Toward seamless environments for dispute prevention and resolution

Given the evolution of the Information Technology society, it is now rather simple to acquire products or services in a foreign country. This practice may conduct to the event of conflicts whenever a consumer detects some fault or malfunction in services or products he/she had bought. A situation that may worsen if at the time of the uncovering of the defect, the shopper is already in a different geographical arena. There is thus the need to develop computational tools that may prevent these disputes from even happening. In this work it is proposed the development of seamless intelligent environments for dispute resolution that will surround the user, independently of his/her location. It is described the implementation of a prototype that may provide contextualized real-time information and legal support to consumers. The objective is to decrease the number of disputes due to a poor understanding in relation to the The Law and make justice more personalized and closer to people.The work described in this paper was developed under the TIARAC - Telematics and Artificial Intelligence in Alternative Conflict Resolution Project (PTDC/JUR/71354/2006), which is a research project supported by FCT (Science & Technology Foundation), Portuga

Structural self-organized holonic multi-agent manufacturing system

Worldwide systems are increasingly growing into unprecedented complexity levels. This increase of system complexity has to be tackled with new control approaches, where decentralization is playing an important role and particularly the Multi-Agent Systems and Holonic Systems. Despite the benefits of this distribution, new problems arise such as the need for entities coordination. This paper proposes an innovative holonic multi-agent system architecture, named ADACOR2, which sets foundation on the already proved ADACOR ar-chitecture. This new control architecture is empowered by a two vector self-organization, called behavioural and structural self-organization. This paper de-scribes the structural self-organization vector, particularizing the need for em-bedding in it learning techniques and nervousness stabilizer. A futuristic test bed, inspired in a real flexible-manufacturing system, is used to demonstrate the benefits of this vector in the architecture

İlköğretim Matematik Öğretmen Adaylarının Öğrencilerin Kurdukları Problemlerdeki Hataları Belirleyebilme Becerilerinin İncelenmesi

Agents are autonomous software components that work with one another in a decentralized fashion to achieve some end. Agent systems have been used in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) before, but these applications seldom take advantage of the fact that each agent may have its own goals and strategies, which makes agent systems an attractive way of providing personalized learning. In particular, since agents can solve problems in a decentralized way, this makes them an attractive way of supporting informal learning. In this paper we use scenarios to examine how common problem solving techniques from the agents world (voting, coalition formation and auction systems) map to significant challenges for personalized and informal learning in the TEL world. Through an agent simulation we then show how an agent system might perform in one of those scenarios and explore how different agent strategies might influence the outcome. Based on this work we argue that agent systems provide a way of providing ultra-personalization of the learning process in a decentralized way and highlight equitability and scrutability as two key challenges for future investigation