Papers by William Lawless
Autonomous human-machine teams: Reality constrains logic, but hides the complexity of data dependency
Data Science in Finance and Economics, 2022
Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, 2011
Design of controllers for teams of mobile autonomous systems presents many challenges that have b... more Design of controllers for teams of mobile autonomous systems presents many challenges that have been addressed in biological systems, such as behavior-based control paradigms that are decentralized, distributed, scalable, and robust. Quorum sensing is a distributed, decentralized decision-making process used by bacteria and by social insects to coordinate group behaviors and perform complex tasks. It is used by bacteria to control the colony behavior for a variety of functions, such as biofilm construction or initiating pathogenicity inside a host. It is used by social insects including the ant Temnothorax albipennis to collectively evaluate and select from amongst potentially many new nesting sites.Honeybees (Apis mellifera) use quorum sensing to collectively choose a new nesting site when the swarm grows too large and needs to split. It is shown that the quorum sensing paradigm may be used to provide robust decentralized team coordination and collective decision-making in mobile autonomous teams performing complex tasks. In this effort quorum sensing-inspired techniques are developed and applied to the design of a decentralized controller for a team of mobile autonomous agents surveying a field containing buried landmines.
AI Magazine, 2014
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the AAAI 20... more The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the AAAI 2014 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, March 24–26, 2014. The titles of the eight symposia were Applied Computational Game Theory, Big Data Becomes Personal: Knowledge into Meaning, Formal Verification and Modeling in Human-Machine Systems, Implementing Selves with Safe Motivational Systems and Self-Improvement, The Intersection of Robust Intelligence and Trust in Autonomous Systems, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Robotics, Qualitative Representations for Robots, and Social Hacking and Cognitive Security on the Internet and New Media). This report contains summaries of the symposia, written, in most cases, by the cochairs of the symposium.
Today, a global scientific and policy consensus exists in support of deep geological disposal [14... more Today, a global scientific and policy consensus exists in support of deep geological disposal [14]. Whether individual nations, especially the US, promote trust for this consensus is the subject of our review. In line with our past research (see [4] through [13]), we provide an overview of government and stakeholder contributions toward building trust in the decisions for the disposal of high-level radioactive wastes in the USA, Japan, UK and Europe. What is unique about a US repository is that the US has rejected its site for political, not scientific, reasons. What is unique about a repository in Japan is the nearness of its possible sites to earthquake zones. What is unique about a repository in Europe is the pursuit of multiple sites instead of one site as in the US or Japan. UNITED STATES
Organizational Case Study: Theory and mathematical specifications for an Agent Based Model (ABM)
This case study found that a military medical department research center (MDRC) with access to ad... more This case study found that a military medical department research center (MDRC) with access to advanced information technology was struggling to determine the quality of the residents it trains and to measure their scholarly productivity. Yet snapshots in time and inevitable researcher biases restrict case studies to hindsight rather than proactive sources of organizational solutions. Case studies guided by theory, however, have illuminated and tested many of the organizational principles that have been discovered. Unlike simple Newtonian mechanics, interactions among organizational members are interdependent with the interviews that a case study collects to establish a base line. Consequently, case study measurements collapse organizational interactions, losing enough information to elude a science of the fundamental interaction. But first principles can be discovered if the uncertainty left from the collapse of interactions can be predicted and exploited for key interdependent variables: planning and execution; or resources and time.
Frontiers in Physics
Computational autonomy has begun to receive significant attention, but neither the theory nor the... more Computational autonomy has begun to receive significant attention, but neither the theory nor the physics is sufficiently able to design and operate an autonomous human-machine team or system (HMS). In this physics-in-progress, we review the shift from laboratory studies, which have been unable to advance the science of autonomy, to a theory of autonomy in open and uncertain environments based on autonomous human systems along with supporting evidence in the field. We attribute the need for this shift to the social sciences being primarily focused on a science of individual agents, whether for humans or machines, a focus that has been unable to generalize to new situations, new applications, and new theory. Specifically, the failure of traditional systems predicated on the individual to observe, replicate, or model what it means to even be the social is at the very heart of the impediment to be conquered and overcome as a prelude to the mathematical physics we explore. As part of th...
Interdependence: A mathematical approach to the autonomy of human-machine systems
Human Factors in Robots, Drones and Unmanned Systems
We update our theory of interdependence for autonomous human-machine teams operating in open syst... more We update our theory of interdependence for autonomous human-machine teams operating in open systems (A-HMT-S). In closed systems, desired outcomes can be easily obtained with rational models (e.g., game theory); there, uncertainty can only be studied as part of a system’s internal com-plexity. In hindsight, the problems with closed system models are obvious: they are fragile, hard to replicate, and not generalizable, the latter being the fatal flaw for autonomous human-machine teams and systems. Surprisingly, no amount or aggregation of data from individuals can be recombined to replicate social data. In contrast, with open systems, interdependence theo-ry is state dependent, reactive to every situation and change, especially the environmental and social uncertainty caused by competition or conflict. More important, in contrast to social science’s reliance on the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data derived from individuals, interde-pendence theory is generalizable...
Engineering for emergence in information fusion systems: A review of some challenges
Human-Machine Shared Contexts, 2020
Modern Information Fusion (IF) systems are faced with evolving operational environments where hum... more Modern Information Fusion (IF) systems are faced with evolving operational environments where human and intelligent systems will function as a team to achieve mission objectives. These evolving operational contexts demand a full spectrum dynamic response of ‘data-to-decision’ from IF systems. Traditional information extraction and fusion levels typically address the “data” end of the spectrum, while recent advancement in Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches are being used for the “decisions” end of the spectrum. However, the IF system behavior emerges from the various complex interactions that take place between different fusion levels (including human interaction), the operational context, and the employed AI/ML techniques. In this paper, we explore this emergent behavior of the IF system and argue that holistic system design and evaluation techniques, as offered by System Engineering (SE), provide means to recognize and characterize this emergent behavior. Furthermore, we describe the research challenges for future IF systems that will enable managing emergence by leveraging SE, while exploiting the context-aware information fusion aided by the advancements in AI/ML.
Exploiting Interdependence in Autonomous Human-Machine Systems to Avoid Disaggregation and Vulnerability
Advances in Simulation and Digital Human Modeling, 2021
AI Magazine, 2019
The AAAI 2019 Spring Series was held Monday through Wednesday, March 25–27, 2019 on the campus of... more The AAAI 2019 Spring Series was held Monday through Wednesday, March 25–27, 2019 on the campus of Stanford University, adjacent to Palo Alto, California. The titles of the nine symposia were Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Machines, and Human Awareness: User Interventions, Intuition and Mutually Constructed Context; Beyond Curve Fitting — Causation, Counterfactuals and Imagination-Based AI; Combining Machine Learning with Knowledge Engineering; Interpretable AI for Well-Being: Understanding Cognitive Bias and Social Embeddedness; Privacy- Enhancing Artificial Intelligence and Language Technologies; Story-Enabled Intelligence; Towards Artificial Intelligence for Collaborative Open Science; Towards Conscious AI Systems; and Verification of Neural Networks.
AI Bookie
AI Magazine, 2019
The AI Bookie column documents highlights from AI Bets, an online forum for the creation of adjud... more The AI Bookie column documents highlights from AI Bets, an online forum for the creation of adjudicatable predictions and bets about the future of AI. While it is easy to make a prediction about the future, this forum was created to help researchers craft predictions whose accuracy can be clearly and unambiguously judged when they come due. The bets will be documented on line, and regularly in this publication in The AI Bookie. We encourage bets that are rigorously and scientifically argued. We discourage bets that are too general to be evaluated, or too specific to an institution or individual. The goal is not to continue to feed the media frenzy and pundit predictions about AI, but rather to curate and promote bets whose outcomes will provide useful feedback to the scientific community. Place your bets! Please go to ai.sciencebets.org
Subsequent behaviour can erase evidence of dissonance-induced attitude change
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1992
The quantum model of social decision-making
Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Oct 6, 2002
The shift from individual agent to group perspective, the major unsolved problem in social psycho... more The shift from individual agent to group perspective, the major unsolved problem in social psychology, precludes realistic models of human decision-making for autonomous agents. Allport was not alone in recognizing this problem. Luce and Raiffa concluded that traditional mathematical logic based on the individual rational perspective, exemplified by the independent uncertainties in game theory between actors and observers as they interact, had been unable to capture social processes such as decision-making. Group theorists, such as Levine and Moreland, agree that a new model must be constructed to replace the individual rational model, primarily aggregated individual self-report data from decision participants or their scientific observers, to study unseen effects of social interaction, like Giddens' identification of unintended social consequences from intentional behavior. Philosophers have long recognized aspects of this problem with Aristotle's distinction between mathematics and physical objects to Descartes mind-body dualism and James' complementarity between thinking and action. But the problem remains unsolved and largely ignored. Our approach is to develop Bohr's social quantum model (SQM), to our knowledge, the only theory to model the conjugate uncertainties that exist interdependently between actors and observers entangled in an interaction. With SQM, the immediate goal is to derive and explore the role of argumentation in social decision-making; the ultimate goal is to develop and apply a general theory of social groups.
Perturbation Theory: A Quantum Model of Organizations, Classical Information, and Perturbations
PsycEXTRA Dataset
Organizational Metrics: A Progress Report
ABSTRACT
Perturbations, Organizational Structure, and the Measurement Problem
1 Professor, Paine College, 1235 15th Street, Augusta, GA 30901-3182; lawlessw@mail.paine.edu; ho... more 1 Professor, Paine College, 1235 15th Street, Augusta, GA 30901-3182; lawlessw@mail.paine.edu; homepage.mac.com/lawlessw. Professional Engineer (Mechanical Engineering; Nuclear Waste Management). Past and current member Savannah River ...
Consensus Seeking Versus Truth Seeking
Practice Periodical of Hazardous, Toxic, and Radioactive Waste Management, 2005
... the modern interpretation of the First Amendment: The best test of truth is the power of the... more ... the modern interpretation of the First Amendment: The best test of truth is the power of the ... CommissionScience, Research, Development, Fifth Framework Programme of the European Atomic Energy Community [EURATOM for research in the fields of nuclear energy ...
Interaction context theory: The interdependence and mutual exclusivity of observation and action
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 1996
... WF Lawless Paine College ... Theorists now concentrate much less on interaction behavior (an ... more ... WF Lawless Paine College ... Theorists now concentrate much less on interaction behavior (an exception is Latane's research; in Lewen-stein, Nowak, & Latane, 1992; see also Vallacher & Nowak, 1994), and virtually not at all on the interdependent relations between cogni-tive ...
Interaction Context Theory: The Case of Military Nuclear Wastes
Journal of Social Philosophy, 1998
Soulevant les problemes scientifiques, politiques et economiques que pose la gestion des dechets ... more Soulevant les problemes scientifiques, politiques et economiques que pose la gestion des dechets nucleaires militaires par le Departement de l'Energie, l'A. mesure la pertinence de la theorie des contextes d'interaction au regard de l'information de l'opinion publique en matiere de controle technologique de l'environnement physique et social. Soulignant la dimension subjective et sociale du developpement de la science, l'A. presente un nouveau modele dynamique des interactions sociales fonde sur la complementarite de l'action et de l'observation, du monde social et du monde physique, de la psychologie et de l'epistemologie, qui contribue a l'evaluation ethique et scientifique du comportement humain
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Papers by William Lawless