Controlling and Assisting Activities in Social Virtual Worlds

Since its beginning, web technology has advanced from a text-based to a visual-based interaction. This evolution has been facilitated by both high speed internet connections and PC's graphical power. Virtual world (VW) technology began as standalone applications (e.g.. virtual simulations) but soon evolved into web-based applications. Nowadays, home users for entertainment and wide-spread enterprises or institutions for business can exploit virtual worlds to develop remote activities between friends, employees, clients, teachers or students (Sherman, 2002). Then, virtual worlds have clear applications in e-governance, elearning and e-commerce, and therefore it is mandatory to study mechanisms ensuring the assistance and the control of activities taking place in these applications..

Designing Normative Theories for Ethical and Legal Reasoning: LogiKEy Framework, Methodology, and Tool Support

A framework and methodology---termed LogiKEy---for the design and engineering of ethical reasoners, normative theories and deontic logics is presented. The overall motivation is the development of suitable means for the control and governance of intelligent autonomous systems. LogiKEy's unifying formal framework is based on semantical embeddings of deontic logics, logic combinations and ethico-legal domain theories in expressive classic higher-order logic (HOL). This meta-logical approach enables the provision of powerful tool support in LogiKEy: off-the-shelf theorem provers and model finders for HOL are assisting the LogiKEy designer of ethical intelligent agents to flexibly experiment with underlying logics and their combinations, with ethico-legal domain theories, and with concrete examples---all at the same time. Continuous improvements of these off-the-shelf provers, without further ado, leverage the reasoning performance in LogiKEy. Case studies, in which the LogiKEy framework and methodology has been applied and tested, give evidence that HOL's undecidability often does not hinder efficient experimentation.Comment: 50 pages; 10 figure

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

09121 Abstracts Collection -- Normative Multi-Agent Systems

From 15.03. to 20.03.2009, the Dagstuhl Seminar 09121 ``Normative Multi-Agent Systems \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general

Automated Negotiation for Provisioning Virtual Private Networks Using FIPA-Compliant Agents

This paper describes the design and implementation of negotiating agents for the task of provisioning virtual private networks. The agents and their interactions comply with the FIPA specification and they are implemented using the FIPA-OS agent framework. Particular attention is focused on the design and implementation of the negotiation algorithms

Social Mental Shaping: Modelling the Impact of Sociality on Autonomous Agents' Mental States

This paper presents a framework that captures how the social nature of agents that are situated in a multi-agent environment impacts upon their individual mental states. Roles and relationships provide an abstraction upon which we develop the notion of social mental shaping. This allows us to extend the standard Belief-Desire-Intention model to account for how common social phenomena (e.g. cooperation, collaborative problem-solving and negotiation) can be integrated into a unified theoretical perspective that reflects a fully explicated model of the autonomous agent's mental state

Detection and resolution of normative conflicts in multi-agent systems : a literature survey

