Generation and selection of likely interpretations during plan recognition in task-oriented consultation systems

This paper presents a mechanism which infers a user's plans from his/her utterances by directing the inference process towards the more likely interpretations of a speaker's statements among many possible interpretations. Our mechanism uses Bayesian theory of probability to assess the likelihood of an interpretation, and it complements this assessment by taking into consideration two aspects of an interpretation: its coherence and its information content. The coherence of an interpretation is determined by the relationships between the different statements in the discourse. The information content of an interpretation is a measure of how well defined the interpretation is in terms of the actions to be performed on the basis of this interpretation. This measure is used to guide the inference process towards interpretations with higher information content. The information content of an interpretation depends on the specificity and the certainty of the inferences in it, where the certainty of an inference depends on the knowledge on which the inference is based. Our mechanism has been developed for use in task-oriented consultation systems. The particular domain that we have chosen for exploration is that of travel booking.     

Using Multimedia to Support Cooperative Editing

By Cooperative Editing we mean the coordinated manipulation of information by a group of authors. During the editing process the (co-)authors need to communicate their ideas, drafts and constraints (remotely or face-to-face) until a final version of the information is achieved. For the different phases of this process - discussion of ideas, editing, cross-checking - different media or media integration are adequate. Furthermore, analysing the transition from individual work to group work, within different human activities, two pitfalls are often detected if computer support is considered: a) technological communication difficulties, especially if the group is remotely located on heterogeneous hardware, associated with a fall in productivity and frequent social inadequacies of the group's computer support; b) the lack of integrated media processing tools available for group editing. In order to solve these problems, we suggest that Multimedia can be applied in two ways: to effectively support the necessary group communication links; and to enhance the expressiveness of the information edited. To test this statement we have been conceptualising and implementing a prototype system. Most of the techniques involved can be used in other tools that need multimedia capabilities or that support other specific types of group activities. The innovative aspects of the work are the use of multimedia techniques to support demanding applications, possibly on cross-platforms, and the integration of several concepts to support cooperation.     

Virtual teamwork in very large undergraduate classes

Collaborative work is an important part of tertiary education but it is very difficult to arrange and supervise for extremely large classes of students in their first year. The possibility that computer-mediated communication can be used to facilitate this type of learning is appealing from a pragmatic organisational point of view. This paper explains in detail what a ‘virtual team’ is in the educational context. It reports on an interpretive field study where students taking an introductory course were allowed to choose where and when they did the required collaborative work. The paper discusses the factors that should be taken into account when offering students the option of working as a virtual team. These include factors that influence the students’ choice. The project cannot be considered to have been successful but indicates reasons for the lack of success and suggests contexts in which it would be valuable to repeat the project. The importance of extensive preparation in terms of teaching the students necessary social and technological skills cannot be over emphasised.     

A novel approach to detecting DDoS Attacks at an Early Stage

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks pose a serious threat to Internet security. Most current research focuses on detection and prevention methods on the victim server or source side. To date, there has been no work on defenses using valuable information from the innocent client whose IP has been used in attacking packets. In this paper, we propose a novel cooperative system for producing warning of a DDoS attack. The system consists of a client detector and a server detector. The client detector is placed on the innocent client side and uses a Bloom filter-based detection scheme to generate accurate detection results yet consumes minimal storage and computational resources. The server detector can actively assist the warning process by sending requests to innocent hosts. Simulation results show that the cooperative technique presented in this paper can yield accurate DDoS alarms at an early stage. We theoretically show the false alarm probability of the detection scheme, which is insensitive to false alarms when using specially designed evaluation functions. This work is partially supported by HK Polyu ICRG A-PF86 and CERG Polyu 5196/04E, and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 90104005.     

Stability analysis of network-based cooperative resource allocation strategies

Resource allocation involves deciding how to divide a resource of limited availability among multiple demands in a way that optimizes current objectives. In this brief paper we focus on one type of distributed resource allocation problem where via an imperfect communication network multiple processors can share the load presented by multiple task types. We introduce asynchronous “cooperative” resource allocation strategies, and show that they lead to a bounded cumulative demand.     

