Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2015
Multiuser museum interactives are computer systems installed in museums or galleries which allow ... more 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. In this paper, we describe WeCurate, a socio-technical system that supports cobrowsing across multiple devices and enables groups of users to collaboratively curate a collection of images, through negotiation, collective decision making and voting. The engineering of such a system is challenging since it requires to address several problems such as: distributed workflow control, collective decision making and multiuser synchronous interactions. The system uses a peer-to-peer Electronic Institution (EI) to manage and execute a distributed curation workflow and models community interactions into scenes, where users engage in different social activities. Social interactions are enacted by intelligent agents that interface the users participating in the curation workflow with the EI infrastructure. The multiagent system supports collective 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 for deciding which images are interesting enough to be discussed, and proposing interactions and resolutions between disagreeing group members. Throughout the paper, we describe the enabling technologies of WeCurate, the peer-to-peer EI infrastructure, the agent collective decision making capabilities and the multi-modal interface. We present a system evaluation based on data collected from cultural exhibitions in which WeCurate was used as supporting multiuser interactive.
Whilst there has been an explosion of interest multi-agent systems, there are still many problems... more Whilst there has been an explosion of interest multi-agent systems, there are still many problems that may have a potentially deleterious impact on the progress of the area. These problems have arisen primarily through the lack of a common structure and language for understanding multi-agent systems, and with which to organise and pursue research in this area. In response to this, previous work has been concerned with developing a computational formal framework for agency and autonomy which, we argue, provides an environment in which to develop, evaluate, and compare systems and theories of multi-agent systems. In this paper we go some way towards justifying these claims by reviewing the framework and showing what we can achieve within it by developing models of agent dimensions, categorising key inter-agent relationships and by applying it to evaluate existing multi-agent systems in a coherent computational model. We outline the benefits of specifying each of the systems within the...
The notion of agents has provided a way of imbuing traditional computing systems with an extra de... more The notion of agents has provided a way of imbuing traditional computing systems with an extra degree of flexibility that allows them to be more resilient and robust in the face of more varied and unpredictable forms of interaction. One class of agents, typically called intelligent agents, represent their world symbolically according to their beliefs, have goals which need to be achieved, and adopt plans or intentions to achieve them. Now, one approach to building agents is to design a programming language whose semantics are based on some theory of rational or intentional agency and to program the desired behaviour of individual agents directly using mental attitudes. Such a technique is referred to as agent oriented programming. Arguably, the most innovative of these languages is 3APL (pronounced "triple-a-p-l") which supports the construction of intelligent agents for the development of complex systems through a set of intuitive concepts like beliefs, goals and plans. In this paper, we provide a Z specification of the programming language 3APL which provides a basis for implementation and also adds to a growing library of agent techniques and features. 1 Note that our use of the term context is distinct from the notion of a context in such systems as AgentSpeak(L) [13, 3], which is defined as the precondition of a plan.
Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies, and Simulated Organizations, 2003
In the paper we discuss variable and generative forms of autonomy. Variable autonomy is discussed... more In the paper we discuss variable and generative forms of autonomy. Variable autonomy is discussed in terms of the practicalities in designing autonomous agents, dealing as it does with the notion of degrees of autonomy and hence issues of agent control. The major part of the paper discusses an absolute, theoretically grounded notion of autonomy: the ability to generate one's own goals. This theoretical account of autonomy is embedded in the larger SMART framework and is intimately linked with the issue of motivation. Autonomous agents are motivated agents in that for the generation of goals an agent needs a set of higher order, non-derivative sources of action, or in our terminology, motivations. Autonomous agents in the SMART framework form the basis and source of action in multi-agent systems, which can thus propagate through the other entities in the system, such as non-autonomous agents and objects. We conclude with a discussion regarding the situations an autonomous agent would be willing to relinquish its autonomy thus linking the generative and variable notions of autonomy.
