Ecotruck: An Agent System for Paper Recycling

Abstract. Recycling has been gaining ground, thanks to the recent progress made in the related technology. However, a limiting factor to its wide adoption, is the lack of modern tools for managing the collection of recyclable resources. In this paper, we present EcoTruck, a management system for the collection of recyclable paper products. EcoTruck is modelled as a multi-agent system and its implementation employs Erlang, a distribution-oriented declarative language. The system aims to automate communication and cooperation of parties involved in the collection process, as well as optimise vehicle routing. The latter have the effect of minimising vehicle travel distances and subsequently lowering transportation costs. By speeding up the overall recycling process, the system could increase the service throughput, eventually introducing recycling methods to a larger audience

Integrating Meeting and Individual Events Scheduling

Automated meeting scheduling is the task of reaching an agreement on a time slot to schedule a new meeting, taking into account the participants’ preferences over various aspects of the problem. Such a negotiation is commonly performed in a non-automated manner, that is, the users decide whether they can reschedule existing individual activities and, in some cases, already scheduled meetings in order to accommodate the new meeting request in a particular time slot, by inspecting their schedules. In this work, we take advantage of SelfPlanner, an automated system that employs greedy stochastic optimization algorithms to schedule individual activities under a rich model of preferences and constraints, and we extend that work to accommodate meetings. For each new meeting request, participants decide whether they can accommodate the meeting in a particular time slot by employing SelfPlanner’s underlying algorithms to automatically reschedule existing individual activities. Time slots are prioritized in terms of the number of users that need to reschedule existing activities. An agreement is reached as soon as all agents can schedule the meeting at a particular time slot, without anyone of them experiencing an overall utility loss, that is, taking into account also the utility gain from the meeting. This dynamic multi-agent meeting scheduling approach has been tested on a variety of test problems with very promising results

SECONDARY EDUCATION TEACHERS' VIEWS ON ISSUES RELATED TO WASTEWATER AND SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT

This research investigated the views of secondary education teachers in Greece regarding waste management. A questionnaire was administered to 332 in-service secondary education teachers from various specialties to collect data on their views related to their ability and willingness to implement waste management topics, knowledge of waste management terms, and prioritization of waste management actions. The findings revealed that secondary education teachers expressed a moderate to low level of ability to implement educational activities related to waste management, with a wide distribution of views. They express that they felt more confident in implementing Environmental Education Programs (EEP) related to solid waste management than wastewater management. Teachers showed interest in participating in and organizing environmental programs, particularly for solid waste management. While teachers demonstrated a moderate level of basic knowledge of waste management, their understanding varied across different topics. Some terms were well-known, while others were less familiar. Teachers had a limited understanding of waste management principles and struggled to correctly prioritize waste management actions, with a significant percentage prioritizing recycling over waste minimization. These findings highlight the need for further education and training for secondary education teachers in Greece regarding waste management and environmental education. Improvements are necessary to bridge the gap between teachers' knowledge and understanding of waste management principles. This study emphasizes the importance of integrating waste management topics into teacher education programs and providing ongoing professional development opportunities. This research contributes to the literature by identifying areas for improvement in environmental education practices among secondary education teachers in Greece. The findings provide insights for curriculum development and teacher training programs. Future research should evaluate the effectiveness of environmental education initiatives aimed at enhancing teachers' knowledge and understanding of waste management principles.  Article visualizations

GRDD: A Dataset for Greek Dialectal NLP

In this paper, we present a dataset for the computational study of a number of Modern Greek dialects. It consists of raw text data from four dialects of Modern Greek, Cretan, Pontic, Northern Greek and Cypriot Greek. The dataset is of considerable size, albeit imbalanced, and presents the first attempt to create large scale dialectal resources of this type for Modern Greek dialects. We then use the dataset to perform dialect idefntification. We experiment with traditional ML algorithms, as well as simple DL architectures. The results show very good performance on the task, potentially revealing that the dialects in question have distinct enough characteristics allowing even simple ML models to perform well on the task. Error analysis is performed for the top performing algorithms showing that in a number of cases the errors are due to insufficient dataset cleaning

