Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Proxy Voting Coordination Mechanisms: Determining How Agents Should Coordinate In A Continuous Preference Space, Michael D. Hegerhorst

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Illness, injury, and other impediments are common occurrences of everyday life. Such impediments prevent or deter voters from participating in important parts of the voting process, especially deliberation, bargaining, and the voting itself. Without participation, the results of the vote may change. There is a need to provide a system in which voters are still able to participate in important voting processes to ensure their vote is represented. We explore ‘proxy voting,’ a system in which voters are able to select another individual, or proxy, to vote on their behalf. By choosing a good proxy, a voter can still …

A Dynamic Behavioural Traffic Assignment Model With Strategic Agents, Johan Barthelemy, Timoteo Carletti

SMART Infrastructure Facility - Papers

Foresee traffic conditions and demand is a major issue nowadays that is very often approached using simulation tools. The aim of this work is to propose an innovative strategy to tackle such problem, relying on the presentation and analysis of a behavioural dynamic traffic assignment. The proposal relies on the assumption that travellers take routing policies rather than paths, leading us to introduce the possibility for each simulated agent to apply, in real time, a strategy allowing him to possibly re-route his path depending on the perceived local traffic conditions, jam and/or time already spent in his journey. The re-routing …

Principles And Experimentations Of Self-Organizing Embedded Agents Allowing Learning From Demonstration In Ambient Robotics, Nicolas R. Verstaevel, Christine Regis, Marie-Pierre Gleizes, Fabrice Robert

SMART Infrastructure Facility - Papers

Ambient systems are populated by many heterogeneous devices to provide adequate services to their users. The adaptation of an ambient system to the specific needs of its users is a challenging task. Because human-system interaction has to be as natural as possible, we propose an approach based on Learning from Demonstration (LfD). LfD is an interesting approach to generalize what has been observed during the demonstration to similar situations. However, using LfD in ambient systems needs adaptivity of the learning technique. We present ALEX, a multi-agent system able to dynamically learn and reuse contexts from demonstrations performed by a tutor. …

Collaboration And Health Care Diagnostics: An Agent Based Model Simulation, Sebastian Linde, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

This paper presents a simple ABM simulation that seeks to provide insight into the public health benefits that derive from greater collaboration among health care professionals. In particular, the paper compares the efficiency, delivery and timeliness of health care diagnostics under two contrasting paradigms–one in which collaboration is encouraged, and an- other where it is not. The preliminary results of this study suggest that while the effect of cooperation on aggregate public health depends on the patient search algorithm employed, its effect on overall efficiency and timeliness of health care diagnostics and treatment is significant and pos- itive. Since the …

Principles And Experimentations Of Self-Organizing Embedded Agents Allowing Learning From Demonstration In Ambient Robotic, Nicolas R. Verstaevel, Christine Regis, Marie-Pierre Gleizes, Fabrice Robert

SMART Infrastructure Facility - Papers

Ambient systems are populated by many heterogeneous devices to provide adequate services to its users. The adaptation of an ambient system to the specific needs of its users is a challenging task. Because human-system interaction has to be as natural as possible, we propose an approach based on Learning from Demonstration (LfD). However, using LfD in ambient systems needs adaptivity of the learning technique. We present ALEX, a multi-agent system able to dynamically learn and reuse contexts from demonstrations performed by a tutor. Results of experiments performed on both a real and a virtual robot show interesting properties of our …

A New Systematic And Flexible Method For Developing Hierarchical Decision-Making Models, Ulaş Beldek, Mehmet Kemal Leblebi̇ci̇oğlu

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The common practice in multilevel decision-making (DM) systems is to achieve the final decision by going through a finite number of DM levels. In this study, a new multilevel DM model is proposed. This model is called the hierarchical DM (HDM) model and it is supposed to provide a flexible way of interaction and information flow between the consecutive levels that allows policy changes in DM procedures if necessary. In the model, in the early levels, there are primary agents that perform DM tasks. As the levels increase, the information associated with these agents is combined through suitable processes and …

Epaminondas: Exploring Combat Tactics, David W. King, Gilbert L. Peterson

Faculty Publications

Epaminondas is a two-person, zero-sum strategy game that combines long-term strategic play with highly tactical move sequences. The game has two unique features that make it stand out from other games. The first feature is the creation of phalanxes, which are groups of pieces that can move as a whole unit. As the number of pieces in a phalanx increases, the mobility and capturing power of the phalanx also increases. The second feature differs from many other strategy games: when a player makes a crossing, a winning move in the game, the second player has an opportunity to respond. This …

Experimental Evidence For Heterogeneous Expectations In A Simple New Keynesian Framework, Atticus David Holm Graven