Cooperation is the single most fundamental characteristic of multiagent systems, and much work ha... more Cooperation is the single most fundamental characteristic of multiagent systems, and much work has been done on studying the various aspects involved, from general models of the overall structure of cooperation to detailed analyses of specific components. In our work, we aim to do both-we provide a general model and instantiate each stage in that model. We take the notions of trust and motivation to be fundamental to engendering successful cooperation between autonomous entities, and our model of cooperation accounts for the important roles played by these concepts. This paper focuses in particular on the details of how, based on trust, an agent chooses and keeps track of which agents it may use to assist in the performance of actions that make up a multi-agent plan, and how that information can be used in actually soliciting the assistance.
Much work in the field of agent-based systems has tended to focus on either the development of pr... more Much work in the field of agent-based systems has tended to focus on either the development of practical applications of agent systems on the one hand, or the development of sophisticated logics for reasoning about agent systems on the other. Our own view is that work on formal models of agent-based systems are valuable inasmuch as they contribute to a fundamental goal of computing of practical agent development. In an ongoing project that has been running for several years, we have sought to do exactly that through the development of a formal framework that provides a conceptual infrastructure for the analysis and modelling of agents and multi-agent systems on the one hand, and enables implemented and deployed systems to be evaluated and compared on the other. In this paper, we describe our research programme, review its achievements to date, and suggest directions for the future.
This paper is concerned with the problem of how effective social interaction arises from individu... more This paper is concerned with the problem of how effective social interaction arises from individual social action and mind. The need to study the individual social mind suggests a move towards the notion of sociological agents who can model their social environment as opposed to acting socially within it. This does not constrain social behaviour; on the contrary, we argue that it provides the requisite information and understanding for such behaviour to be effective. Indeed, it is not enough for agents to model other agents in isolation; they must also model the relationships between them. A sociological agent is thus an agent that can model agents and agent relationships. Several existing models use notions of autonomy and dependence to show how this kind of interaction comes about, but the level of analysis is limited. In this paper, we show how an existing agent framework leads naturally to the enumeration of a map of inter-agent relationships that can be modelled and exploited by sociological agents to enable more effective operation, especially in the context of multi-agent plans.
In this paper we have sought to bring together several strands of our work, on motivation, autono... more In this paper we have sought to bring together several strands of our work, on motivation, autonomous agents and interaction between agents, to show how creativity can have a central place within what might be considered rather straightforward aspects of the design of modern computing systems. We review our previous work on the SMART agent framework, and re-interpret it in light of considerations of creativity arising from autonomy, motivation and contributing to the process of autonomous interaction. Here, behaviour is not prescribed but is determined in relation to motivation, leading to different, potentially creative outcomes for different individuals, especially during the process of interaction. Moreover, considering interaction as discovery imbues it with the same creative aspect as in scientific discovery, in which it can be argued that creativity plays a significant role in theory formation and revision. In fact, these are two sides of the same coin: in our view, the creativity in discovery arises from the motivation and autonomy of the individual involved.
Autonomy is a necessary part of the design of agents flexible enough to function effectively and ... more Autonomy is a necessary part of the design of agents flexible enough to function effectively and efficiently in a sophisticated world. Much work, however, has taken a very restricted view of what is entailed by autonomous interaction; in particular, the effects of an interaction have, to some extent, been guaranteed. In this paper, we argue that no facet of interaction can ever be guaranteed, and that if agents are to be autonomous, they must be able to cope with this inherent uncertainty. We propose a model of autonomous interaction in response, which addresses these concerns, and which can be viewed as a process of motivated discovery. This approach has two important aspects: first, modelling the motivations of the agent allows a more adequate model of autonomy to be achieved, and also provides a control strategy for the process of interaction; second, the discovery paradigm provides a suitable framework for effective action and reasoning in an uncertain environment.
