Raz Lin

Can automated agents proficiently negotiate with humans

Exciting research in the design of automated negotiators is making great progress.

GENIUS: AN INTEGRATED ENVIRONMENT FOR SUPPORTING THE DESIGN OF GENERIC AUTOMATED NEGOTIATORS

The design of automated negotiators has been the focus of abundant research in recent years. However, due to difficulties involved in creating generalized agents that can negotiate in several domains and against human counterparts, many automated negotiators are domain specific and their behavior cannot be generalized for other domains. Some of these difficulties arise from the differences inherent within the domains, the need to understand and learn negotiators’ diverse preferences concerning issues of the domain, and the different strategies negotiators can undertake. In this paper we present a system that enables alleviation of the difficulties in the design process of general automated negotiators termed Genius, a General Environment for Negotiation with Intelligent multi‐purpose Usage Simulation. With the constant introduction of new domains, e‐commerce and other applications, which require automated negotiations, generic automated negotiators encompass many benefits and advantages over agents that are designed for a specific domain. Based on experiments conducted with automated agents designed by human subjects using Genius we provide both quantitative and qualitative results to illustrate its efficacy. Finally, we also analyze a recent automated bilateral negotiators competition that was based on Genius. Our results show the advantages and underlying benefits of using Genius and how it can facilitate the design of general automated negotiators.

Supporting the Design of General Automated Negotiators

The design of automated negotiators has been the focus of abundant research in recent years. However, due to difficulties involved in creating generalized agents that can negotiate in several domains and against human counterparts, many automated negotiators are domain specific and their behavior cannot be generalized for other domains. Some of these difficulties arise from the differences inherent within the domains, the need to understand and learn negotiators’ diverse preferences concerning issues of the domain and the different strategies negotiators can undertake. In this paper we present a system that enables alleviation of the difficulties in the design process of general automated negotiators termed Genius, a General Environment for Negotiation with Intelligent multi-purpose Usage Simulation. With the constant introduction of new domains, e-commerce and other applications, which require automated negotiations, generic automated negotiators encompass many benefits and advantages over agents that are designed for a specific domain. Based on experiments conducted with automated agents designed by human subjects using Genius we provide both quantitative and qualitative results to illustrate its efficacy. Our results show the advantages and underlying benefits of using Genius for designing general automated negotiators.

Training with automated agents improves people's behavior in negotiation and coordination tasks

There is inconclusive evidence whether practicing tasks with computer agents improves peoples performance on these tasks. This paper studies this question empirically using extensive experiments involving bilateral negotiation and three-player coordination tasks played by hundreds of human subjects. We used different training methods for subjects, including practice interactions with other human participants, interacting with agents from the literature, and asking participants to design an automated agent to serve as their proxy in the task. Following training, we compared the performance of subjects when playing state-of-the-art agents from the literature. The results revealed that in the negotiation settings, in most cases, training with computer agents increased peoples performance as compared to interacting with people. In the three player coordination game, training with computer agents increased peoples performance when matched with the state-of-the-art agent. These results demonstrate the efficacy of using computer agents as tools for improving peoples skills when interacting in strategic settings, saving considerable effort and providing better performance than when interacting with human counterparts.

Detecting anomalies in unmanned vehicles using the Mahalanobis distance

The use of unmanned autonomous vehicles is becoming more and more significant in recent years. The fact that the vehicles are unmanned (whether autonomous or not), can lead to greater difficulties in identifying failure and anomalous states, since the operator cannot rely on its own body perceptions to identify failures. Moreover, as the autonomy of unmanned vehicles increases, it becomes more difficult for operators to monitor them closely, and this further exacerbates the difficulty of identifying anomalous states, in a timely manner. Model-based diagnosis and fault-detection systems have been proposed to recognize failures. However, these rely on the capabilities of the underlying model, which necessarily abstracts away from the physical reality of the robot. In this paper we propose a novel, model-free, approach for detecting anomalies in unmanned autonomous vehicles, based on their sensor readings (internal and external). Experiments conducted on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) demonstrate the efficacy of the approach by detecting the vehicles deviations from nominal behavior.

