City of Uruk 3000 B.C. : using genetic algorithms, dynamic planning and crowd simulation to re-enact everyday life of ancient Sumerians

Virtual reality reconstructions of ancient historical sites have become a valuable technique for popularising science and visualising expert knowledge to general audiences. Most such reconstructions only re-create buildings and artefacts and place them in the context of the virtual environment, but what is often missing in such simulations is the ability to see how ancient people lived their daily life in these environments. Our presented case study shows how the use of genetic algorithms and simulation of physiological needs helped us to populate the 3D reconstruction of the city of Uruk with a large crowd of intelligent agents simulating daily life of ancient Sumerians in Uruk

Populating virtual cities with diverse physiology driven crowds of intelligent agents

When conducting archaeological excavations of ancient cities, 3D reconstruction has become an important mechanism of documenting the findings and showing the results to general public in an accessible way. Most such reconstructions, however, mainly focus on visualising buildings and artefacts, while rarely simulating the actual people that populated the reconstructed city and aspects of their everyday life. Simulating such people and their lives in all their diversity is a costly and time-consuming exercise comparable in cost and efforts to development of a commercial video game, involving years of development and millions of dollars in funding. In this paper we present a novel approach that can significantly decrease the cost and effort required for simulating everyday life of ancient inhabitants of virtual cities, while still capturing enough detail to be useful in historical simulations. We show how it is possible to manually design a small number of individual avatars and then automatically generate a substantially large crowd of virtual agents, which will live their lives in the simulated city, perform choirs and rituals as well as other routine activities that are consistent with their social status. The key novelty of our approach that enables simulating such sophisticated crowds is the combination of physiological needs - for generating agent goals, emotions and personality - for choosing how to fulfil each goal and genetically informed propagation of appearance and personality traits - to propagate aspects of appearance and behaviour from a small sample of manually designed individuals to large agent groups of a desired size. The usefulness of our approach is demonstrated by applying it to simulating everyday life in the ancient city of Uruk, 3000 B.C.

Dispute Resolution Using Argumentation-Based Mediation

Mediation is a process, in which both parties agree to resolve their dispute by negotiating over alternative solutions presented by a mediator. In order to construct such solutions, mediation brings more information and knowledge, and, if possible, resources to the negotiation table. The contribution of this paper is the automated mediation machinery which does that. It presents an argumentation-based mediation approach that extends the logic-based approach to argumentation-based negotiation involving BDI agents. The paper describes the mediation algorithm. For comparison it illustrates the method with a case study used in an earlier work. It demonstrates how the computational mediator can deal with realistic situations in which the negotiating agents would otherwise fail due to lack of knowledge and/or resources.Comment: 6 page

JobIQ : recommending study pathways based on career choices

Modern job markets often require an intricate combination of multi-disciplinary skills or specialist and technical knowledge, even for entry-level positions. Such requirements pose increased pressure on higher education graduates entering the job market. This paper presents our JobIQ recommendation system helping prospective students choose educational programs or electives based on their career preferences. While existing recommendation solutions focus on internal institutional data, such as previous student experiences, JobIQ considers external data, recommending educational programs that best cover the knowledge and skills required by selected job roles. To deliver such recommendations, we create and compare skill profiles from job advertisements and educational subjects, aggregating them to skill profiles of job roles and educational programs. Using skill profiles, we build formal models and algorithms for program recommendations. Finally, we suggest other recommendations and benchmarking approaches, helping curriculum developers assess the job readiness of program graduates. The video presenting the JobIQ system is available online∗

Assistant Agents to Advice Users in Hybrid Structured 3D Virtual Environments

Hybrid structured 3D Virtual Environments model serious activities in immersive 3D spaces, where participants are human and software agents, and their interactions are regulated by an Organization Centered Multi-Agent System (OCMAS). In this context, both OCMAS social model and the tasks that users need to accomplish can be rather complex, and thus, users may benefit from having an assistance service. Hence, we propose personal assistant agents (PA), which, based on knowledge about the OCMAS specification and current system state, provide the user with an advice (a plan) to achieve her or his goal. Additionally, we implement this service with plan-ea, an extension of the A¿*¿ algorithm that generates plans for a user whose actions may depend on other users¿ actions. Thus, PAs provide plans that do not only include assisted user actions but also other users¿ ones. We illustrate our approach by means of v-mWater¿an online water market¿and make a comparative analysis, with and without assistance, where efficiency¿in terms of number of user actions¿shows an improvement (7 vs 10.8), efficacy¿percentage of completed tasks¿also improves (93% vs 77%), and assistance's overall satisfaction is positive. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer Reviewe

