Mark Klein

Supporting conflict resolution in cooperative design systems

The author presents an implemented computational model, based on studies of human group problem solving, for supporting conflict resolution in cooperative design. This model is based on the insights that general conflict resolution expertise exists separately from domain-level design expertise, and that this expertise can be instantiated in the context of particular conflicts into specific advice for resolving these conflicts. Conflict resolution expertise consists of a taxonomy of design conflict classes and associated general advice suitable for resolving conflicts in these classes. The abstract nature of conflict resolution expertise makes it applicable to a wide variety of design domains. The author describes this conflict resolution model and provides examples of its operation from an implemented cooperative design system for local area network design that uses machine-based design agents. How this model is being extended to support and learn from collaboration of human design agents is discussed. >

Toward high-precision service retrieval

Online repositories are increasingly called on to provide access to services that describe or provide useful behaviors. Existing techniques for finding services offer low retrieval precision, returning many irrelevant matches. We introduce a novel service retrieval approach that captures service semantics using process models, and applies a pattern-matching algorithm to find the services with the behavior the user wants. Evaluations suggest that process-based queries offer substantially greater retrieval precision than existing approaches and scale well with the number of services being accessed.

A Knowledge-based Approach to Handling Exceptions inWorkflow Systems

This paper describes a novel knowledge-based approachfor helping workflow process designers andparticipants better manage the exceptions (deviationsfrom an ideal collaborative work process caused byerrors, failures, resource or requirements changesetc.) that can occur during the enactment of aworkflow. This approach is based on exploiting ageneric and reusable body of knowledge concerning whatkinds of exceptions can occur in collaborative workprocesses, and how these exceptions can handled(detected, diagnosed and resolved). This work buildsupon previous efforts from the MIT Process Handbookproject and from research on conflict management incollaborative design.

Negotiating Complex Contracts

Work to date on computational models of negotiation has focused almost exclusively on defining contracts consisting of one or a few independent issues and tractable contract spaces. Many real-world contracts, by contrast, are much more complex, consisting of multiple inter-dependent issues and intractably large contract spaces. This paper describes a simulated annealing based approach appropriate for negotiating such complex contracts that achieves near-optimal social welfares for negotiations with binary issue dependencies.

Conflict resolution in cooperative design

Design is increasingly becoming a cooperative endeavor carried out by multiple agents with diverse kinds of expertise. The development of tools and underlying theories for supporting cooperative design has lagged, however, behind the growing needs implied by this evolution. The goal of this thesis work is to provide a computational model for supporting a critical component of cooperative design; the run-time resolution of conflicts. Though the long-term goal is to support unrestricted conflict resolution among human agents, this thesis focuses on an important subset of this problem: the resolution of domain-level conflicts in routine design, using machine-based agents. This thesis proposes a model of conflict resolution in cooperative design that corresponds well to how human design experts actually perform cooperative design, based on analysis of their group problem solving activity. This model supports natural participation for human experts, both at development-time as domain experts asked to create machine-based agents, as well as at run-time as problem solving agents themselves. The conflict resolution model is elaborated into a detailed implemented computational theory that offers many insights into how the conflict resolution expert and design agents should operate. The model incorporates a considerable body of conflict resolution expertise applicable to a wide variety of domains, as well as techniques for acquiring further expertise and evaluating its completeness.

Auctions and bidding: A guide for computer scientists

There is a veritable menagerie of auctions—single-dimensional, multi-dimensional, single-sided, double-sided, first-price, second-price, English, Dutch, Japanese, sealed-bid—and these have been extensively discussed and analyzed in the economics literature. The main purpose of this article is to survey this literature from a computer science perspective, primarily from the viewpoint of computer scientists who are interested in learning about auction theory, and to provide pointers into the economics literature for those who want a deeper technical understanding. In addition, since auctions are an increasingly important topic in computer science, we also look at work on auctions from the computer science literature. Overall, our aim is to identifying what both these bodies of work these tell us about creating electronic auctions.

The Dynamics of Collaborative Design: Insights from Complex Systems and Negotiation Research

Almost all complex artifacts nowadays, including physical artifacts such as airplanes, as well as informational artifacts such as software, organizations, business processes, plans, and schedules, are defined via the interaction of many, sometimes thousands of participants, working on different elements of the design. This collaborative design process is typically expensive and time-consuming because strong interdependencies between design decisions make it difficult to converge on a single design that satisfies these dependencies and is acceptable to all participants. Recent research from the complex systems and negotiation literatures has much to offer to the understanding of the dynamics of this process. This paper reviews some of these insights and offers suggestions for improving collaborative design.

Using Domain-Independent Exception Handling Services to Enable Robust Open Multi-Agent Systems: The Case of Agent Death

This paper addresses a simple but critical question: how can we create robust multi-agent systems out of the often unreliable agents and infrastructures we can expect to find in open systems contexts? We propose an approach to this problem based on distinct exception handling (EH) services that enact coordination protocol-specific but domain-independent strategies to monitor agent systems for problems (‘exceptions’) and intervene when necessary to avoid or resolve them. The value of this approach is demonstrated for the ‘agent death’ exception in the Contract Net protocol; we show through simulation that the EH service approach provides substantially improved performance compared to existing approaches in a way that is appropriate for open multi-agent systems.

Towards High-Precision Service Retrieval

The ability to rapidly locate useful on-line services (e.g. software applications, software components, process models, or service organizations), as opposed to simply useful documents, is becoming increasingly critical in many domains. Current service retrieval technology is, however, notoriously prone to low precision. This paper describes a novel service retrieval approached based on the sophisticated use of process ontologies. Our preliminary evaluations suggest that this approach offers qualitatively higher retrieval precision than existing (keyword and table-based) approaches without sacrificing recall and computational tractability/scalability.

Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Address Global Climate Change

Global climate change, caused by human-generated greenhouse-gas emissions, is perhaps the most pressing and important problem currently facing humanity. It is also unique by virtue of being a truly systemic problem of vast complexity: it affects every one of us, and is directly affected by every one of our actions. Like nothing else, the climate crisis calls upon us to engage in effective collective decision making on a global scale. At the same time, the spectacular emergence of the Internet and associated information technology has created unprecedented opportunities for new kinds of interactions, via email, instant messaging, news groups, chat rooms, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and the like. As the well-known examples of Wikipedia and Linux illustrate, it is now possible to combine the work of thousands of knowledgeable and interested individuals in ways that were completely impossible a few years ago. But these technologies have not yet been used to deal effectively with our global problems. Our societal conversations about controversial topics like global climate change are often strident and unproductive. And we have no clear way to converge on well-supported decisions concerning what actions, both grand- and ground-level, humanity should take to solve these problems. In this paper we argue that it is now possible to harness computer technology to facilitate “collective intelligence”—the synergistic and cumulative channeling of