Showing papers by "Alexander Artikis published in 2013"

Research directions in agent communication

Abstract: Increasingly, software engineering involves open systems consisting of autonomous and heterogeneous participants or agents who carry out loosely coupled interactions. Accordingly, understanding and specifying communications among agents is a key concern. A focus on ways to formalize meaning distinguishes agent communication from traditional distributed computing: meaning provides a basis for flexible interactions and compliance checking.Over the years, a number of approaches have emerged with some essential and some irrelevant distinctions drawn among them. As agent abstractions gain increasing traction in the software engineering of open systems, it is important to resolve the irrelevant and highlight the essential distinctions, so that future research can be focused in the most productive directions.This article is an outcome of extensive discussions among agent communication researchers, aimed at taking stock of the field and at developing, criticizing, and refining their positions on specific approaches and future challenges. This article serves some important purposes, including identifying (1) points of broad consensus; (2) points where substantive differences remain; and (3) interesting directions of future work.

The design of intelligent socio-technical systems

Abstract: The design of intelligent socio-technical systems calls for careful examination of relevant social and organizational concepts. We present a method for supporting this design process, placing emphasis on different levels of formal characterization, with equal attention to both the analysis of concepts in a formal calculus independent of computational concerns, and the representation of concepts in a machine-processable form, fully cognizant of implementation issues--a step in the method we refer to as principled operationalization. There are many tools (i.e. formal languages) that can be used to support the design method; we define and discuss criteria for evaluating such tools. We believe that, were the method proposed to be adopted, it would enhance the state-of-the-art in the systematic design and engineering of socio-technical systems, respecting the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of those tasks, in both their theoretical and practical dimensions.

Self-adaptive event recognition for intelligent transport management

Abstract: Intelligent transport management involves the use of voluminous amounts of uncertain sensor data to identify and effectively manage issues of congestion and quality of service. In particular, urban traffic has been in the eye of the storm for many years now and gathers increasing interest as cities become bigger, crowded, and “smart”. In this work we tackle the issue of uncertainty in transportation systems stream reporting. The variety of existing data sources opens new opportunities for testing the validity of sensor reports and self-adapting the recognition of complex events as a result. We report on the use of a logic-based event reasoning tool to identify regions of uncertainty within a stream and demonstrate our method with a real-world use-case from the city of Dublin. Our empirical analysis shows the feasibility of the approach when dealing with voluminous and highly uncertain streams.

Event recognition for assisted independent living

Abstract: We present the application of a recently proposed probabilistic logical formalism, on the task of sensor data fusion in the USEFIL project. USEFIL seeks to extract valuable knowledge concerning the well-being of elderly people by combining information coming from low-cost, unobtrusive monitoring devices. The approach we adopt to device its data fusion component is based on the Event Calculus and the stochastic logic programming language ProbLog and aims towards constructing a semantic representation of the received data, usable by a Decision Support System that will assist elderly people in their every day activities and will provide to doctors, relatives and carers insights on the user's behaviour and health.

A Logic-Based Approach to Activity Recognition.

Abstract: We have been developing a system for recognising human activities given a symbolic representation of video content. The input of our system is a stream of time-stamped short-term activities detected on video frames. The output of our system is a set of recognised long-term activities, which are pre-defined spatio-temporal combinations of short-term activities. The constraints on the short-term activities that, if satisfied, lead to the recognition of a long-term activity, are expressed using a dialect of the Event Calculus. We illustrate the expressiveness of the dialect by showing the representation of several typical complex activities. Furthermore, we present a detailed evaluation of the system through experimentation on a benchmark dataset of surveillance videos.

Introduction to the special section on agent communication

Abstract: We are pleased to bring you the Special Section on Agent Communication in this issue of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST). The section contains three high-quality articles which we believe will serve to advance the field. The article were selected following the stringent review process that one would expect of a leading journal. Researchers in software engineering are increasingly concerned with the issues of building robust open systems that are constituted from multiple autonomous agents. Agent communication research focuses on the insight that the right way to go about building such systems is by modeling the interactions among agents. In the past, this led to research on all-purpose agent communications languages. Now, it is driving research on protocol specification. Where agent communication really distinguishes itself is in the nature of the challenges with which it is concerned. How should we specify protocols so that agents can enact them flexibly? How can we engineer protocols effectively? How can we ensure that protocols meet stakeholder requirements? How do we ensure interoperability during distributed enactment? Research on protocols is especially relevant given emerging trends that point to the adoption of standardized protocols in communities of practice such as finance and healthcare. The articles selected address some of these challenges. The article by Chopra et al. is a collection of individual manifestos by some of the leading active researchers in the agent communication. Each author provides insight on some of the pressing challenges for the area. Notably, the researchers agree on some broad points, chief among them that communication must have a social semantics. The article by Gerard and Singh addresses the engineering of protocols. They define a refinement relation among protocols and present a tool that can check for refinement. Baldoni et al. propose specifying the meaning of protocol messages separately from the flow between messages in order to facilitate greater reusability of protocols. All three article are essential steps towards the idea of protocols as first-class software engineering artifacts. All of them reaffirm the importance of social commitments in specifying the meaning of communication. The emphasis on meaning has the potential to fundamentally alter the way we look at the software engineering of distributed systems. We hope that the readers will find the selection of articles interesting. Our higher purpose behind this section was to bring some clarity and a sense of direction to the field and to position agent communication as an exciting area of research. Indeed, as the articles demonstrate, the opportunities are virtually limitless. We would like to thank TIST Editor-in-Chief Qiang Yang for giving us the opportunity to edit this special section, his assistant Weike Pan for helping us navigate the editing process, and the reviewers for turning in high-quality reviews. We would also like to thank Marco Colombetti, Nicoletta Fornara, Andrew Jones, Munindar Singh, and Pinar Yolum for their helpful suggestions.