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Social Order and Adaptability in Animal and Human Cultures as Analogues for Agent Communities: Toward a Policy-Based Approach

29 Oct 2003-pp 21-48
TL;DR: Some of the ways social order is maintained in animal and human realms are discussed, with the goal of enriching the thinking about mechanisms that might be employed in developing similar means of ordering communities of agents.
Abstract: In this paper we discuss some of the ways social order is maintained in animal and human realms, with the goal of enriching our thinking about mechanisms that might be employed in developing similar means of ordering communities of agents. We present examples from our current work in human-agent teamwork, and we speculate about some new directions this kind of research might take. Since communities also need to change over time to cope with changing circumstances, we also speculate on means that regulatory bodies can use to adapt.

Summary (7 min read)

1. Introduction

  • As computational systems with increasing autonomy interact with humans in more complex ways—and with the welfare of the humans sometimes dependent on the conduct of the agents—there is a natural concern that the agents act in ways that are acceptable to people [7; 51].
  • In addition to traditional concerns for safety and robustness in such systems [12], there are important social aspects relating to predictability, control, feedback, order, and naturalness of the interaction that must be attended to [8; 10; 50].
  • Since enduring communities also need to change over time to cope with changing circumstances, the authors speculate briefly on means that regulatory bodies can utilize for supporting adaptation (section 6).
  • Finally, the authors present some concluding observations (section 7).

2. Some Sources of Order in the Animal World

  • The authors start by examining some of the ways that animals cooperate and maintain order.
  • Speaking of the process of mutual “attunement” (roughly, “getting to know one another”) among individuals, a component process of cooperation, biologist W.J. Smith states: Smith goes on to discuss two main benefits that accrue from such processes of cooperation or “joint activity.”.
  • But the main benefit of predictability is the social order it contributes to the group.
  • Thus, to know that an individual is performing a particular display is to learn something about the behavior it may select—every display can thus be described as encoding messages about behavioral selections [60, p. 87].

2.1. Interactional Displays

  • Interactional displays indicate availability or unavailability to participate in joint activity.
  • These displays “primarily provide information about the communicator’s readiness or lack of readiness, to join in acts that involve other individuals” [60, p. 88].
  • This category also includes signals of shunning interaction.
  • To see why this may be useful, consider the signaling functions of the lights on the back of a car: “[W]e use turn signals and brake lights to tell others of their actions and intentions.
  • Loud sounds, loud singing, howling (e.g., one jackal howls, and all the rest in the area howl in response), assuming high, visible physical positions, special kinds of flight patterns or displays, also known as Absence of opportunity.

2.2. Seeking Displays

  • The behavioral selection about which a display provides information if it is done only in this way can be termed ‘seeking.’.
  • The display is interpreted as providing not just the information that a communicator is ready to do this second selection, but that its behavior includes seeking or preparing to seek an opportunity” [60, p. 118].
  • These are associated with so many kinds of behaviors that their particular forms vary widely.
  • Agents that indicate to others what they are trying to do can elicit the right form of aid from others, can contribute to possible coordination among tasks, and the like.

2.3. Receptiveness Displays

  • Displays indicating receptiveness are the inverse of seeking displays, i.e., they indicate a specific response to the seeking of particular kinds of activities by others: “Some displays indicate the behavioral selections that a communicator will accept, not those it is prepared to perform.
  • At least two behavioral selection messages must be provided by such a display, one indicating that the communicator will behave receptively and another indicating the class of acts to which it is receptive.
  • Effectively, the communicator adopts the role of soliciting acts from another individual; it does not offer them” [60, p. 122].
  • These displays sometimes carry over into adult relationships, as when a female mate solicits various forms of “help with the nest” from her male partner [60, p. 125].
  • As with seeking displays, receptivity displays are so diverse that they defy general description.

2.4. Attack and Escape Displays

  • Displays indicating attack and escape: “are said to encode either, or both, of attack and escape messages when all their occurrence is correlated with a range of attack- or escape-related behavior.
  • Behavioral indices of attack differ among and within species, but include acts that, if completed, will harm another individual.
  • Escape behavior can be any appropriate form of avoidance, ranging from headlong fleeing to turning aside, or even freezing and other ways of hiding” [60, p. 93].
  • Attack and escape displays may differ, but they are sometimes more or less the same display, differing only in degree or subtle nuance.
  • They have value both between and within groups, for instance, to muster help against an intruder or to avoid inadvertent flare-ups (e.g., one group member coming upon another by surprise).

