Miguel Rebollo

The International Symposium on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence (DCAI 2010) is an annual forum that will bring together ideas, projects, lessons, etc.. associated with distributed computing, artificial intelligence and its applications in different themes. The workshop will be organized into CEDI 2010 that will be held at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in September 7-10th, 2010.

This symposium will be organized by the Biomedicine, Intelligent System and Educational Technology Reseach Group (BISITE) of the University of Salamanca. The technology transfer in this field is still a challenge and for that reason this type of contributions will be specially considered in this symposium. This conference is the forum in which to present application of innovative techniques to complex problems.

The artificial intelligence is changing our society. Its application in distributed environments, such as the Internet, electronic commerce, mobile communications, wireless devices, distributed computing, and so on is increasing and is becoming an element of high added value and economic potential, both industrial and research. These technologies are changing constantly as a result of the large research and technical effort being undertaken in both universities and businesses. The exchange of ideas between scientists and technicians from both academic and business areas is essential to facilitate the development of systems that meet the demands of today’s society.

DCAI 2010 is sponsored by the IEEE Systems Man and Cybernetics Society, Spain Section Chapter. The accepted papers included in DCAI 2010 proceedings (long papers, short papers and doctoral consortium papers) will be published by Springer Verlag in the Advances in Intelligent and Soft-Computing series of Springer. At least one of the authors will be required to register and attend the symposium to present the paper in order to include the paper in the conference proceedings.

(Read the complete Call for Papers)

Los días 18 y 19 de  febrero tendrá lugar el workshop Agreement Technologies and Social Neuroscience, organizado dentro del proyecto Agreement Technologies. Se trata de un workshop multidiciplinar para tratar de comprender mejor cómo se pueden modelar acuerdos dentro de un contexto social entre

El año pasado asistí y la verdad es que resultó muy interesante: hablar con expertos de áreas que no tienen que ver nada con la mía… ni siquiera con la informática, descoloca un poco pero es muy enriquecedor. Si te gustan estas cosas te recomiendo que vayas. Si hay hueco, yo pretendo ir.

Si quieres saber algo más, aquí tienes el programa y los resúmenes de las ponencias…. y no voy a escribir más frases que empiecen con “si”.

Es el título de la demo que hemos mandado al AAMAS 2010. Thomas es entorno que permite formar organizaciones virtuales abiertas que pueden evolucionar con el tiempo y permiten a los agentes inteligentes registrarse en ellas e interactuar con el resto de agentes a traves, principalmente, de la invocación de servicios.

Como el vídeo incluye pantallas de la aplicación, se ve mejor en pantalla completa o directamente la versión en HD en vimeo.

Sobre todo, gracias a Elena y a Natalia por el esfuerzo en tenerlo todo listo a tiempo.

Managing quality in agent dialogues
Josep Puyol-Gruart

Measuring the quality of answers in agent’s conversations. Quality measures:
precision (smaller interval) and certainly (how close is to true or false). They are related: precision is more interesting when certainly is close to true or false. Talking about absolute (values for the facts) and relative (external view) quality. But explaining all these thing he’s run out of time, so he can’t explain how agents can use this quality measures.

Designing Automated Agents Capable of Efficiently Negotiating with People – Overcoming the Challenge
Raz Lin

It’s very difficult to design domain independent agents that negotiate with other agents or with people, and this is the goal of the paper. HE establihes the negotiation environment, how the agent isdesigned and shows some samples in games andother environments: Diplomacy, autONA, Cliff-Edge… finishing with the KBAgent, which includes all the characteristics developed in the previous ones

• Generic agent / domain independent
• Qualitative decision making
• Non deterministic behavior / randomization
• Incorporating data from past interactions

And now something about validation. It is a problem because it is no standard fto do that. What is a ‘good’ agent? maximal payoff/maximal social welfare/end with agreement/pass Turing test? This is an open question.

A good question from Ingrid Nunes abuot emotions, because their influence in human negotiations. But at the moment they are not taken into account

Como es costumbre, os dejo aquí mi presentación del artículo de EUMAS ’09. Que el título no engañe: habla más de MDD que de sistemas limitados aunque el ejemplo que ponemos sea de Android. Esta vez me ha costado mucho terminarla y aún así el resultado tampoco me convence demasiado… la he reordenador un millón de veces.

Topology and memory effect on convention emergence
Daniel Villatoro

Sorry, I’m a bit late, but this is the ideas that I’ve seen before, so I hope I’ll be able to complete this part later.

Measures of Context-Awareness for Self-Organizing Systems
Andrei Olaru

Points in common of selforg and ambient intelligence (a boring part about reactive and congnitive agents that I’m not going to comment) and now a bit about context-awareness. Agents connected in agrid with 8 neig (similiar to Kleinberg structure). Two measures: (i) pressure: how important a piece of information is; it represents urgency and determines how important the information is and how it is propagated; and (ii) interest (similar to attention focus) related with data, agents and facts. Showing how information is propagated.

