Verification of the Socio-Technical Aspects of Voting: The Case of the Polish Postal Vote 2020

Voting procedures are designed and implemented by people, for people, and with significant human involvement. Thus, one should take into account the human factors in order to comprehensively analyze properties of an election and detect threats. In particular, it is essential to assess how actions and strategies of the involved agents (voters, municipal office employees, mail clerks) can influence the outcome of other agents' actions as well as the overall outcome of the election. In this paper, we present our first attempt to capture those aspects in a formal multi-agent model of the Polish presidential election 2020. The election marked the first time when postal vote was universally available in Poland. Unfortunately, the voting scheme was prepared under time pressure and political pressure, and without the involvement of experts. This might have opened up possibilities for various kinds of ballot fraud, in-house coercion, etc. We propose a preliminary scalable model of the procedure in the form of a Multi-Agent Graph, and formalize selected integrity and security properties by formulas of agent logics. Then, we transform the models and formulas so that they can be input to the state-of-art model checker Uppaal. The first series of experiments demonstrates that verification scales rather badly due to the state-space explosion. However, we show that a recently developed technique of user-friendly model reduction by variable abstraction allows us to verify more complex scenarios

Working Notes from the 1992 AAAI Workshop on Automating Software Design. Theme: Domain Specific Software Design

The goal of this workshop is to identify different architectural approaches to building domain-specific software design systems and to explore issues unique to domain-specific (vs. general-purpose) software design. Some general issues that cut across the particular software design domain include: (1) knowledge representation, acquisition, and maintenance; (2) specialized software design techniques; and (3) user interaction and user interface

Automatic Identification of Addresses: A Systematic Literature Review

Cruz, P., Vanneschi, L., Painho, M., & Rita, P. (2022). Automatic Identification of Addresses: A Systematic Literature Review. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 11(1), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi11010011 -----------------------------------------------------------------------The work by Leonardo Vanneschi, Marco Painho and Paulo Rita was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) within the Project: UIDB/04152/2020—Centro de Investigação em Gestão de Informação (MagIC). The work by Prof. Leonardo Vanneschi was also partially supported by FCT, Portugal, through funding of project AICE (DSAIPA/DS/0113/2019).Address matching continues to play a central role at various levels, through geocoding and data integration from different sources, with a view to promote activities such as urban planning, location-based services, and the construction of databases like those used in census operations. However, the task of address matching continues to face several challenges, such as non-standard or incomplete address records or addresses written in more complex languages. In order to better understand how current limitations can be overcome, this paper conducted a systematic literature review focused on automated approaches to address matching and their evolution across time. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines were followed, resulting in a final set of 41 papers published between 2002 and 2021, the great majority of which are after 2017, with Chinese authors leading the way. The main findings revealed a consistent move from more traditional approaches to deep learning methods based on semantics, encoder-decoder architectures, and attention mechanisms, as well as the very recent adoption of hybrid approaches making an increased use of spatial constraints and entities. The adoption of evolutionary-based approaches and privacy preserving methods stand as some of the research gaps to address in future studies.publishersversionpublishe

The legend about sailing ship effects – Is it true or false? The example of cleaner propulsion technologies diffusion in the automotive industry

The global automotive industry is faced with major technological change in the field of propulsion systems. Due to low carbon emission regulations and a rising societal demand for sustainability, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are forced to innovate either in the conventional technology or in the technological alternatives such as electric drives or fuel cells. However, OEMs are only marginally switching to electromobility so far, but rather incrementally innovating traditional technologies. This behaviour can be described as sailing ship effect which contains the reaction of an old technology to a new technology by fostering innovation in the old technology. Firstly, the present study contributes to the discussion in literature on the sailing ship effect by combining its underlying ideas and consequences with the rationales of path dependence to demonstrate that such a behaviour may be individually economical rational. Based on these considerations, we respond to the call for further empirical investigation of the sailing ship effect. We show patent-based evidence that there has been a temporary sailing ship effect in the automotive industry concerning traditional and emerging propulsion systems and discuss implications for corporate technology strategy and policy

CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR MODELLING: A MYTH OR HEURISTIC DEVICE?