Online data-driven anomaly detection in autonomous robots

The use of autonomous robots is appealing for tasks, which are dangerous to humans. Autonomous robots might fail to perform their tasks since they are susceptible to varied sorts of faults such as point and contextual faults. Not all faults can be known in advance, and hence, anomaly detection is required. In this paper, we present an online data-driven anomaly detection approach (ODDAD) for autonomous robots. ODDAD is suitable for the dynamic nature of autonomous robots since it declares a fault based only on data collected online. In addition, it is unsupervised, model free and domain independent. ODDAD proceeds in three steps: data filtering, attributes grouping based on dependency between attributes and outliers detection for each group. Above a calculated threshold, an anomaly is declared. We empirically evaluate ODDAD in different domains: commercial unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a vacuum-cleaning robot, a high-fidelity flight simulator and an electrical power system of a spacecraft. We show the significance and impact of each component of ODDAD . By comparing ODDAD to other state-of-the-art competing anomaly detection algorithms, we show its advantages.

Bridging the Gap: Face-to-Face Negotiations with an Automated Mediator

The automated, animated mediator AniMed* aims to increase the social welfare of people in bilateral negotiations, utilizing a generic strategy mechanism and the ability to propose partial solutions.

On the benefits of cheating by self-interested agents in vehicular networks

As more and more cars are equipped with GPS and Wi Fi transmitters, it becomes easier to design systems that will allow cars to interact autonomously with each other, e.g., regarding traffic on the roads. Indeed, car manufacturers are already equipping their cars with such devices. Though, currently these systems are a proprietary, we envision a natural evolution where agent applications will be developed for vehicular systems, e.g., to improve car routing in dense urban areas. Nonetheless, this new technology and agent applications may lead to the emergence of self-interested car owners, who will care more about their own welfare than the social welfare of their peers. These car owners will try to manipulate their agents such that they transmit false data to their peers. Using a simulation environment, which models a real transportation network in a large city, we demonstrate the benefits achieved by self-interested agents if no counter-measures are implemented.

The Second Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC2011)

In May 2011, we organized the Second International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC2011) in conjunction with AAMAS 2011. ANAC is an international competition that challenges researchers to develop a successful automated negotiator for scenarios where there is incomplete information about the opponent. One of the goals of this competition is to help steer the research in the area of bilateral multi-issue negotiations, and to encourage the design of generic negotiating agents that are able to operate in a variety of scenarios. Eighteen teams from seven different institutes competed in ANAC2011. This chapter describes the participating agents and the setup of the tournament, including the different negotiation scenarios that were used in the competition. We report on the results of the qualifying and final round of the tournament.

Temporal Reasoning for a Collaborative Planning Agent in a Dynamic Environment

We present a temporal reasoning mechanism for an individual agent situated in a dynamic environment such as the web and collaborating with other agents while interleaving planning and acting. Building a collaborative agent that can flexibly achieve its goals in changing environments requires a blending of real-time computing and AI technologies. Therefore, our mechanism consists of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) planning subsystem and a Real-Time (RT) scheduling subsystem. The AI planning subsystem is based on a model for collaborative planning. The AI planning subsystem generates a partial order plan dynamically. During the planning it sends the RT scheduling subsystem basic actions and time constraints. The RT scheduling subsystem receives the dynamic basic actions set with associated temporal constraints and inserts these actions into the agents schedule of activities in such a way that the resulting schedule is feasible and satisfies the temporal constraints. Our mechanism allows the agent to construct its individual schedule independently. The mechanism handles various types of temporal constraints arising from individual activities and its collaborators. In contrast to other works on scheduling in planning systems which are either not appropriate for uncertain and dynamic environments or cannot be expanded for use in multi-agent systems, our mechanism enables the individual agent to determine the time of its activities in uncertain situations and to easily integrate its activities with the activities of other agents. We have proved that under certain conditions temporal reasoning mechanism of the AI planning subsystem is sound and complete. We show the results of several experiments on the system. The results demonstrate that interleave planning and acting in our environment is crucial.