items of their need from a big set of items, helping users to overcome the overwhelming feeling when facing a vast information source, such as the web, an organizational repository or the like. Besides serving as a case for our methodology, this work also aims at exploring the suitability of the KARe system to support KM processes. Our choice for supporting knowledge sharing through questioning and answering processes is again supported by Constructivism proponents, who understand that social interaction is vital for active knowledge building. This assumption is also defended by some KM theories, claiming that knowledge is created through cycles of transformation between two types of knowledge: tacit and explicit knowledge. Up to now, research on KM has paid much attention to the formalization and exchange of explicit knowledge, in the form of documents or other physical artifacts, often annotated with metadata, and classified by taxonomies or ontologies. Investigations surrounding tacit knowledge have been so far scarce, perhaps by the complexity of the tasks of capturing and integrating such kind of knowledge, defined as knowledge about personal experience and values, usually confined on people’s mind. Taking a flexible approach on supporting this kind of knowledge conversion, KARe relies on the potential of social interaction underlying organizational practices to support knowledge creation and sharing. The global objective of this work is to support knowledge creation and sharing within an organization, according to its own natural processes and social behaviors. In other words, this work is based on the assumption that KM is better supported if knowledge is looked at from a constructivist perspective. To sum up, this thesis aims at: 1) Providing an agent-oriented approach to guide the creation and evolvement of KM initiatives, by analyzing the organizational potentials, behaviors and processes concerning knowledge sharing; 2) Developing the KARe recommender system, based on a semantically enriched Information Retrieval technique for recommending knowledge artifacts, supporting users to ask and answer to each others’ questions. These objectives are achieved as follows: - Defining the principles that characterize a Constructivist KM supporting environment and understanding how they may be used to support the creation of more effective KM solutions; - Providing an agent-oriented approach to develop KM systems. This approach is based on the integration of two different agent-oriented software engineering works, profiting from their strengths in providing a comprehensive methodology that targets both analysis and design activities; - Proposing and designing a socially aware agent-oriented recommender system both to exemplify the application of the proposed approach and to explore its potential on supporting knowledge creation and sharing. - Implementing an Information Retrieval algorithm to support the previously mentioned system in generating recommendations. Besides describing the algorithm, this thesis brings experimental results to prove its effectiveness

Governance of Dual-Use Technologies: Theory and Practice

The term dual-use characterizes technologies that can have both military and civilian applications. What is the state of current efforts to control the spread of these powerful technologies—nuclear, biological, cyber—that can simultaneously advance social and economic well-being and also be harnessed for hostile purposes? What have previous efforts to govern, for example, nuclear and biological weapons taught us about the potential for the control of these dual-use technologies? What are the implications for governance when the range of actors who could cause harm with these technologies include not just national governments but also non-state actors like terrorists? These are some of the questions addressed by Governance of Dual-Use Technologies: Theory and Practice, the new publication released today by the Global Nuclear Future Initiative of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The publication's editor is Elisa D. Harris, Senior Research Scholar, Center for International Security Studies, University of Maryland School of Public Affairs. Governance of Dual-Use Technologies examines the similarities and differences between the strategies used for the control of nuclear technologies and those proposed for biotechnology and information technology. The publication makes clear the challenges concomitant with dual-use governance. For example, general agreement exists internationally on the need to restrict access to technologies enabling the development of nuclear weapons. However, no similar consensus exists in the bio and information technology domains. The publication also explores the limitations of military measures like deterrence, defense, and reprisal in preventing globally available biological and information technologies from being misused. Some of the other questions explored by the publication include: What types of governance measures for these dual-use technologies have already been adopted? What objectives have those measures sought to achieve? How have the technical characteristics of the technology affected governance prospects? What have been the primary obstacles to effective governance, and what gaps exist in the current governance regime? Are further governance measures feasible? In addition to a preface from Global Nuclear Future Initiative Co-Director Robert Rosner (University of Chicago) and an introduction and conclusion from Elisa Harris, Governance of Dual-Use Technologiesincludes:On the Regulation of Dual-Use Nuclear Technology by James M. Acton (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)Dual-Use Threats: The Case of Biotechnology by Elisa D. Harris (University of Maryland)Governance of Information Technology and Cyber Weapons by Herbert Lin (Stanford University