2.5. Copulation Behavior Displays

  • There are displays indicating copulation behavior: “Some displays are performed only before or during the social interactions in which eggs are fertilized.
  • These interactions involve either copulation or some behavioral analogue such as the amplexus behavior of frogs” [60, p. 97].
  • This class of social display would seem to have little to do with agents—at least at their current stage of development.
  • Analogues to these displays may be pertinent when certain forms of intricate inter-coordination are occurring among agents, involving the need for complex cooperation and coordination to carry out the task successfully, e.g., exchanging ontologies.
  • In a simple fashion, a Palm PDA demonstrates this kind of display when it beeps and lights up after successful docking in its cradle.

2.6. Association Maintenance Displays

  • There are displays associated with maintaining, staying-in association: “Some displays correlate with the behavior involved in remaining with another individual.
  • These displays appear to provide a kind of reassurance to other group members that, despite some possible indications to the contrary, the individual has not broken ranks with the group.
  • Such assurances are particularly useful when salient events may raise doubt about the continued association.
  • “the likelihood that a group will remain together after one or more have fought with each other or with outsiders can also be increased by displays encoding an association message” [60, p. 104].
  • Various kinds of vocalizations—clearly, signals that can operate over a distance are important in this function.

2.7. Indecisiveness Displays

  • Indicators of indecision are various, ranging from simply adopting a static, frozen stance, as if waiting for the situation to provide greater cues, to variations on displays that usually indicate action but are modified to increase the range of choice.
  • Displays for indecisiveness can include behaviors irrelevant and inappropriate to the situation, e.g., suddenly, unexpectantly initiating grooming or eating [60, p. 107].

2.8. Locomotion Displays

  • Displays indicating locomotion simply signal that the animal is moving or is about to move: “[These] displays provide information about a communicator’s use of flight (or other locomotive) behavior, but not about functional categories of flight such as approach, withdrawal, attack, or foraging.
  • The displays correlate with all these acts and more…some [animals] extend the performance of the displays to correlate with hopping or running when they forage on the ground.
  • These displays appear to consist primarily of various forms of vocalizations.
  • Signals indicating that an animal is about to move can be more diverse, for example, dances in honeybees, head-tossing in geese.
  • Signals that indicate that an agent is moving or is about to move would seem particularly germane in teams containing mobile agents.

2.9. Staying-Put Displays

  • Displays indicating remaining with a site are the opposite of the locomotion displays: “Displays performed only when a communicator is remaining at a fixed site encode the information he will remain at a single point, in the vicinity of such a locus, or in an area that allows considerable movement within fixed boundaries.
  • The behavioral selection referred to is simply “staying-put,” defined with respect to a site” [60, p. 115].
  • Song vocalizations, in particular, are associated with remaining in a territory.
  • Birds that do not sing can have special vocalizations for remaining in place, e.g., the “ecstatic” vocalization of the Adelie penguin [60, p. 115].
  • Also included are wing-beating, and various specialized postures and movements.

2.10. Attentiveness Displays

  • Displays indicating attentiveness to a stimulus simply convey that the communicator is attending to something and monitoring it.
  • Three distinct barks of a prairie-dog, indicating three different phases of monitoring.
  • For agents, these signals could portend that something important might be happening.
  • Appropriate response, of course, would require additional information.
  • In the animal world, for instance, this additional information sometimes indicates the location of the stimulus.

3. Some Sources of Order in the Human World

  • It is not surprising that joint activity—and the “getting to know each other” both necessary for it and engendered by it—are also important to humans.
  • Because of their wider behavioral repertoire, the greater complexity of their communication processes, and their reduced dependence on biological determinism, human cooperation and regulatory processes take on an even greater variety of forms.
  • Culture, the accumulated totality of such patterns, is not just an ornament of human existence but—the principal basis of its specificity—an essential condition for it.
  • For a comprehensive and interesting treatment of these kinds of issues regarding joint activity in humans, see[15].
  • Order and predictability may have a basis in the simple cooperative act between two people, in which the parties “contract” to engage together in a set of interlinked, mutually beneficial activities.

