Autonomous Agentes

Este artículo hace parte de una investigación preliminar sobre la importancia del papel que cumplen las Escuelas de Formación Artística Local en Bogotá. Estas son escuelas de educación no formal avaladas por el gobierno distrital para el desarrollo y fomento de las artes en la ciudad. Tomando como caso la Escuela de Formación Artística de Puente Aranda, se estudian las relaciones entre política cultural, educación y comunidad.

In this paper, we propose an intelligent and secure internet of things approach for the healthcare system that monitors the patient heart rate in real-time and from any place. Thanks to the agent, the proposed system can predict the critical condition before it even happens and takes fast and apt decisions in an emergency case. Based on the experimentation, the proposed system is convenient, reliable, and ensures data security at a low cost. The proposed algorithm outperforms other algorithms regarding the system's operational efficiency. It is more suitable for devices with power, storage, and processing limitations, such as in IoT devices. Also, agents are the better current technologies for heterogeneous and distributed systems, such as the internet of things. Moreover, this approach's scalability makes it suitable for a broad range of IoT environments, including smart homes, smart cities, dynamic and large-area networks, etc.

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become well known. It has
attracted much attention thanks to its powerful application in different fields. Currently, billions of IoT devices are connected. The massive rise in the number of connected devices instantly produces further data that requires high storage and processing technology. Besides, the IoT equipment has limited processing, and storage capability did not allow data processing or even storage. Also, things cannot make smart and quick decisions to achieve their goals, and the thing ability to communicate with other things depends on service similarity and communication protocols; this will impact the performance, efficiency, development, and scalability of IoT applications. This thesis provides three main contributions, in the first contribution, we propose a Cloud-IoT approach to provide an efficient solution for the storage and analysis of data generated by IoT applications and improve IoT scalability. In order to demonstrate the viability of the proposed approach, a Cloud-IoT system for remote patient monitoring is developed.
IoT security becomes a more challenging problem due to the computing and communication limits of IoT devices make IoT more vulnerable to security and privacy attacks. Hence, as a second contribution, we propose a robust solution based on lightweight cryptography to ensure data security. Also, we have used the access control mechanism to ensure data privacy. The experimentation demonstrates that the proposed solution more suitable for IoT devices. To tap the most out of massive data streams, IoT needs real-time management and analysis of data. In order to enhance the intelligence of IoT devices and to improve our first approach, we have developed an efficient, autonomous, and real-time solution based on the agent for data management and analysis as a third contribution. The proposed system can make fast and apt decisions in an emergency case.

The European Parliament has proposed legal personhood for artificial intelligence entities, to ensure honouring of rights and responsibility. The article discusses the question of legal personhood for non-human beings from a legal-historical and legal-sociological perspective. In addition, it examines legal personhood in the modern German legal system and discusses the implementation of a tertium genus for artificial intelligence as proposed by the European Parliament. This analysis leads to the conclusion that introduction of e-personhood would constitute a paradigm shift that blurs the boundaries between humans and machines.

In this study, the hardware and software design and implementation of an autonomous electric vehicle are addressed. We aimed to develop an autonomous electric vehicle for path tracking. Control and navigation algorithms are developed and implemented. The vehicle is able to perform
path-tracking maneuvers under environments in which the positioning signals from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) are not accessible. The proposed control approach uses a modified
constrained input-output nonlinear model predictive controller (NMPC) for path-tracking control. The proposed localization algorithm used in this study guarantees almost accurate position estimation under GNSS-denied environments. We discuss the procedure for designing the vehicle hardware, electronic drivers, communication architecture, localization algorithm, and controller architecture. The system’s full state is estimated by fusing visual inertial odometry (VIO) measurements with
wheel odometry data using an extended Kalman filter (EKF). Simulation and real-time experiments are performed. The obtained results demonstrate that our designed autonomous vehicle is capable of
performing path-tracking maneuvers without using Global Navigation Satellite System positioning data. The designed vehicle can perform challenging path tracking maneuvers with a speed of up to
1 m per second.

