Software agents & human behavior

People make important decisions in emergencies. Often these decisions involve high stakes in terms of lives and property. Bhopal disaster (1984), Piper Alpha disaster (1988), Montara blowout (2009), and explosion on Deepwater Horizon (2010) are a few examples among many industrial incidents. In these incidents, those who were in-charge took critical decisions under various ental stressors such as time, fatigue, and panic. This thesis presents an application of naturalistic decision-making (NDM), which is a recent decision-making theory inspired by experts making decisions in real emergencies. This study develops an intelligent agent model that can be programed to make human-like decisions in emergencies. The agent model has three major components: (1) A spatial learning module, which the agent uses to learn escape routes that are designated routes in a facility for emergency evacuation, (2) a situation recognition module, which is used to recognize or distinguish among evolving emergency situations, and (3) a decision-support module, which exploits modules in (1) and (2), and implements an NDM based decision-logic for producing human-like decisions in emergencies. The spatial learning module comprises a generalized stochastic Petri net-based model of spatial learning. The model classifies routes into five classes based on landmarks, which are objects with salient spatial features. These classes deal with the question of how difficult a landmark turns out to be when an agent observes it the first time during a route traversal. An extension to the spatial learning model is also proposed where the question of how successive route traversals may impact retention of a route in the agent’s memory is investigated. The situation awareness module uses Markov logic network (MLN) to define different offshore emergency situations using First-order Logic (FOL) rules. The purpose of this module is to give the agent the necessary experience of dealing with emergencies. The potential of this module lies in the fact that different training samples can be used to produce agents having different experience or capability to deal with an emergency situation. To demonstrate this fact, two agents were developed and trained using two different sets of empirical observations. The two are found to be different in recognizing the prepare-to-abandon-platform alarm (PAPA ), and similar to each other in recognition of an emergency using other cues. Finally, the decision-support module is proposed as a union of spatial-learning module, situation awareness module, and NDM based decision-logic. The NDM-based decision-logic is inspired by Klein’s (1998) recognition primed decision-making (RPDM) model. The agent’s attitudes related to decision-making as per the RPDM are represented in the form of belief, desire, and intention (BDI). The decision-logic involves recognition of situations based on experience (as proposed in situation-recognition module), and recognition of situations based on classification, where ontological classification is used to guide the agent in cases where the agent’s experience about confronting a situation is inadequate. At the planning stage, the decision-logic exploits the agent’s spatial knowledge (as proposed in spatial-learning module) about the layout of the environment to make adjustments in the course of actions relevant to a decision that has already been made as a by-product of situation recognition. The proposed agent model has potential to be used to improve virtual training environment’s fidelity by adding agents that exhibit human-like intelligence in performing tasks related to emergency evacuation. Notwithstanding, the potential to exploit the basis provided here, in the form of an agent representing human fallibility, should not be ignored for fields like human reliability analysis

The implications of the concept of exaptation for a theory of economic change

The term exaptation, coined by Gould and Vrba, refers to those characters that are useful for survival but that were not selected for this purpose. In this paper I will focus on the notion of exaptation in socio economic systems and on its implications for a theory of economic change. In socio-economic systems, an exaptation is the result of a process through which the initial attribution of new functionalities to existing socio-economic entities (agents, artifacts, social institutions) leads to new entities and new relationships between entities. The notion of exaptation forces to examine the processes of change in socio-economic systems in terms of an interaction-based ontology that I will provide, following the complexity theory of innovation. I will use this ontology to highlight how processes of economic change can be analysed in terms of emergent phenomena and in particular in terms of the emergence of new specific functionalities and qualitatively new entities and relationships. I will refer these processes to the relationships between agent and artifacts, and to the organization of the economy and society. This second type of process of emergence will be examined with reference to the changing characteristics and functions of the division of labour emerging from the historical processes of interaction between quantitative and qualitative changes of production relations. I will conclude that economic change cannot be analysed in terms of a mere recombination of existing things or in terms of selection-variation mechanisms. It must be analysed through the dynamic historical process by which “a new thing leads to another”. In these processes of transformation the causality links are themselves the results of processes in which ex ante potential causality links can be transformed into different (and new) effective (or actual) causality links

A framework for guiding cadastral systems development in customary land rights contexts

Land reform in South Africa is reported to be failing, and land tenure reform in customary contexts is the least well-addressed component of land reform. To address this failure, a framework for guiding cadastral systems development in customary land rights contexts is developed. Using a research synthesis methodology, this conceptual framework is derived from existing literature. It comprises of five evaluation areas (underlying theory, land administration system context, change drivers, change process, and review process), each of which is broken down into related aspects and elements. The three interrelated goals of success, sustainability, and significance permeate the framework. It is suggested that cadastral systems development (and, by consequence, land tenure reform) projects operating in customary land rights contexts fail when they are not sensitive to the significance of development processes and outcomes for customary land rights-holders. The conceptual framework is tested and extended through a progressive case study of four examples of cadastral systems development in Germany, the Netherlands, Mozambique, and South Africa. The elements of the framework are compared against context-specific descriptors that emerge from the case studies to assess how well they have been addressed. Thus, each case brings contextual relevance to the framework, sequentially increasing its groundedness. The European cases are chosen because they are seen to be examples of ‘good practice’ for their contexts and because developments in southern Africa have drawn from and been influenced by them. Hence, they are expected to add relevant insight to the conceptual framework. The southern African cases are chosen because they reflect the intended context of application of the framework and have been undergoing cadastral systems development for the past few decades. The framework was found to be useful in highlighting strengths and weaknesses in all four cases. Weaknesses in the European cases related to their insensitivity towards human rights, class and gender issues possibly arising from assumptions about the uniformity of their socio-economic context. There was also inadequate attention given to the review processes. Strengths arose from the developed nature of the countries as reflected in their good governance and well-functioning cadastral systems. In the southern African cases, the primary weaknesses arose from the adoption of inappropriate theory of development, leading to a loss of significance of development process and outcomes. Other weaknesses are related to the lack of developing status of southern African countries, as reflected in their poor land governance and low levels of technological capacity. Strengths related to acknowledgement of human rights issues and the need to address historical injustices in the southern African cases. The resultant, grounded framework is intended to be used as a tool by policymakers and cadastral systems developers. By taking note of the framework’s aspects and elements, it is proposed that cadastral systems development in customary land rights contexts will carry significance for the land rights-holders, encouraging their adoption and embrace of the process and outcomes of development, which in turn fosters the success and sustainability of development

Game design research: an introduction to theory & practice

Design research is an active academic field covering disciplines such as architecture, graphic, product, service, interaction, and systems design. Design research aims to understand not only the designed end products but also how design as an activity unfolds. The book demonstrates different approaches to design research in game design research

Synergies in innovation : lessons learnt from innovation ethics for responsible innovation

This paper draws on the emerging field of innovation ethics (IE) to complement the more established field of responsible innovation (RI) by focusing on key ethical issues raised by technological innovations. One key limitation of influential frameworks of RI is that they tend to neglect some key ethical issues raised by innovation, as well as major normative dimensions of the notion of responsibility. We explain how IE could enrich RI by stressing the more important role that ethical analysis should play in RI. We focus on two transversal issues of IE: the issue of redrawing conceptual boundaries, especially the topic of the artificialization of the world, and the issue of responsibility, especially the notion of total responsibility. We address these two issues from the thematic perspective of IE, thereby generating lessons learnt for RI. These two examples are taken as illustrations and blueprint of the dialogue that should take place between the two fields