Human Interactions in Electronic Institutions

Every social network has its own fixed, but different, set of rules that apply to all users. This reflects the fact that in real life every community has different norms depending on the relationships between its members. Unfortunately this has required people to create many different social networks that exist next to each other even though they have largely overlapping sets of members. In this paper we argue that Electronic Institutions (EI) solve this problem by allowing to create a generic social network in which users can set up their own sub-communities with their own particular norms and protocols. Electronic Institutions make it easy for users to specify these protocols and norms in a visual way, and adapt them when necessary. Furthermore we present a new framework on top of the existing EI architecture that allows humans to interact in any EI. It can generate a graphic user interface from the institution-specification without the requirement of any extra programming or design. However, it still allows designers to design a more sophisticated, domain specific GUI.This work is supported by the Agreement Technologies CONSOLIDER project, and CHIST-ERA project ACE, EU project 318770 PRAISE, and the CBIT project (TIN2010-16306).Peer Reviewe

Infrastructures to Engineer Open Agent Environments by Means of Electronic Institutions

Electronic institutions provide a computational analogue of human institutions to engineer open environments in which agents can interact in an autonomous way while complying with the norms of an institution. The purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we lightly survey our research on coordination infrastructures for electronic institutions in the last ten years. On the other hand, we highlight the research challenges in environment engineering that we have tackled during this journey as well as promising research paths for future research on the engineering of open environments for multi-agent systems.This paper has been partially funded by the following projects: TIN2012-38876-C02-01, PRAISE (FP7-318770), CollectiveMind (TEC2013-49430-EXP), ACE (Autonomic software engineering for online Cultural Experiences), and the Generalitat of Catalunya (2014 SGR 118)Peer reviewe

Multiuser Museum Interactives for Shared Cultural Experiences: an Agent Based Approach

Multiuser museum interactives are computer systems installed in museums or galleries which allow several visitors to interact together with digital representations of artefacts and information from the museum's collection. WeCurate is such a system, providing a multiuser curation work ow where the aim is for the users to synchronously view and discuss a selection of images, #12;nally choosing a subset of these images that the group would like to add to their group collection. The system presents two main problems: work control and group decision making. An Electronic Institution (EI) is used to model the work into scenes, where users engage in speci#12;c activities in speci#12;c scenes. A multiagent system is used to support group decision making, representing the actions of the users within the EI, where the agents advocate and support the desires of their users e.g. aggregating opinions, proposing interactions and resolutions between disagreeing group members and choosing images for discussion. Copyright © 2013, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.Peer Reviewe

The challenge of negotiation in the game of Diplomacy

The game of Diplomacy has been used as a test case for complex automated negotiations for a long time, but to date very few successful negotiation algorithms have been implemented for this game. We have therefore decided to include a Diplomacy tournament within the annual Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC). In this paper we present the setup and the results of the ANAC 2017 Diplomacy Competition and the ANAC 2018 Diplomacy Challenge. We observe that none of the negotiation algorithms submitted to these two editions have been able to significantly improve the performance over a non-negotiating baseline agent. We analyze these algorithms and discuss why it is so hard to write successful negotiation algorithms for Diplomacy. Finally, we provide experimental evidence that, despite these results, coalition formation and coordination do form essential elements of the game

Music Learning with Massive Open Online Courses

Steels, Luc et al.-- Editors: Luc SteelsMassive Open Online Courses, known as MOOCs, have arisen as the logical consequence of marrying long-distance education with the web and social media. MOOCs were confidently predicted by advanced thinkers decades ago. They are undoubtedly here to stay, and provide a valuable resource for learners and teachers alike. This book focuses on music as a domain of knowledge, and has three objectives: to introduce the phenomenon of MOOCs; to present ongoing research into making MOOCs more effective and better adapted to the needs of teachers and learners; and finally to present the first steps towards 'social MOOCs’, which support the creation of learning communities in which interactions between learners go beyond correcting each other's assignments. Social MOOCs try to mimic settings for humanistic learning, such as workshops, small choirs, or groups participating in a Hackathon, in which students aided by somebody acting as a tutor learn by solving problems and helping each other. The papers in this book all discuss steps towards social MOOCs; their foundational pedagogy, platforms to create learning communities, methods for assessment and social feedback and concrete experiments. These papers are organized into five sections: background; the role of feedback; platforms for learning communities; experiences with social MOOCs; and looking backwards and looking forward. Technology is not a panacea for the enormous challenges facing today's educators and learners, but this book will be of interest to all those striving to find more effective and humane learning opportunities for a larger group of students.Funded by the European Commission's OpenAIRE2020 project.Peer reviewe

Collaborative Peer Assessment using PeerLearn

In this chapter we introduce the PeerLearn methodology and its associated tools. We base the design of pedagogical workflows for students on the definition of rubrics (using PeerAssess) as the starting element that drives the creation of lesson plans (using LessonEditor). These plans run over our web platform (Peer-Flow). Students can evaluate one another following given rubrics and teachers can accept (or not) marks produced by a collaborative assessment tool (COMAS). Experimental results show that PeerLearn provide students with a highly satisfying new pedagogical experience and increased learning outcomes. © 2015 The authors and IOS Press.Peer reviewe

An Experience-Based BDI Logic: Motivating Shared Experiences and Intentionality

This paper proposes the notion of experience to help situate agents in their environment, providing a link on how the continually evolving environment impacts the evolution of an agent's BDI model and vice versa. Then, using the notion of shared experience as a primitive construct, we develop a novel formal model of shared intention which we believe more adequately describes social behaviour than traditional BDI logics that focus on individual agents. Whilst many philosophers have argued that collective intentionality cannot always be equated to the collection of the individual agents' intentions, there has been no AI model that addresses this issue. We believe this is the first attempt to develop an explicit notion of shared experience from an AI perspective. © 2013 IEEE.This work is supported by: the ACE ERA-Net project; the CBIT project (funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science & Innovation TIN2010-16306); and the Agreement Technologies project (CONSOLIDER CSD 2007-0022, INGENIO 2010)Peer Reviewe

An Experience-Based BDI Logic: Motivating Shared Experiences and Intentionality

International audienceThis paper proposes the notion of experience to help situate agents in their environment, providing a link on how the continually evolving environment impacts the evolution of an agent's BDI model and vice versa. Then, using the notion of shared experience as a primitive construct, we develop a novel formal model of shared intention which we believe more adequately describes social behaviour than traditional BDI logics that focus on individual agents. Whilst many philosophers have argued that collective intentionality cannot always be equated to the collection of the individual agents' intentions, there has been no AI model that addresses this issue. We believe this is the first attempt to develop an explicit notion of shared experience from an AI perspective

u-Help: supporting helpful communities with information technology

When people need help with day-to-day tasks they turn to family, friends or neighbours to help them out. Finding someone to help out can be a stressful waste of time. Despite an increasingly networked world, technology falls short in supporting such daily irritations. u-Help provides a platform for building a community of helpful people and supports them in finding help for day-to-day tasks. It relies on a trio of techniques that allow a requester and volunteer to find one another easily, and build up a community around such provision of services. First, we use an ontology to distinguish between the various tasks that u-Help allows people to provide. Second, a computational trust model is used to aggregate feedback from community members and allows people to discover who are good or bad at performing the various tasks. Last, a flooding algorithm, similar to the popular Gnutella algorithm, quickly disseminates requests for help through the community. This paper describes these three techniques in detail. This work is implemented as an iPhone application that we also describe in this paper.This work is supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya grant 2009-SGR-1434, the CBIT project (TIN2010-16306), the Agreement Technologies project (CONSOLIDER CSD2007-0022, INGENIO 2010), and the ACE ERA-Net project.Peer Reviewe

The Yield of Routine Post-Operative Doppler Ultrasound to Detect Early Post-Liver Transplantation Vascular Complications

Early detection of liver transplantation (LT) vascular complications enables timely management. Our aim was to assess if routine Doppler ultrasound (rDUS) improves the detection of hepatic artery thrombosis (HAT), portal vein thrombosis (PVT) and hepatic venous outflow obstruction (HVOO). We retrospectively analysed timing and outcomes, number needed to diagnose one complication (NND) and positive predictive value (PPV) of rDUS on post-operative day (POD) 0,1 and 7 in 708 adult patients who underwent primary LT between 2010–2022. We showed that HAT developed in 7.1%, PVT in 8.2% and HVOO in 3.1% of patients. Most early complications were diagnosed on POD 0 (26.9%), 1 (17.3%) and 5 (17.3%). rDUS correctly detected 21 out of 26 vascular events during the protocol days. PPV of rDUS was 53.8%, detection rate 1.1% and NND was 90.5. Median time to diagnosis was 4 days for HAT and 47 days for PVT and 21 days for HVOO. After intervention, liver grafts were preserved in 57.1%. In conclusion, rDUS protocol helps to detect first week’s vascular events, but with low PPV and a high number of ultrasounds needed.</p