Ignasi Gómez-Sebastià

Making games ALIVE: an organisational approach

The AI techniques used in commercial games are usually predictable, inflexible and unadaptive, causing a lack of realism for the player. In this paper, we introduce a proposal of integrating the ALIVE framework, based on Organisational theory, into commercial games. The objective of our proposal is to provide game AI developers with a methodology and tools to model gaming scenarios using social structures.

Dynamic Orchestration of Distributed Services on Interactive Community Displays: The ALIVE Approach

Interconnected service providers constitute a highly dynamic, complex, distributed environment. Multi-agent system design-methodologies have been trying to address this kind of environments for a long time. The European project ALIVE presents a framework of three interconnected levels that tackles this issue relying on organisation and coordination techniques, as well as on developments in the Web-services world. This paper presents initial results focused on a high-tech, real use case: interactive community displays with touristic information and services, dynamically personalized according to user preferences and local laws.

Situated Agents and Humans in Social Interaction for Elderly Healthcare: From Coaalas to AVICENA

Assistive Technologies (AT) are an application area where several Artificial Intelligence techniques and tools have been successfully applied to support elderly or impeded people on their daily activities. However, approaches to AT tend to center in the user-tool interaction, neglecting the user’s connection with its social environment (such as caretakers, relatives and health professionals) and the possibility to monitor undesired behaviour providing both adaptation to a dynamic environment and early response to potentially dangerous situations. In previous work we have presented Coaalas, an intelligent social and norm-aware device for elderly people that is able to autonomously organize, reorganize and interact with the different actors involved in elderly-care, either human actors or other devices. In this paper we put our work into context, by first examining what are the desirable properties of such a system, analysing the state-of-the-art on the relevant topics, and verifying the validity of our proposal in a larger context that we call AVICENA. AVICENA’s aim is develop a semi-autonomous (collaborative) tool to promote monitored, intensive, extended and personalized therapeutic regime adherence at home based on adaptation techniques.

CF2-extensions as Answer-set Models

Extension-based argumentation semantics have shown to be a suitable approach for performing practical reasoning. Since extension-based argumentation semantics were formalized in terms of relationships between atomic arguments, it has been shown that extension-based argumentation semantics based on admissible sets such as stable semantics can be characterized in terms of answer sets. In this paper, we present an approach for characterizing SCC-recursive semantics in terms of answer set models. In particular, we will show a characterization of CF2 in terms of answer set models. This result suggests that not only extension-based argumentation semantics based on admissible sets can be characterized in terms of answer sets; but also extension-based argumentation semantics based on Strongly Connected Components can be characterized in terms of answer sets.

Reasoning about river basins: WaWO+ revisited

This paper characterizes part of an interdisciplinary research effort on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and tools applied to Environmental Decision-Support Systems (EDSS). WaWO+ the ontology we present here, provides a set of concepts that are queried, advertised and used to support reasoning about and the management of urban water resources in complex scenarios as a River Basin. The goal of this research is to increase efficiency in Data and Knowledge interoperability and data integration among heterogeneous environmental data sources (e.g., software agents) using an explicit, machine understandable ontology to facilitate urban water resources management within a River Basin.

Social network data analysis for event detection

Cities concentrate enough Social Network (SN) activity to empower rich models. We present an approach to event discovery based on the information provided by three SN, minimizing the data properties used to maximize the total amount of usable data. We build a model of the normal city behavior which we use to detect abnormal situations (events). After collecting half a year of data we show examples of the events detected and introduce some applications.

Urban context detection and context-aware recommendation via networks of humans as sensors

The wide adoption of smart mobile devices makes the concept of human as a sensor possible, opening the door to new ways of solving recurrent problems that occur in everyday life by taking advantage of the information these devices can produce. In the case of this paper, we present part of the work done in the EU project SUPERHUB and introduce how geolocated positioning coming from such devices can be used to infer the current context of the city, e.g., disruptive events, and how this information can be used to provide services to the end-users.

Socially-Aware emergent narrative

In agent research, emergent narrative aims for practical solutions to the narrative paradox problem in both drama and interactive scenarios. At the same time, organisational frameworks can be used in games to provide flexibility, adaptiveness, or social-awareness. In this paper, we propose an extension of our cOncienS framework to support emergent narrative in games with two objectives: 1) provide social-awareness in emergent narrative by means of an organisational model, and 2) create convincing dynamic and flexible storytelling in games.

ALIVE Meets SHARE-it: An Agent-Oriented Solution to Model Organisational and Normative Requirements in Assistive Technologies

Assistive technologies represent a recent application area of a wide variety of Artificial Intelligence methods and tools to support people in their activities of daily living. But most approaches do only center in the direct interaction between the user and the assistive tool, without taking into consideration the important role that other actors (caregivers, relatives) may have in the user activities, nor they explicitly reflect the norms and regulations that apply in such scenarios. In this paper we present an approach to the development of assistive technologies which uses organisational and normative elements to ease the design of both the social network arround the user and their expected behavioural patterns.

A Norm-Aware Multi-agent System for Social Simulations in a River Basin

Wastewater management is a complex task involving a wide range of technical environmental and social factors. Furthermore, it typically requires the coordination of a heterogeneous society of actors with different goals. Regulations and protocols can be effectively used to tackle this complexity. In this chapter we present a norm-aware multi-agent system for social simulations in a river basin. The norms we present are inspired in European policies for wastewater management and they can evolve through time.