A Roadmap for Self-Evolving Communities

Self-organisation and self-evolution is evident in physics, chemistry, biology, and human societies. Despite the existing literature on the topic, we believe self-organisation and self-evolution is still missing from the IT tools (whether online or offline) we are building and using. In the last decade, human interactions have been moving more and more towards social media. The time we spend interacting with others in virtual communities and networks is tremendous. Yet, the tools supporting those interactions remain rigid. This position paper argues the need for self-evolving software-enabled communities, and proposes a roadmap for achieving this required self-evolution. The proposal is based on building normative-based communities, where community interactions are regulated by norms and community members are free to discuss and modify their community's norms. The evolution of communities is then dictated by the evolution of its norms.Peer Reviewe

MORE: Merged Opinions Reputation Model

Reputation is generally defined as the opinion of a group on an aspect of a thing. This paper presents a reputation model that follows a probabilistic modelling of opinions based on three main concepts: (1) the value of an opinion decays with time, (2) the reputation of the opinion source impacts the reliability of the opinion, and (3) the certainty of the opinion impacts its weight with respect to other opinions. Furthermore, the model is flexible with its opinion sources: it may use explicit opinions or implicit opinions that can be extracted from agent behavior in domains where explicit opinions are sparse. We illustrate the latter with an approach to extract opinions from behavioral information in the sports domain, focusing on football in particular. One of the uses of a reputation model is predicting behavior. We take up the challenge of predicting the behavior of football teams in football matches, which we argue is a very interesting yet difficult approach for evaluating the model.Comment: 12th European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS 2014

Personalised automated assessments

Consider an evaluator, or an assessor, who needs to assess a large amount of information. For instance, think of a tutor in a massive open online course with thousands of enrolled students, a senior program committee member in a large peer review process who needs to decide what are the final marks of reviewed papers, or a user in an e-commerce scenario where the user needs to build up its opinion about products evaluated by others. When assessing a large number of objects, sometimes it is simply unfeasible to evaluate them all and often one may need to rely on the opinions of others. In this paper we provide a model that uses peer assessments to generate expected assessments and tune them for a particular assessor. Furthermore, we are able to provide a measure of the uncertainty of our computed assessments and a ranking of the objects that should be assessed next in order to decrease the overall uncertainty of the calculated assessments.This work is supported by the CollectiveMind project (funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, under grant number TEC2013-49430-EXP) and the PRAISE project (funded by the European Commission, under grant number 318770).Peer reviewe

Charters for Self-Evolving Communities

Self-organisation and self-evolution is evident in physics, chem-istry, biology, and human societies. Despite the existing literature on the topic, we believe self-organisation and self-evolution is still missing in the IT tools we are building and using. Instead of creating numerous rigid systems, we should aim at providing tools for creating self-evolving systems that adapt to the ever evolving community's needs. This pa- per proposes a roadmap for self-evolution by presenting a set of building blocks, which we refer to as community charters. The paper also presents an approach for each of these blocks, helping build the first prototype for self-evolving communities.This work is supported by the PRAISE project (funded by the European Commission under the FP7 STREP grant number 318770), the CBIT project (funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science & Innovation under the grant number TIN2010-16306), and the Agreement Technologies project (funded by CONSOLIDER CSD 2007-0022, INGENIO 2010).Peer Reviewe

Combining Theory of Mind and Abduction for Cooperation under Imperfect Information

In this paper, we formalise and implement an agent model for cooperation under imperfect information. It is based on Theory of Mind (the cognitive ability to understand the mental state of others) and abductive reasoning (the inference paradigm that computes explanations from observations). The combination of these two techniques allows agents to derive the motives behind the actions of their peers, and incorporate this knowledge into their own decision-making. We have implemented this model in a totally domain-independent fashion and successfully tested it for the cooperative card game Hanabi

Trustworthy advice

Abstract 'If you go to Ferran Adria's restaurant you will have the time of your life!' 'If you study everyday for two hours you will get very good marks next semester.' These are examples of advice. We say an advice has two components: a plan to perform and a goal to achieve. In dynamic logic, an advice could be formalised as: [Pη]G. That is, if η performs plan P, then goal G will necessarily be achieved. An adviser is an entity which provides such advice. An adviser may be an agent, a planner, or a complex recommender system. This paper proposes a novel trust model for assessing the trustworthiness of advice and advisers. It calculates the expectation of an advice's outcome by assessing the probabilities of the advised plan being picked up and performed, and the goal being achieved. These probabilities are learned from an analysis of similar past experiences using tools such as semantic matching and action empowerment. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work is supported by the PRAISE project (funded by the European Commission under the FP7 STREP grant number 318770), and the Agreement Technologies project (funded by CONSOLIDER CSD 2007-0022, INGENIO 2010).Peer Reviewe

