Multiagent systems

Our future is that of a mixed society of people and AI artifacts. A multitude of devices in our homes will need not only to make intelligent decisions, but they will also need to coordinate with each other to serve us well. Cars will have to coordinate to allow safe road crossings, avoiding accidents. Also, the industry is already beginning to integrate teams of humans and robots collaborating to solve complex problems...Peer reviewe

RICORS2040 : The need for collaborative research in chronic kidney disease

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a silent and poorly known killer. The current concept of CKD is relatively young and uptake by the public, physicians and health authorities is not widespread. Physicians still confuse CKD with chronic kidney insufficiency or failure. For the wider public and health authorities, CKD evokes kidney replacement therapy (KRT). In Spain, the prevalence of KRT is 0.13%. Thus health authorities may consider CKD a non-issue: very few persons eventually need KRT and, for those in whom kidneys fail, the problem is 'solved' by dialysis or kidney transplantation. However, KRT is the tip of the iceberg in the burden of CKD. The main burden of CKD is accelerated ageing and premature death. The cut-off points for kidney function and kidney damage indexes that define CKD also mark an increased risk for all-cause premature death. CKD is the most prevalent risk factor for lethal coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the factor that most increases the risk of death in COVID-19, after old age. Men and women undergoing KRT still have an annual mortality that is 10- to 100-fold higher than similar-age peers, and life expectancy is shortened by ~40 years for young persons on dialysis and by 15 years for young persons with a functioning kidney graft. CKD is expected to become the fifth greatest global cause of death by 2040 and the second greatest cause of death in Spain before the end of the century, a time when one in four Spaniards will have CKD. However, by 2022, CKD will become the only top-15 global predicted cause of death that is not supported by a dedicated well-funded Centres for Biomedical Research (CIBER) network structure in Spain. Realizing the underestimation of the CKD burden of disease by health authorities, the Decade of the Kidney initiative for 2020-2030 was launched by the American Association of Kidney Patients and the European Kidney Health Alliance. Leading Spanish kidney researchers grouped in the kidney collaborative research network Red de Investigación Renal have now applied for the Redes de Investigación Cooperativa Orientadas a Resultados en Salud (RICORS) call for collaborative research in Spain with the support of the Spanish Society of Nephrology, Federación Nacional de Asociaciones para la Lucha Contra las Enfermedades del Riñón and ONT: RICORS2040 aims to prevent the dire predictions for the global 2040 burden of CKD from becoming true

Enfermería Nefrológica y ALCER

La imprescindible colaboración entre la Sociedad Española de Enfermería Nefrológica y la Federación Nacional de ALCER es fiel reflejo del vínculo que une a ambos colectivos. Objetivos comunes, dedicación, y necesidad de superación nos unen para llevar a la excelencia el ejercicio profesional y ofrecer los mejores cuidados a las personas con enfermedad renal y a sus familias. Como un ejemplo más de esta simbiosis hemos integrado en esta Editorial la conferencia que Daniel Gallego, Presidente de la Federación Nacional ALCER, ofreció con motivo de nuestro último Congreso Nacional

Challenge 2: Multiagent systems

Accés lliure al text del llibre a la web de l'editorOur future is that of a mixed society of people and AI artifacts. A multitude of devices in our homes will need not only to make intelligent decisions, but they will also need to coordinate with each other to serve us well. Cars will have to coordinate to allow safe road crossings, avoiding accidents. Also, the industry is already beginning to integrate teams of humans and robots collaborating to solve complex problems. Once there are a multitude of autonomous agents that interact in a collective system, a multiagent system (MAS), the notion of autonomous software agent takes a completely new perspective. On one hand, there are the agents, as a primitive entity and, on the other, there is the shared social space where they interact as a different primitive element. Research in this field has commenced with the engineering of autonomous agents and their reasoning and decision making capabilities. This was followed by interest in the interaction and coordination mechanisms of such complex systems, with solutions like agent communication languages, organisational and institutional approaches, competition and collaboration, and team formation popping up. Lately, agreement technologies have been gaining ground, which focus on normative systems, argumentation and negotiation mechanisms, trust and reputation, computational social choice, and semantics [...]Postprint (published version