4th International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE 08), 2008
We present a prototype multi-agent system whose goal is to support a 3D application for e-retaili... more We present a prototype multi-agent system whose goal is to support a 3D application for e-retailing. The prototype demonstrates how the use of agent environments can be amongst the most promising and flexible approaches to engineer e-retailing applications. We illustrate this point by showing how the agent environment GOLEM uses semantic web concepts to develop the e-retailing application. In this context we describe the features of GOLEM that allow a user to become an avatar and explore the environment by searching and dynamically discovering new products and services.
Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, 2013
This paper presents a Peer to Peer (P2P) agent coordination framework for the exchange of Electro... more This paper presents a Peer to Peer (P2P) agent coordination framework for the exchange of Electronic Health Records (EHR) between health organisations that comply with the existing interoperability standards as proposed by the Integrating Healthcare Enterprise (IHE). Every health organisation represents a community in a P2P network and uses a set of autonomous agents and a set of distributed coordination rules to coordinate the agents in the search of specific health records. To model the interactions among communities, the framework uses the tuple centre agent communication model and semantic web technologies. In order to illustrate the scalability of our approach, we evaluate the proposed solution in distributed settings.
Easy access to data is one of the main avenues to accelerate scientific research. As a key elemen... more Easy access to data is one of the main avenues to accelerate scientific research. As a key element of scientific innovations, data sharing allows the reproduction of results, helps prevent data fabrication, falsification, and misuse. Although the research benefits from data reuse are widely acknowledged, the data collections existing today are still kept in silos. Indeed, monitoring what happens to data once they have been handed to a third party is currently not feasible within the current data-sharing practices. We propose a blockchain-based system to trace data collections, and potentially create a more trustworthy data sharing process. In this paper, we present the LUCE (License accoUntability and CompliancE) architecture as a decentralized blockchain-based platform supporting data sharing and reuse. LUCE is designed to provide full transparency on what happens to the data after they are shared with third parties. The contributions of this work are: the definition of a generic m...
We present a prototype multi-agent system whose goal is to support a 3D application for e-retaili... more We present a prototype multi-agent system whose goal is to support a 3D application for e-retailing. The prototype demonstrates how the use of agent environments can be amongst the most promising and flexible approaches to engineer e-retailing ap-plications. We illustrate this point by showing how the agent environment GOLEM supports social interactions and how it combines them with semantic-web technolo-gies to develop the e-retailing application. We also describe the features of GOLEM that allow a user to engage in e-retailing activities in order to explore the virtual social environment by searching and dynamically discovering new agents, products and services. Key words: agent environments, e-retailing, social interaction, games 1
We present a knowledge representation framework with an associated run-time support infrastructur... more We present a knowledge representation framework with an associated run-time support infrastructure that is able to compute, for the benefit of the members of a norm-governed multi-agent system, the physically possible and permitted actions current at each time, as well as sanctions that should be applied to violations of prohibitions. To offer the envisioned run-time support we use an Event Calculus dialect for efficient temporal reasoning. Both the knowledge representation framework and its associated infrastructure are highly configurable in the sense that they can be appropriately distributed in order to support real-time responses to agent requests. To exemplify the ideas, we apply the infrastructure on a benchmark scenario for multi-agent systems. Through experimental evaluation we also show how distributing our infrastructure can provide run-time support to large-scale multi-agent systems regulated by norms.
Service-oriented computing can benefit from multi-agent system technologies by adopting the coord... more Service-oriented computing can benefit from multi-agent system technologies by adopting the coordination mechanisms, interaction protocols, and decision-making tools designed for multi-agent systems. We demonstrate here the use of a fully decentralised multi-agent system supporting the discovery, selection, and negotiation of services.
In this paper we present our preliminary work on monitoring data License accoUntability and Compl... more In this paper we present our preliminary work on monitoring data License accoUntability and CompliancE (LUCE). LUCE is a blockchain platform solution designed to stimulate data sharing and reuse, by facilitating compliance with licensing terms. The platform enables data accountability by recording the use of data and their purpose on a blockchain-supported platform. LUCE allows for individual data to be rectified and erased. In doing so LUCE can ensure subjects' General Data Protection Regulation's (GDPR) rights to access, rectification and erasure. Our contribution is to provide a distributed solution for the automatic management of data accountability and their license terms.
We present a knowledge representation framework with an associated run-time support infrastructur... more We present a knowledge representation framework with an associated run-time support infrastructure that is able to compute, for the benefit of the members of a norm-governed multi-agent system, physically possible and/or permitted actions current at each time, as well as sanctions that should be applied to violations of prohibitions. Experimental results on a benchmark scenario indicate how by distributing norms we can provide run-time support to large-scale, norm-governed multi-agent systems.
BACKGROUND Artificial intelligence (AI) typically requires a significant amount of high-quality d... more BACKGROUND Artificial intelligence (AI) typically requires a significant amount of high-quality data to build reliable models, where gathering enough data within a single institution can be particularly challenging. In this study we investigated the impact of using sequential learning to exploit very small, siloed sets of clinical and imaging data to train AI models. Furthermore, we evaluated the capacity of such models to achieve equivalent performance when compared to models trained with the same data over a single centralized database. METHODS We propose a privacy preserving distributed learning framework, learning sequentially from each dataset. The framework is applied to three machine learning algorithms: Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Perceptron. The models were evaluated using four open-source datasets (Breast cancer, Indian liver, NSCLC-Radiomics dataset, and Stage III NSCLC). FINDINGS The proposed framework ensured a comparable predictive performan...
