Software agents as legal persons

The Law has long been recognizing that, besides natural persons, other entities socially engaged must also be subject of rights and obligations. Western laws usually recognize Corporate Bodies as having legal personality and capacity for every right and obligation needed or convenient to the prosecution of its social goals. But can we foresee a similar attribution of such a regime to software agents? In other words, are intelligent software agents capable of being personified? One of the main characteristics of a personality is the existence of a physical being or organization provided with its own will. In that sense, intelligent software agents are quite close to human beings. Indeed, they have a physical existence, and they have the capability of learning and of having a will of their own

Can models of agents be transferred between different areas?

One of the main reasons for the sustained activity and interest in the field of agent-based systems, apart from the obvious recognition of its value as a natural and intuitive way of understanding the world, is its reach into very many different and distinct fields of investigation. Indeed, the notions of agents and multi-agent systems are relevant to fields ranging from economics to robotics, in contributing to the foundations of the field, being influenced by ongoing research, and in providing many domains of application. While these various disciplines constitute a rich and diverse environment for agent research, the way in which they may have been linked by it is a much less considered issue. The purpose of this panel was to examine just this concern, in the relationships between different areas that have resulted from agent research. Informed by the experience of the participants in the areas of robotics, social simulation, economics, computer science and artificial intelligence, the discussion was lively and sometimes heated

An Open-Source Simulator for Cognitive Robotics Research: The Prototype of the iCub Humanoid Robot Simulator

This paper presents the prototype of a new computer simulator for the humanoid robot iCub. The iCub is a new open-source humanoid robot developed as a result of the “RobotCub” project, a collaborative European project aiming at developing a new open-source cognitive robotics platform. The iCub simulator has been developed as part of a joint effort with the European project “ITALK” on the integration and transfer of action and language knowledge in cognitive robots. This is available open-source to all researchers interested in cognitive robotics experiments with the iCub humanoid platform

A process algebra based framework for promise theory

We present a process algebra based approach to formalize the interactions of computing devices such as the representation of policies and the resolution of conflicts. As an example we specify how promises may be used in coming to an agreement regarding a simple though practical transportation problem.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure