New Zealand

Stefano de Luca, Roberta Di Pace and Facundo Storani (June 22nd 2019). Approaches for Modelling User’s Acceptance of Innovative Transportation Technologies and Systems, Transportation Systems Analysis and Assessment, Stefano De Luca, Roberta Di Pace and Boban Djordjevic, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.87088. 

Todorka Glushkova (October 21st 2015). Personalization and User Modeling in Adaptive E-Learning Systems for Schools, E-Learning - Instructional Design, Organizational Strategy and Management, Boyka Gradinarova, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/61084. 

Celso de Melo and Ana Paiva (May 1st 2008). The Art of Expressing Emotions in Virtual Humans, Affective Computing, Jimmy Or, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/6179.

Agents that adapt to their user need to have knowledge of their user and expertise on how best to adapt to that type of user. In this paper we describe the addition of an agent’s expertise and collection of machine-learnt user profiles to the proposed extended FAtiMA (Fearnot AffecTive Mind Architecture) cognitive agent architecture. A study to evaluate the extended architecture is presented which compares the benefit (i.e. reduced stress and increased rapport) of tailoring dialogue (i.e. empathic or neutral) to the specific user.

AAMAS 2020

User-Models to drive an Adaptive Virtual Advisor

user model

agent’s expertise

virtual advisor

virtual humans

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally-respected archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

Browse keynotes, discussions, panels and over 300 presentations.


AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). 

technical paper

We will introduce interactive, integrative, quality assurance and live observability facilities to help on collaborative programming of multi-agent systems.


A Framework for Collaborative and Interactive Agent-oriented Developer Operations

"Reinforcement learning (RL) methods learn optimal decisions in the presence of a stationary environment. However, the stationary assumption on the environment is very restrictive. In many real world problems like traffic signal control, robotic applications, etc., one often encounters situations with non-stationary environments and in these scenarios, RL methods yield sub-optimal decisions. In this presentation, I talk about the problem of developing RL methods that obtain optimal decisions in a non-stationary environment. The goal of this problem is to maximize the long-term discounted reward accrued when the underlying model of the environment changes over time. To achieve this, we first adapt a change point algorithm to detect change in the statistics of the environment and then develop an RL algorithm that maximizes the long-run reward accrued. I illustrate that our change point method detects change in the model of the environment effectively and thus facilitates the RL algorithm in maximizing the long-run reward. In our work, we further validate the effectiveness of the proposed solution on non-stationary random Markov decision processes, a sensor energy management problem and a traffic signal control problem.
"


Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Autonomous Adaptive Agents

"Our PhD research is concerned with the task of achieving cooperation in a system of competitive agents which cannot be explicitly controlled. To this end, it examines the problem from the system’s point of view, without restricting the agents’ behavior or requiring specific knowledge about their decision-making.
The governance of the MAS will be achieved via a dynamically adaptive governing policy based on a set of rules, which leaves full autonomy to the individual agents, but reacts to their actions via suitable changes of the environment. The mechanism is designed to lead to system-level cooperation while only assuming that the agents follow their own self-interested motives."


Achieving Emergent Governance in Competitive Multi-Agent Systems

This is an overview of my doctoral work studying inequality in social networks. The focus of this work is to design fairer algorithms that take into account the networks structure as well as community affiliations and individual incentives. I'll show my work in this field in three applications: recommendation algorithms, information diffusion, and partition algorithms. 


Algorithmic Fairness for Networked Algorithms

"Recent years have seen a push towards deploying fully autonomous robots in large, complex domains such as autonomous driving, space exploration, and service robots. However, legal, ethical, or technical constraints have limited the extent of these systems' employable autonomy. In order to successfully achieve their intended goals, these systems must utilize assistance from humans to compensate for their limitations. For such systems to be successful over the course of a long-term deployment, they must both be cognizant of their own competence and have the ability to improve this competence over time in a safe way. 
Motivated by practical concerns faced in industry, 
this thesis provides a formal model for such a human-agent system to reason about its own competence and aims in future work to provide effective ways of safely improving the competence of the system over the course of its deployment."


Competence-Aware Systems for Long-Term Autonomy

Many contributions to the field of computational social choice employ a variety of techniques developed in computer science to study preference aggregation mechanisms. However, there has been little research on how the availability of such techniques can help us reason about collective decision making. In this positional paper I discuss how computer-aided methods can be used to —automatically— reason about the outcomes of a collective decision making process. I also lay down several research directions one could explore to further develop the field in this direction.


Computer-aided Reasoning about Collective Decision Making

The process of determining the appropriate set of norms, referred to as synthesis, for a multiagent system has predominantly been carried out offline by the designers of the system. Of recent, there have been a few approaches that synthesise norms online utilising a centralised mechanism. The research presented here aims to propose a mechanism for decentralised runtime (online) norm synthesis through the use of agents dedicated to synthesising norms based on participating agents' requests.


Decentralised Runtime Norm Synthesis

The problem of multi-agent resource allocation is important and well-studied within AI and economics. The general assumption is that the amount of each resource is known beforehand. However, many real-world problems, the exact amount of each resource may not be known at the time of decision making, e,g. in the case of weather dependent renewable energy production. This work considers a homogeneous divisible resource where the available amount is given by a probability distribution. In general, a model for efficient usage under fairness and the possibilities of manipulation is studied. Firstly, the notion of ex-ante envy-freeness, where, in expectation, agents weakly prefer their allocation over every other agent's allocation is introduced. For this case the tension between fairness and social welfare is considered. The price of envy-freeness is at least $\Omega(n)$, where $n$ is the number of agents and the problem of optimising ex-ante social welfare subject to ex-ante envy-freeness is strongly NP-hard. Additionally, the possibility for an integer program to calculate the optimal ex-ante envy-free allocation for linear satiable valuation functions is presented.


Efficiency and Fairness of Resource Utilisation under Uncertainty

Cost Allocation in Ridesharing

We formalize an allocation model that is more gen- eral than the well-studied Shapley-Scarf housing market. In our model, the agents do not just care which house or resource they get but also care about who gets their own resource. This assump- tion is especially important when considering tem- porary exchanges in which each resource is eventu- ally returned to the owner. We show that several positive axiomatic and computational results that hold for housing markets do not extend to the more general setting. We then identify natural restric- tions on the preferences of agents for which several positive results do hold. One of our central results is a general class of algorithms that return any allo- cation that is individually rational and Pareto opti- mal with respect to the responsive set extension.


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A Framework for Collaborative and Interactive Agent-oriented Developer Operations

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User-Models to drive an Adaptive Virtual Advisor

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