Human-agent collectives

We live in a world where a host of computer systems, distributed throughout our physical and information environments, are increasingly implicated in our everyday actions. Computer technologies impact all aspects of our lives and our relationship with the digital has fundamentally altered as computers have moved out of the workplace and away from the desktop. Networked computers, tablets, phones and personal devices are now commonplace, as are an increasingly diverse set of digital devices built into the world around us. Data and information is generated at unprecedented speeds and volumes from an increasingly diverse range of sources. It is then combined in unforeseen ways, limited only by human imagination. People’s activities and collaborations are becoming ever more dependent upon and intertwined with this ubiquitous information substrate. As these trends continue apace, it is becoming apparent that many endeavours involve the symbiotic interleaving of humans and computers. Moreover, the emergence of these close-knit partnerships is inducing profound change. Rather than issuing instructions to passive machines that wait until they are asked before doing anything, we will work in tandem with highly inter-connected computational components that act autonomously and intelligently (aka agents). As a consequence, greater attention needs to be given to the balance of control between people and machines. In many situations, humans will be in charge and agents will predominantly act in a supporting role. In other cases, however, the agents will be in control and humans will play the supporting role. We term this emerging class of systems human-agent collectives (HACs) to reflect the close partnership and the flexible social interactions between the humans and the computers. As well as exhibiting increased autonomy, such systems will be inherently open and social. This means the participants will need to continually and flexibly establish and manage a range of social relationships. Thus, depending on the task at hand, different constellations of people, resources, and information will need to come together, operate in a coordinated fashion, and then disband. The openness and presence of many distinct stakeholders means participation will be motivated by a broad range of incentives rather than diktat. This article outlines the key research challenges involved in developing a comprehensive understanding of HACs. To illuminate this agenda, a nascent application in the domain of disaster response is presented

Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

Modeling Cultural Cognition

In this article we defend our contention that culture is prior to facts in resolving the gun debate. The basis for this position, simply put, is that culture is prior to facts in human cognition. Through an overlapping set of psychological and social mechanisms, individuals adopt the factual beliefs that are dominant among persons who share their cultural orientations. Far from being updated in light of new evidence, beliefs so formed operate as an evidentiary filter, inducing individuals to dismiss any contrary evidence as unreliable, particularly when that evidence is proffered by individuals of an opposing cultural affiliation. So even accepting - which we do - that individuals care about both what guns do and what guns mean, it\u27s idle to hope that consensus based on empirical research can settle the gun debate: individuals simply won\u27t perceive any such consensus to exist so long as cultural conflict over the meaning of guns persists. We fill out the details of this claim - and the extensive research in social psychology on which it rests - by developing a series of models that simulate the formation and transmission of belief. Section 2 will present the Factual Enlightenment Model, which shows how persuasive empirical proof can indeed generate societal consensus on a disputed issue. Section 3 will present the Cultural Cognition Model, which shows how various social and psychological mechanisms can generate beliefs that are uniform within and polarized across distinct cultural orientations. Section 4 develops a model - Truth vs. Culture - that shows that cultural cognition constrains factual enlightenment when these two dynamics of belief-formation and transmission are pitted against one another. And finally, in section, we develop a Breakthrough Politics Model, which shows how persuasive empirical proof can dispel culturally influenced states of false belief once policy options are invested with social meanings that make them compatible with diverse cultural orientations

Modeling Cultural Cognition

In this article we defend our contention that culture is prior to facts in resolving the gun debate. The basis for this position, simply put, is that culture is prior to facts in human cognition. Through an overlapping set of psychological and social mechanisms, individuals adopt the factual beliefs that are dominant among persons who share their cultural orientations. Far from being updated in light of new evidence, beliefs so formed operate as an evidentiary filter, inducing individuals to dismiss any contrary evidence as unreliable, particularly when that evidence is proffered by individuals of an opposing cultural affiliation. So even accepting - which we do - that individuals care about both what guns do and what guns mean, it\u27s idle to hope that consensus based on empirical research can settle the gun debate: individuals simply won\u27t perceive any such consensus to exist so long as cultural conflict over the meaning of guns persists. We fill out the details of this claim - and the extensive research in social psychology on which it rests - by developing a series of models that simulate the formation and transmission of belief. Section 2 will present the Factual Enlightenment Model, which shows how persuasive empirical proof can indeed generate societal consensus on a disputed issue. Section 3 will present the Cultural Cognition Model, which shows how various social and psychological mechanisms can generate beliefs that are uniform within and polarized across distinct cultural orientations. Section 4 develops a model - Truth vs. Culture - that shows that cultural cognition constrains factual enlightenment when these two dynamics of belief-formation and transmission are pitted against one another. And finally, in section, we develop a Breakthrough Politics Model, which shows how persuasive empirical proof can dispel culturally influenced states of false belief once policy options are invested with social meanings that make them compatible with diverse cultural orientations

Institutional Efficiency in Independent Central Banking: A Communicative Matter?

Political economists have traditionally been indifferent to the communicative construction of money and central banking in the public sphere. It does not matter to them whether monetary affairs are rendered as a rational game over the preservation of the value of the currency or, for example, as a morality play. In this paper I will suggest that the very political economy of central bank independence requires a departure from such a practice. I will argue that the communicative articulation of the monetary game is relevant to understand how independent central banks can achieve institutional efficiency, and why they face no tradeoff between institutional efficiency and democratic legitimacy. In particular, I will suggest than an institutionally efficient central bank cannot but act as an agent of communicative empowerment of the audiences that make up its local context of operation.