New Zealand

Olaf van Kooten, Caroline Nevejan, Frances Brazier, Michel Oey and Coen Hubers (December 20th 2017). SamenMarkt®, a Proposal for Restoring Trust in the Horticultural Fresh Food Market by Using Multi-Agent System Technology, Agricultural Value Chain, Gokhan Egilmez, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.70140.

We call for attention to climate change research as a domain of application for multiagent technologies. The multiagent nature of climate change challenges and successful application of multiagent methods in decentralized power grid systems, market organization, and industrial engineering, could improve our ability to address decarbonization (climate change mitigation) and to deal with some unavoidable consequences of global warming (climate change adaptation). We review major challenges to which the community of multiagent systems can contribute, highlight open research problems and argue for the application of multiagent models and solution concepts in a variety of issues related to this global challenge.


AAMAS 2020

Multiagent Climate Change Research

multiagent research for global challenges

emerging applications of agent-based systems

agents for climate change

innovative agents and multiagent applications

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally-respected archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

Browse keynotes, discussions, panels and over 300 presentations.


AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). 

technical paper

Ethics is inherently a multiagent concern. However, research on AI ethics today is dominated by work on individual agents: (1) how an autonomous robot or car may harm or (differentially) benefit people in hypothetical situations (the so-called trolley problems) and (2) how a machine learning algorithm may produce biased decisions or recommendations. The societal framework is largely omitted.

To develop new foundations for ethics in AI, we adopt a sociotechnical stance in which agents (as technical entities) help autonomous social entities or principals (people and organizations). This multiagent conception of a sociotechnical system (STS) captures how ethical concerns arise in the mutual interactions of multiple stakeholders. These foundations would enable us to realize ethical STSs that incorporate social and technical controls to respect stated ethical postures of the agents in the STSs. The envisioned foundations require new thinking, along two broad themes, on how to realize (1) an STS that reflects its stakeholders’ values and (2) individual agents that function effectively in such an STS.


New Foundations of Ethical Multiagent Systems

We present an argumentation-supported explanation generating system, called Schedule Explainer, that assists with makespan scheduling. Our stand-alone generic tool explains to a lay user why a resource allocation schedule is good or not, and offers actions to improve the schedule given the user’s constraints. Schedule Explainer provides actionable textual explanations via an interactive graphical interface. We illustrate our system with a proof-of-concept application tool in a nurse rostering scenario whereby a shift-lead nurse aims to account for unexpected events by rescheduling some patient procedures to nurses and is aided by the system to do so.


AI-assisted Schedule Explainer for Nurse Rostering

In this demo, we present a Consensus-based Group Decision Support System that makes use of a Multi-Agent Microservices approach. The proposed system comprises a Client App, an API Gateway and a set of Microservices where different Artificial Intelligence methods are implemented. It allows to create and manage Multiple Criteria Decision Problems and to support dispersed decisionmakers, allowing them to take advantage of the benefits associated to face-to-face Group Decision-Making processes.


A Consensus-based Group Decision Support System using a Multi-Agent MicroServices Approach

Agents that adapt to their user need to have knowledge of their user and expertise on how best to adapt to that type of user. In this paper we describe the addition of an agent’s expertise and collection of machine-learnt user profiles to the proposed extended FAtiMA (Fearnot AffecTive Mind Architecture) cognitive agent architecture. A study to evaluate the extended architecture is presented which compares the benefit (i.e. reduced stress and increased rapport) of tailoring dialogue (i.e. empathic or neutral) to the specific user.


User-Models to drive an Adaptive Virtual Advisor

Agents that adapt to their user need to have knowledge of their user and expertise on how best to adapt to that type of user. In this paper we describe the addition of an agent’s expertise and collection of machine-learnt user profiles to the proposed extended FAtiMA (Fearnot AffecTive Mind Architecture) cognitive agent architecture. A study to evaluate the extended architecture is presented which compares the benefit (i.e. reduced stress and increased rapport) of tailoring dialogue (i.e. empathic or neutral) to the specific user.

We will introduce interactive, integrative, quality assurance and live observability facilities to help on collaborative programming of multi-agent systems.


A Framework for Collaborative and Interactive Agent-oriented Developer Operations

"Reinforcement learning (RL) methods learn optimal decisions in the presence of a stationary environment. However, the stationary assumption on the environment is very restrictive. In many real world problems like traffic signal control, robotic applications, etc., one often encounters situations with non-stationary environments and in these scenarios, RL methods yield sub-optimal decisions. In this presentation, I talk about the problem of developing RL methods that obtain optimal decisions in a non-stationary environment. The goal of this problem is to maximize the long-term discounted reward accrued when the underlying model of the environment changes over time. To achieve this, we first adapt a change point algorithm to detect change in the statistics of the environment and then develop an RL algorithm that maximizes the long-run reward accrued. I illustrate that our change point method detects change in the model of the environment effectively and thus facilitates the RL algorithm in maximizing the long-run reward. In our work, we further validate the effectiveness of the proposed solution on non-stationary random Markov decision processes, a sensor energy management problem and a traffic signal control problem.
"


Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Autonomous Adaptive Agents

"Our PhD research is concerned with the task of achieving cooperation in a system of competitive agents which cannot be explicitly controlled. To this end, it examines the problem from the system’s point of view, without restricting the agents’ behavior or requiring specific knowledge about their decision-making.
The governance of the MAS will be achieved via a dynamically adaptive governing policy based on a set of rules, which leaves full autonomy to the individual agents, but reacts to their actions via suitable changes of the environment. The mechanism is designed to lead to system-level cooperation while only assuming that the agents follow their own self-interested motives."


Achieving Emergent Governance in Competitive Multi-Agent Systems

This is an overview of my doctoral work studying inequality in social networks. The focus of this work is to design fairer algorithms that take into account the networks structure as well as community affiliations and individual incentives. I'll show my work in this field in three applications: recommendation algorithms, information diffusion, and partition algorithms. 


Algorithmic Fairness for Networked Algorithms

"Recent years have seen a push towards deploying fully autonomous robots in large, complex domains such as autonomous driving, space exploration, and service robots. However, legal, ethical, or technical constraints have limited the extent of these systems' employable autonomy. In order to successfully achieve their intended goals, these systems must utilize assistance from humans to compensate for their limitations. For such systems to be successful over the course of a long-term deployment, they must both be cognizant of their own competence and have the ability to improve this competence over time in a safe way. 
Motivated by practical concerns faced in industry, 
this thesis provides a formal model for such a human-agent system to reason about its own competence and aims in future work to provide effective ways of safely improving the competence of the system over the course of its deployment."


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New Foundations of Ethical Multiagent Systems

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Optimal Swarm Strategy for Dynamic Target Search and Tracking

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