Peer reviewedPostprin

Advances in infrastructures and tools for multiagent systems

In the last few years, information system technologies have focused on solving challenges in order to develop distributed applications. Distributed systems can be viewed as collections of service-provider and ser vice-consumer components interlinked by dynamically defined workflows (Luck and McBurney 2008).Alberola Oltra, JM.; Botti Navarro, VJ.; Such Aparicio, JM. (2014). Advances in infrastructures and tools for multiagent systems. Information Systems Frontiers. 16:163-167. doi:10.1007/s10796-014-9493-6S16316716Alberola, J. M., Búrdalo, L., Julián, V., Terrasa, A., & García-Fornes, A. (2014). An adaptive framework for monitoring agent organizations. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(2). doi: 10.1007/s10796-013-9478-x .Alfonso, B., Botti, V., Garrido, A., & Giret, A. (2014). A MAS-based infrastructure for negotiation and its application to a water-right market. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(2). doi: 10.1007/s10796-013-9443-8 .Andrighetto, G., Castelfranchi, C., Mayor, E., McBreen, J., López-Sánchez, M., & Parsons, S. (2013). (Social) norm dynamics. In G. Andrighetto, G. Governatori, P. Noriega, & L. W. van der Torre (Eds.), Normative multi-agent systems (pp. 135–170). Dagstuhl: Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik.Baarslag, T., Fujita, K., Gerding, E. H., Hindriks, K., Ito, T., Jennings, N. R., et al. (2013). Evaluating practical negotiating agents: results and analysis of the 2011 international competition. Artificial Intelligence, 198, 73–103.Boissier, O., Bordini, R. H., Hübner, J. F., Ricci, A., & Santi, A. (2013). Multi-agent oriented programming with JaCaMo. Science of Computer Programming, 78(6), 747–761.Campos, J., Esteva, M., López-Sánchez, M., Morales, J., & Salamó, M. (2011). Organisational adaptation of multi-agent systems in a peer-to-peer scenario. Computing, 91(2), 169–215.Carrera, A., Iglesias, C. A., & Garijo, M. (2014). Beast methodology: an agile testing methodology for multi-agent systems based on behaviour driven development. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(2). doi: 10.1007/s10796-013-9438-5 .Criado, N., Such, J. M., & Botti, V. (2014). Norm reasoning services. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(2). doi: 10.1007/s10796-013-9444-7 .Del Val, E., Rebollo, M., & Botti, V. (2014). Enhancing decentralized service discovery in open service-oriented multi-agent systems. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 28(1), 1–30.Denti, E., Omicini, A., & Ricci, A. (2002). Coordination tools for MAS development and deployment. Applied Artificial Intelligence, 16(9–10), 721–752.Dignum, V., & Dignum, F. (2012). A logic of agent organizations. Logic Journal of IGPL, 20(1), 283–316.Ferber, J., & Gutknecht, O. (1998). A meta-model for the analysis and design of organizations in multi-agent systems. In Multi agent systems. Proceedings. International Conference on (pp. 128–135). IEEE.Fogués, R. L., Such, J. M., Espinosa, A., & Garcia-Fornes, A. (2014). BFF: a tool for eliciting tie strength and user communities in social networking services. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(2). doi: 10.1007/s10796-013-9453-6 .Garcia, E., Giret, A., & Botti, V. (2011). Evaluating software engineering techniques for developing complex systems with multiagent approaches. Information and Software Technology, 53(5), 494–506.Garcia-Fornes, A., Hübner, J., Omicini, A., Rodriguez-Aguilar, J., & Botti, V. (2011). Infrastructures and tools for multiagent systems for the new generation of distributed systems. Engineering Applications of Articial Intelligence, 24(7), 1095–1097.Jennings, N., Faratin, P., Lomuscio, A., Parsons, S., Sierra, C., & Wooldridge, M. (2001). Automated negotiation: prospects, methods and challenges. International Journal of Group Decision and Negotiation, 10(2), 199–215.Jung, Y., Kim, M., Masoumzadeh, A., & Joshi, J. B. (2012). A survey of security issue in multi-agent systems. Artificial Intelligence Review, 37(3), 239–260.Kota, R., Gibbins, N., & Jennings, N. R. (2012). Decentralized approaches for self-adaptation in agent organizations. ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS), 7(1), 1.Kraus, S. (1997). Negotiation and cooperation in multi-agent environments. Artificial Intelligence, 94(1), 79–97.Lin, Y. I., Chou, Y. W., Shiau, J. Y., & Chu, C. H. (2013). Multi-agent negotiation based on price schedules algorithm for distributed collaborative design. Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 24(3), 545–557.Luck, M., & McBurney, P. (2008). Computing as interaction: agent and agreement technologies.Luck, M., McBurney, P., Shehory, O., & Willmott, S. (2005). Agent technology: Computing as interaction (A roadmap for agent based computing). AgentLink.Ossowski, S., & Menezes, R. (2006). On coordination and its significance to distributed and multiagent systems. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 18(4), 359–370.Ossowski, S., Sierra, C., & Botti. (2013). Agreement technologies: A computing perspective. In Agreement Technologies (pp. 3–16). Springer Netherlands.Pinyol, I., & Sabater-Mir, J. (2013). Computational trust and reputation models for open multi-agent systems: a review. Artificial Intelligence Review, 40(1), 1–25.Ricci, A., Piunti, M., & Viroli, M. (2011). Environment programming in multi-agent systems: an artifact-based perspective. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 23(2), 158–192.Sierra, C., & Debenham, J. (2006). Trust and honour in information-based agency. In Proceedings of the 5th international conference on autonomous agents and multi agent systems, (p. 1225–1232). New York: ACM.Sierra, C., Botti, V., & Ossowski, S. (2011). Agreement computing. KI-Knstliche Intelligenz, 25(1), 57–61.Vasconcelos, W., García-Camino, A., Gaertner, D., Rodríguez-Aguilar, J. A., & Noriega, P. (2012). Distributed norm management for multi-agent systems. Expert Systems with Applications, 39(5), 5990–5999.Wooldridge, M. (2002). An introduction to multiagent systems. New York: Wiley.Wooldridge, M., & Jennings, N. R. (1995). Intelligent agents: theory and practice. Knowledge Engineering Review, 10(2), 115–152