Computable Rationality, NUTS, and the Nuclear Leviathan

This paper explores how the Leviathan that projects power through nuclear arms exercises a unique nuclearized sovereignty. In the case of nuclear superpowers, this sovereignty extends to wielding the power to destroy human civilization as we know it across the globe. Nuclearized sovereignty depends on a hybrid form of power encompassing human decision-makers in a hierarchical chain of command, and all of the technical and computerized functions necessary to maintain command and control at every moment of the sovereign's existence: this sovereign power cannot sleep. This article analyzes how the form of rationality that informs this hybrid exercise of power historically developed to be computable. By definition, computable rationality must be able to function without any intelligible grasp of the context or the comprehensive significance of decision-making outcomes. Thus, maintaining nuclearized sovereignty necessarily must be able to execute momentous life and death decisions without the type of sentience we usually associate with ethical individual and collective decisions

Regulated MAS: Social Perspective

This chapter addresses the problem of building normative multi-agent systems in terms of regulatory mechanisms. It describes a static conceptual model through which one can specify normative multi-agent systems along with a dynamic model to capture their operation and evolution. The chapter proposes a typology of applications and presents some open problems. In the last section, the authors express their individual views on these mattersMunindar Singh’s effort was partially supported by the U.S. Army Research Office under grant W911NF-08-1-0105. The content of this paper does not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the U.S. Government; no official endorsement should be inferred or implied. Nicoletta Fornara’s effort is supported by the Hasler Foundation project nr. 11115-KG and by the SER project nr. C08.0114 within the COST Action IC0801 Agreement Technologies. Henrique Lopes Cardoso’s effort is supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), under project PTDC/EIA-EIA/104420/2008. Pablo Noriega’s effort has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through the Agreement Technologies CONSOLIDER project under contract CSD2007-0022, and the Generalitat of Catalunya grant 2009-SGR-1434.Peer Reviewe

Alliance Management of the US and China over Two Koreas' Nuclear Weapons Programs

