Rino Falcone

Social trust: a cognitive approach

As it was been written in the call of the original workshop “In recent research on electronic commerce” trust has been recognized as one of the key factors for successful electronic commerce adoption. In electronic commerce problems of trust are magnified, because agents reach out far beyond their familiar trade environments. Also it is far from obvious whether existing paper-based techniques for fraud detection and prevention are adequate to establish trust in an electronic network environment where you usually never meet your trade partner face to face, and where messages can be read or copied a million times without leaving any trace. With the growing impact of electronic commerce distance trust building becomes more and more important, and better models of trust and deception are needed. One trend is that in electronic communication channels extra agents, the so called Trusted Third Parties, are introduced in an agent community that take care of trust building among the other agents in the network. But in fact different kind of trust are needed and should be modelled and supported: trust in the environment and in the infrastructure (the socio-technical system); trust in your agent and in mediating agents; trust in the potential partners; trust in the warrantors and authorities (if any).

Towards a theory of delegation for agent-based systems

Abstract In this paper a theory of delegation is presented. There are at least three reasons for developing such a theory. First, one of the most relevant notions of “agent” is based on the notion of “task” and of “on behalf of”. In order to found this notion a theory of delegation among agents is needed. Second, the notion of autonomy should be based on different kinds and levels of delegation. Third, the entire theory of cooperation and collaboration requires the definition of the two complementary attitudes of goal delegation and adoption linking collaborating agents. After motivating the necessity for a principled theory of delegation (and adoption) the paper presents a plan-based approach to this theory. We analyze several dimensions of the delegation/adoption (on the basis of the interaction between the agents, of the specification of the task, of the possibility to subdelegate, of the delegation of the control, of the help levels). The agents autonomy and levels of agency are then deduced. We describe the modelling of the client from the contractors point of view and vice versa, with their differences, and the notion of trust that directly derives from this modelling. Finally, a series of possible conflicts between client and contractor are considered: in particular collaborative conflicts, which stem from the contractors intention to help the client beyond its request or delegation and to exploit its own knowledge and intelligence (reasoning, problem solving, planning, and decision skills) for the client itself.

Trust, Reputation, and Security: Theories and Practice

Discussions at the 5th Workshop on Deception, Fraud and Trust in Agent Societies held at the 1st International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2002) centered around many important research issues. This paper attempts to challenge researchers in the community toward future work concerning three issues inspired by the workshop’s roundtable discussion: (1) distinguishing elements of an agent’s behavior that influence its trustworthiness, (2) building reputation-based trust models without relying on interaction, and (3) benchmarking trust modeling algorithms. Arguments justifying the validity of each problem are presented, and benefits from their solutions are enumerated.

Trust in Cyber-societies

Introduction: Bringing Together Humans and Artificial Agents in Cyber-societies:A New Field of Trust Research.- Trust Rules for Trust Dilemmas: How Decision Makers Think and Act in the Shadow of Doubt.- Trust and Distrust Definitions: One Bite at a Time.- The Socio-cognitive Dynamics of Trust: Does Trust Create Trust?.- Belief Revision Process Based on Trust: Agents Evaluating Reputation of Information Sources.- Adaptive Trust and Co-operation: An Agent-Based Simulation Approach.- Experiments in Building Experiential Trust in a Society of Objective-Trust Based Agents.- Learning to Trust.- Learning Mutual Trust.- Distributed Trust in Open Multi-agent Systems.- Modelling Trust for System Design Using the i * Strategic Actors Framework.

The Socio-cognitive Dynamics of Trust: Does Trust Create Trust?

We 1 will examine in this paper three crucial aspects of trust dynamics: a) How As trusting B and relying on it in situation Ω can actually (objectively) influnce Bs trustworthiness within Ω. Either trust is a self-fulfilling prophecy that modifies the probability of the predicted event; or it is a self-defeating strategy by negatively influencing the events. And also how A can be aware of and take into account the effect of its own decision in the very moment of that decision. b) How trust creates a reciprocal trust, and distrust elicits distrust; but also vice versa: how As trust in B could induce lack of trust or distrust in B towards A, while As diffidence can make B more trustful in A. And also how A can be aware of and take into account this effect of its own decision in the very moment of that decision. c) How diffuse trust diffuses trust (trust atmosphere), that is how As trusting B can influence C trusting B or D, and so on. Those phenomena are very crucial in human societies (market, groups, states), however we claim that they are also very fundamental in computer mediated organizations, interactions (like Electronic Commerce), cooperation (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), etc. and even in Multi-Agent Systems with autonomous agents.

