一种基于社会承诺的Agent组织模型OMSC

多Agent领域所面临的一个重大的挑战是解决开放异质的多Agent系统中自治Agent间的协调问题。多Agent为了协调它们之间的活动,需要进行交互。社会承诺作为一种通信和交互机制,为自治的多Agent提供了一种协调的途径。然而,仅靠交互难以实现多Agent间的协调。Agent组织作为一种协调模型可以有效地控制多Agent间的交互与合作。论文将社会承诺和Agent组织两种协调机制相结合,提出一种基于社会承诺的Agent组织模型OMSC,分析了Agent如何用社会承诺进行推理以及基于社会承诺的多Agent系统并给出了一个实例,为多Agent间的协调提供了一种新的方法。     

Multi-Agent System Development Based on Organizations

Organizational models have been recently used in agent theory for modeling coordination in open systems and to ensure social order in multi-agent system applications. In this paper, we propose the employment of Organization Theory for the analysis and design of multiagent systems. Thus, we first discuss the current state of the art of organization-oriented multiagent system methods, placing emphasis on their organizational features. We also review human organizational structures, and we propose several guidelines for implementing agent organizations by means of Organization Theory. Our final aim is to employ well-known human organizational structures to develop multiagent systems.     

Virtual Customer Service Agents: Using Social Presence and Personalization to Shape Online Service Encounters

By performing tasks traditionally fulfilled by service personnel and having a humanlike appearance, virtual customer service agents bring classical service elements to the web, which may positively influence customer satisfaction through eliciting social responses and feelings of personalization. This paper sheds light on these dynamics by proposing and testing a model drawing upon the theories of implicit personality, social response, emotional contagion, and social interaction. The model proposes friendliness, expertise, and smile as determinants of social presence, personalization, and online service encounter satisfaction. An empirical study confirms the cross‐channel applicability of friendliness and expertise as determinants of social presence and personalization. Overall, the study underlines that integration between technology and personal aspects may lead to more social online service encounters.     

Negotiated Collusion: Modeling Social Language and its Relationship Effects in Intelligent Agents

Building a collaborative trusting relationship with users is crucial in a wide range of applications, such as advice-giving or financial transactions, and some minimal degree of cooperativeness is required in all applications to even initiate and maintain an interaction with a user. Despite the importance of this aspect of human–human relationships, few intelligent systems have tried to build user models of trust, credibility, or other similar interpersonal variables, or to influence these variables during interaction with users. Humans use a variety of kinds of social language, including small talk, to establish collaborative trusting interpersonal relationships. We argue that such strategies can also be used by intelligent agents, and that embodied conversational agents are ideally suited for this task given the myriad multimodal cues available to them for managing conversation. In this article we describe a model of the relationship between social language and interpersonal relationships, a new kind of discourse planner that is capable of generating social language to achieve interpersonal goals, and an actual implementation in an embodied conversational agent. We discuss an evaluation of our system in which the use of social language was demonstrated to have a significant effect on users’ perceptions of the agent’s knowledgableness and ability to engage users, and on their trust, credibility, and how well they felt the system knew them, for users manifesting particular personality traits.This revised version was published online in July 2005 with corrections to the author name Bickmore.     

基于效用的Agent多动作选择承诺机制

研究以KARO为逻辑框架的多动作选择承诺,给出与其相关的效用函数计算方法。在引入模型状态迁移概念和相关函数、谓词后,对各种承诺建立和取消承诺的情况进行了形式化,详细给出了kripke型可能世界语义描述。丰富了KARO逻辑框架关于承诺的研究。使主体在合作时,可以充分考虑自己的情况,理性的作出选择,提高多主体间合作的协调性。     

Coordinating Self-interested Planning Agents

We consider planning problems where a number of non-cooperative agents have to work on a joint problem. Such problems consist in completing a set of interdependent, hierarchically ordered tasks. Each agent is assigned a subset of tasks to perform for which it has to construct a plan. Since the agents are non-cooperative, they insist on planning independently and do not want to revise their individual plans when the joint plan has to be assembled from the individual plans. We present a general formal framework to study some computational aspects of this non-cooperative coordination problem and we establish some complexity results to identify some of the factors that contribute to the complexity of this problem. Finally, we illustrate our approach with an application to coordination in multi-modal logistic planning.     

Information,Community, and Action: How Nonprofit Organizations Use Social Media*

The rapid diffusion of “microblogging” services such as Twitter is ushering in a new era of possibilities for organizations to communicate with and engage their core stakeholders and the general public. To enhance understanding of the communicative functions microblogging serves for organizations, this study examines the Twitter utilization practices of the 100 largest nonprofit organizations in the United States. The analysis reveals there are three key functions of microblogging updates—“information,”“community,” and “action.” Though the informational use of microblogging is extensive, nonprofit organizations are better at using Twitter to strategically engage their stakeholders via dialogic and community‐building practices than they have been with traditional websites. The adoption of social media appears to have engendered new paradigms of public engagement.     