Business and Economics Honors Papers

This paper is a two-dimensional analysis of agent behavior in a standard New Keynesian (NK) Macroeconomic model. On the dimension of pure mathematics, we analyze the parameters of the NK model and of possible prediction rules. On the other dimension we continue a practice of empirical study of heterogeneous expectations with an experiment. The experiment will ask participants to make predictions of future output and inflation. Their responses will create a data-set upon which analysis will be performed to illuminate and corroborate current theories of economic decision making. The literature has shown that most agents' forecasting rules can be modeled …

Adapting In-Game Agent Behavior By Observation Of Players Using Learning Behavior Trees, Emmett Tomai, Roberto Flores

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper we describe Learning Behavior Trees, an extension of the popular game AI scripting technique. Behavior Trees provide an effective way for expert designers to describe complex, in-game agent behaviors. Scripted AI captures human intuition about the structure of behavioral decisions, but suffers from brittleness and lack of the natural variation seen in human players. Learning Behavior Trees are designed by a human designer, but then are trained by observation of players performing the same role, to introduce human-like variation to the decision structure. We show that, using this model, a single hand-designed Behavior Tree can cover a …

N-Phenethyl And N-Naphthylmethyl Isatins And Analogues As In Vitro Cytotoxic Agents, John Bremner, Stephen Pyne, Marie Ranson, Danielle Skropeta, Julie Locke, Lidia Matesic, Kara Perrow

Danielle Skropeta

Arange of N-phenethyl,N-phenacyl, and N-(1- and 2-naphthylmethyl) derivatives of 5,7-dibromoisatin 2 were prepared byN-alkylation reactions. Their activity against human monocyte-like histiocytic lymphoma (U937), leukemia (Jurkat), and breast carcinoma (MDA-MB-231) cell lines was assessed. The results allowed further development of structureactivity relationships. The compound 5,7-dibromo-N-(1-naphthylmethyl)-1H-indole-2,3-dione 5a was the most potent against U937 cells with an IC50 value of 0.19 microM.

Revealing Indigenous Indonesian Traditional Medicine: Anti-Infective Agents, Paul A. Keller, Ari Satia Nugraha

Paul Keller

Indonesia is rich in medicinal plants which the population has used traditionally from generation to generation for curing diseases. Our interest in the treatment of infectious diseases has lead to the investigation of traditional Indonesian treatments. In this review, we present a comprehensive review of ethnopharmacologically directed screening in Indonesian medicinal plants to search for new anti-viral, antimalarial, anti-bacterial and anti-fungal agents. Some potent drug leads have been isolated from Indonesian medicinal plants. Further research is still required for the lead development as well as the search for new bioactive compounds from the enormous medicinal plant resources.

Big Data: Immediate Opportunities And Longer Term Challenges, Jens Pohl, Kym Jason Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The transformation of words, locations, and human interactions into digital data forms the basis of trend detection and information extraction opportunities that can be automated with the increasing availability of relatively inexpensive computer storage and processing technology. Trend detection, which focuses on what, is facilitated by the ability to apply analytics to an entire corpus of data instead of a random sample. Since the corpus essentially includes all data within a population there is no need to apply any of the precautions that are in order to ensure the representativeness of a sample in traditional statistical analysis. Several examples are …

The Application Of Embodied Conversational Agents For Mentoring African American Stem Doctoral Students, Kinnis Gosha

All Dissertations

This dissertation presents the design, development and short-term evaluation of an embodied conversational agent designed to mentor human users. An embodied conversational agent (ECA) was created and programmed to mentor African American computer science majors on their decision to pursue graduate study in computing. Before constructing the ECA, previous research in the fields of embodied conversational agents, relational agents, mentorship, telementorship and successful mentoring programs and practices for African American graduate students were reviewed. A survey used to find areas of interest of the sample population. Experts were then interviewed to collect information on those areas of interest and a …

The Representation Of Context In Computer Software, Hisham Assal, Kym Pohl, Jens G. Pohl

Hisham Assal

Computers do not have the equivalent of a human cognitive system and therefore store data simply as the numbers and words that are entered into the computer. For a computer to interpret data it requires an information structure that provides at least some level of context. This can be accomplished utilizing an ontology of objects with characteristics, semantic behavior, and a rich set of relationships to create a virtual version of real world situations and provide the context within which intelligent logic (e.g., agents) can automatically operate. This paper discusses the process of developing ontologies that serve to provide context …

Modelling Awareness Of Agents Using Policies, Amir Talaei-Khoei, Pradeep Ray, Nandan Parameswaran, Ghassan Beydoun

Associate Professor Ghassan Beydoun

In addition to cooperation, research in disaster management exposes the need for policy awareness to recognize relevant information in enhancing cooperation. Intelligent software agents have previously been employed for problem solving in disaster situations but without incorporating how the agents can create or model awareness. This paper presents an awareness based modelling method, called MAAP, to maintain awareness of software agents of a given set of policies. The paper presents preliminary results indicating that the use of policies as a source of awareness, as facilitated by MAAP, is a potentially effective method to enhance cooperation.

