Towards VEsNA, a Framework for Managing Virtual Environments via Natural Language Agents

Automating a factory where robots are involved is neither trivial nor cheap. Engineering the factory automation process in such a way that return of interest is maximized and risk for workers and equipment is minimized, is hence of paramount importance. Simulation can be a game changer in this scenario but requires advanced programming skills that domain experts and industrial designers might not have. In this paper we present the preliminary design and implementation of a general-purpose framework for creating and exploiting Virtual Environments via Natural language Agents (VEsNA). VEsNA takes advantage of agent-based technologies and natural language processing to enhance the design of virtual environments. The natural language input provided to VEsNA is understood by a chatbot and passed to a cognitive intelligent agent that implements the logic behind displacing objects in the virtual environment. In the VEsNA vision, the intelligent agent will be able to reason on this displacement and on its compliance to legal and normative constraints. It will also be able to implement what-if analysis and case-based reasoning. Objects populating the virtual environment will include active objects and will populate a dynamic simulation whose outcomes will be interpreted by the cognitive agent; explanations and suggestions will be passed back to the user by the chatbot

Smart balancing of E-scooter sharing systems via deep reinforcement learning: a preliminary study

Nowadays, micro-mobility sharing systems have become extremely popular. Such systems consist in fleets of dockless electric vehicles which are deployed in cities, and used by citizens to move in a more ecological and flexible way. Unfortunately, one of the issues related to such technologies is its intrinsic load imbalance, since users can pick up and drop off the electric vehicles where they prefer. In this paper we present ESB-DQN, a multi-agent system for E-Scooter Balancing (ESB) based on Deep Reinforcement Learning where agents are implemented as Deep Q-Networks (DQN). ESB-DQN offers suggestions to pick or return e-scooters in order to make the fleet usage and sharing as balanced as possible, still ensuring that the original plans of the user undergo only minor changes. The main contributions of this paper include a careful analysis of the state of the art, an innovative customer-oriented rebalancing strategy, the integration of state-of-the-art libraries for deep Reinforcement Learning into the existing ODySSEUS simulator of mobility sharing systems, and preliminary but promising experiments that suggest that our approach is worth further exploration

RV4JaCa—Towards Runtime Verification of Multi-Agent Systems and Robotic Applications

This paper presents a Runtime Verification (RV) approach for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) using the JaCaMo framework. Our objective is to bring a layer of security to the MAS. This is achieved keeping in mind possible safety-critical uses of the MAS, such as robotic applications. This layer is capable of controlling events during the execution of the system without needing a specific implementation in the behaviour of each agent to recognise the events. In this paper, we mainly focus on MAS when used in the context of hybrid intelligence. This use requires communication between software agents and human beings. In some cases, communication takes place via natural language dialogues. However, this kind of communication brings us to a concern related to controlling the flow of dialogue so that agents can prevent any change in the topic of discussion that could impair their reasoning. The latter may be a problem and undermine the development of the software agents. In this paper, we tackle this problem by proposing and demonstrating the implementation of a framework that aims to control the dialogue flow in a MAS; especially when the MAS communicates with the user through natural language to aid decision-making in a hospital bed allocation scenario

RV4JaCa - Runtime Verification for Multi-Agent Systems

This paper presents a Runtime Verification (RV) approach for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) using the JaCaMo framework. Our objective is to bring a layer of security to the MAS. This layer is capable of controlling events during the execution of the system without needing a specific implementation in the behaviour of each agent to recognise the events. MAS have been used in the context of hybrid intelligence. This use requires communication between software agents and human beings. In some cases, communication takes place via natural language dialogues. However, this kind of communication brings us to a concern related to controlling the flow of dialogue so that agents can prevent any change in the topic of discussion that could impair their reasoning. We demonstrate the implementation of a monitor that aims to control this dialogue flow in a MAS that communicates with the user through natural language to aid decision-making in hospital bed allocation

Explaining Semantic Reasoning Using Argumentation

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are popular because they provide a paradigm that naturally meets the current demand to design and implement distributed intelligent systems. When developing a multi-agent application, it is common to use ontologies to provide the domain-specific knowledge and vocabulary necessary for agents to achieve the system goals. In this paper, we propose an approach in which agents can query semantic reasoners and use the received inferences to build explanations for such reasoning. Also, thanks to an internal representation of inference rules used to build explanations, in the form of argumentation schemes, agents are able to reason and make decisions based on the answers from the semantic reasoner. Furthermore, agents can communicate the built explanation to other agents and humans, using computational or natural language representations of arguments. Our approach paves the way towards multi-agent systems able to provide explanations from the reasoning carried out by semantic reasoners

Smart rogaining for computer science orientation

In this paper, we address the problem of designing new formats of computer science orientation activities to be offered during high school students internships in Computer Science Bachelor degrees. In order to cover a wide range of computer science topics as well to deal with soft skills and gender gap issues, we propose a teamwork format, called smart rogaining, that offer engaging introductory activities to prospective students in a series of checkpoints dislocated along the different stages of a rogaine. The format is supported by a smart mobile and web application. Our proposal is aimed at stimulating the interest of participants in different areas of computer science and at improving digital and soft skills of participants and, as a side effect, of staff members (instructors and university students). In the paper, we introduce the proposed format and discuss our experience in the editions organized at the University of Genoa before the COVID-19 pandemic (2019 and 2020 waves)

Behavioral types in programming languages

A recent trend in programming language research is to use behav- ioral type theory to ensure various correctness properties of large- scale, communication-intensive systems. Behavioral types encompass concepts such as interfaces, communication protocols, contracts, and choreography. The successful application of behavioral types requires a solid understanding of several practical aspects, from their represen- tation in a concrete programming language, to their integration with other programming constructs such as methods and functions, to de- sign and monitoring methodologies that take behaviors into account. This survey provides an overview of the state of the art of these aspects, which we summarize as the pragmatics of behavioral types

Detecting and Correcting Conservativity Principle Violations in Ontology-to-Ontology Mappings

In order to enable interoperability between ontology-based systems, ontology matching techniques have been proposed. However, when the generated mappings suffer from logical flaws, their usefulness may be diminished. In this paper we present an approximate method to detect and correct violations to the so-called conservativity principle where novel subsumption entailments between named concepts in one of the input ontologies are considered as unwanted. We show that this is indeed the case in our application domain based on the EU Optique project. Additionally, our extensive evaluation conducted with both the Optique use case and the data sets from the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) suggests that our method is both useful and feasible in practice.Copyright 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland. The final publication is available at http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-11915-1_

Minimizing conservativity violations in ontology alignments: algorithms and evaluation

In order to enable interoperability between ontology-based systems, ontology matching techniques have been proposed. However, when the generated mappings lead to undesired logical consequences, their usefulness may be diminished. In this paper, we present an approach to detect and minimize the violations of the so-called conservativity principle where novel subsumption entailments between named concepts in one of the input ontologies are considered as unwanted. The practical applicability of the proposed approach is experimentally demonstrated on the datasets from the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative