ENHANCING PRIVACY IN MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS

La pérdida de privacidad se está convirtiendo en uno de los mayores problemas en el mundo de la informática. De hecho, la mayoría de los usuarios de Internet (que hoy en día alcanzan la cantidad de 2 billones de usuarios en todo el mundo) están preocupados por su privacidad. Estas preocupaciones también se trasladan a las nuevas ramas de la informática que están emergiendo en los ultimos años. En concreto, en esta tesis nos centramos en la privacidad en los Sistemas Multiagente. En estos sistemas, varios agentes (que pueden ser inteligentes y/o autónomos) interactúan para resolver problemas. Estos agentes suelen encapsular información personal de los usuarios a los que representan (nombres, preferencias, tarjetas de crédito, roles, etc.). Además, estos agentes suelen intercambiar dicha información cuando interactúan entre ellos. Todo esto puede resultar en pérdida de privacidad para los usuarios, y por tanto, provocar que los usuarios se muestren adversos a utilizar estas tecnologías. En esta tesis nos centramos en evitar la colección y el procesado de información personal en Sistemas Multiagente. Para evitar la colección de información, proponemos un modelo para que un agente sea capaz de decidir qué atributos (de la información personal que tiene sobre el usuario al que representa) revelar a otros agentes. Además, proporcionamos una infraestructura de agentes segura, para que una vez que un agente decide revelar un atributo a otro, sólo este último sea capaz de tener acceso a ese atributo, evitando que terceras partes puedan acceder a dicho atributo. Para evitar el procesado de información personal proponemos un modelo de gestión de las identidades de los agentes. Este modelo permite a los agentes la utilización de diferentes identidades para reducir el riesgo del procesado de información. Además, también describimos en esta tesis la implementación de dicho modelo en una plataforma de agentes.Such Aparicio, JM. (2011). ENHANCING PRIVACY IN MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/13023Palanci

Seguridad en sistemas multiagente

La seguridad se está convirtiendo en un aspecto importantísimo dentro de la interoperabilidad entre agentes y Sistemas Multiagente en general, ya que, de forma que las aplicaciones basadas éstos van creciendo, va apareciendo la necesidad de entender los riesgos asociados a su uso. Este trabajo se centra en asegurar la plataforma de agentes Magentix.Such Aparicio, JM. (2008). Seguridad en sistemas multiagente. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/13473Archivo delegad

Experiencias con una Técnica de Aprendizaje Activo basada en Retroalimentación Instantánea y Anónima

[ES] Durante las clases en la universidad, los profesores suelen tener poca realimentación acerca de la evolución de los alumnos. Pocos alumnos son los que responden a preguntas como: ¿Lo habéis entendido?, ¿Alguna pregunta?, etc. En este artículo, presentamos nuestras experiencias en la explotación de un sistema de encuestas electrónicas para incrementar la realimentación que los profesores reciben sobre sus alumnos. También detallamos un ejemplo concreto aplicado a la asignatura de Sistemas Operativos. Finalmente, presentamos una evaluación de nuestras experiencias teniendo en cuenta varios factores, como las impresiones de los profesores, el porcentaje de participación, encuestas escritas a los alumnos, y calificaciones en los exámenes[EN] During higher education lectures, instructors usually have little feedback from the students. Only very few students answer questions like: ¿Did you understand this?, ¿Do you have any question?, etc. In this paper, we present an active learning technique that is based on the think-pair-share technique improved with the introduction of electronic polls to obtain anonymous instant feedback. We also present an example of application to an Operating System lecture. Finally, we evaluate our proposal by considering instructors impressions, participation rates, opinion surveys, and exam grades.Such Aparicio, JM.; Criado Pacheco, N.; García-Fornes, A. (2011). Experiencias con una Técnica de Aprendizaje Activo basada en Retroalimentación Instantánea y Anónima. Revista iberoamericana de Informática Educativa. (14):15-23. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/29256S15231

Open challenges in relationship-based privacy mechanisms for social network services

[EN] Social networking services (SNSs) such as Facebook or Twitter have experienced an explosive growth during the few past years. Millions of users have created their profiles on these services because they experience great benefits in terms of friendship. SNSs can help people to maintain their friendships, organize their social lives, start new friendships, or meet others that share their hobbies and interests. However, all these benefits can be eclipsed by the privacy hazards that affect people in SNSs. People expose intimate information of their lives on SNSs, and this information affects the way others think about them. It is crucial that users be able to control how their information is distributed through the SNSs and decide who can access it. This paper presents a list of privacy threats that can affect SNS users, and what requirements privacy mechanisms should fulfill to prevent this threats. Then, we review current approaches and analyze to what extent they cover the requirementsThis article has been developed as a result of a mobility stay funded by the Erasmus Mundus Programme of the European Comission under the Transatlantic Partnership for Excellence in Engineering-TEE Project.López Fogués, R.; Such Aparicio, JM.; Espinosa Minguet, AR.; García-Fornes, A. (2015). Open challenges in relationship-based privacy mechanisms for social network services. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. 31(5):350-370. doi:10.1080/10447318.2014.1001300S35037031

Tie and tag: A study of tie strength and tags for photo sharing

[EN] Tie strength and tags have been separately suggested as possible attributes for photo access controls in Social Network Services. However, an evaluation is missing about the benefits/drawbacks of adding one or both of these attributes to the ones already used in access controls for Social Network Services (groups and individuals). In this paper, we describe an experiment with 48 participants using access controls that include tie strength and tags (separately and simultaneously) together with attributes for groups and individuals. We analyze the results using several quantitative and qualitative metrics. We find that users consider these two new attributes useful in defining their sharing policies, and they prefer to employ access controls that consider tags and tie strength jointly. Specifically, users believe that tie strength improves policy understandability and that tags help them define sharing policies faster. However, we also observe that when users employ these two attributes they tend to make more mistakes in terms of the resulting sharing policy. We hypothesize that this could be caused by the lack of experience using tie strength and tags in access controls.This research was supported by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (http://www.mineco.gob.es/), grant number: TIN2014-55206-R and TIN2017-89156-R to A.G.F. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.López Fogués, R.; Such Aparicio, JM.; Espinosa Minguet, AR.; García-Fornes, A. (2018). Tie and tag: A study of tie strength and tags for photo sharing. PLoS ONE. 13(8). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202540S13

A Scalable Multiagent Platform for Large Systems

[EN] A new generation of open and dynamic systems requires execution frameworks that are capable of being efficient and scalable when large populations of agents are launched. These frameworks must provide efficient support for systems of this kind, by means of an efficient messaging service, agent group management, security issues, etc. To cope with these requirements, in this paper, we present a novel Multiagent Platform that has been developed at the Operating System level. This feature provides high efficiency rates and scalability compared to other high-performance middleware-based Multiagent Platforms.This work has been partially supported by CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 under grant CSD2007-00022, and projects TIN2011-27652-C03-01 and TIN2008-04446. Juan M. Alberola has received a grant from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion de Espana (AP2007-00289).Alberola Oltra, JM.; Such Aparicio, JM.; Botti, V.; Espinosa Minguet, AR.; García-Fornes, A. (2013). A Scalable Multiagent Platform for Large Systems. Computer Science and Information Systems. 10(1):51-77. doi:10.2298/CSIS111029039AS517710

Supporting Dynamicity in Emergency Response Applications

[EN] Multiagent Systems are a promising paradigm for software development. It is feasible to model such systems with many components where each one can solve a specific problem. This division of responsibilities allows multiagent systems to work in dynamically changing environments. An example of an environment that is very changeable is related with emergencies management. Emergency management systems depend on the cooperation of all their components due to their specialization. In order to obtain this cooperation, the components need to interact with each other and adapt their interactions depending on their purpose and the system components they are interacting with. Also, new components may arrive on the scene, which must be informed about the interaction policies that original components are using. Although Multiagent Systems are suited to managing scenarios of this kind, their effectiveness depends on their capacity to dynamically modify and adapt the protocols that control the interactions among agents in the system. In this paper, an infrastructure to support dynamically changing interaction protocols is presented.This work has been partially supported by CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 under grant CSD2007-00022, and project TIN2008-04446.López Fogués, R.; Such Aparicio, JM.; Alberola Oltra, JM.; Espinosa Minguet, AR.; García Fornes, AM. (2014). Supporting Dynamicity in Emergency Response Applications. Computing and Informatics. 33(6):1288-1311. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/50972S1288131133