4. The Problem of Adaptability

  • While the discussion so far has dealt mainly with the maintenance of order, change is also necessary in perpetuating healthy societies, especially if those societies are expected to adapt to new circumstances and endure over long periods of time.
  • In the second case, the party responding to the request for help might, on the one hand, go to the unmanned end of the table and try to help lift (and he would not throw a rope—due to the basic circumstantial difference).
  • [In Mexico, when two cars approach a narrow bridge from different directions, flashing your headlights means, ‘I got here first, so keep out of my way.’.
  • Thus the elements of consistency, but also potential novelty, may both be necessary to signaling activity in the real world, because the world is never static: “In all social events, the behavior of participants must engender considerable predictability.
  • With regard to change and adaptation in culture and its regulatory role, modern biologists have increasingly emphasized that the natural selection process includes not only basic biology but also the equally complex elements of culture, cultural change and cultural selection.

5. Building Cultures for Agent Communities: Sources of Order

  • The authors agent research and development efforts over the past decade have maintained a consistent trend.
  • It is in this sense that what the authors have been doing might be thought of as creating “cultures” for agent communities, especially communities that might endure for long periods of time.
  • Beyond the basics of individual agent protection, these communities will depend on legal services, based on explicit policies, to ensure that rights and obligations are monitored and enforced.
  • The authors will introduce KAoS (5.4) and some basic categories of technical and social policies (5.5).

5.1. Norms and Policy

  • In the early 20th century, a legal theorist named Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld developed a theory of fundamental legal concepts [32] from which most of current work on theories of normative positions have taken at least some degree of inspiration (see e.g., [40; 57]).
  • In the multi-agent system research community, Conte and Castelfranchi [19] found that norms were variously described as constraints on 8.
  • In an insightful essay, Roger Clarke explores some of the implications of Asimov’s stories about the laws of robotics for information technologists [16].
  • Interest in policy-based approaches to multi-agent and distributed systems has also grown considerably in recent years (http://www.policy-workshop.org) [22; 37; 67].
  • While sharing much in common with norm-based approaches, policy-based perspectives differ in subtle ways.

5.2. Plans and Policy

  • Policy management should not be confused with planning or workflow management, which are related but separate functions.
  • Planning mechanisms are generally deliberative (i.e., they reason deeply and actively about activities in support of complex goals) whereas policy mechanisms tend to be reactive (i.e., concerned with simple actions triggered by some environmental event) [27, pp. 161-162].
  • The independence of policy, reasoning, and enforcement mechanisms from planning capabilities helps assure that, wherever possible, key constraints imposed by the humans are respected even in the face of buggy or malicious agents on the one hand, and poorly designed or oversimplified plans on the other.
  • Plans tend to be strategic and comprehensive, while policies, in their sense, are by nature tactical and piecemeal.
  • In short, the authors might say that while policies constitute the “rules of the road”—providing the stop signs, speed limits, and lane markers that serve to coordinate traffic and minimize mishaps—they are not sufficient to address the problem of “route planning.

5.3. Autonomy and Policy12

  • The outermost rectangle, labeled potential actions, represents the set of all actions defined in some ontology under current consideration.
  • Of these possible actions, any given actor15 (e.g., Agent A) will likely only be deemed to be capable of performing some subset.
  • Environmental autonomy can be expressed in terms of the possible actions available to the agent—the more the behavior is wholly deterministic in the presence of a fixed set of environmental inputs, the smaller the range of possible actions available to the agent.
  • A computational system’s “ontology” defines what exists for the program—in other words, what can be represented by it.
  • For this reason, adjustable autonomy may involve not merely a shift in roles among a human-agent pair, but rather the distribution of dynamic demands across many coordinated actors.

5.4. Overview of KAoS

  • KAoS is a collection of componentized agent services compatible with several popular agent frameworks, including Nomads [63], the DARPA CoABS Grid [38], the DARPA ALP/Ultra*Log Cougaar framework (http://www.cougaar.net), CORBA (http://www.omg.org), and Voyager (http://www.recursionsw.com/osi.asp).
  • KAoS domain services provide the capability for groups of agents, people, resources, and other entities to be structured into organizations of agent domains and subdomains to facilitate agent-agent collaboration and external policy administration.
  • The KAoS Policy Ontologies (KPO), represented in OWL [69], distinguishes between authorizations (i.e., constraints that 19 As Hancock and Scallen [31] rightfully observe, the problem of adaptive function allocation is not merely one of efficiency or technical elegance.
  • Permit or forbid some action) and obligations (i.e., constraints that require some action to be performed, or else serve to waive such a requirement) [22].