Dynamic Evolution of Role Taxonomies through Multidimensional Clustering in Multiagent Organizations
Ramon Hermoso (a.k.a. Dani Mateo :-)

Related with adaptive organizations. When an agent arrives to a organization, it has to choose a counterpart to interact with. They propose a mechanism to create role taxonomies and to allow them to evolve (that is, to modificate them and, sometimes, to create new ones).

Some comments: Are always new roles specializations of existing ones? Are new roles based on existing actions? Removing roles? Has it any sense? (better remove it when there is no agents in it? who decides the role fora existing agents (supervision??

A Taxonomy of Adaptive Systems
Jan Calta

Talking about self-* properties:

• self-stabilization (SSS) = closure +convergence
• selg-organization (SOS) = adaptability +decentralization + local knowledge + homogeneity
• self-management (SMS)  = configuration + optimization + healing (fixing)+ protection
• self-adaptation (SAS) = can be considered as a generalization of SSS, SOS and SMS.

Conparing these three approaches in terms of adaptation, architecture and the approach used in their design. Interesting to describe correctly consensus networks. I think that is a SOS+SSS system (importance of the convergence)

Tags: eumas09, self-organization, organization, adaption,

A Trust Aggregation Engine that Uses Contextual Information
Joana Urbano

Enhacing traditional aggregation approaches by the inclusion of dynamics and being situation-aware (context).

Dynamics, based on Hysteresis of Trust and Betrayal (Straker, 2008), introducing 3 properties as asymmetry, maturity and distinguishable past. Thier model is called SinAlpha. Asymmetry penalizes intermittent behav., maturity avoids selection with few evidences and distiguishably prevents fast forgiveness. But the sin approach is not better than the linear model (experimentally).

Situation-aware is covered by contextual fitness. It is something very similar to CBR: clustering, stereotype extraction, analysis of similarity. Interestng for me: Multidimensional context representation for situational trust (Rehak, Gregor & Pechoucek, 2006). To do: deal with newcomers (first-encounter)

Preliminary Results on Reputation Systems: Balancing Quantity and Quality
Jonathan Ben-Naim

Agents in a network with a ranking that models reputation. A global measure (untractable for very large open systems as web). Two axioms: transitivity and strict transitiviy (good as first approach, but it can not be generalized). They refines the values in different interactions. What does it happend when there are loops? A lot of things to explain: ‘random’ initial ranking that he promises is not affecting to the final result (I can’t believe this), no weight/importance, the use of group size (stricti trans.) is questionable….

An Interaction-oriented Model of Trust Alignment
Andrew Koster

Well, I’ve seen this a lot of times: how to align trust concepts. Particularly, I prefer to have an standard on this part. Because we can continue with that: for example, ACL; why can’t we align ACL ontologies so the agents can speack in any language? In this case: agents share the same sintactis (about trust) and the semantics has to be aligned (what does it means to have a 0.8 confidence?) Implemented using inductive llogic programming (scalability?)

Supplier performance in a Digital Ecosystem
Angela Fabregues

Deals with partnership selection in cases where negotiation/argumentation is involved.

(Inciso: OMG bolitas paseándose por la pantalla, a DocThreeC le encantará esta plantilla ¿se lo digo? luego nos torturará).

To define the model of trust she begins with the ontology, similarity, expectations (see the invited talk of Carles Sierra this morning). By using past experiences, the probab. distribution of expected observation is modified. So, at the end, you do not take into accout the information about the exact object, but the similar ones too.

(otro inciso: ¡qué garrillas tiene la chica de las traspas! parece Ana Obregón :-D)

She continues explainig how the trust value is calculated using all these things and a bit (quickly) about similarity.

On Norm Internalization. A Position Paper
Daniel Villatoro (as guess star) in behalf of Rosaria Conte

How agents internalize existing norms and incorporates them to their behavior. He begins talking about goal internalization. At the beginnig, you behav. is directed by norms, but when yo asimilated them then you behaves in that way not to avoid a punishment, but because you want to behave in that way (for example, to stop when light is red in a semaphore). Too fast to listen and to write at the same time (you know, I’m a man), but it is a very interesting thing and I think that is related with adaptive organizations. I have to read the paper this this idea on mind. An intertesting point: urgency is a factor that affects to the speed at which intentions are internalized.

It is integrated with EMIL-A (BDI), N-Bel -> N-Goal -> N-Intentions that are Internalized as a conformed behav. A comment: this work is about people, not artificial agents.

Tags: eumas09, trust, reputation, dynamics, context,

On the design of mWater: a case study for Agreement Technologies
Pablo Noriega

About how to deal with water problems, involving many stakeholder with conflicting interests. This problem is modelled using electronic institutions. My comment: I think that is importan to consider more general works. I particularly like the papers about complex social ecological systems (Ostrom 2009 and Meizen-Dick 2007 ) which combines the environment, the resources, the users and the institutions and their relationships in a complete model. eInstitutions are very useful to model the institutional part (administrations, goverment…), but a more open environment (Thomas) is needed to take into account individual users and their social relationships to create a self-adaptive subsystem. I guess that this is the correct direction to deal with this problem. The vision that Carlos, Alberto and myself propose with consensus networks is just another point of view, but all of them are important and they need to be integrated.