Data sharing is very important for accelerating scientific research, business innovations, and fo... more Data sharing is very important for accelerating scientific research, business innovations, and for informing individuals. Yet, concerns over data privacy, cost, and lack of secure data-sharing solutions have prevented data owners from sharing data. To overcome these issues, several research works have proposed blockchain-based data-sharing solutions for their ability to add transparency and control to the data-sharing process. Yet, while models for decentralized data sharing exist, how to incentivize these structures to enable data sharing at scale remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose incentive mechanisms for decentralized data-sharing platforms. We use smart contracts to automate different payment options between data owners and data requesters. We discuss multiple cost pricing scenarios for data owners to monetize their data. Moreover, we simulate the incentive mechanisms on a blockchain-based data-sharing platform. The evaluation of our simulation indicates that ...
In modern healthcare systems, being able to share electronic health records is crucial for provid... more In modern healthcare systems, being able to share electronic health records is crucial for providing quality care and for enabling a larger spectrum of health services. Health data sharing is dependent on obtaining individual consent which, in turn, is hindered by a lack of resources. To this extend, blockchain-based platforms facilitate data sharing by inherently creating a trusted distributed network of users. These users are enabled to share their data without depending on the time and resources of specific players (such as the health services). In blockchain-based platforms, data governance mechanisms become very important due to the need to specify and monitor data sharing and data use conditions. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based data sharing consent model for access control over individual health data. We use smart contracts to dynamically represent the individual consent over health data and to enable data requesters to search and access them. The dynamic consent ...
We study the use of games as a metaphor for building social interaction in norm-governed multi-ag... more We study the use of games as a metaphor for building social interaction in norm-governed multi-agent systems. As part of our research we propose MAGE (Multi-Agent Game Environment) as a logic-based framework that represents complex agent interactions as games. MAGE seeks to (a) reuse existing computational techniques for defining event-based normative system and (b) complement these techniques with a coordination component to support complex interactions. A game in MAGE is defined by a state, a set of normative rules describing the valid moves at different states and a set of effect rules describing how the state evolves as a result of a move taking place. Given a specification of the normative rules, in the implementation of a game, we use game containers as components that mediate the moves of players by checking their compliance with the rules of the game and by maintaining the state of the game. The reuse part of MAGE relates physical actions that happen in an agent environment ...
Automating Workflow using Dialectical Argumentation
This paper presents a multi-agent framework based on argumentative agent technology for the autom... more This paper presents a multi-agent framework based on argumentative agent technology for the automation of the workflow selection and execution. In this framework, workflow selection is coordinated by agent interactions governed by the rules of a dialogue game whose purpose is to evaluate the workflow's properties via argumentation. Once a workflow is selected using this process, the workflow is executed by dynamically configuring workflow engines to coordinate the participating agents' workflow activities. We illustrate the overall framework with an example of workflow composition that allows an agent to book an appropriate ticket and rent a car.
This paper presents a model of a MAS framework for dynamic aggregation of population health data ... more This paper presents a model of a MAS framework for dynamic aggregation of population health data for research purposes. The contribution of the paper is twofold: First, it describes a MAS architecture that allows one to built on the fly anonymized databases from the distributed sources of data. Second, it shows how to improve the utility of the data with the growth of the database.
This paper presents a multi-agent framework based on argumentative agent technology for the autom... more This paper presents a multi-agent framework based on argumentative agent technology for the automation of the workflow selection and execution. In this framework, workflow selection is coordinated by agent interactions governed by the rules of a dialogue game whose purpose is to evaluate the workflow's properties via argumentation. Once a workflow is selected using this process, the workflow is executed by dynamically configuring workflow engines to coordinate the participating agents' workflow activities.
This paper presents a framework for dynamic work∞ow creation and execution developed as part of A... more This paper presents a framework for dynamic work∞ow creation and execution developed as part of ARGUGRID, a collaborative project that seeks to provide a new model for programming the Grid at a semantic, knowledge-based level of abstraction through the use of argumentative agent technology. In this framework, work∞ow selection is coordinated by agent interactions based upon a dialogue game that allows agents to argue about work∞ows and their properties.
Ten years ago, researchers in multi-agent systems became more and more aware that agent systems c... more Ten years ago, researchers in multi-agent systems became more and more aware that agent systems consist of more than only agents. The series of workshops on Environments for Multi-Agent Systems (E4MAS 2004-2006) emerged from this awareness. One of the primary outcomes of this endeavor was a principled understanding that the agent environment should be considered as a primary design abstraction, equally important as the agents. A special issue in JAAMAS 2007 contributed a set of influential papers that define the role of agent environments, describe their engineering, and outline challenges in the field that have been the drivers for numerous follow up research efforts. The goal of this paper is to wrap up what has been achieved in the past 10 years and identify challenges for future research on agent environments. Instead of taking a broad perspective, we focus on three particularly relevant topics of modern software intensive systems: large scale, openness, and humans in the loop. For each topic, we reflect on the challenges outlined 10 years ago, present an example application that highlights the current trends, and from that outline challenges for the future. We conclude with a roadmap on how the different challenges could be tackled.
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Papers by Visara Urovi