Carole Adam

A logical formalization of the OCC theory of emotions

In this paper, we provide a logical formalization of the emotion triggering process and of its relationship with mental attitudes, as described in Ortony, Clore, and Collins’s theory. We argue that modal logics are particularly adapted to represent agents’ mental attitudes and to reason about them, and use a specific modal logic that we call Logic of Emotions in order to provide logical definitions of all but two of their 22 emotions. While these definitions may be subject to debate, we show that they allow to reason about emotions and to draw interesting conclusions from the theory.

Simulation of the emotion dynamics in a group of agents in an evacuation situation

Nowadays, more and more emergency evacuation simulations are used to evaluate the safety level of a building during an emergency evacuation after an accident. The heart of this kind of simulations is the simulation of human behavior because simulation results depend for a big part on how this behavior is simulated. However, human behaviors in a real emergency situation are determined by a lot of cognitive mechanisms. In order to make the simulation more realistic, plenty of factors (e.g. innate characteristics, perception of the environment, internal rules, personality and even emotions) that affect human behaviors must be taken into account. This paper focuses on the influence of emotions, and more precisely on the influence of their dynamics and propagation from an agent to another. The main contribution of this work is the development of a model of emotions taking into account their dynamics and their propagation and its integration in an evacuation simulation. The first results of the simulation show the benefits of considering emotion propagation.

Comparing Agent Architectures in Social Simulation: BDI Agents versus Finite-state Machines

Each summer in Australia, bushfires burn many hectares of forest, causing deaths, injuries, and destroying property. Agent-based simulation is a powerful tool for decision-makers to explore different strategies for managing such crisis, testing them on a simulated population; but valid results require realistic underlying models. It is therefore essential to be able to compare models using different architectures to represent the human behaviour, on objective and subjective criteria. In this paper we describe two simulations of the Australian population’s behaviour in bushfires: one with a finite-state machine architecture; one with a BDI architecture. We then compare these two models with respect to a number of criteria.

A Cognitive and Affective Architecture for Social Human-Robot Interaction

Robots show up frequently in new applications in our daily lives where they interact more and more closely with the human user. Despite a long history of research, existing cognitive architectures are still too generic and hence not tailored enough to meet the specific needs demanded by social HRI. In particular, interaction-oriented architectures require handling emotions, language, social norms, etc, which is quite a handful. In this paper, we present an overview of a Cognitive and Affective Interaction-Oriented Architecture for social human-robot interactions abbreviated CAIO. This architecture is parallel to the BDI (Belief, Desire, Intention) architecture that comes from philosophy of actions by Bratman. CAIO integrates complex emotions and planning techniques. It aims to contribute to cognitive architectures for HRI by enabling the robot to reason on mental states (including emotions) of the interlocutors, and to act physically, emotionally and verbally.

Social Human-Robot Interaction: A New Cognitive and Affective Interaction-Oriented Architecture

In this paper, we present CAIO, a Cognitive and Affective Interaction-Oriented architecture for social human-robot interactions (HRI), allowing robots to reason on mental states (including emotions), and to act physically, emotionally and verbally. We also present a short scenario and implementation on a Nao robot.

SPRITE – Participatory Simulation for Raising Awareness About Coastal Flood Risk on the Oleron Island

Coastal flood is a major risk for the French Atlantic coast and its island territories, and its management is a key issue for local authorities. Good management of this risk requires understanding the need for a trade-off between occupant safety, attractiveness of the island, environmental development, costs minimisation and population satisfaction. But such a trade-off can be difficult to find and to understand, for both decision makers and the population. SPRITE is a serious game aiming to answer this problem by placing the player in the role of a decision maker and letting them explore various (more or less balanced) policies. The knowledge gained from playing SPRITE can benefit both decision makers, enabling them to make more informed decisions, and residents, helping them to understand the issues involved in territory management.

Crisis Mobility of Pedestrians: From Survey to Modelling, Lessons from Lebanon and Argentina

This study aims at developing a generic model of crisis mobility based on two case studies in Lebanon and Argentina. The research is characterised by a strong interdisciplinary cooperation between geographers, psychologists and computer scientists. The objective of the model is to show how appropriate human behaviours can reduce fatalities. The paper presents the methodology used in both case studies, some results of the Lebanese model as well as lessons from Lebanon to be applied to Argentinian study (on-going work). The methodology consists in field studies, model design, development, validation/calibration and simulation. The simulation aims at reproducing survey results as well as investigating new scenarios.

A Multi-agent Mediation Platform for Automated Exchanges between Businesses

To automate electronic exchanges between business, the classical approach is to define beforehand an interacting protocol that must then be rigorously followed. This imposes a costly design time and a constrained runtime. We thus adopt a different approach, representing companies with autonomous agents whose interaction is mediated by an additional agent able to anticipate and resolve interoperability problems at runtime. We build these agents using the agent platform JADE and more precisely we designed an institutional plugin for JADE called JIA, allowing agents to reason about institutional concepts such as obligations, norms and powers. This paper describes the functioning of JIA and its use to create the mediation platform.

A MAS Approach for Group Recommendation Based on Negotiation Techniques

Providing recommendation to groups of users has become a promising research area, since many items tend to be consumed by groups of people. Various techniques have been developed aiming at making recommendations to the group as a whole, but satisfying all group members in an even way still remains as a challenge. We propose a multi-agent approach based on negotiation techniques for group recommendation. In this approach we use the multilateral monotonic concession protocol to combine individual recommendations into a group recommendation. We applied our proposal in the movies domain. The results obtained indicate that using this negotiation protocol, users in the groups were more evenly satisfied than with traditional ranking aggregation approaches.

Modelling the Tactical Behaviour of the Australian Population in a Bushfire

This paper is concerned with the development of an agent-based model of population behaviour during a bushfire, to form the basis of a simulator that will be used as a decision-support tool for emergency managers. To ensure the validity of the simulation results, it is essential that the model, and the underlying agent architecture, are as realistic as possible. After providing some context about recent bushfires in Victoria, Australia, we justify the need for a BDI (belief, desire, intention) agent architecture. Although some tools exist to support the integration of such agents in simulations, they are infrequently used. We therefore show how an existing methodology for modelling military tactics can be adapted to this context. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: providing an agent-based model of population behaviour during bushfires; and presenting a methodology that can be used by other model designers in the field of crisis management.