Modified bargaining protocols for automated negotiation in open multi-agent systems

Current research in multi-agent systems (MAS) has advanced to the development of open MAS, which are characterized by the heterogeneity of agents, free exit/entry and decentralized control. Conflicts of interest among agents are inevitable, and hence automated negotiation to resolve them is one of the promising solutions. This thesis studies three modifications on alternating-offer bargaining protocols for automated negotiation in open MAS. The long-term goal of this research is to design negotiation protocols which can be easily used by intelligent agents in accommodating their need in resolving their conflicts. In particular, we propose three modifications: allowing non-monotonic offers during the bargaining (non-monotonic-offers bargaining protocol), allowing strategic delay (delay-based bargaining protocol), and allowing strategic ignorance to augment argumentation when the bargaining comprises argumentation (ignorance-based argumentation-based negotiation protocol). Utility theory and decision-theoretic approaches are used in the theoretical analysis part, with an aim to prove the benefit of these three modifications in negotiation among myopic agents under uncertainty. Empirical studies by means of computer simulation are conducted in analyzing the cost and benefit of these modifications. Social agents, who use common human bargaining strategies, are the subjects of the simulation. In general, we assume that agents are bounded rational with various degrees of belief and trust toward their opponents. In particular in the study of the non-monotonic-offers bargaining protocol, we assume that our agents have diminishing surplus. We further assume that our agents have increasing surplus in the study of delay-based bargaining protocol. And in the study of ignorance-based argumentation-based negotiation protocol, we assume that agents may have different knowledge and use different ontologies and reasoning engines. Through theoretical analysis under various settings, we show the benefit of allowing these modifications in terms of agents’ expected surplus. And through simulation, we show the benefit of allowing these modifications in terms of social welfare (total surplus). Several implementation issues are then discussed, and their potential solutions in terms of some additional policies are proposed. Finally, we also suggest some future work which can potentially improve the reliability of these modifications

Reflections on the adoption of virtual reality-based application on word recognition for Chinese children with Autism

Deficiency of attention and sensory overload have been well documented in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); yet attention impairments could preclude children from developing social, cognitive and literacy skills. On the other hand, To address this limitation, virtual reality (VR)-mediated instruction could provide an isolated and focused learning space where noises can be faded out and in turn facilitate the integration of additional visual and auditory cues, thus improve children\u27s learning skills. Unfortunately, most of the prior works of VR-based applications had focused on constructing a safe controllable immersive environment to enable children with ASD to develop useful social and communication skills; published research along this path is even rare in mainland China, which motivates our on-going research. In particular, in this short paper, we report a qualitative observation of the acceptability of such an application in trials involving a twelve-year old boy with high-functioning autism (though is now in a public school) and his mother. Although it is their first encounter with such a technology, and both show high enthusiasm on it; but when it comes to its deployment, mixed results were obtained

A privacy-preserving concurrent query-answering protocol for selfish knowledge-based systems

This paper shows a distributed implementation of concurrent query-answering protocol among agents with objective to answer their individual query by means of logical inference from the integrated private knowledge bases (KBs) owned by each agent. Agents may misreport some contents of their KB as long as it will not affect the correctness of the answer they are looking, and such a misreport is not verifiable by others. Our proposed protocol is intended to prevent agents from misreporting and, more importantly, to protect their privacy, so that all answers obtained from the integrated KB are truthfully derived and no party knows the knowledge of individual others other than its own

M. Ishizuka and A. Sattar (Eds.) PRICAI 2002 © Springer-Verlag Genetic Algorithm and Social Simulation

Abstract. Artificial agents have been deployed in simulating social or economic phenomena in order to find optimal policy to govern agents ’ society. However, with an increase of the complexity of agents ’ internal behaviors as well as their social interactions, modeling social behaviors and tracking down optimal policies in mathematical form become intractable. In this paper, genetic algorithm is used to find optimal solutions to deter criminals in order to reduce the social cost caused by the crimes in the artificial society. The society is characterized by multiple-equilibria and noisy parameters. Sampling evaluation is used to evaluate every candidate. The results of experiments show that genetic algorithms can quickly find the optimal solutions

An intelligent lego tutoring system for children with autism spectrum disorder

Prior studies have shown the effectiveness of LEGO-based activities to improve children‟s social skills, especially those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In such activities, teachers are expected to provide instructions/guidance and facilitate communication among children during their collaborative play. When the ratio of children to teacher increases, an intelligent monitoring system could be very helpful to prompt the teachers of any necessary intervention, or to provide children some trivial feedback so that their teachers could focus on other tasks. In this paper, we propose such a system to assist both teachers and children in playing with LEGO bricks. At first, teachers may use the system to create some models. The system will then generate step-by-step instructions in both visual and auditory forms. In addition, the system can track the children‟s brick-building process in real time and provide some feedback when any mistakes were made. Two cameras with a unique image recognition module are used to capture the 3D structure of LEGO bricks

Poster: An interactive picture exchange communication system (PECS) embedded with augmented AIDS enabled by IoT and sensing technologies for Chinese individuals with autism

PECS or Picture Exchange Communication System, involving teaching individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to use the picture cards for requesting items and activities; it has been used with not only the individuals with ASD, but also their families and teachers with notably success. Despite the much progress achieved so far, to our knowledge, there are very few dedicated PECS (software) application available in Chinese. Motivated by these previous research, we are developing a highly customizable and contextually expandable PECS system embedded with augmented aids and some additional communication abilities. In particular, our system can not only offer content-authoring tools but also expands picture vocabularies by automatically offering context-sensitive picture cards (via location- and event sensing) for users to make on-demand request through WeChat, one of the most used social communication tools in China. Last but not the least, the simpler version with typical PECS capabilities with message-sending module has also been loaded in a children s tablet which makes our PECS very affordable for Chinese children s use in rural areas

Sensory substitution to enable the visually impaired to play an affordable wearable mobile game

Sensory substitution allows the visually impaired to regain access to the missing visual information by having the information processed by another intact sense (such as touch and hearing). In this paper, we present a low-cost wearable mobile game that utilizes auditory-visual sensory substitution to engage players. In particular, we employed an array of electrical auditory stimulators attached in a thin helmet worn by the visually impaired player. Our testing with blindfolded sighted players demonstrated the potential of our design in terms of accessibility and ease of use, and the effectiveness of sensory substitution