5.5. Technical and Social Policy Categories

  • To increase the likelihood of human acceptance of agent technology, successful systems must attend to both the technical and social aspects of policy [51].
  • From a social perspective, the authors want agents to be designed to fit well with how people actually work together and otherwise interact.
  • This category of policies is concerned with assuring that identification of proper users is associated with various agent commands and actions.
  • The authors now discuss a few simple examples of policy relating to the theme of display and signaling behavior.
  • In places that have large control panels,… the first act of the human operators is to shut off the alarms so they can concentrate upon the problem” [50, p. 128].

5.6. Nonverbal Expression Policy: Examples

  • Where possible, agents usually take advantage of explicit verbal channels for communication in order to reduce the need for relying on current primitive robotic vision and auditory sensing capabilities [47, p. 295].
  • Books on human etiquette [70] contain many descriptions of appropriate behavior in a wide variety of social settings.
  • Finally, in addition to this previous work, the authors think that display and signaling behavior among people [46] and groups of animals will be one of the most fruitful sources of policy for effective nonverbal expression in agents.
  • This policy prevents the PSA from moving until it has first signaled for some number of seconds its intention to move.

6. Building Cultures for Agent Communities: Potential Sources of Adaptation

  • The authors have seen an example of the need for this kind of adaptation in the last section, in which the comfortable distance a PSA should keep from its partner invokes cultural considerations.
  • The second type of adaptation involves changes in policy, either in response to experience, for example, in realizing that enforcing a policy or set of policies has consistently resulted in untoward outcomes, or by recognizing that the nature of the operational world had changed in consequential ways.
  • This second kind of adaptation has been even less explored.
  • From the perspective of this paper, such adaptation might involve a sort of “cultural learning” that might prove challenging to current machine learning approaches.

7. Conclusion

  • The authors have attempted to encourage an expansion of thinking about the sources, nature, and diversity of regulatory systems that can be utilized to achieve acceptable levels of order when groups of agents or mixed agent-human groups are engaged in consequential work.
  • Roughly interpreted, the constitution of authority refers to how things of various sorts come to have regulatory power over human conduct.
  • That is, there are limits to the speed with which a particular sort of car, on a particular sort of road, can navigate the turn without crashing, and people who do not want to get hurt will honor these constraints as they are able.
  • At much greater degrees of abstraction from the scene, there is the Motor Vehicle Code and other formal statutes that, for instance, prescribe the amount of certain substances that the driver may have in his or her body.
  • The complexity of this interplay makes us realize even more that the authors are only at the beginning in addressing the dual problems of order and change in agent communities (let alone the optimal delicate balance between them), and it is hard not to feel a bit overwhelmed.

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Social Order and Adaptability in Animal and Human
Cultures as Analogues for Agent Communities:
Toward a Policy-Based Approach
Paul J. Feltovich, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Renia Jeffers, Niranjan Suri, Andrzej Uszok
Institute for Human and Machine Cognition/University of West Florida
40 S. Alcaniz, Pensacola, FL 32501
{pfeltovich, jbradshaw, rjeffers, nsuri, auszok}@ihmc.us
Abstract. In this paper we discuss some of the ways social order is maintained
in animal and human realms, with the goal of enriching our thinking about
mechanisms that might be employed in developing similar means of ordering
communities of agents. We present examples from our current work in human-
agent teamwork, and we speculate about some new directions this kind of
research might take. Since communities also need to change over time to cope
with changing circumstances, we also speculate on means that regulatory
bodies can use to adapt.
1. Introduction
As computational systems with increasing autonomy interact with humans in more
complex ways—and with the welfare of the humans sometimes dependent on the
conduct of the agents—there is a natural concern that the agents act in ways that are
acceptable to people [7; 51]. In addition to traditional concerns for safety and
robustness in such systems [12], there are important social aspects relating to
predictability, control, feedback, order, and naturalness of the interaction that must be
attended to [8; 10; 50]. In this paper we investigate just some of the ways social order
is maintained in animal and human realms (sections 2 and 3), with the goal of
enriching our thinking about mechanisms that might be employed to enhance order in
mixed human-agent teams.
1
We present examples of such systems that have been
created to support agent-based applications (section 4), and we speculate about new
directions this kind of research might take (section 5). Since enduring communities
also need to change over time to cope with changing circumstances, we speculate
briefly on means that regulatory bodies can utilize for supporting adaptation (section
6). Finally, we present some concluding observations (section 7).
1 In this sense, we agree with the conjecture of Norman: “Technology recapitulates phylogeny”
[50, p. 134].

2. Some Sources of Order in the Animal World
We start by examining some of the ways that animals cooperate and maintain order.
Why would individuals ever choose to cooperate with others to pursue their aims,
rather than “going it alone”? In the animal realm, ethnologists and evolutionary
biologists have taken a fairly common stance with regard to this question. Speaking of
the process of mutual “attunement” (roughly, “getting to know one another”) among
individuals, a component process of cooperation, biologist W.J. Smith states:
Such attunement is necessary when no single individual can fully control an
encounter—when participants in encounters must depend on each other for a
useful outcome. The value of that outcome need not be equal for each
participant, but it must exceed for each the average payoff that would come
from eschewing the interaction [61, p. 366].
Smith goes on to discuss two main benefits that accrue from such processes of
cooperation or “joint activity.” The first is that certain tasks get accomplished that
could not have been accomplished by any individual. The second is that these kinds of
activities, over time, yield increased inter-predictability among the parties; they come
to know each other’s ways. This can have constructive benefits: for instance,
knowledge of the other’s capabilities might be tapped during future cooperation. It
can also yield protective benefits: for example, learning the other’s “hot buttons” that
tend to invoke hostility. But the main benefit of predictability is the social order it
contributes to the group. Gross, mutual unpredictability is almost definitional of
disorder. Predictability and order are so important to animals that they seem to go to
great lengths to build but also maintain it: For instance:
[Some male birds] remember how to recognize previous neighbors by their
individually distinctive songs and remember the location in which each
neighbor belongs. Relationships with known neighbors are valuable and those
with strangers are problematic. Known mutual boundaries can be
reestablished with much less effort and uncertainty than goes into the task of
working out relationships with new neighbors [61, p. 365].
Animals engage in joint activities, in which they get to know each other, in part
through processes of signaling and display that are associated with predictable kinds
of behaviors. That is, display and signaling behavior among animals supports joint
activity by providing more or less rough clues to others concerning what each
individual is about to do. Displays and signals can range widely in form (e.g.,
vocalizations, body posture, facial expressions):
Each individual has a repertoire of behavior made up of all the many kinds of
acts it can perform. It can be thought of as continuously choosing among these
acts, even at times when its behavior is unchanging (among the choices
available at any instant is to do whatever was done in the previous instant).
Any choice can be called a ‘behavioral selection.’
Each kind of display has a consistent and specifiable relationship to certain
choices. It is performed in correlation with some kinds of behavior and not

others. Thus, to know that an individual is performing a particular display is
to learn something about the behavior it may select—every display can thus be
described as encoding messages about behavioral selections [60, p. 87].
Hence, display behavior has an anticipatory, predictive (but only a probabilistically
predictive) function. It is a clue, sometimes highly indicative, sometimes much less
so,
2
to what an individual is about to do. It also decouples actual action from a kind of
notice that it is about to happen.
3
This decoupling both invites and enables others to
participate in coordination, support, or avoidance with respect to what might occur.
This joint engagement in an activity would not be possible if the activity were merely
executed and not signaled in advance. In this sense, display is an important ingredient
in enabling things like coordination and teamwork.
While signaling and display can take many and complicated forms, even in the
animal world, biologist Smith has advanced ten signal-behavior couplings that appear
to be pervasive in almost all vertebrates, although they might manifest different
physical forms in different species [60, pp. 87-126]. The fact that these are so
pervasive suggests they may be particularly fundamental. We will briefly describe
each of these types of displays and signals along with possible functions they could
serve within agent communities.
2.1. Interactional Displays
Interactional displays indicate availability or unavailability to participate in joint
activity. These displays “primarily provide information about the communicator’s
readiness or lack of readiness, to join in acts that involve other individuals” [60, p.
88]. Since they may be associated with more than one kind of interaction, they do not
specify any one kind. They might indicate readiness to copulate, associate, attack an
intruder, and so forth. Hence, they are anticipatory to various kinds of intended joint
activity, simply signaling a readiness (or lack thereof) to join in association with
others.
This category also includes displays indicating absence of opportunity to interact.
These displays essentially signal that an individual is alone and has nobody else to
interact with, for example, when an individual is the last remaining at the nest or
territory. This category also includes signals of shunning interaction. These are
simply signals that the initiator does not want interaction with others, and this
intention can range from mild to fierce.
Example interactional forms. Kinds of chirping. Various forms of bowing.
“Tidbitting”—offering a morsel of food. Forms of touching. Signals from a
2 Sometimes the ambiguity of the signal itself serves an important function, for example as an
indicator that the signaler’s next move may depend on the response its current move evokes.
3 To see why this may be useful, consider the signaling functions of the lights on the back of a
car: “[W]e use turn signals and brake lights to tell others of our actions and intentions. In the
case of brake lights, we signal actions as we carry them out. In the case of turn signals, we
signal our intentions before we actually commit them into action. In either case, we allow
others to know our future actions so that we can ensure that there is no conflict” [50, p. 129].

subordinate to a dominant, the purpose of which is to test the dominant’s willingness
to interact, to tolerate interaction.
Absence of opportunity: Loud sounds, loud singing, howling (e.g., one jackal howls,
and all the rest in the area howl in response), assuming high, visible physical
positions, special kinds of flight patterns or displays.
Shunning: Interestingly, various forms of displaying the tongue. Chittering barks.
Vocalizations at special, unusual frequencies.
Possible functions in agent communities. Displays in this general category clearly
have benefits for coordination among groups of agents by providing information
about which are or are not in a position to interact with others, in what ways, when,
and so forth, e.g.: Call me. I am open for calls. I need to talk to someone. May I
interject, may I say something?
Absence of opportunity: I am out of touch. I am working all alone. I have no help. I
have lost contact with everybody.
Shunning: Do not attempt to communicate with me for whatever reason, e.g., my line
is bugged, or I am involved in something that cannot be interrupted. Leave me alone.
While the general interactional displays just discussed are non-specific in the
activity they portend, others are more specific.
2.2. Seeking Displays
Displays indicating that one is seeking joint activity are similar to the interactional
ones in that they indicate a readiness to participate in some kind joint activity but
differ in that they indicate active attempt at engaging in a particular kind of activity
rather than just a general state of availability or receptiveness:
“Animals may display while seeking the opportunity to perform some kind of
activity during what ethnologists call ‘appetitive’ behavior as distinguished
from ‘consummatory’ behavior in which activity is completed. The behavioral
selection about which a display provides information if it is done only in this
way can be termed ‘seeking.’ What a communicator is seeking to do is
encoded in the same display by a second behavioral selection message. The
display is interpreted as providing not just the information that a
communicator is ready to do this second selection, but that its behavior
includes seeking or preparing to seek an opportunity” [60, p. 118].
The seeking display can be associated with many kinds of activities, seeking, for
example, to interact, associate, copulate, attack, or escape.
Example forms. These are associated with so many kinds of behaviors that their
particular forms vary widely.
Possible functions in agent communities. Agents that indicate to others what they
are trying to do can elicit the right form of aid from others, can contribute to possible
coordination among tasks, and the like.