There is confusion in literature as to whether consumer behavior models are myths or heuristic devices. Myths are symbolic tales (believed as true, usually sacred) of the distant past, connected to belief systems or rituals, and may serve to direct social action and values while heuristic device is a provisional and plausible creation whose purpose is to discover the solution of a particular problem at hand. On the other hand, models are theoretical construction and simplified presentation of phenomenon. Notwithstanding the semantics in the definition and description of CB models in the literature, the crux of the matter presents two strange bed fellows: myth and heuristic device, and a number of conundrums are raised: Is it really possible to model a complex, dynamic and unpredictable entity like the consumer? Or is it just a scholarly exercise? To what extent, if necessary, can it help marketers achieve precision in understanding and predicting the customer or consumer behavior? This matter has polarized the scholarly community of marketers for decades. This conceptual paper, therefore, seeks to contribute to this discourse by undertaking an archival survey of the extant literature to look at the two sides of the coins, that is, whether CB is a myth or heuristic device. The study concludes that CB models provide a frame of reference for solving consumer problems and helping to point the way for hypothesis needed for CB theory development. This makes it a heuristic device. The implication is that consumer is at the center of all marketing programmes, scholars and practitioners should understand this and apply it successfully incorporating the views, preferences, feelings, motives and innuendoes of the consumer

Affinity-Based Reinforcement Learning : A New Paradigm for Agent Interpretability

The steady increase in complexity of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is accompanied by a corresponding increase in opacity that obfuscates insights into their devised strategies. Methods in explainable artificial intelligence seek to mitigate this opacity by either creating transparent algorithms or extracting explanations post hoc. A third category exists that allows the developer to affect what agents learn: constrained RL has been used in safety-critical applications and prohibits agents from visiting certain states; preference-based RL agents have been used in robotics applications and learn state-action preferences instead of traditional reward functions. We propose a new affinity-based RL paradigm in which agents learn strategies that are partially decoupled from reward functions. Unlike entropy regularisation, we regularise the objective function with a distinct action distribution that represents a desired behaviour; we encourage the agent to act according to a prior while learning to maximise rewards. The result is an inherently interpretable agent that solves problems with an intrinsic affinity for certain actions. We demonstrate the utility of our method in a financial application: we learn continuous time-variant compositions of prototypical policies, each interpretable by its action affinities, that are globally interpretable according to customers’ financial personalities. Our method combines advantages from both constrained RL and preferencebased RL: it retains the reward function but generalises the policy to match a defined behaviour, thus avoiding problems such as reward shaping and hacking. Unlike Boolean task composition, our method is a fuzzy superposition of different prototypical strategies to arrive at a more complex, yet interpretable, strategy.publishedVersio

A study of facility management knowledge classification for the effective stewardship of existing buildings

The aim of the study was to establish the Facility Management knowledge categories within the life cycle of a building context. The significance of the study stemmed from research undertaken into the compliance to Australian Standards 1851-17:2005 Maintenance of Fire and Smoke Doors within West Australian nursing homes, which demonstrated 87 per cent non-compliance. The level of non-compliance appeared to identify a lack of knowledge, and appropriately qualified and experienced personnel involved within the management of nursing homes (Doleman, 2008). The issues identified prompted the question on how facility management knowledge categories evolves and develops throughout the life cycle of a building. The research used a three Phase, Grounded Theory interpretive analysis of the Facility Management knowledge construct. Phase One involved the examination of 21 international tertiary undergraduate Facility Managers courses. The course content was analysed and assessed through linguistic analysis to extract the knowledge categories and subordinate concepts. The findings identified 14 primary knowledge categories which were presented to 10 Facility Management experts for validation. Phase Two presented the findings of Phase One in a Multi Dimensional Scaling (MDS) survey instrument to Facility Management experts for dissimilarity assessments. The results from the 56 completed surveys were embedded within MDS software to present spatial knowledge proximity cluster analysis. The final phase was the validation of the research findings through semi-structured interviews of 10 industry experts, selected with consideration of heterogeneity in order to validate the findings of the previous phase. The outcome of this study was to develop an understanding of the Facility Management knowledge categories within the life cycle of a building context and the identification of 14 core knowledge base, required as a Facility Manager practitioner. Core knowledge categories included Finance as a central theme within the Facility Management domain with Building Services and Business providing an indication as to the broad nature of Facility Management knowledge construct. Also identified within the research was the lack of legislative harmonisation between different states and territories within the Facility Management domain and the disparity between Facility Management practitioners with regards to knowledge context and application. The role of Facility Management and their involvement within the lifecycle of a building was also identified within the research as being little or none during the design and construction phases of the building. The handover and management of the buildings to Facility Managers occurs within the occupancy phase of the buildings life cycle meaning that the building was inherited without due consideration of continued operational efficiencies or functionality affecting the overall cost effectiveness of the building. Such outcomes lead to a number of recommendations such as a the introduction of central knowledge standard in order to provide context of definitions and well as the continued development and drive of Facility Management practitioners and associations to establish the Facility Management profession as a respected body