Effects of CSCW on organizations

We consider the potential impact of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, with special reference to large technically advanced projects involving several organizations. It is vital that such projects are managed efficiently, without delays, since a product that reaches the market a few months earlier than its competitors enjoys a great advantage. Traditional methods of coordinating large projects, based on hierarchical communication, tend to produce delays, since technicians at remote sites are obliged to solve coordination problems by passing them up the hierachy. It would be better if such problems were solved by improvising conferences among the technicians; Computer Supported Cooperative Work will provide the technical means of implementing this heterarchical style of management without losing control of the project. The use of computers as a social medium raises methodological and ethical issues which are discussed in the final section.     

支持产品协同设计的AD技术与服务层项目人员管理的实现

在产品的协同设计过程中，每个项目都要涉及到众多的工作人员和大量的网络资源。协调好各个人员的工作并且有效、安全地使用网络资源是保证产品设计顺利进行的关键。本文提出并研究了采用活动目录技术来实现协同设计系统的服务层上的项目人员管理需求模式，开发了相应的项目人员管理工具，并且在基于知识的注塑模具和冲压模具设计系统中得到应用。     

Modularized design for cooperative control and plug-and-play operation of networked heterogeneous systems

In this paper, a cooperative control analysis and design method is investigated for heterogeneous dynamical systems that may be of arbitrary relative degree or nonminimum-phase or both. To achieve consensus or cooperative stability, a negative value of input-feedforward passivity index is used to accommodate and analyze such systems, and the magnitude of the index value is also used as the impact coefficient to quantify the impacts of heterogeneous dynamics of these systems on their networked operations. Physical-system-level designs are explicitly carried out to make individual linear and nonlinear systems (which are either feedback linearizable or nonminimum phase of certain form) become passivity-short and to embed one pure integrator into their input–output dynamics. The network-level distributed control can simply be chosen without any knowledge of the heterogeneous dynamics but with only information of an upper bound on their impact coefficients. It is shown, using the impact equivalence principle, that these controls separately designed but implemented together always ensure either local or global consensus and that a global non-trivial consensus emerges if and only if the information network has at least one globally reachable node or is varying but cumulatively connected. The proposed methodology of fully modularized designs unravels complexity of analyzing and designing cyber–physical systems and enables their plug-and-play into networked operations.     

单向通信拓扑领航者动态未知线性多智能体系统的协同迭代学习控制（英文）

This paper considers the cooperative tracking of linear multi-agent systems with a dynamic leader whose input information is unavailable to any followers. Cooperative iterative learning controllers, based on the relative state information of neighboring agents, are proposed for tracking the dynamic leader over directed communication topologies. Stability and convergence of the proposed controllers are established using Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals. Furthermore, this result is extended to the output feedback case where only the output information of each agent can be obtained. A local observer is constructed to estimate the unmeasurable states. Then, cooperative iterative learning controllers, based on the relative observed states of neighboring agents,are devised. For both cases, it is shown that the multi-agent systems whose communication topologies contain a spanning tree can reach synchronization with the dynamic leader, and meanwhile identify the unknown input of the dynamic leader using distributed iterative learning laws. An illustrative example is provided to verify the proposed control schemes.     

Internal structure of coalitions in competitive and altruistic graphical coalitional games

This paper introduces a certain graphical coalitional game where the internal topology of the coalition depends on a prescribed communication graph structure among the agents. The game Value Function is required to satisfy four Axioms of Value. These axioms make it possible to provide a refined study of coalition structures on graphs by defining a formal graphical game and by assigning a Positional Advantage, based on the Shapley value, to each agent in a coalition based on its connectivity properties within the graph. Using the Axioms of Value the graphical coalitional game can be shown to satisfy properties such as convexity, fairness, cohesiveness, and full cooperativeness. Three measures of the contributions of agents to a coalition are introduced: marginal contribution, competitive contribution, and altruistic contribution. The mathematical framework given here is used to establish results regarding the dependence of these three types of contributions on the graph topology, and changes in these contributions due to changes in graph topology. Based on these different contributions, three online sequential decision games are defined on top of the graphical coalitional game, and the stable graphs under each of these sequential decision games are studied. It is shown that the stable graphs under the objective of maximizing the marginal contribution are any connected graph. The stable graphs under the objective of maximizing the competitive contribution are the complete graph. The stable graphs under the objective of maximizing the altruistic contribution are any tree.