The use of general descriptive names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even i... more The use of general descriptive names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
This paper considers some of the issues involved in building a crowdbased system for learning mus... more This paper considers some of the issues involved in building a crowdbased system for learning music socially in communities. The effective implementation of building such systems provides several fascinating challenges if they are to be sufficiently flexible and personal for effective social learning to take place when they are large number of users. Based on our experiences of building the infrastructure for a crowd-based music learning system in Goldsmiths called MusicCircle we address several some of the challenges using an agent based approach, employing formal specifications to articulate the agent design which can later be used for software development. The challenges addressed are: 1) How can a learner be provided with a personalised learning experience? 2) How can a learner make best use of the heterogenous community of humans and agents who cohabit the virtual learning environment? We present formal specifications for an open learner model, a learning environment, learning plans and a personal learning agent. The open learner model represents the learner as having current and desired skills and knowledge and past and present learning plans. The learning environment is an online platform affording learning tasks which can be carried out by individuals or communities of users and agents. Tasks are connected together into learning plans, with pre and post conditions. We demonstrate how the personal learning agent can find learning plans and propose social connections for its user within a system which affords a dynamic set of learning plans and a range of human/ agent social relationships, such as learner-teacher, learner-learner and producer-commentator.
As the field of agent-based computing has continued to develop, there have been several contribut... more As the field of agent-based computing has continued to develop, there have been several contributions to its theoretical underpinnings, and several others to supporting the efforts of practical systems development. Yet the connection between the two has been limited at best. In this paper we aim to address these limitations through a consideration of appropriate agent infrastructure that can support principled development of agent systems based on a strong conceptual framework. As well as a general discussion of infrastructure requirements in this context, we also describe the PARADIGMA implementation environment, based on the SMART agent framework, which represents our initial efforts in this direction.
As computer scientists, our goals are motivated by the desire to improve computer systems in some... more As computer scientists, our goals are motivated by the desire to improve computer systems in some way: making them easier to design and implement, more robust and less prone to error, easier to use, faster, cheaper, and so on. In the field of multi-agent systems, our goal is to build systems capable of flexible autonomous decision making, with societies of such systems cooperating with one-another. There is a lot of formal theory in the area but it is often not obvious what such theories should represent and what role the theory is intended to play. Theories of agents are often abstract and obtuse and not related to concrete computational models.
Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory, 2006
One of the key issues in the computational representation of open societies relates to the introd... more One of the key issues in the computational representation of open societies relates to the introduction of norms that help to cope with the heterogeneity, the autonomy and the diversity of interests among their members. Research regarding this issue presents two omissions. One is the lack of a canonical model of norms that facilitates their implementation, and that allows us to describe the processes of reasoning about norms. The other refers to considering, in the model of normative multi-agent systems, the perspective of individual agents and what they might need to effectively reason about the society in which they participate. Both are the concerns of this paper, and the main objective is to present a formal normative framework for agent-based systems.
The Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) is the best established agent architecture currently availa... more The Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) is the best established agent architecture currently available. It has been deployed in many major industrial applications, ranging from fault diagnosis on the space shuttle to air traffic management and business process control. The theory of PRS-like systems has also been widely studied: within the intelligent agents research community, the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model of practical reasoning that underpins PRS is arguably the dominant force in the theoretical foundations of rational agency. Despite the interest in PRS and BDI agents, no complete attempt has yet been made to precisely specify the behaviour of real PRS systems. This has led to the development of a range of systems that claim to conform to the PRS model, but which differ from it in many important respects. Our aim in this paper is to rectify this omission. We provide an abstract formal model of an idealised dMARS system (the most recent implementation of the PRS architecture), which precisely defines the key data structures present within the architecture and the operations that manipulate these structures. We focus in particular on dMARS plans, since these are the key tool for programming dMARS agents. The specification we present will enable other implementations of PRS to be easily developed, and will serve as a benchmark against which future architectural enhancements can be evaluated.
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2015
Multiuser museum interactives are computer systems installed in museums or galleries which allow ... more 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. In this paper, we describe WeCurate, a socio-technical system that supports cobrowsing across multiple devices and enables groups of users to collaboratively curate a collection of images, through negotiation, collective decision making and voting. The engineering of such a system is challenging since it requires to address several problems such as: distributed workflow control, collective decision making and multiuser synchronous interactions. The system uses a peer-to-peer Electronic Institution (EI) to manage and execute a distributed curation workflow and models community interactions into scenes, where users engage in different social activities. Social interactions are enacted by intelligent agents that interface the users participating in the curation workflow with the EI infrastructure. The multiagent system supports collective 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 for deciding which images are interesting enough to be discussed, and proposing interactions and resolutions between disagreeing group members. Throughout the paper, we describe the enabling technologies of WeCurate, the peer-to-peer EI infrastructure, the agent collective decision making capabilities and the multi-modal interface. We present a system evaluation based on data collected from cultural exhibitions in which WeCurate was used as supporting multiuser interactive.
