Petar Curkovic, Bojan Jerbic and Tomislav Stipancic (March 1st 2010). Comparison of Swarm Optimization and Genetic Algorithm for Mobile Robot Navigation, Swarm Robotics from Biology to Robotics, Ester Martinez Martin, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/8601.

Mário Cordeiro, Rui P. Sarmento, Pavel Brazdil and João Gama (October 31st 2018). Evolving Networks and Social Network Analysis Methods and Techniques, Social Media and Journalism - Trends, Connections, Implications, Ján Višňovský and Jana Radošinská, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.79041. 

Fuxiang Zhang (March 1st 2010). Optimization Design Method of IIR Digital Filters for Robot Force Position Sensors, Swarm Robotics from Biology to Robotics, Ester Martinez Martin, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/8602.

New Zealand

Vaccination is a standard public health intervention for controlling the spread of epidemics. However, the supply of vaccines is typically limited, and therefore, their deployment needs to be optimized. Further, vaccines are produced over time, so the strategies have to be temporal. We study the problem \prob{} of designing vaccination strategies, within available budget constraints, to minimize the spread of an outbreak. This is a challenging stochastic optimization problem. We design a bicriteria approximation algorithm, which combines a linear programming based rounding, along with the sample average approximation technique. Our approach also provides the empirical approximation factor for the problem instance, relative to the optimum. We find that the approximation factor is significantly better than the worst case bound, and, in practice, is a small constant factor. Further, our method shows significantly better performance than all prior heuristics for this problem. With additional pruning techniques, we are able to scale our algorithm to networks with millions of edges.

AAMAS 2020

Designing Effective and Practical Interventions to Contain Epidemics

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

We propose a game-theoretic approach to generalizing the classical Schelling model. At the core of our model are two features that did not receive much attention before. First, we allow multiple individuals to occupy the same location. Second, each individual's choice of location is influenced by their social network neighbors that also choose the same location. In addition, an individual's choice is influenced by others in the adjacent locations in a network-structured way, which captures the main spirit of the classical Schelling model and its numerous extensions. Our solution concept is a stable configuration represented as a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium (PSNE). We show that even for various special cases of the problem, computing or counting PSNE is provably hard. We give algorithms for computing PSNE, including efficient algorithms for several special cases. We highlight some of the attractive features of our model, such as predicting very few PSNE, through experiments.

Schelling Models with Localized Social Influence: A Game-Theoretic Framework

Report-sensitive spot-checking in peer grading systems

We develop a methodology for comparing two or more agent-based models that are developed for the same domain, but may differ in the particular data sets (e.g., geographical regions) to which they are applied, and in the structure of the model. Our approach is to learn a response surface in the common parameter space of the models and compare the regions corresponding to qualitatively different behaviors in the models. As an example, we develop an active learning algorithm to learn phase transition boundaries in contagion processes in order to compare two agent-based models of rooftop solar panel adoption.

An Active Learning Method for the Comparison of Agent-based Models

Deployment of a Plug-in multi-agent system for

Detection of anomalies and faults is a key element for long-term robot autonomy, because, together with subsequent diagnosis and recovery, allows to reach the required levels of robustness and persistency. The aim of my PhD thesis is to develop new techniques to model and quantitatively compare observed robot behaviors with nominal ones. My goal is to propose approaches for detecting anomalous behaviors of robot systems involved in complex long-term autonomy scenarios, both online, while robots are operating, and offline, after robots have completed a run of their tasks.

Modeling and Comparing Robot Behaviors for Anomaly Detection

Conventional Traffic Management System

a-Rank: Practically Scaling a-Rank through Stochatic Optimisation

A dark pool is a private forum for trading financial instruments such as equities and derivatives. The service is offered to traders, often representing large financial institutions, who aim to make large trades without telegraphing their intentions in a public venue such as the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ. Internally, the dark pool operates just like a public exchange, but the order book, a list of offers to buy and sell, is not visible to any of the participants. Only when matching orders are found the trade is executed and reported externally. Because the large orders are not visible to others, the risk of significant price moves is reduced. 