Modelling With Agents, Estefania Argente, Ghassan Beydoun, Ruben Fuentes-Fernandez, Brian Henderson-Sellers, Graham Low

Associate Professor Ghassan Beydoun

No abstract provided.

Secure Mobile Agents With Designated Hosts, Qi Zhang, Yi Mu, Minjie Zhang, Robert H. Deng

Associate Professor Minjie Zhang

Mobile agents often travel in a hostile environment where their security and privacy could be compromised by any party including remote hosts in which agents visit and get services. It was proposed in the literature that the host visited by an agent should jointly sign a service agreement with the agent's home, where a proxy-signing model was deployed and every host in the agent system can sign. We observe that this actually poses a serious problem in that a host that should be excluded from an underlying agent network could also send a signed service agreement. In order to solve …

P2p Distributed Intrusion Detections By Using Mobile Agents, Dayong Ye, Quan Bai, Minjie Zhang, Zhen Ye

Associate Professor Minjie Zhang

Traditional hierarchical intrusion detection systems have a central manager which attracts hackers to attack and might overload when there are too many client requests. To overcome these drawbacks, some researchers suggested to apply Peer-to-Peer approaches in intrusion detection. Most current Peer-to-Peer intrusion detection systems only allow hosts to collect related information from "neighbours" (one hop hosts). The limitation of information sources may lead a system to make inaccurate decisions. In this paper, we propose a Mobile Agent Based Peer-to-Peer Distributed Intrusion Detection Framework. Agents are included in this framework to achieve intrusion detections. In addition, a mobile agent migration strategy …

Agents, Idols, And Icons, Pascal Perez

Professor Pascal Perez

Since the early 1960s, Artificial Intelligence has cherished the ambition to design an artificial cognitive machine able to reproduce intimate aspects of human behaviour. Distributed Artificial Intelligence and its most recent avatars—Multi- Agent Systems—have developed the concept towards social interactions and societal dynamics, attracting the attention of sociologists and ethnographers who found new ways to elaborate or validate their theories. But populations of cognitive agents aren’t the real thing, despite the efforts of their designers. Furthermore, one must cautiously examine the rationale behind these often incredibly complex arrangements of algorithms, in order to assess the usefulness of such exercises. As …

Secure Mobile Agents With Designated Hosts, Qi Zhang, Yi Mu, Minjie Zhang, Robert H. Deng

Professor Yi Mu

Mobile agents often travel in a hostile environment where their security and privacy could be compromised by any party including remote hosts in which agents visit and get services. It was proposed in the literature that the host visited by an agent should jointly sign a service agreement with the agent's home, where a proxy-signing model was deployed and every host in the agent system can sign. We observe that this actually poses a serious problem in that a host that should be excluded from an underlying agent network could also send a signed service agreement. In order to solve …

Decision-Theoretic Meta-Reasoning In Partially Observable And Decentralized Settings, Alan Scott Carlin

Open Access Dissertations

This thesis examines decentralized meta-reasoning. For a single agent or multiple agents, it may not be enough for agents to compute correct decisions if they do not do so in a timely or resource efficient fashion. The utility of agent decisions typically increases with decision quality, but decreases with computation time. The reasoning about one's computation process is referred to as meta-reasoning. Aspects of meta-reasoning considered in this thesis include the reasoning about how to allocate computational resources, including when to stop one type of computation and begin another, and when to stop all computation and report an answer. Given …

Revealing Indigenous Indonesian Traditional Medicine: Anti-Infective Agents, Paul A. Keller, Ari Satia Nugraha

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

Indonesia is rich in medicinal plants which the population has used traditionally from generation to generation for curing diseases. Our interest in the treatment of infectious diseases has lead to the investigation of traditional Indonesian treatments. In this review, we present a comprehensive review of ethnopharmacologically directed screening in Indonesian medicinal plants to search for new anti-viral, antimalarial, anti-bacterial and anti-fungal agents. Some potent drug leads have been isolated from Indonesian medicinal plants. Further research is still required for the lead development as well as the search for new bioactive compounds from the enormous medicinal plant resources.