From Automaticity to Autonomy: The Frontier of Artificial Agents

In the paper we give a definition of autonomy that tries to answer to the main questions this concept brings with it. We also provide an operationalized notion of autonomy. In particular, we interpret autonomy as a concept strictly related with other relevant notions: dependence, delegation, awareness, predictability, automaticity. We analyze more deeply autonomy in collaboration, its relationships with control and finally, the modalities of its possible adjustments.

Why a Cognitive Trustier Performs Better: Simulating Trust-Based Contract Nets

We use a Contract Net protocol for comparing various strategies for trusting other agents. We introduce three classes of trustiers: a random trustier, a statistical trustier, and a cognitive trustier.

Anticipation and anticipatory behavior: II

Anticipation is a highly multidisciplinary theme, and a growing interest is emerging in the empirical, theoretical and computational literatures. There is now a converging body of evidence in psychology and neurobiology indicating the presence of several anticipatory mechanisms in the brain, and highlighting a crucial role of anticipation in a large array of cognitive functionalities such as vision, motor control, learning, motivational and emotional dynamics. Simulative and generative capabilities have been advocated for bridging the gap between situated action and high-level cognitive capabilities such as planning, imitation, theory of mind, and language use. These advances in the understanding of the anticipatory nature of much human cognition does not only constitute a promising direction of investigation for experimental studies, but involve a rethinking of central theoretical notions such as representation and intentionality. Many studies provide strong support to the claim that representations are mainly action-oriented and deeply related to the motor apparatus, and that multiple representations of goals and expectations exist in the brain that mediate action selection, intention selection and deliberation: these facts have nowadays a tremendous impact on theories of cognition. Anticipatory representations and mechanisms have now begun to be explored from a computational point of view, too, and recently there is much interest on how anticipations can be learned and exploited for selecting and controlling behavior in artificial systems. The current special issue of Cognitive Processing focuses specifically on the convergence of empirical, theoretical and computational work about anticipation and anticipatory behavior. It follows a number of other initiatives of our research groups on the topic of anticipation, such as the ERCIM news special issue on ‘‘Cognitive Systems’’ (number 53, April 2003); the EU funded project MindRACES ‘‘From Reactive to Anticipatory Cognitive Embodied Systems’’, FP6-511931 (2004-2007); the ABiALS workshops on ‘‘Anticipatory Behavior in Adaptive Learning Systems’’ (2002, 2004 and 2006); the AAAI Fall Symposium: ‘‘From Reactive to Anticipatory Cognitive Embodied Systems’’ (2005). We have invited contributions by key researchers in different disciplinary fields: philosophy, psychology, neurobiology and computer science. Our aim is to contribute to a general understanding of anticipation and anticipatory behavior in natural cognition, and to investigate how it can be modeled in artificial cognitive systems. The contributions in the special issue highlight important aspects of anticipatory behavior in different aspects of cognition, from the point of view of different disciplines. Two papers are primarily psychological, one is primarily neurobiological, two papers are primarily theoretical and methodological, and one paper is the report of theoretical, psychological and computational work in the University of Würzburg. Besides, the contributions reveal complementary and highly correlated aspects of the phenomenon of G. Pezzulo (&) R. Falcone Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione-CNR, Via S. Martino della Battaglia, 44-00185 Rome, Italy e-mail: giovanni.pezzulo@istc.cnr.it

From Task Delegation to Role Delegation

Roles may be analyzed in many ways: “abstract agents”; as power positions; as sets of obligations; etc. For sure one of the main facets of roles is their Delegation-Adoption nature. This is exactly the perspective we assume here: it is a partial view of roles, but a fundamental one.

Integrating trustfulness and decision using fuzzy cognitive maps

The aim of this paper is to show how relevant is a trust model based on beliefs and their credibility. We will also show how the Fuzzy Cognitive Maps are convenient and practicable for implementing and integrating trustfulness and delegation.