Social Mental Shaping: Modelling the Impact of Sociality on the Mental States of Autonomous Agents

This paper presents a framework that captures how the social nature of agents that are situated in a multi-agent environment impacts upon their individual mental states. Roles and social relationships provide an abstraction upon which we develop the notion of social mental shaping . This allows us to extend the standard Belief-Desire-Intention model to account for how common social phenomena (e.g. cooperation, collaborative problem-solving and negotiation) can be integrated into a unified theoretical perspective that reflects a fully explicated model of the autonomous agent's mental state.     

社会Agent的BDO模型

目前MAS中思维状态的研究趋势是在个体模型中加入社会思维属性,研究社会承诺、依赖、联合意图的推理关系。在BDI模型中,以意图为中心的观点不描述社会Agent。该文分析了以竭力为中心的Agent思维状态研究存在的问题,提出MAS的分层模型,并提出以信念、愿望和义务作为基本思维属性（简称BDO）来描述Agent的思维状态和社会属性,给出了BDO逻辑和语义模型,考虑了奖励、惩罚、承诺和承诺解除问题,并对队、组织、组织意图等现象给出了描述。该文力图更自然地描述社会性Agent的思维状态和群体概念,是对Rao和Georgeff提出的BDI模型的改进。最后通过一个例子说明了BDO的表达能力。进一步的工作包括建立更为完善的语义模型、结合各个思维属性的动态修正语义给出BDO Agent的动态模型以及给出基于BDO逻辑框架的Agent／MAS实现结构。     

基于ACP的动态网民群体运动组织建模与计算实验研究

由互联网促成的社会运动组织一经出现, 就受到了广大社会学者以及计算机领域专家的广泛关注. 一方面, 互联网特别是移动互联网在整合信息、引发共振、实时分享及高度互动等方面的特性, 为网民行为的大规模快速聚集提供了直通渠道, 使得多角度超视距观察并研究在线人群复杂行为及其组织特性成为可能; 另一方面, 这一研究在社会化媒体营销、共享经济、非军事组织行动中的应用意义愈加显著. 本文引入群体行为动力学和社会运动组织理论的研究, 提出基于ACP的动态网民群体运动组织(Cyber movement organizations, CMOs)研究方法. 本文工作首先使用多智能体建模方法构造双层结构的人工社区模型, 以此为基础对动态网民的个体以及群体动态组织行为展开计算实验探讨, 重点阐释了社区用户的交互行为机制及群体组织活动的建模机制, 为揭示微观个体简单行为对于宏观群体复杂涌现现象的影响奠定基础.     

Toward A Formalism for Conversation Protocols Using Joint Intention Theory

Conversation protocols are used to achieve certain goals or to bring about certain states in the world. Therefore, one may identify the landmarks or the states that must be brought about during the goal–directed execution of a protocol. Accordingly, the landmarks, characterized by propositions that are true in the state represented by that landmark, are the most important aspect of a protocol. Families of conversation protocols can be expressed formally as partially ordered landmarks after the landmarks necessary to achieve a goal have been identified. Concrete protocols represented as joint action expressions can, then, be derived from the partially ordered landmarks and executed directly by joint intention interpreters. This approach of applying Joint Intention theory to protocols also supports flexibility in the actions used to get to landmarks, shortcutting protocol execution, automatic exception handling, and correctness criterion for protocols and protocol compositions.     

Exploring the Impact of Social Networking on Communication in Organizations

ABSTRACT

Social networking technology has the potential to transform how organizations communicate, cooperate, and connect with key stakeholders. Our research explores how social networking technologies are deployed within organizations and how the use of these technologies is related to effectiveness in organizational communication and promotion. We also identify the facilitating factors and constraints around the use of social networking tools for communication. To examine these questions, we conducted interviews with 131 senior level executives across a broad range of organizations and employed both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis. The executives were asked to rate numerically and then discuss in narrative form a series of questions about IT strategy and issues affecting social networking in their organization. We find important differences both in the types of tools used as well as how they are used and discuss the implications of our findings for companies seeking to more effectively harness social networking technologies.     

On Social Constraints for Rational Agents

We define and study social constraints for rational agents. Our work is complementary to work on mechanism design in economics and Distributed Artificial Intelligence, as well as to work on artificial social systems. In our setting agents are rational but obey social laws that are imposed by the system's designer. Agents can be obliged to obey some social constraints, but not any constraint can serve as part of the social law. The main theme of our work is the study of settings where there are restrictions on the constraints that can serve as social laws. In such settings the designer should find social laws that can be imposed on the agents, and that will lead rational agents to satisfactory behavior. Our study is carried out in the context of zero‐sum and general‐sum games (with complete and with incomplete information) in extensive form.     