Assistant Agents to Advice Users in Hybrid Structured 3D Virtual Environments

Hybrid structured 3D Virtual Environments model serious activities in immersive 3D spaces, where participants are human and SW agents, and their interactions are regulated by an OCMAS (Organization Centered Multi-Agent System). In this context, both OCMAS social model and the tasks that users need to accomplish can be rather complex, and thus, users may benefit from having an assistance service. Hence, we propose Personal Assistant agents (PA) which, based on knowledge about the OCMAS specification and current system state, provide the user with an advice (a plan) to achieve her goal. Additionally, we implement this service with PLAN-EA, an Extension of the $A^{\ast}$ algorithm that generates plans for a user whose actions may depend on other users' actions. Thus, PAs provide plans that do not only include assisted user actions but other users' ones. We illustrate our approach by means of v-mWater -an online water market- and make a comparative analysis, with and without assistance, where efficiency -in terms of number of user actions- shows an improvement (7 vs 10.8), efficacy -percentage of completed tasks- also improves (93% vs 77%), and assistance's overall satisfaction is positive

Execution infrastructure for normative virtual environments

Virtual Institutions (VIs) have proven to be adequate to engineer applications where participants can be humans and software agents. VIs combine Electronic Institutions (EIs) and 3D Virtual Worlds (VWs). In this context, Electronic Institutions are used to establish the regulations that structure interactions and support software agent participation while Virtual Worlds facilitate human participation. In this paper we propose Virtual Institution eXEcution Environment (VIXEE) as an innovative communication infrastructure for VIs. Using VIXEE to connect Virtual Worlds and EI opens EI to humans, providing a fully operational and comprehensive environment. The main features of the infrastructure are (i) the causal connection between Virtual Worlds and Electronic Institutions, (ii) the automatic generation and update of the VIs' 3D visualization and (iii) the simultaneous participation of users from different virtual world platforms. We illustrate the execution of VIXEE system in a simple eAuction house example and use this example to evaluate the performance of our solution

Virtual worlds in Australian and New Zealand higher education: remembering the past, understanding the present and imagining the future

3D virtual reality, including the current generation of multi-user virtual worlds, has had a long history of use in education and training, and it experienced a surge of renewed interest with the advent of Second Life in 2003. What followed shortly after were several years marked by considerable hype around the use of virtual worlds for teaching, learning and research in higher education. For the moment, uptake of the technology seems to have plateaued, with academics either maintaining the status quo and continuing to use virtual worlds as they have previously done or choosing to opt out altogether. This paper presents a brief review of the use of virtual worlds in the Australian and New Zealand higher education sector in the past and reports on its use in the sector at the present time, based on input from members of the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group. It then adopts a forward-looking perspective amid the current climate of uncertainty, musing on future directions and offering suggestions for potential new applications in light of recent technological developments and innovations in the area

A Virtual World Grammar for automatic generation of virtual worlds

11 páginas, 11 figuras.-- El PDF es la versión manuscrita de autor.Hybrid systems such as those that combine 3D virtual worlds and organization based multiagent systems add new visual and communication features for multiuser applications. The design of such hybrid and dynamic systems is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a system that can automatically generate a 3D virtual world (VW) from an organization based multiagent system (MAS) specification that establishes the activities participants can engage on. Both shape grammar and virtual world paradigms inspired us to propose a Virtual World Grammar (VWG) to support the generation process of a virtual world design. A VWG includes semantic information about both MAS specification and shape grammar elements. This information, along with heuristics and validations, guides the VW generation producing functional designs. To support the definition and execution of a Virtual World Grammar, we have developed a so named Virtual World Builder Toolkit (VWBT). We illustrate this process by generating a 3D visualization of a virtual institution from its specification.This work is partially funded by EVE (TIN2009-14702-C02-01/TIN2009-14702-C02-02) and AT (CONSOLIDER CSD2007-0022) projects, EU-FEDER funds, the Catalan Gov. (Grant 2005-SGR-00093), and Marc Esteva’s Ramon y Cajal contract.Peer reviewe

Teaching programming fundamentals to modern university students

In this paper we investigate how teaching programming to the modern generation of students, “digital natives” who grew up with Google and Facebook and do not know the world before the Internet, can be improved through a highly visual game-like approach. Many programming teachers report that modern programming students have short attention span, lack concentration and have poor motivation to learn programming. We show how we were able to improve the motivation of students and their marks by changing the study program so that the entire entry-level programming course (Programming Fundamentals) is being taught using a visual set of in-class examples and assignments. The paper presents a set of successful teaching patterns that helped to convert one of the most hated subjects in our school into a subject that many students loved and were able to master. The corresponding statistics suggests that one of the key achievements of our approach is a dramatic change in students’ motivation to learn programming, which has resulted a significant improvement in their overall results and was noticeable in the follow-up subjects