The operators of dark pools are trustworthy, but traders are notoriously suspicious. Traders are concerned about any ``leakage'' of information that might alert others to their intentions and cause price moves against them. The operator sees all orders posted by all participants, including sensitive information such as the volume of the order and the bid or ask price. Because the operator of the dark pool is usually a large financial institution with its own investments in the assets being traded, it may have conflicts of interest with the clients it serves in the dark pool. While such conflicts are mitigated by law and regulation, they continue to exist.

We propose new mechanism that reduce the need of traders to trust the operator of the dark pool. By adopting cryptographic techniques, we achieve a fully private and secure marketplace where sellers and buyers interact with the operator without exposing the volumes or prices of their orders to the operator or to any other counter party. These values remain secret until a matching order is found, and only afterward it will be revealed publicly. This provides a strictly stronger privacy guarantee compared to ordinary dark pools, and may lead to an increase in the trust of the participants to the system and reduce tension between participants and the operator.

Privacy Preserving Dark Pools

"On-demand ride-pooling (e.g., UberPool) has recently become popular because of its ability to lower costs for passengers while simultaneously increasing revenue for drivers and aggregation companies. Unlike in Taxi on Demand (ToD) services – where a vehicle is only assigned one passenger at a time – in on-demand ride-pooling, each (possibly partially filled) vehicle can be assigned a group of passenger requests with multiple different origin and destination pairs. To ensure near real-time response, existing solutions to the real-time ride-pooling problem are myopic in that they optimise the objective (e.g., maximise the number of passengers served) for the current time step without considering its effect on future assignments. This is because even a myopic assignment in ride-pooling involves considering what combinations of passenger requests that can be assigned to vehicles, which adds a layer of combinatorial complexity to the ToD problem.

A popular approach that addresses the limitations of myopic assignments in ToD problems is Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP). Existing ADP methods for ToD can only handle Linear Program (LP) based assignments, however, while the assignment problem in ride-pooling requires an Integer Linear Program (ILP) with bad LP relaxations. To this end, our key technical contribution is in providing a general ADP method that can learn from ILP-based assignments. Additionally, we handle the extra combinatorial complexity from combinations of passenger requests by using a Neural Network based approximate value function and show a connection to Deep Reinforcement Learning that allows us to learn this value-function with increased stability and sample-efficiency. We show that our approach outperforms past approaches on a real-world dataset by up to 16%, a significant improvement in city-scale transportation problems."

Neural Approximate Dynamic Programming for On-Demand Ride-Pooling

Large-scale screening for potential threats with limited resources and capacity for screening is a problem of interest at airports, seaports, and other ports of entry. Adversaries can observe screening procedures and arrive at a time when there will be gaps in screening due to limited resource capacities. To capture this game between ports and adversaries, this problem has been previously represented as a Stackelberg game, referred to as a Threat Screening Game (TSG). Given the significant complexity associated with solving TSGs and uncertainty in arrivals of customers, existing work has assumed that screenees arrive and are allocated security resources at the beginning of the time-window. In practice, screenees such as airport passengers arrive in bursts correlated with flight time and are not bound by fixed time-windows. To address this, we propose an online threat screening model in which the screening strategy is determined adaptively as a passenger arrives while satisfying a hard bound on acceptable risk of not screening a threat. To solve the online problem, we first reformulate it as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which the hard bound on risk translates to a constraint on the action space and then solve the resultant MDP using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). To this end, we provide a novel way to efficiently enforce linear inequality constraints on the action output in DRL. We show that our solution allows us to significantly reduce screenee wait time without compromising on the risk.

Designing Effective and Practical Interventions to Contain Epidemics

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Schelling Models with Localized Social Influence: A Game-Theoretic Framework

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Agents are Dead Long Live Agents !

Designing Effective and Practical Interventions to Contain Epidemics

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Schelling Models with Localized Social Influence: A Game-Theoretic Framework

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Agents are Dead Long Live Agents !

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