Constructivist Ambient Intelligent Agent for Smart Environments

International audienceBuilding a smart home is a multi-disciplinary and challenging problem. Our goal is to build an agent that can propose context aware services to the users. High variability of users' needs and the uniqueness of every home are difficult to handle using "Classical AI". We propose an alternative approach inspired by Developmental Artificial Intelligence and Constructivism Theory. Being constructivist means that the agent builds its knowledge in situ through user's interactions. This continuous interaction process enables the user to customize or bring up the system to meet his personal needs. We have made a first experiment by learning schemas from a simulated two-weeks home scenario. This preliminary experiment gives us indications that Constructivism is a promising approach for ambient intelligence

Rethinking Trust in Social Robotics

— In 2018 the European Commission highlighted the demand of a human-centered approach to AI. Such a claim is gaining even more relevance considering technologies specifi cally designed to directly interact and physically collaborate with human users in the real world. This is notably the case of social robots. The domain of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) emerged to investigate these issues."Human-robot trust" has been highlighted as one of the most challenging and intriguing factors influencing HRI. On the one hand, user studies and technical experts underline how trust is a key element to facilitate users’ acceptance, consequently increasing the chances to pursue the given task. On the other hand, such a phenomenon raises also ethical and philosophical concerns leading scholars in these domains to argue that humans should not trust robots. However, trust in HRI is not an index of fragility, it is rooted in anthropomorphism, and it is a natural characteristic of every human being. Thus, instead of focusing solely on how to inspire user trust in social robots, this paper argues that what should be investigated is to what extent and for which purpose it is suitable to trust robots. Such an endeavour requires an interdisciplinary approach taking into account (i) technical needs and (ii) psychological implications

Intelligent Human-input-based Blockchain Oracle (IHiBO)

The advent of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) has paved the way for a new paradigm of traceability in all information systems areas. In the context of decision-making processes, however, DLTs are generally used only to trace the end results. In this work we argue that a reasoning system can be put in place for making these decisions, in order to enhance auditability, transparency, and finally to provide explainability. We propose the Intelligent Human-input-based Blockchain Oracle (IHiBO), a cross-chain oracle that enables the execution and traceability of formal argumentation and negotiation processes, involving the intervention of human experts. We take as reference the decision-making processes of fund managements, as trust is of crucial importance in such ``trust services''. The architecture and implementation of IHiBO are based on leveraging two-layer DLTs, smart contracts, argumentation and negotiation in a multi-agent setup. Finally, we provide some experimental results that support our discussion, namely that in the use-case we have considered our methodology can increase trust from principals to trusted services

Constructivist Ambient Intelligent Agent for Smart Environments

International audienceBuilding a smart home is a multi-disciplinary and challenging problem. Our goal is to build an agent that can propose context aware services to the users. High variability of users' needs and the uniqueness of every home are difficult to handle using "Classical AI". We propose an alternative approach inspired by Developmental Artificial Intelligence and Constructivism Theory. Being constructivist means that the agent builds its knowledge in situ through user's interactions. This continuous interaction process enables the user to customize or bring up the system to meet his personal needs. We have made a first experiment by learning schemas from a simulated two-weeks home scenario. This preliminary experiment gives us indications that Constructivism is a promising approach for ambient intelligence

Enhancing Trust in Trust Services: Towards an Intelligent Human-input-based Blockchain Oracle (IHiBO)

As their name suggests, trust is of crucial importance in ‘‘trust service". Nevertheless, in many cases, these services suffer from a lack transparency, documentation, traceability, and inclusive multi-lateral decision-making mechanisms. To overcome these challenges, in this paper we propose an integrated framework which incorporates formal argumentation and negotiation within a blockchain environment to make the decision-making processes of fund management transparent and traceable. We introduce three possible architectures and we evaluate and compare them considering different technical, financial, and legal aspects

IRRMA: An Image Recommender Robot Meeting Assistant

The number of people who attend virtual meetings has increased as a result of COVID-19. In this paper, we present a system that consists of an expressive humanoid social robot called QTRobot, and a recommender system that employs natural language processing techniques to recommend images related to the content of the presenter’s speech to the audience in real time. This is achieved utilising the QTRobot’s platform capabilities (microphone, computation power, and Wi-Fi)

Argumentation in Trust Services within a Blockchain Environment

Both argumentation and trust concern multi-lateral uncertainties, while argumentation owns the ability to enhance trust in many ways. In the field of trust service where the trustee administers financial assets on behalf of principals, trust is an indispensable element. Often, the trustees withhold the investment plans and of which the decision-making process from their principals such that these services lack of transparency， documentation, traceability, and inclusive decision-making mechanisms. In this paper, we integrate formal argumentation within a blockchain framework. Both argumentation and blockchain have distinctive features that complement each other. They together make the decision-making of the trustees transparent and traceable in order to gain trust and confidence in principals. We introduce three possible architectures and we evaluate and compare them considering different technical, financial, and legal aspects. Specifically, we discuss the role of argumentation in building trust between trustees and their principals

XAI: Using Smart Photobooth for Explaining History of Art

The rise of Artificial Intelligence has led to advancements in daily life, including applications in industries, telemedicine, farming, and smart cities. It is necessary to have human-AI synergies to guarantee user engagement and provide interactive expert knowledge, despite AI’s success in "less technical" fields. In this article, the possible synergies between humans and AI to explain the development of art history and artistic style transfer are discussed. This study is part of the "Smart Photobooth" project that is able to automatically transform a user’s picture into a well-known artistic style as an interactive approach to introduce the fundamentals of the history of art to the common people and provide them with a concise explanation of the various art painting styles. This study investigates human-AI synergies by combining the explanation produced by an explainable AI mechanism with a human expert’s insights to provide reasons for school students and a larger audience