학위논문 (박사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 국제대학원 국제학과, 2021. 2. 신성호.By examining the alliance management of the US and China over two Koreas nuclear weapons programs, this dissertation finds the cause of nuclear restraint from security commitment. It asserts that a patron takes entrapment risk and increases security commitment when it fears nuclear proliferation greater than entrapment. This dissertation employs the combination of a case comparison method and a within-case method because nuclear restraint is a complex process that follows multiple steps, including rollback, suspension, or resumption of the nuclear weapons program. From 1974 to 1982, the US provided South Korea with an increasing commitment level because Washington worried more about nuclear proliferation than entrapment. The US perceived high risk of nuclear proliferation, which might cause a major destabilizing effect in Asia, where Washington built a security network of bilateral alliances. To avoid nuclear proliferation, the US took entrapment risk and terminated South Koreas nuclear weapons development. In contrast, from 1993 to 2009, China provided North Korea with a decreasing commitment level because Beijing was more concerned with entrapment than nuclear proliferation. China perceived high risk of entrapment from a possible North Korean regime collapse and a massive refugee influx across the border. To avoid entrapment, China remained at a low commitment level to North Korea, which eventually conducted nuclear tests and withdrew from nuclear negotiations. This finding expands our knowledge about the commitment by differentiating the risks of entrapment and nuclear proliferation. It also emphasizes the role of positive security commitment for nuclear restraint.이 논문은 남북한 핵개발에 대한 미국과 중국의 동맹 관리를 연구함으로써 핵무기 개발 제지의 원인을 안보 공약에서 찾고, 후견국이 연루보다 핵확산을 더 두려워할 때 연루의 위험을 감수하면서 안보 공약을 증가한다고 주장한다. 핵 제지는 핵개발의 롤백(rollback), 잠정중단, 재개 등 여러 단계를 거치는 복잡한 과정인 점을 고려하여, 사례 비교와 단일 사례 연구 방법을 활용한다. 1974년부터 1982년까지 미국은 연루보다 핵확산을 더 두려워했기 때문에 한국에 대한 공약을 증가했다. 미국은 양자 동맹 형태의 안보 네트워크를 구축한 아시아에서 주요한 불안정 효과가 나타날 것으로 보고 핵확산의 위험을 높게 인식했다. 미국은 핵확산을 회피하기 위해 연루의 위험을 감수했고, 한국은 핵개발을 종료했다. 이와 대조적으로 1993년부터 2009년까지 중국은 핵확산보다 연루를 더 두려워했기 때문에 북한에 대한 공약을 감소했다. 중국은 북한 체제 붕괴 및 대규모 난민 유입 가능성을 보고 연루의 위험을 높게 인식했다. 중국은 연루를 회피하기 위해 낮은 수준의 공약을 유지했고, 결과적으로 북한은 핵실험을 감행하고 핵협상으로부터 철수했다. 이러한 연구 결과는 연루와 핵확산의 위험을 구별함으로써 안보 공약에 대한 지식을 확장하는데 기여하며, 핵 제지(nuclear restraint)를 위한 적극적 안전보장(positive security assurance)의 역할을 강조한다.I. INTRODUCTION 1 1. Puzzle 2 2. Alliance and Nuclear Weapons 7 Alliance Management in Nuclear Restraint 7 Client's Motivation: Fear of Abandonment 9 Patron's Motivation: Nuclear Nonproliferation 12 3. Argument 19 4. Plan of Dissertation 24 II. THEORIES OF ALLIANCE MANAGEMENT 27 1. Theoretical Overview 27 Patron's Management Tool: Commitment 27 Patron's Management Challenge: Entrapment 32 Avoiding Entrapment: Withdrawal 35 Limits of Withdrawal 41 2. Theoretical Framework 46 Options of a Nuclear Weapons Program 47 Definition and Scope of Commitment 52 Avoiding Nuclear Proliferation: Commitment 58 Hard and Soft Commitments 69 3. Research Design 80 Case Selection 82 Sources 89 III. THE US AND NUCLEAR NONPROLIFERATION IN SOUTH KOREA 91 1. US Risk-taking Alliance Policy 91 Containment and the Hub-and-Spoke System 91 Dtente and Peace Through Partnership 97 Peace Through Strength and Alliances 106 2. South Korea from 1974 to 1976 112 Withdrawal and Warnings of Proliferation 112 Withholding of Nuclear Energy Cooperation 120 Assurance Despite Disengagement 123 South Korea's Reluctant Ratification of the NPT 130 3. South Korea from 1977 to 1982 134 A Proposal for Complete Withdrawal 134 The 1981 Summit to Restore the Alliance 143 Termination of the Nuclear Weapons Program 150 4. Conclusion 153 IV. CHINA AND NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION IN NORTH KOREA 161 1. China's Risk-averse Alliance Policy 161 A Reluctant Intervention in the Korean War 161 The Alliance of Lips and Teeth 165 Non-Alignment and the New Security Concept 171 2. North Korea from 1993 to 1994 180 Disengagement and the Yongbyon Reactor 180 Strategic Dilemma and Entrapment Fear 186 Opposition to International Pressure 190 Praise for the Agreed Framework 194 3. North Korea from 2003 to 2009 197 Devotion to Reform and Opening 197 Shuttle Diplomacy and the Six-Party Talks 204 Failed Nuclear Restraint 210 4. Conclusion 213 V. CONCLUSION 221 1. Main Argument and Findings 221 2. Policy Implications 228 Bibliography 233 Appendix 1. List of Important Visits by Chinese Leaders to North Korea 263 Appendix 2. List of Important Visits by North Korean Leaders to China 265 Abstract in Korean 267 Acknowledgments 268Docto

ATTRIBUTES, COMPLIANCE AND EFFECTIVENESS OF NESTED REGIMESTHE BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS REGIME COMPLEX

Are non-proliferation regimes effective? If so, under which circumstances? Existing theoretical and empirical studies fall short of providing consistent indications of the constraining power of security institutions and non-proliferation regimes on state decisions. On the one hand, proponents of regimes highlight the overall capacity of institutions to contain the number of proliferators. On the other hand, detractors maintain that regimes have little or no effect on state decision to pursue specific weapons. The empirical associations between framework conventions and the non-proliferation of the weapons under provision have proved unsatisfactory and weak. Moving from a broader idea of regimes and a graduated notion of effectiveness, this project develops a theoretical argument about the importance of networks of individual institutions (regime complexes) in regime analysis. I argue that regime-complex level data can enhance our capacity to explain actual regime effectiveness, as well as the link between specific institutional features and non-proliferation outcomes. The project does so, interalia, by introducing a new dataset, which gathers information on several institutions that are part of the biological non-proliferation regime complex. The work then illustrates the use of the new dataset by developing measures of state exposure to the regime-complex in terms of overall embeddedness and compliance