Coordinating Multiple Agents via Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we attempt to use reinforcement learning techniques to solve agent coordination problems in task-oriented environments. The Fuzzy Subjective Task Structure model (FSTS) is presented to model the general agent coordination. We show that an agent coordination problem modeled in FSTS is a Decision-Theoretic Planning (DTP) problem, to which reinforcement learning can be applied. Two learning algorithms, coarse-grained and fine-grained, are proposed to address agents coordination behavior at two different levels. The coarse-grained algorithm operates at one level and tackle hard system constraints, and the fine-grained at another level and for soft constraints. We argue that it is important to explicitly model and explore coordination-specific (particularly system constraints) information, which underpins the two algorithms and attributes to the effectiveness of the algorithms. The algorithms are formally proved to converge and experimentally shown to be effective.     

利用移动代理提高网络管理性能的研究

目前针对基于移动代理的网管系统的性能研究较少，且多局限于与传统的集中式网管系统的性能比较．本文致力于提高基于移动代理的网管系统的自身性能．首先分析了现有的基于移动代理的网管系统的性能通弊，然后针对这些缺陷分别给出了解决策略．仿真实验结果表明，将改进后的方案运用在原有的基于移动代理的网管系统后，在一定程度上提高了管理性能．     

Negotiating Dialogue Games

Recently in the field of agent communication, many authors have adopted the view of interaction as a joint activity regulated by means of dialogue games. It is argued in particular that this approach should increase the flexibility of dialogues by allowing a variety of game compositions. In this research note, we present a framework suited to this feature. A preliminary attempt to capture the negotiation phase (which allows agents to agree upon the dialogue game currently regulating their conversation) is discussed.     

An Efficient Two-Phase Model for Computing Influential Nodes in Social Networks Using Social Actions

在社会网络的影响的测量在数据采矿社区收到了很多注意。影响最大化指发现尽量利用信息或产品采纳的有影响的用户的过程。在真实设置,在一个社会网络的一个用户的影响能被行动的集合建模(例如,份额,重新鸣叫,注释) 在其出版物以后由网络的另外的用户表现了。就我们的知识而言,在文学的所有建议模型同等地对待这些行动。然而,它是明显的一工具少些比一样的出版的份额影响的一份出版物相似。这建议每个行动有它影响的自己的水平(或重要性) 。在这份报纸,我们建议一个模型(叫的社会基于行动的影响最大化模型, SAIM ) 为在社会网络的影响最大化。在 SAIM,行动没在测量一个个人的影响力量同等地被考虑,并且它由二主要的步组成。在第一步,我们在社会网络计算每个个人的影响力量。这影响力量用 PageRank 从用户行动被计算。在这步的结束,我们得到每个节点被它的影响力量在标记的一个加权的社会网络。在 SAIM 的第二步,我们计算一个新概念说出 influence-BFS 树的使用的有影响的节点的一个最佳的集合。在大规模真实世界、合成的社会网络上进行的实验在计算揭示我们的模型 SAIM 的好表演,在可接受的时间规模,允许信息的最大的传播的有影响的节点的一个最小的集合。     

Personalized Tag Recommendation Using Social Influence

Tag recommendation encourages users to add more tags in bridging the semantic gap between human concept and the features of media object,which provides a feasible solution for content-based multimedia information retrieval.In this paper,we study personalized tag recommendation in a popular online photo sharing site - Flickr.Social relationship information of users is collected to generate an online social network.From the perspective of network topology,we propose node topological potential to characterize user’s social influence.With this metric,we distinguish different social relations between users and find out those who really have influence on the target users.Tag recommendations are based on tagging history and the latent personalized preference learned from those who have most influence in user’s social network.We evaluate our method on large scale real-world data.The experimental results demonstrate that our method can outperform the non-personalized global co-occurrence method and other two state-of-the-art personalized approaches using social networks.We also analyze the further usage of our approach for the cold-start problem of tag recommendation.     

利用分布式主动智能体检测灰度图像的对称轴

图像的对称性研究是模式识别和计算几何的重要内容,在目标识别、视觉监视和形状表示等研究中有一定的应用价值.提出一种利用分布式主动智能体提取灰度图像中的基本反射对称轴的新方法,它通过对智能体在局部图像环境中定居、发展以及迁徙和死亡等行为的模拟来检测、编组和连接显著的局部对称轴.该方法可以提取任意灰度图像中的基本反射对称轴,并且易于并行实现,关于自然图像的实验结果表明了它的有效性.