Whilst there has been an explosion of interest multi-agent systems, there are still many problems... more Whilst there has been an explosion of interest multi-agent systems, there are still many problems that may have a potentially deleterious impact on the progress of the area. These problems have arisen primarily through the lack of a common structure and language for understanding multi-agent systems, and with which to organise and pursue research in this area. In response to this, previous work has been concerned with developing a computational formal framework for agency and autonomy which, we argue, provides an environment in which to develop, evaluate, and compare systems and theories of multi-agent systems. In this paper we go some way towards justifying these claims by reviewing the framework and showing what we can achieve within it by developing models of agent dimensions, categorising key inter-agent relationships and by applying it to evaluate existing multi-agent systems in a coherent computational model. We outline the benefits of specifying each of the systems within the...
The notion of agents has provided a way of imbuing traditional computing systems with an extra de... more The notion of agents has provided a way of imbuing traditional computing systems with an extra degree of flexibility that allows them to be more resilient and robust in the face of more varied and unpredictable forms of interaction. One class of agents, typically called intelligent agents, represent their world symbolically according to their beliefs, have goals which need to be achieved, and adopt plans or intentions to achieve them. Now, one approach to building agents is to design a programming language whose semantics are based on some theory of rational or intentional agency and to program the desired behaviour of individual agents directly using mental attitudes. Such a technique is referred to as agent oriented programming. Arguably, the most innovative of these languages is 3APL (pronounced "triple-a-p-l") which supports the construction of intelligent agents for the development of complex systems through a set of intuitive concepts like beliefs, goals and plans. In this paper, we provide a Z specification of the programming language 3APL which provides a basis for implementation and also adds to a growing library of agent techniques and features. 1 Note that our use of the term context is distinct from the notion of a context in such systems as AgentSpeak(L) [13, 3], which is defined as the precondition of a plan.
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2015
Multiuser museum interactives are computer systems installed in museums or galleries which allow ... more 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. In this paper, we describe WeCurate, a socio-technical system that supports cobrowsing across multiple devices and enables groups of users to collaboratively curate a collection of images, through negotiation, collective decision making and voting. The engineering of such a system is challenging since it requires to address several problems such as: distributed workflow control, collective decision making and multiuser synchronous interactions. The system uses a peer-to-peer Electronic Institution (EI) to manage and execute a distributed curation workflow and models community interactions into scenes, where users engage in different social activities. Social interactions are enacted by intelligent agents that interface the users participating in the curation workflow with the EI infrastructure. The multiagent system supports collective 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 for deciding which images are interesting enough to be discussed, and proposing interactions and resolutions between disagreeing group members. Throughout the paper, we describe the enabling technologies of WeCurate, the peer-to-peer EI infrastructure, the agent collective decision making capabilities and the multi-modal interface. We present a system evaluation based on data collected from cultural exhibitions in which WeCurate was used as supporting multiuser interactive.
Whilst there has been an explosion of interest multi-agent systems, there are still many problems... more Whilst there has been an explosion of interest multi-agent systems, there are still many problems that may have a potentially deleterious impact on the progress of the area. These problems have arisen primarily through the lack of a common structure and language for understanding multi-agent systems, and with which to organise and pursue research in this area. In response to this, previous work has been concerned with developing a computational formal framework for agency and autonomy which, we argue, provides an environment in which to develop, evaluate, and compare systems and theories of multi-agent systems. In this paper we go some way towards justifying these claims by reviewing the framework and showing what we can achieve within it by developing models of agent dimensions, categorising key inter-agent relationships and by applying it to evaluate existing multi-agent systems in a coherent computational model. We outline the benefits of specifying each of the systems within the...
