The Prisma System: intelligent agents working on crime pattern analysis supported by geographic information systems

The process of extracting useful knowledge from large databases became one of the tasks of prior importance in today’s organizations. The collection of excessive amount of information makes very difficult its treatment and analysis without appropriated means. Police Departments are real examples of organizations that currently debate themselves with situations involving large volumes of distributed information and requiring effective real time decision making. Some of these situations are critical in the normal Police Department’s activities, namely the ones related to Crime Pattern Analysis. These are concerned with the recognition of spatial and temporal regularities in reported crime and the ability of predict future criminal activity. This is very important due the possibility to provide effective elements to increase patrol actions, improve priority investigations or even perform better public notification. Through the combination of Multi-Agent Systems and Geographic Information Systems technologies we design a computational system Intelligent Crime Pattern Analysis: the Prisma system. It considers a community of intelligent agents, divided essentially into two classes, that will be responsible respectively to populated specialized Data Marts and make Criminal Patterns Identification. With Prisma, Police Departments will be able to examine patterns related to notified incidents and analyze their movement in relation to police initiatives

Client Views on Confidentiality

This study is part of the growing interest in ethical issues in clinical practice. Confidentiality is of particular concern, being regarded by many mental health professionals as a prerequisite for successful treatment. However, conflicts of interest inevitably arise and confidentiality must be weighed against other values. How to deal with these dilemmas has been a matter of considerable debate among professionals; interestingly, the views of clients on these issues have rarely been investigated. The purpse of the study was to explore the attitudes and expectations of human service/mental health center clients regarding confidentiality. A 36 item scale, consisting primarily of 20 Likert format items, was carefully developed to assess these views, particularly the circumstances under which confidentiality should be broken. It proved highly reliable and had a distinct factor structure. The questionnaire was adminstered as part of routine intake procedures at 7 North Dakota human service centers; 465 clients responded. The major finding was that clients are very much concerned about confidentiality and value it highly. Although three quarters expressed a preference for absolute confidentiality, they were willing to have it broken in a few circumstances, primarily when the safety of third parties was involved. For example, they felt child abuse should be reported and threatened third parties protected. On the other hand, they disapproved of some routine professional practices, such as sending personally identifiable data on clients to central registries. To these clients, confidentiality was not an absolute, but was situational and relative to a given context. Clients very much wanted to be informed about any limits on confidentiality that might exist. While they generally expected confidentiality, they also reported having been in a significant number of situations where it was broken; perhaps as a result, they often hesitated to enter treatment. Their views were compared with those of professionals and nonprofessionals in previous studies. Suggestions were offered for further work, to help actualize ethics in theory, research, and practice

ROSAPL: towards a heterogeneous multi‐robot system and Human interaction framework

The appearance of numerous robotic frameworks and middleware has provided researchers with reliable hardware and software units avoiding the need of developing ad-hoc platforms and focus their work on how improve the robots' high-level capabilities and behaviours. Despite this none of these are facilitating frameworks considering social capabilities as a factor in robots design. In a world that everyday seems more and more connected, with the slow but steady advance of the Internet of Things to many aspects of our daily lifes, the lack of social capabilities in a robot limits developers and researchers on areas where robots are seen as part of a solution, and not the solution. This thesis states that a social layer should be accessible in any robotic platform in order to ease the development of systems where such platforms are just a piece in the whole socio-technical system. As result of this e ort we present the ROSAPL framework to develop social robots on top of ROS middleware. We tested our approach in a real scenario at IBEC's Robotics group in the context of the InHANDS, which project tries to assist a handicapped persons in the kitchen. For them we designed and implemented a prototype to proof ROSAPL applicability. This latter will be fully implemented to o er real functionalities for the kitchen

Um framework para simulação econômica baseado em um modelo de agente adaptativo antecipatório com racionalidade limitada

Dissertação (Mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico

GEMAS : un environnement de développement d'applications basées sur les systèmes multi-agents hétérogènes

Les agents et les systèmes multi-agents hétérogènes (SMA) représentent l'approche logicielle du futur pour une grande partie de la communauté informatique. Ils sont bien adaptés aux applications d'aujourd'hui qui sont de plus en plus complexes, distribuées et hétérogènes. Avec ces caractéristiques, ils représentent une architecture intéressante pour des systèmes intelligents. Les SMA sont un domaine de recherche très actif. Bien que les agents et les SMA représentent une approche très prometteuse, leurs caractéristiques intrinsèques comme la complexité, l'hétérogénéité et la distribution, en font des systèmes difficiles à analyser, à concevoir et à réaliser. Plusieurs défis de taille restent à résoudre, comme l'intégration systématique d'agents hétérogènes, le développement d'outils génériques réutilisables, la définition de méthodologies de conception et le raisonnement avec des connaissances incomplètes, incertaines et contradictoires. D'un autre côté, les véhicules autonomes sont un domaine très populaire en intelligence artificielle, car ils représentent un défi tant au niveau du matériel qu'au niveau du système logiciel qui les contrôle. L'architecture logicielle des SMA est une approche intéressante pour ce type d'application. Les travaux de recherche présentés dans cette thèse proposent, conçoivent et réalisent un modèle générique d'agent nommé GAM ( Generic Agent Model ) et un environnement générique de développement de SMA hétérogènes nommé GEMAS ( Generic Environment for Multi-Agent Systems ). Ils solutionnent les problèmes d'intégration d'agents hétérogènes et de manque d'outils génériques et réutilisables de développement de SMA. Afin de valider le modèle GAM et l'environnement GEMAS, un nouveau modèle de pilote pour véhicule autonome basé sur les SMA hétérogènes a été conçu et réalisé à l'aide des agents issus du modèle GAM et de l'environnement GEMAS

Negotiating Socially Optimal Allocations of Resources with Argumentation

The resource allocation problem of multi-agent systems is the problem of deciding how to allocate resources, controlled by agents, to agents within a given system. Agents typically have preferences over alternative allocations of resources. These preferences may be derived from the agents’ goals, which can be fulfilled by different plans (sets of resources). The problem arises because agents may not be able to fulfil their goals without being re-allocated resources controlled by other agents and agents may have conflicting preferences over allocations. Examples of the resource allocation problem include electronic commerce (where resources are commodities equipped with prices), the grid (where resources are computational entities equipped with computational power), and scheduling and timetabling (where resources may be tasks with costs). The focus in this thesis is distributed decision-making amongst agents, whereby agents actively participate in computing re-allocations, starting from initial allocations which may or may not fulfil their goals. A re-allocation is arrived at by means of local negotiation steps wherein resources change hands between the agents involved in the negotiations. The negotiation method of choice in this thesis is argumentation-based negotiation supported by assumption-based argumentation. This method allows agents to work towards their goals despite incomplete information regarding the goals of and resources allocated to other agents, to share knowledge, thereby eliminating unknowns, and to resolve conflicts within themselves and between one another which may arise because of inconsistent information. Solutions generated by a resource allocation mechanism may be ranked according to how they affect the individual welfare of the agents as well as the overall social welfare of the agent society, according to different notions of social welfare borrowed from economics. The argumentation-based negotiation mechanism we propose guarantees, for the problem domain of interest in this thesis, that negotiations between agents always terminate converging to a solution. Moreover, the mechanism guarantees that solutions reached optimise the welfare of the individual agents as well as the agent society as a whole according to Pareto optimal and utilitarian notions of social welfare