Supporting Dynamicity in Emergency Response Applications

Multiagent Systems are a promising paradigm for software development. It is feasible to model such systems with many components where each one can solve a specific problem. This division of responsibilities allows multiagent systems to work in dynamically changing environments. An example of an environment that is very changeable is related with emergencies management. Emergency management systems depend on the cooperation of all their components due to their specialization. In order to obtain this cooperation, the components need to interact with each other and adapt their interactions depending on their purpose and the system components they are interacting with. Also, new components may arrive on the scene, which must be informed about the interaction policies that original components are using. Although Multiagent Systems are suited to managing scenarios of this kind, their effectiveness depends on their capacity to dynamically modify and adapt the protocols that control the interactions among agents in the system. In this paper, an infrastructure to support dynamically changing interaction protocols is presented

Argumentation for multi-party privacy management

Social network services enable users to share large quantities of private information. Often, the shared information concerns individuals who are members of the social network but did not upload the information to the service. In such situations, inappropriate sharing preferences can cause conflict and threaten users’ privacy. Since related studies suggest that users prefer to solve multi-party privacy conflicts through negotiation, we introduce a novel approach based on negotiation through arguments. In our approach, users propose privacy settings and support their proposals with logical arguments. The final decision is based on a setting supported by sound arguments

Tie and tag: A study of tie strength and tags for photo sharing.

Tie strength and tags have been separately suggested as possible attributes for photo access controls in Social Network Services. However, an evaluation is missing about the benefits/drawbacks of adding one or both of these attributes to the ones already used in access controls for Social Network Services (groups and individuals). In this paper, we describe an experiment with 48 participants using access controls that include tie strength and tags (separately and simultaneously) together with attributes for groups and individuals. We analyze the results using several quantitative and qualitative metrics. We find that users consider these two new attributes useful in defining their sharing policies, and they prefer to employ access controls that consider tags and tie strength jointly. Specifically, users believe that tie strength improves policy understandability and that tags help them define sharing policies faster. However, we also observe that when users employ these two attributes they tend to make more mistakes in terms of the resulting sharing policy. We hypothesize that this could be caused by the lack of experience using tie strength and tags in access controls

SoSharP: Recommending Sharing Policies in Multiuser Privacy Scenarios

Users often share information about others and may inadvertently violate their privacy. We propose SoSharP, an agent-based approach to help users maintain their own and others’ privacy by guiding selection of sharing policies in multiuser scenarios. SoSharP learns incrementally and asks for user input only when required, reducing user effort