The notion of agents has provided a way of imbuing traditional computing systems with an extra de... more The notion of agents has provided a way of imbuing traditional computing systems with an extra degree of flexibility that allows them to be more resilient and robust in the face of more varied and unpredictable forms of interaction. One class of agents, typically called intelligent agents, represent their world symbolically according to their beliefs, have goals which need to be achieved, and adopt plans or intentions to achieve them. Now, one approach to building agents is to design a programming language whose semantics are based on some theory of rational or intentional agency and to program the desired behaviour of individual agents directly using mental attitudes. Such a technique is referred to as agent oriented programming. Arguably, the most innovative of these languages is 3APL (pronounced "triple-a-p-l") which supports the construction of intelligent agents for the development of complex systems through a set of intuitive concepts like beliefs, goals and plans. In this paper, we provide a Z specification of the programming language 3APL which provides a basis for implementation and also adds to a growing library of agent techniques and features. 1 Note that our use of the term context is distinct from the notion of a context in such systems as AgentSpeak(L) [13, 3], which is defined as the precondition of a plan.
Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies, and Simulated Organizations, 2003
In the paper we discuss variable and generative forms of autonomy. Variable autonomy is discussed... more In the paper we discuss variable and generative forms of autonomy. Variable autonomy is discussed in terms of the practicalities in designing autonomous agents, dealing as it does with the notion of degrees of autonomy and hence issues of agent control. The major part of the paper discusses an absolute, theoretically grounded notion of autonomy: the ability to generate one's own goals. This theoretical account of autonomy is embedded in the larger SMART framework and is intimately linked with the issue of motivation. Autonomous agents are motivated agents in that for the generation of goals an agent needs a set of higher order, non-derivative sources of action, or in our terminology, motivations. Autonomous agents in the SMART framework form the basis and source of action in multi-agent systems, which can thus propagate through the other entities in the system, such as non-autonomous agents and objects. We conclude with a discussion regarding the situations an autonomous agent would be willing to relinquish its autonomy thus linking the generative and variable notions of autonomy.
Cooperation is the single most fundamental characteristic of multiagent systems, and much work ha... more Cooperation is the single most fundamental characteristic of multiagent systems, and much work has been done on studying the various aspects involved, from general models of the overall structure of cooperation to detailed analyses of specific components. In our work, we aim to do both-we provide a general model and instantiate each stage in that model. We take the notions of trust and motivation to be fundamental to engendering successful cooperation between autonomous entities, and our model of cooperation accounts for the important roles played by these concepts. This paper focuses in particular on the details of how, based on trust, an agent chooses and keeps track of which agents it may use to assist in the performance of actions that make up a multi-agent plan, and how that information can be used in actually soliciting the assistance.
Much work in the field of agent-based systems has tended to focus on either the development of pr... more Much work in the field of agent-based systems has tended to focus on either the development of practical applications of agent systems on the one hand, or the development of sophisticated logics for reasoning about agent systems on the other. Our own view is that work on formal models of agent-based systems are valuable inasmuch as they contribute to a fundamental goal of computing of practical agent development. In an ongoing project that has been running for several years, we have sought to do exactly that through the development of a formal framework that provides a conceptual infrastructure for the analysis and modelling of agents and multi-agent systems on the one hand, and enables implemented and deployed systems to be evaluated and compared on the other. In this paper, we describe our research programme, review its achievements to date, and suggest directions for the future.
This paper is concerned with the problem of how effective social interaction arises from individu... more This paper is concerned with the problem of how effective social interaction arises from individual social action and mind. The need to study the individual social mind suggests a move towards the notion of sociological agents who can model their social environment as opposed to acting socially within it. This does not constrain social behaviour; on the contrary, we argue that it provides the requisite information and understanding for such behaviour to be effective. Indeed, it is not enough for agents to model other agents in isolation; they must also model the relationships between them. A sociological agent is thus an agent that can model agents and agent relationships. Several existing models use notions of autonomy and dependence to show how this kind of interaction comes about, but the level of analysis is limited. In this paper, we show how an existing agent framework leads naturally to the enumeration of a map of inter-agent relationships that can be modelled and exploited by sociological agents to enable more effective operation, especially in the context of multi-agent plans.
