Sergio Álvarez-Napagao

Normative monitoring: semantics and implementation

The concept of Normative Systems can be used in the scope of Multi-Agent Systems to provide reliable contexts of interactions between agents where acceptable behaviour is specified in terms of norms. Literature on the topic is growing rapidly, and there is a considerable amount of theoretical frameworks for normative environments, some in the form of Electronic Institutions. Most of these approaches focus on regulative norms rather than on substantive norms, and lack a proper implementation of the ontological connection between brute events and institutional facts. In this paper we present a formalism for the monitoring of both regulative (deontic) and substantive (constitutive) norms based on Structural Operational Semantics, its reduction to Production Systems semantics and our current implementation compliant to these semantics.

Engineering Social Reality with Inheritance Relations

In systems based on organisational specifications a reoccurring problem remains to be solved in the disparity between the level of abstractness of the organisational concepts and the concepts used in the implementation. Organisational specifications (deliberately) abstract from general practice, which creates a need to relate the abstract concepts used in the specification to concrete ones used in the practice. The prevailing solution for this problem is the use of counts-as statements. However, current implementations of counts-as view the relations expressed in this notion as static ontological classifications, which presents problems in dynamic environments where the meaning of abstract concepts can change over time. This limitation has already been solved in complex formal theoretical investigations, but the results of that study are far too complex to make a practical implementation. This paper investigates the limitations of current implementations of counts-as, and proposes a more flexible implementation based on the use of inheritance relations.

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.

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.

USE: A Concept-Based Recommendation System to Support Creative Search

Semiotics is a field where research on Computer Science methodologies has focused, mainly concerning Syntax and Semantics. These methodologies, however, are lacking of some flexibility for the continuously evolving web community, in which the knowledge is classified with tags rather than with ontologies. In this paper we propose a system for the recommendation of tagged pictures obtained from the Web. The system, driven by user feedback, executes an abductive reasoning (based on WordNet synset semantic relations) that is able to iteratively lead to new concepts which progressively represent the cognitive creative user state.

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.

Using SOA provenance to implement norm enforcement in e-institutions

In the last 10 years several approaches and technologies other than MAS (such as Web services and Grid computing) have emerged, with the support of the industry, providing their own solutions to distributed computation. As both Web services and Grid computing are based in the concept of service orientation, where all computation is split in independent, decoupled services, there is an opportunity for MAS researchers to test and extend their mechanisms and techniques in these emerging technologies. In this paper we describe a way to adapt the Harmon IA framework to be applied in highly regulated Web services and Grid computing scenarios. To do so we include a provenance mechanism as part of our norm enforcement mechanisms, which can be integrated into a SOA Governance workflow. We will show with an example how provenance allows the observation of both service interactions and (optionally) extra information about meaningful events in the system that cannot be observed in the interaction messages.

A middleware architecture for building contract-aware agent-based services

This paper presents a middleware to help designers in theimplementation of contract-aware agent-based services. The middlewareprovides several components, including a contract manager, a communicationmanager and a workflow manager, which combine to allow agentsto manage contracts and the actions associated with them. The middlewareis built as part of a Web service implementation of the ISTCONTRACTframework. An electronic commerce example is used toillustrate how the components of the middleware facilitates the managementand execution of agreements in a contract at run-time.