Runtime Verification of Deontic and Trust Models in Multiagent Interactions

In distributed open systems, such as multiagent systems, new interactions are constantly appearing and new agents are continuously joining or leaving. It is unrealistic to expect agents to automatically trust new interactions. It is also unrealistic to expect agents to refer to their users for help every time a new interaction is encountered. An agent should decide for itself whether a specific interaction with a given group of agents is suitable or not. This thesis presents a runtime verification mechanism for addressing this problem. Verifying multiagent systems has its challenges. It is hard to predict the reliability of interactions, in systems that are heavily influenced by autonomous agents, without having access to the agent specifications. Available verification mechanisms may roughly be divided into two categories: (1) those that verify interaction models independently of specific agents, and (2) those that verify agent models whose constraints shape the interactions. Interaction models are not sufficient when verifying dynamic properties that depend on the agents engaged in an interaction. On the other hand, verifying agent specifications, such as BDI models, is extremely inefficient. Specifications are usually not explicit enough, resulting in the verification of a massive number of permissible interactions. Furthermore, in open systems, an agent’s internal specification is usually not accessible for many reasons, including security and privacy. This thesis proposes a model checker that verifies a combination of a global interaction model and local deontic models. The deontic model may be viewed as a list of agent constraints that are deemed necessary to share and verify, such as the inability of the buyer to pay by credit card. The result is a lightweight, efficient, and powerful model checker that is capable of verifying rich properties of multiagent systems without the need for accessing agents’ internal specifications. Although the proposed model checker has potential for addressing a variety of problems, the trust domain receives special attention due to the critically of the trust issue in distributed open systems and the lack of reliable trust solutions. The thesis illustrates how a dynamic model checker, using deontic/trust models, can help agents decide whether the scenarios they wish to join are trustworthy or not. In summary, the main contribution of this research is in introducing interaction time verification for checking deontic and trust models multiagent interactions. When faced with new unexplored interactions, agents can verify whether joining a given interaction with a given set of collaborating agents would violate any of its constraints

Propagation of opinions in Structural Graphs

Trust and reputation measures are crucial in distributed open systems where agents need to decide whom or what to choose. Existing work has mainly focused on the reputation of single entities, neglecting their position amongst others and its effect on the propagation of trust. This paper presents an algorithm for the propagation of reputation in structural graphs. It allows agents to infer their opinion about unfamiliar entities based on their view of related entities. The proposed mechanism focuses on the >part of> relation to illustrate how reputation may ?ow (or propagate) from one entity to another. The paper bases its reputation measures on opinions, which it defines as probability distributions over an evaluation space, providing a richer representation of opinions.This work has been supported by both the LiquidPublications project (http://project.LiquidPub.org/), funded by the FET programme under the European Commission’s FET-Open grant number 213360, and the Agreement Technologies project (http://www.agreementtechnologies.org/), funded by CONSOLIDER CSD 2007-0022, INGENIO 2010.Peer Reviewe

Addressing Constraint Failures in Distributed Dialogue Protocols

Early agent communication languages lacked the means to coordinate the interaction between agents. The importance of coordination was better appreciated when open systems became in favor. Some solutions have been proposed; however, these normally rely on centralized gatekeepers. Distributed Dialogues, on the other hand, provide both communication and coordination protocols for multi-agent systems. They do that without the need to re-program agents every time they need to adapt to a new dialogue system and without the need for centralized gatekeepers for coordination. However, these dialogue protocols still aren’t tolerant to failure. When an agent does not respond appropriately, the dialogue simply stops. This usually happens when constraints are broken. This dissertation addresses these kinds of failure by offering ‘induced backtracking’ to explore other parts of the dialogue. It also proposes a negotiation protocol that could be used when some failed constraints are better dealt with by negotiation

CHARMS: A Charter Management System. Automating the Integration of Electronic Institutions and Humans

The execution of process models is usually presented through a graphical user interface, especially when users¿ input is required. Existing mechanisms, such as Electronic Institutions (EIs), provide means to easily specify and automatically execute process models. However, every time the specification is modified, the graphical user interface (GUI) needed during the execution stage should be manually modified accordingly. This paper proposes a system that helps maintain such GUIs in an efficient and automated manner. We present and test Charms, a system built on top of EIs that allows the automatic creation and update of GUIs based on the provided process model specification. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.This work has been supported by: the LiquidPublications project (project.LiquidPub.org), funded by the Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission under fet-open grant number 213360; the Agreement Technologies project (www.agreement-technologies.org), funded by consolider csd 2007-0022, ingenio 2010; and the cbit project on community-building information technology, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant number TIN2010-16306.Peer Reviewe