2.3. Receptiveness Displays
Displays indicating receptiveness are the inverse of seeking displays, i.e., they
indicate a specific response to the seeking of particular kinds of activities by others:
“Some displays indicate the behavioral selections that a communicator will
accept, not those it is prepared to perform. At least two behavioral selection
messages must be provided by such a display, one indicating that the
communicator will behave receptively and another indicating the class of acts
to which it is receptive. Effectively, the communicator adopts the role of
soliciting acts from another individual; it does not offer them” [60, p. 122].
The display indicating receptiveness indicates that the communicator is willing to
engage in a behavior, or set of behaviors, initiated by another. An interesting form of
soliciting has to do with being receptive to “aid or care” and is common among
infants who indicate receptiveness to feeding, grooming, shading, and so forth.
Although often associated with the young, these displays sometimes carry over into
adult relationships, as when a female mate solicits various forms of “help with the
nest” from her male partner [60, p. 125].
Example forms. As with seeking displays, receptivity displays are so diverse that
they defy general description.
Possible functions in agent communities. As with the seeking displays, receptivity
displays can contribute to cooperation in the conduct of activity and to the
coordination among activities.
2.4. Attack and Escape Displays
Displays indicating attack and escape:
“are said to encode either, or both, of attack and escape messages when all
their occurrence is correlated with a range of attack- or escape-related
behavior. Behavioral indices of attack differ among and within species, but
include acts that, if completed, will harm another individual. Escape behavior
can be any appropriate form of avoidance, ranging from headlong fleeing to
turning aside, or even freezing and other ways of hiding” [60, p. 93].
Attack and escape displays may differ, but they are sometimes more or less the
same display, differing only in degree or subtle nuance. They have value both
between and within groups, for instance, to muster help against an intruder or to avoid
inadvertent flare-ups (e.g., one group member coming upon another by surprise).
Various choreographies of interactive displays relating to attacking and escaping can
more often than not serve to avoid actual combat. Actual fighting is more likely to
happen among relatively unfamiliar groups [60, p. 94], partly because they have less
mutual predictability, including prediction of each other’s reaction to display
activities that can fend off real fighting.
Example forms. Body posture and orientation. Head bobbing. Forms of jumping.
Baring teeth.

Citations
More filters
Proceedings ArticleDOI
19 May 2008
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss some of the challenges and requirements for successful coordination, and briefly how they have used KAoS HART services framework to support coordination in a multi- team human-robot field exercise.
Abstract: Coordination is an essential ingredient of a teamwork- centered approach to autonomy. In this paper, we discuss some of the challenges and requirements for successful coordination, and briefly how we have used KAoS HART services framework to support coordination in a multi- team human-robot field exercise.

30 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
25 Jul 2005
TL;DR: Kaa (KAoS adjustable autonomy), which extends previous work on KAoS policy and domain services to provide a policy-based capability for adjustable autonomy based on this richer notion of adjustable autonomy, is introduced.
Abstract: Though adjustable autonomy is hardly a new topic in agent systems, there has been a general lack of consensus on terminology and basic concepts. In this paper, we describe the multi-dimensional nature of adjustable autonomy and give examples of how various dimensions might be adjusted in order to enhance performance of human-agent teams. We then introduce Kaa (KAoS adjustable autonomy), which extends our previous work on KAoS policy and domain services to provide a policy-based capability for adjustable autonomy based on this richer notion of adjustable autonomy. The current implementation of Kaa uses a combination of ontologies represented in OWL and influence-diagram-based decision-theoretic algorithms to determine what if any changes should be made in agent autonomy in a given context. We have demonstrated Kaa as part of ONR-sponsored research to improve naval de-mining operations through more effective human-robot interaction. A brief comparison among alternate approaches to adjustable autonomy is provided.

26 citations


Cites methods from "Social Order and Adaptability in An..."

  • ...As part of this research, we are developing policies to govern various nonverbal forms of expression in software agents and robots [ 11 ]....

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Book ChapterDOI
TL;DR: Some important dimensions relating to autonomy are described and examples of how these dimensions might be adjusted in order to enhance performance of human-agent teams are given.
Abstract: Trust is arguably the most crucial aspect of agent acceptability. At its simplest level, it can be characterized in terms of judgments that people make concerning three factors: an agent's competence, its benevolence, and the degree to which it can be rapidly and reliably brought into compliance when things go wrong. Adjustable autonomy consists of the ability to dynamically impose and modify constraints that affect the range of actions that the human-agent team can successfully perform, consistently allowing the highest degrees of useful autonomy while maintaining an acceptable level of trust. Many aspects of adjustable autonomy can be addressed through policy. Policies are a means to dynamically regulate the behavior of system components without changing code or requiring the cooperation of the components being governed. By changing policies, a system can be adjusted to accommodate variations in externally imposed constraints and environmental conditions. In this paper we describe some important dimensions relating to autonomy and give examples of how these dimensions might be adjusted in order to enhance performance of human-agent teams. We introduce Kaa (KAoS adjustable autonomy) and provide a brief comparison with two other implementations of adjustable autonomy concepts.