Modelling Awareness Of Agents Using Policies, Amir Talaei-Khoei, Pradeep Ray, Nandan Parameswaran, Ghassan Beydoun

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

In addition to cooperation, research in disaster management exposes the need for policy awareness to recognize relevant information in enhancing cooperation. Intelligent software agents have previously been employed for problem solving in disaster situations but without incorporating how the agents can create or model awareness. This paper presents an awareness based modelling method, called MAAP, to maintain awareness of software agents of a given set of policies. The paper presents preliminary results indicating that the use of policies as a source of awareness, as facilitated by MAAP, is a potentially effective method to enhance cooperation.

Solving The Data Deluge Problem, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The paper postulates that the information technology revolution that is commonly referred to as the Information Age is currently in a transition stage between data-processing and knowledge management that should be more aptly referred to as the Data Age. Symptoms of this transition stage are a data deluge problem that is evidenced by the inability of human computer-users to effectively analyze and draw useful conclusions from the overwhelming volume of data that is being collected, the increasing complexity of networked systems, and the acknowledged vulnerability of virtually all existing digital systems to cyber security threats.

The author suggests that the …

Overseer: A Mobile Context-Aware Collaboration And Task Management System For Disaster Response, Faisal B. Luqman, Martin L. Griss

Martin L Griss

Efficient collaboration and task management is challenging in distributed, dynamically-formed organizations such as ad hoc disaster response teams. Ineffective collaboration may result in poor performance and possible loss of life. In this paper, we present an open multi-agent system, called Overseer, that leverages context information in a mobile setting to facilitate collaboration and task allocation for disaster response. We describe our system architecture, deployment, evaluation metrics, challenges and proposed solutions. We also show how mobile context can be used to create dynamic rolebased assignments to support collaboration and effective task management

Implementing Reactive Bdi Agents With User-Given Constraints And Objectives, Aniruddha Dasgupta, Aditya K. Ghose

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

CASO is an agent-oriented programming language based on AgentSpeak(L), one of the most influential abstract languages based on the beliefs-desires-intentions (BDI) architecture. For many applications, it is more convenient to let the user provide in real time, a more elaborate specification consisting of constraints and preferences over possible goal states. Then, let the system discover a plan for the most desirable among the feasible goal states. CASO incorporates constraints and objectives into the symbolic approach of reactive BDI model which lead to better expressive capabilities as well as more efficient computation. Jason is a fully-fledged interpreter for a much improved …

The Representation Of Context In Computer Software, Hisham Assal, Kym Pohl, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Computers do not have the equivalent of a human cognitive system and therefore store data simply as the numbers and words that are entered into the computer. For a computer to interpret data it requires an information structure that provides at least some level of context. This can be accomplished utilizing an ontology of objects with characteristics, semantic behavior, and a rich set of relationships to create a virtual version of real world situations and provide the context within which intelligent logic (e.g., agents) can automatically operate.

This paper discusses the process of developing ontologies that serve to …

A Method For Introducing Artificial Perception (Ap) To Improve Human Behavior Representation (Hbr) Using Agents In Synthetic Environments, Randall Bartholomew Garrett

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

While psychology has shown that perception is very important for the human decision process, agent perception has not been covered in sufficient detail within the agent directed simulation field. To contribute to such a solution, an open challenge lies in capturing the knowledge of human sciences, such as psychology, and making this knowledge usable for engineers. This dissertation addresses perception by describing an experimental method where agent perception simulates human perception. In particular, it presents engineering methods based on accepted psychological approaches resulting in a proof of concept. To prove the feasibility, an Artificial Perception (AP) meta-model is presented using …

Secure Mobile Agents With Designated Hosts, Qi Zhang, Yi Mu, Minjie Zhang, Robert H. Deng

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Mobile agents often travel in a hostile environment where their security and privacy could be compromised by any party including remote hosts in which agents visit and get services. It was proposed in the literature that the host visited by an agent should jointly sign a service agreement with the agent's home, where a proxy-signing model was deployed and every host in the agent system can sign. We observe that this actually poses a serious problem in that a host that should be excluded from an underlying agent network could also send a signed service agreement. In order to solve …

Agent-Organized Network Coalition Formation, Levi L. Barton

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis presents work based on modeling multi-agent coalition formation in an agent organized network. Agents choose which agents to connect with in the network. Tasks are periodically introduced into the network. Each task is defined by a set of skills that agents must fill. Agents form a coalition to complete a task by either joining an existing coalition a network neighbor belongs to, or by proposing a new coalition for a task no agents have proposed a coalition for. We introduce task patience and strategic task selection and show that they improve the number of successful coalitions agents form. …