Detecting Anomalies in Unmanned Vehicles Using the Mahalanobis Distance
Raz Lin

A model-free method based on statistical techniques to detect anomalies so that they can be corrected on time. They apply Mahalanobis distance (it sounds to me; i think that Alberto talked us about this for consensus networks; I have to check it). Using this distance eliminates the problems that appears in multidimensional data for euclidean distances. THe problem: it does not work well with qualitative changes (even if a partial order can be artificially defined?). An you’re losing a lot of domain dependent knowledge that can be useful!!

Dynamic ontology co-construction based on adaptive multi-agent technology
Sellami Zied

A tool to help ontologists to create ontologies (Dynamo project  A bit confusing: there is another dynamo for ontologies)

Tags: eumas09, agent, application, mwater, vehicles, ontology

Invited talk by Carles Sierra

The overview: beginning from individual opinion, how it is transformed into group opinion to achieve some reputation. Reputation is actually a grupal opinion about someone or something.

The example: Liquid publishing, about how people change their opinion by arguieng and considering reputation (the example is about paper review for a conference). The reputation of author, reviewers, the paper or the conference itself are considered.

First step: forming individual opinions. Agent receives messages that contribute to agent’s knowledge creating a distribution about the quality (or the true value) of the predicate. And this quality decays with time, having a decay limit distribution. This process (updating information and decaying with time) is reactive reasoning (giving formula about all these things). But we can have two types of opinion: verifiable (tomorrow will rain) and unverifiable (Earth will exist in 1 million years).

Second step: To structure the knowledge (as we organize sections in a paper). So the opinions can be given about each one of the identified elements and these opinions can be used to create a reputation value. So opinions are associated to nodes in the structure.

With that, entering in the third step: how group opinion are formed. To do that, (i) a language to share opinions, (ii) distances about opinions and (iii) methods to aggregate opinions are needed. So we are looking for a function that summarizes the group opinion. About the language, we can inform opinions (somehow a subjective thing) and experiences (objective facts). About getting information, citations can be good, but opinions can be even better (problem with ‘the rich get richer), and this can be done using distances between distributions: (i) by calculating how similar two functions are, (ii) calculating the distances between them (EMD)-not euclidean for opinions- Explaining different methods to combine opinions. Something interesting: reputation labels; inexorable, predetermination, persuasiveness, compliance, dogmatic and adherence that describe the position of an agent with respect to the opinion ofa group. BUt individuals have social relationships and this information ca be also taken into account.

So, to summarize:

• reputation is becoming crucial for all sort of web-related applications
• current model ignore the structure of the knowledge, as social relations
• integrated models that deals with all these information (social, structural, dependence…) are required

Tags: eumas09, reputation, opinion, group, knowledge

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Semantic Web Service Composition using Planning and Ontology Concept Relevance
Ourania Hatzi

A planning approach to compose services… very similar to our work: OWL-S to describe services, Pellet as semantic reasoner for OWL and a planner to compose services. The most interesting thing is not about services, but about semantic awareness when the planner fails.

Improving Web services adaptability thanks to a synergy between aspect programming and a multi-agent middleware
Flavien Balbo and Valérie Monfort

About enterprise IS. They add “aspects” to ws and use a middleware (agent-based) to improve adaptability. I don’t understand why all these mess: AOP to add dynamically new behavior to web services and agents just to coordinate (by communication) ws… I guess that using just one technology will be easier.

QoSS Policies Operating for Web Services within SOA
David Allison

QoSS: Quality of Security Service. Metadata includes information about authentication, authorization and privacy, embedded inside the SOAP message. I don’t know why to modify SOAP is needed instead of use the WS-Auth, WS-Privacy and so on, most of them provided by the service platforms. This can be useful for “private” service (inside an intranet, or for enterprise services), but not for public ones.

Building Blocks: Layered Components Approach for Accumulating High-Demand Web Services
Satoshi Morimoto, Satoshi Sakai, Masaki Gotou, Heeryon Cho, Toru Ishida, and Yohei Murakami

They use web services as language resources that can be combined to create new tools (A Language Grid). For example, multiple dictionaries. Building blocks for simple components programed in PHP or Java are encapsulated inside web services. This is used to create new systems (I assume that it’s used by programmers) faster than without them.

A framework to guarantee time-bounded composed services
Elena del Val.

Well, these is our paper, so I have no things to say…. it’s perfect :-D Ok, ok… I tell you something about that. The idea is to guarantee service execution time (soft real-time). Commitment Manager reach agreements with providers to get a temporal windows in which is ensured that the service will be provided. WS-Agreement protocol is used to do that. 

Supporting Web Service Protocol Changes by Propagation
Ahmed Azough

About business protocols. They consider them as FSM and allow add and delete state, transitions and the final state.

Reasoning about Web Services with Local Closed World Assumption
Limin Chen, Hong Hu, and Zhongzhi Shi

Ups, no one for this paper, so we’ve finished