25 citations

Book ChapterDOI
06 Sep 2006
TL;DR: This chapter explores the role of regulation in joint activity that is conducted among people and how understanding this better can enhance the efforts of researchers seek ing to develop effective means to coordinate the performance of consequential work within mixed teams of humans, agents, and robots.
Abstract: In this chapter we explore the role of regulation in joint activity that is conducted among people and how understanding this better can enhance the efforts of researchers seek ing to develop effective means to coordinate the performance of consequential work within mixed teams of humans, agents, and robots. Our analysis reveals challenges to the quality of human-machine mutual understanding; these in turn set upper bounds on the degree of sophistication of human-automation joint activity that can be supported today and point to key areas for further research. These include development of an ontology of regulatory systems that can be utilized within human-agent-robotic teamwork to help with mutual understanding and complex coordination.

20 citations


Cites background from "Social Order and Adaptability in An..."

  • ...Joint activity, interdependent activity, is important even to animals, which in some ways are better analogues than humans for the limited intellectual capacities of software agents [16]....

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  • ...Wohlmuth's full analysis is discussed in [16]....

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Book ChapterDOI
15 Jul 2003
TL;DR: In this article, it has been argued that some "Laws of Complexity" exist, which govern the behaviour of complex systems of any sort, from natural to artificial ones.
Abstract: The ever growing complexity of software systems calls for new forms of understanding and conceptual tools. It has been argued that some “Laws of Complexity” exist, which govern the behaviour of complex systems of any sort, from natural to artificial ones.

20 citations

References
More filters
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01 Jan 1973
TL;DR: The INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES CLIFFORD GEERTZ Books files are available at the online library of the University of Southern California as mentioned in this paper, where they can be used to find any kind of Books for reading.
Abstract: THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES CLIFFORD GEERTZ PDF Are you searching for THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES CLIFFORD GEERTZ Books files? Now, you will be happy that at this time THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES CLIFFORD GEERTZ PDF is available at our online library. With our complete resources, you could find THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES CLIFFORD GEERTZ PDF or just found any kind of Books for your readings everyday.

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"Social Order and Adaptability in An..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Breazeal has taken inspiration from research in child psychology [68] to develop robot displays that reflect four basic classes of preverbal social responses: affective (changing facial expressions), exploratory (visual search, maintenance of mutual regard with human), protective (turning head away), and regulatory (expressive feedback to gain caregiver attention, cyclic waxing and waning of internal states, habituation, and signals of internal motivation) [13]....

    [...]

Proceedings ArticleDOI
Eric Horvitz1
01 May 1999
TL;DR: In this article, the Lookout system for scheduling and meeting management is presented, which allows engineers to enhance human-computer interaction through an elegant coupling of automated services with direct manipulation.
Abstract: Recent debate has centered on the relative promise of focusing user-interface research on developing new metaphors and tools that enhance users abilities to directly manipulate objects versus directing effort toward developing interface agents that provide automation. In this paper, we review principles that show promise for allowing engineers to enhance human-computer interaction through an elegant coupling of automated services with direct manipulation. Key ideas will be highlighted in terms of the Lookout system for scheduling and meeting management.

1,233 citations


"Social Order and Adaptability in An..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Measures of expected utility can be used to evaluate the tradeoffs involved in potentially interrupting the ongoing activities of agents and humans in such situations, in order to communicate, coordinate, and reallocate responsibilities [18; 33; 34]....

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Frequently Asked Questions (1)
Q1. What are the contributions mentioned in the paper "Social order and adaptability in animal and human cultures as analogues for agent communities: toward a policy-based approach" ?

In this paper the authors discuss some of the ways social order is maintained in animal and human realms, with the goal of enriching their thinking about mechanisms that might be employed in developing similar means of ordering communities of agents. The authors present examples from their current work in humanagent teamwork, and they speculate about some new directions this kind of research might take. Since communities also need to change over time to cope with changing circumstances, the authors also speculate on means that regulatory bodies can use to adapt.