Jarred McGinnis

Towards an argument interchange format

The theory of argumentation is a rich, interdisciplinary area of research straddling the fields of artificial intelligence, philosophy, communication studies, linguistics and psychology. In the last few years, significant progress has been made in understanding the theoretical properties of different argumentation logics. However, one major barrier to the development and practical deployment of argumentation systems is the lack of a shared, agreed notation or ‘interchange format’ for argumentation and arguments. In this paper, we describe a draft specification for an argument interchange format (AIF) intended for representation and exchange of data between various argumentation tools and agent-based applications. It represents a consensus ‘abstract model’ established by researchers across fields of argumentation, artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. In its current form, this specification is intended as a starting point for further discussion and elaboration by the community, rather than an attempt at a definitive, all-encompassing model. However, to demonstrate proof of concept, a use case scenario is briefly described. Moreover, three concrete realizations or ‘reifications’ of the abstract model are illustrated.

Amongst First-Class Protocols

The ubiquity of our increasingly distributed and complex computing environments have necessitated the development of programming approaches and paradigms that can automatically manage the numerous tasks and processes involved. Hence, research into agency and multi-agent systems are of more and more interest as an automation solution. Coordination becomes a central issue in these environments. The most promising approach is the use of interaction protocols. Interaction protocols specify the interaction or social norms for the participating agents. However the orthodoxy see protocols as rigid specifications that are defined a priori. A recent development in this field of research is the specification of protocols that are treated as first-class computational entities. This paper explores the most prominent approaches and compares them.

Models of Interaction as a Grounding for Peer to Peer Knowledge Sharing

Most current attempts to achieve reliable knowledge sharing on a large scale have relied on pre-engineering of content and supply services. This, like traditional knowledge engineering, does not by itself scale to large, open, peer to peer systems because the cost of being precise about the absolute semantics of services and their knowledge rises rapidly as more services participate. We describe how to break out of this deadlock by focusing on semantics related to interaction and using this to avoid dependency on a priori semantic agreement; instead making semantic commitments incrementally at run time. Our method is based on interaction models that are mobile in the sense that they may be transferred to other components, this being a mechanism for service composition and for coalition formation. By shifting the emphasis to interaction (the details of which may be hidden from users) we can obtain knowledge sharing of sufficient quality for sustainable communities of practice without the barrier of complex meta-data provision prior to community formation.

The ArguGRID Platform: An Overview

The ArguGRID project aims at supporting service selection and composition in distributed environments, including the Grid and Service-oriented architectures, by means of argumentative agents, an agent environment, a service-composition environment, Peer-to-Peer technology and Grid middleware. Agents are argumentative in that they use argumentation-based decision-making and argumentation-supported negotiation of services and contracts. The integration of all technologies gives rise to the overall ArguGRID platform. In this paper we outline the main components and the overall functionalities of the ARGUGRID platform.

Dynamic and Distributed Interaction Protocols

This paper describes a protocol language which can provide agents with a flexible mechanism for coherent dialogues. The protocol language does not rely on centralised control or bias toward a particular model of agent communication. Agents can adapt the protocol and distribute it to dialogical partners during interactions.

A Formal Framework of Virtual Organisations as Agent Societies

We propose a formal framework that supports a model of agent-based Virtual Organisations (VOs) for service grids and provides an associated operational model for the creation of VOs. The framework is intended to be used for describing different service grid applications based on multiple agents and, as a result, it abstracts away from any realisation choices of the service grid application, the agents involved to support the applications and their interactions. Within the proposed framework VOs are seen as emerging from societies of agents, where agents are abstractly characterised by goals and roles they can play within VOs. In turn, VOs are abstractly characterised by the agents participating in them with specific roles, as well as the workflow of services and corresponding contracts suitable for achieving the goals of the participating agents. We illustrate the proposed framework with an earth observation scenario.

Realizing agent dialogues with distributed protocols

This paper describes a protocol language which can provide agents with a flexible mechanism for coherent dialogues. The protocol language does not rely on centralised control or bias toward a particular model of agent communication. Agents can adapt the protocol and distribute it to dialogical partners during interactions.

First-Class Protocols for Agent-Based Coordination of Scientific Instruments

The coordination of distributed processing is of great interest to a number of research communities. However these research communities, such as those involved in e-science GRIDs and multi-agent systems, view this problem from disparate viewpoints. This paper aims to contribute to the necessary reconciliation of these perspectives. By demonstrating the coordination of processes whether reactive (such as web services) or proactive (such as autonomous agents) can be done with a single representation using a protocol language, RASA The multi-agent paradigm introduces, into any model of distributed systems, flexibility and autonomy that can be daunting and intimidating to scientists accustomed to more orthodox approaches. It is for this reason that it is important that the model for coordination of this system is reliable, verifiable, inspectable, referable, composable and executable. The language RASA provides this functionality, which we extend its use for not only agent interaction protocols but also to express workflows. The language for expression then becomes the domain of discourse as well as potentially the language for the workflows execution.

A formal model of agent-oriented virtual organisations and their formation

We present a formal model for agent-oriented Virtual Organisations VOs for service grids and we study an associated operational model for the creation of VOs. The model is intended to be used for describing different service grid applications based on multiple agents and, as a result, it abstracts away from any realisation choices of service grid applications, the agents involved to support the applications and their interactions. Within the proposed framework VOs are created within societies of agents, where agents are abstractly characterised by goals and roles they can play within VOs. In turn, VOs are abstractly characterised by the agents participating in them with specific roles, as well as the workflow of services and corresponding contracts suitable for achieving the goals of the participating agents. We illustrate the proposed framework with an earth observation scenario, we discuss implementation issues, and we compare our approach with existing work.

Argumentative Agents for Service-Oriented Computing

In this paper, we claim that the online selling can be improved if the experience of the customer is closer to the one in a retailing store. For this purpose, we aim at providing a virtual selling agent that is proactive and adaptive. Our proactive dialogical agent initiates the dialogue, uses marketing strategies and drives the inquiring process for collecting information in order to make relevant proposals. Moreover, our virtual seller is adaptive since she is able to adjust her behaviour according to the buyer profile.