In this paper we have sought to bring together several strands of our work, on motivation, autono... more In this paper we have sought to bring together several strands of our work, on motivation, autonomous agents and interaction between agents, to show how creativity can have a central place within what might be considered rather straightforward aspects of the design of modern computing systems. We review our previous work on the SMART agent framework, and re-interpret it in light of considerations of creativity arising from autonomy, motivation and contributing to the process of autonomous interaction. Here, behaviour is not prescribed but is determined in relation to motivation, leading to different, potentially creative outcomes for different individuals, especially during the process of interaction. Moreover, considering interaction as discovery imbues it with the same creative aspect as in scientific discovery, in which it can be argued that creativity plays a significant role in theory formation and revision. In fact, these are two sides of the same coin: in our view, the creativity in discovery arises from the motivation and autonomy of the individual involved.
Autonomy is a necessary part of the design of agents flexible enough to function effectively and ... more Autonomy is a necessary part of the design of agents flexible enough to function effectively and efficiently in a sophisticated world. Much work, however, has taken a very restricted view of what is entailed by autonomous interaction; in particular, the effects of an interaction have, to some extent, been guaranteed. In this paper, we argue that no facet of interaction can ever be guaranteed, and that if agents are to be autonomous, they must be able to cope with this inherent uncertainty. We propose a model of autonomous interaction in response, which addresses these concerns, and which can be viewed as a process of motivated discovery. This approach has two important aspects: first, modelling the motivations of the agent allows a more adequate model of autonomy to be achieved, and also provides a control strategy for the process of interaction; second, the discovery paradigm provides a suitable framework for effective action and reasoning in an uncertain environment.
The use of general descriptive names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even i... more The use of general descriptive names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
This paper considers some of the issues involved in building a crowdbased system for learning mus... more This paper considers some of the issues involved in building a crowdbased system for learning music socially in communities. The effective implementation of building such systems provides several fascinating challenges if they are to be sufficiently flexible and personal for effective social learning to take place when they are large number of users. Based on our experiences of building the infrastructure for a crowd-based music learning system in Goldsmiths called MusicCircle we address several some of the challenges using an agent based approach, employing formal specifications to articulate the agent design which can later be used for software development. The challenges addressed are: 1) How can a learner be provided with a personalised learning experience? 2) How can a learner make best use of the heterogenous community of humans and agents who cohabit the virtual learning environment? We present formal specifications for an open learner model, a learning environment, learning plans and a personal learning agent. The open learner model represents the learner as having current and desired skills and knowledge and past and present learning plans. The learning environment is an online platform affording learning tasks which can be carried out by individuals or communities of users and agents. Tasks are connected together into learning plans, with pre and post conditions. We demonstrate how the personal learning agent can find learning plans and propose social connections for its user within a system which affords a dynamic set of learning plans and a range of human/ agent social relationships, such as learner-teacher, learner-learner and producer-commentator.
As the field of agent-based computing has continued to develop, there have been several contribut... more As the field of agent-based computing has continued to develop, there have been several contributions to its theoretical underpinnings, and several others to supporting the efforts of practical systems development. Yet the connection between the two has been limited at best. In this paper we aim to address these limitations through a consideration of appropriate agent infrastructure that can support principled development of agent systems based on a strong conceptual framework. As well as a general discussion of infrastructure requirements in this context, we also describe the PARADIGMA implementation environment, based on the SMART agent framework, which represents our initial efforts in this direction.
As computer scientists, our goals are motivated by the desire to improve computer systems in some... more As computer scientists, our goals are motivated by the desire to improve computer systems in some way: making them easier to design and implement, more robust and less prone to error, easier to use, faster, cheaper, and so on. In the field of multi-agent systems, our goal is to build systems capable of flexible autonomous decision making, with societies of such systems cooperating with one-another. There is a lot of formal theory in the area but it is often not obvious what such theories should represent and what role the theory is intended to play. Theories of agents are often abstract and obtuse and not related to concrete computational models.
Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory, 2006
One of the key issues in the computational representation of open societies relates to the introd... more One of the key issues in the computational representation of open societies relates to the introduction of norms that help to cope with the heterogeneity, the autonomy and the diversity of interests among their members. Research regarding this issue presents two omissions. One is the lack of a canonical model of norms that facilitates their implementation, and that allows us to describe the processes of reasoning about norms. The other refers to considering, in the model of normative multi-agent systems, the perspective of individual agents and what they might need to effectively reason about the society in which they participate. Both are the concerns of this paper, and the main objective is to present a formal normative framework for agent-based systems.
The Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) is the best established agent architecture currently availa... more The Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) is the best established agent architecture currently available. It has been deployed in many major industrial applications, ranging from fault diagnosis on the space shuttle to air traffic management and business process control. The theory of PRS-like systems has also been widely studied: within the intelligent agents research community, the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model of practical reasoning that underpins PRS is arguably the dominant force in the theoretical foundations of rational agency. Despite the interest in PRS and BDI agents, no complete attempt has yet been made to precisely specify the behaviour of real PRS systems. This has led to the development of a range of systems that claim to conform to the PRS model, but which differ from it in many important respects. Our aim in this paper is to rectify this omission. We provide an abstract formal model of an idealised dMARS system (the most recent implementation of the PRS architecture), which precisely defines the key data structures present within the architecture and the operations that manipulate these structures. We focus in particular on dMARS plans, since these are the key tool for programming dMARS agents. The specification we present will enable other implementations of PRS to be easily developed, and will serve as a benchmark against which future architectural enhancements can be evaluated.
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2015
Multiuser museum interactives are computer systems installed in museums or galleries which allow ... more 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. In this paper, we describe WeCurate, a socio-technical system that supports cobrowsing across multiple devices and enables groups of users to collaboratively curate a collection of images, through negotiation, collective decision making and voting. The engineering of such a system is challenging since it requires to address several problems such as: distributed workflow control, collective decision making and multiuser synchronous interactions. The system uses a peer-to-peer Electronic Institution (EI) to manage and execute a distributed curation workflow and models community interactions into scenes, where users engage in different social activities. Social interactions are enacted by intelligent agents that interface the users participating in the curation workflow with the EI infrastructure. The multiagent system supports collective 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 for deciding which images are interesting enough to be discussed, and proposing interactions and resolutions between disagreeing group members. Throughout the paper, we describe the enabling technologies of WeCurate, the peer-to-peer EI infrastructure, the agent collective decision making capabilities and the multi-modal interface. We present a system evaluation based on data collected from cultural exhibitions in which WeCurate was used as supporting multiuser interactive.
Whilst there has been an explosion of interest multi-agent systems, there are still many problems... more Whilst there has been an explosion of interest multi-agent systems, there are still many problems that may have a potentially deleterious impact on the progress of the area. These problems have arisen primarily through the lack of a common structure and language for understanding multi-agent systems, and with which to organise and pursue research in this area. In response to this, previous work has been concerned with developing a computational formal framework for agency and autonomy which, we argue, provides an environment in which to develop, evaluate, and compare systems and theories of multi-agent systems. In this paper we go some way towards justifying these claims by reviewing the framework and showing what we can achieve within it by developing models of agent dimensions, categorising key inter-agent relationships and by applying it to evaluate existing multi-agent systems in a coherent computational model. We outline the benefits of specifying each of the systems within the...
The notion of agents has provided a way of imbuing traditional computing systems with an extra de... more The notion of agents has provided a way of imbuing traditional computing systems with an extra degree of flexibility that allows them to be more resilient and robust in the face of more varied and unpredictable forms of interaction. One class of agents, typically called intelligent agents, represent their world symbolically according to their beliefs, have goals which need to be achieved, and adopt plans or intentions to achieve them. Now, one approach to building agents is to design a programming language whose semantics are based on some theory of rational or intentional agency and to program the desired behaviour of individual agents directly using mental attitudes. Such a technique is referred to as agent oriented programming. Arguably, the most innovative of these languages is 3APL (pronounced "triple-a-p-l") which supports the construction of intelligent agents for the development of complex systems through a set of intuitive concepts like beliefs, goals and plans. In this paper, we provide a Z specification of the programming language 3APL which provides a basis for implementation and also adds to a growing library of agent techniques and features. 1 Note that our use of the term context is distinct from the notion of a context in such systems as AgentSpeak(L) [13, 3], which is defined as the precondition of a plan.
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Papers by Mark d'Inverno