ExperNet: An Intelligent Multiagent System for WAN Management

This paper describes ExperNet, an intelligent multi-agent system that was developed under an EU funded project to assist in the management of a large-scale data network. ExperNet assists network operators at various nodes of a WAN to detect and diagnose hardware failures and network traffic problems and suggests the most feasible solution, through a web-based interface. ExperNet is composed by intelligent agents, capable of both local problem solving and social interaction among them for coordinating problem diagnosis and repair. The current network state is captured and maintained by conventional network management and monitoring software components, which have been smoothly integrated into the system through sophisticated information exchange interfaces. For the implementation of the agents, a distributed Prolog system enhanced with networking facilities was developed. The agents’ knowledge base is developed in an extensible and reactive knowledge base system capable of handling multiple types of knowledge representation. ExperNet has been developed, installed and tested successfully in an experimental network zone of Ukraine

Towards specification of a software architecture for cross-sectoral big data applications

The proliferation of Big Data applications puts pressure on improving and optimizing the handling of diverse datasets across different domains. Among several challenges, major difficulties arise in data-sensitive domains like banking, telecommunications, etc., where strict regulations make very difficult to upload and experiment with real data on external cloud resources. In addition, most Big Data research and development efforts aim to address the needs of IT experts, while Big Data analytics tools remain unavailable to non-expert users to a large extent. In this paper, we report on the work-in-progress carried out in the context of the H2020 project I-BiDaaS (Industrial-Driven Big Data as a Self-service Solution) which aims to address the above challenges. The project will design and develop a novel architecture stack that can be easily configured and adjusted to address cross-sectoral needs, helping to resolve data privacy barriers in sensitive domains, and at the same time being usable by non-experts. This paper discusses and motivates the need for Big Data as a self-service, reviews the relevant literature, and identifies gaps with respect to the challenges described above. We then present the I-BiDaaS paradigm for Big Data as a self-service, position it in the context of existing references, and report on initial work towards the conceptual specification of the I-BiDaaS software architecture.This work is supported by the IBiDaaS project, funded by the European Commission under Grant Agreement No. 780787.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Parallel constraint logic programming systems

Logic programming (LP) maintains all the advantages of the declarative programming paradigm, and the main disadvantage of reduced efficiency. To this problem two "orthogonal" solutions have been proposed. The first concerns exploitation of the parallelism that is naturally embedded in logic programs. The second concerns replacing the standard unification process of LP with constraint solving, a solution that led to the introduction of constraint logic programming (CLP). The above two solutions are orthogonal in the sense that they can exist simultaneously in a system, thus leading to the creation of parallel constraint logic programming systems. The present thesis is an effort to propose a solution to the open problem of implementing such systems. In this framework the research described in this thesis was aimed toward a complete solution to the problem of increasing the efficiency of CLP programs, by proposing both a platform, CSPCONS, for the implementation of parallel/distributed CLP applications and a parallel consistency algorithm Dis-SAC. CSPCONS supports programming based on communicating sequential processes that interact through message passing and event generation. Communication between processes is naturally extended over TCP/IP channels, thus allowing the parallel execution of CLP programs in low cost multi-processor environments. CSPCONS is the first LP platform that combines constraint solving, processes and channel based communication and is an excellent platform for the prototyping and implementing parallel/distributed CLP applications. In the present work, this was further demonstrated by the development of two example applications: a distributed workforce management application and an animator tool for X-machines. Towards the more efficient execution of CLP programs, the distributed filtering algorithm Dis-SAC was proposed. Dis-SAC is a consistency algorithm that presents important characteristics, such as the fact that it imposes a high degree of consistency, simple implementation and linear speedup with respect to the number of processing units involved in the execution. The combination of CSPCONS and the Dis-SAC algorithm for the solution of CLP problems, proved to be highly efficient, as demonstrated by the initial implementation and experimental results. This combination is the main result of the present research effort: a complete solution to the efficient execution of CLP programs in a multi-processor environment.Ο λογικός προγραμματισμός (LP) διατηρεί όλα τα πλεονεκτήματα του δηλωτικού προγραμματισμού, με βασικό μειονέκτημα τη μειωμένη απόδοση. Για την επίλυση αυτού του προβλήματος προτάθηκαν δύο λύσεις: η εκμετάλλευση του παραλληλισμού και η αντικατάσταση της διαδικασίας ενοποίησης με επίλυση περιορισμών (LP με υποστήριξη περιορισμών-CLP). Οι δύο λύσεις είναι ορθογώνιες, δηλαδή είναι δυνατή η ταυτόχρονη εκμετάλλευση τους σε ένα σύστημα, οδηγώντας έτσι στα παράλληλα συστήματα λογικού προγραμματισμού με υποστήριξη περιορισμών. Η διατριβή προτείνει μια λύση στο ανοικτό πρόβλημα της υλοποίησης τέτοιων συστημάτων. Στο πλαίσιο αυτό, η ερευνητική εργασία έγινε στην κατεύθυνση εύρεσης μιας ολοκληρωμένης λύσης για την αύξηση της απόδοσης προγραμμάτων CLP, προτείνοντας τόσο μια πλατφόρμα, την CSPCONS, κατάλληλη για την ανάπτυξη παράλληλων/κατανεμημένων CLP εφαρμογών, καθώς και ενός παράλληλου αλγορίθμου εξασφάλισης συνέπειας σε προβλήματα περιορισμών, του Dis-SAC. Η CSPCONS υποστηρίζει προγραμματισμό βασισμένο σε σειριακές διεργασίες που επικοινωνούν μέσω καναλιών και συμβάντων. Η επικοινωνία μεταξύ των διεργασιών επεκτείνεται με φυσικό τρόπο πάνω από TCP/IP δίκτυα, επιτρέποντας έτσι την παράλληλη εκτέλεση CLP προγραμμάτων σε πολυεπεξεργαστικά περιβάλλοντα χαμηλού κόστους. H CSPCONS αποτελεί την πρώτη πλατφόρμα LP που συνδυάζει ικανοποίηση περιορισμών, διεργασίες και επικοινωνία μέσω καναλιών και αποτελεί μια εξαιρετική πλατφόρμα για προτυποποίηση και ανάπτυξη κατανεμημένων/παράλληλων CLP εφαρμογών. Η καταλληλότητα της πλατφόρμας καταδεικνύεται στα πλαίσια της παρούσας έρευνας με την ανάπτυξη δύο εφαρμογών: μιας κατανεμημένης εφαρμογής διαχείρισης προσωπικού και ενός εργαλείου απεικόνισης εκτέλεσης Χ-μηχανών. Στην κατεύθυνση της αποδοτικής επίλυσης προβλημάτων CSP προτάθηκε επίσης ο κατανεμημένος αλγόριθμος διήθησης τιμών Dis-SAC. Ο Dis-SAC ανήκει στην κατηγορία των αλγορίθμων συνέπειας CSP προβλημάτων και παρουσιάζει σημαντικά χαρακτηριστικά, όπως είναι το γεγονός ότι εξασφαλίζει ισχυρή συνέπεια, απλότητα στην υλοποίηση, καθώς και γραμμική αύξηση της απόδοσης του σε σχέση με τον αριθμό των επεξεργαστών. Ο συνδυασμός της CSPCONS και του αλγορίθμου Dis-SAC για την επίλυση προβλημάτων αποδείχθηκε ιδιαίτερα αποδοτικός, όπως φάνηκε από την αρχική υλοποίηση και πειραματική μελέτη. Ο συνδυασμός των δύο αποτελεί και το κύριο αποτέλεσμα της παρούσας ερευνητικής εργασίας: μια ολοκληρωμένη λύση για την αποδοτική εκτέλεση προγραμμάτων CLP σε πολυεπεξεργαστικά περιβάλλοντα

Designing Environment-Agnostic Agents

International audienceWe present autonomous agents that are designed without encoding strategies or knowledge of the environment in the agent. The design approach focuses on the notion of sensorimotor patterns of interaction between the agent and the environment rather than separating perception from action. The agent’s motivational system is also interaction-centered in that the agent has inborn proclivities to enact certain sensorimotor patterns and to avoid others. Such motivations result in the agent autonomously discovering, learning, and exploiting regularities of interaction afforded by the environment, and constructing operative knowledge of the environment. Because such agents have no predefined goals, we propose a set of behavioral criteria to both judge and demonstrate the agents’ capacities, rather than performance measurement. A design platform based on NetLogo is presented. Results show that these agents demonstrate interesting behavioral properties such as hedonistic temperance, active perception, and individuation