Abstract:
It is argued that robots are just quasi-autonomous beings, which must be understood, within an emergent systems view, as intrinsically linked to and presupposing human beings as societal creatures within a technologically mediated world. Biosemiotics is introduced as a perspective on living systems that is based upon contemporary biology but reinterpreted through a qualitative organicist tradition in biology. This allows for emphasizing the differences between (1) an organism as a general semiotic system with vegetative and self-reproductive capacities, (2) an animal body also with sentience and phenomenal states, and (3) higher forms of anthroposemiotic systems such as humans, machines and robots. On all three levels, representations (or sign action) are crucial processes. The “representationalism” invoked by critiques of cognitive science and robotics tends to focus only on simplistic notions of representations, and must be distinguished from a Peircean or biosemiotic notion of representation. Implications for theorizing about the physical, biological, animate, phenomenal and social body and their forms of autonomy is discussed.
Key Words:
biosemiotics, autonomy, organicism, representationalism, robots, levels of reality.

Contracts are designed to govern the relations between business partners and allocate risk among them, yet they cannot mitigate all risks; hence, dispute resolution mechanisms have been developed to assist. According to research, arbitration is considered one of the most efficient legally binding dispute resolution mechanisms. Since initiating an arbitration case against business partners often severs the business relationship between them, predicting the arbitrator's decision becomes valuable to the arbitrating parties. To do so, arbitration prediction models are suggested in this paper through modeling the arbitrator's award in two stages: evidence admissibility and evidence evaluation. While arbitrators currently admit evidence in a relatively unsystematic way, this proposed admissibility framework systemizes the current practice by preserving its subjectivity, yet aligning it with the widely deployed rules of arbitration. This research further proposes an evidence evaluation model, providing a rapid answer to the famous commercial arbitration battle, discovery. While the current arbitrators' practice in allowing discovery is not systematic, the proposed optimization model is a tool that could systematically assist arbitrators trading between the arbitration key characteristic, efficiency, and justice. This is achieved by assigning weights to evidence parameters such as sufficiency and credibility, which in turn provide numerical measures to reduce the decision's subjectivity.

El presente trabajo incursiona en el campo de los robots autónomos móviles como caso específico para el desarrollo de una propuesta de arquitectura de diseño que apoye a sistemas basados en agentes cooperantes. Se considera que el comportamiento de un robot ante una serie de situaciones es la meta que se desea lograr, y que para realizarla se ven involucrados una serie de factores que deben ser controlados y coordinados para que el robot pueda realizar su objetivo.

Existe una estrecha relación entre los agentes y la robótica, de hecho los paradigmas de diseño para cada uno de ellos siguen la misma tendencia. Esto se debe en gran medida a que un robot puede ser considerado como un agente físico.

This talk was given as an afternoon lecture open to the public and serves as an introduction to some of my research interests and ideas.  Topics include:  Reliance on complex systems, intelligent systems, interpersonal trust, human-machine trust, trustworthiness.

The spacecraft and ground systems monitoring processes at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are described, focusing on the monitoring of spacecraft telecommunications subsystem health and telecommunications link status operations. A system based on artificial intelligence technology that seeks to overcome many of these limitations is described. The system, called the Spacecraft Health Automated Reasoning Prototype (SHARP), is designed to automate health and status analysis for multimission spacecraft and ground data systems operations. The use of SHARP during the Voyager encounter with Neptune is evaluated. It has proved to be effective for detecting and analyzing potential spacecraft and ground systems problems by performing real-time analysis of spacecraft and ground data systems engineering telemetry. Four principal areas where benefits from the use of SHARP and its descendants, namely, safety, workforce savings, reliability, and productivity, are discussed

After arguing about the crucial importance of trust for Agents and MAS, we provide a dejnition of trust both as a mental state and as a social attitude and relation. Wepresent the mental ingredients of trust: its specific beliefs and goals, with special attention to evaluations and expectations. We show the relation between trust and the mental background of delegation. We explain why trust is a bet, and implies some risks, and analyse the most basic forms of non-social trust (reliance on objects and tools) to arrive at the more complexforms of social trust, based on morality and reputation. Finally we present a principled quantification of trust, based on its cognitive ingredients, and use this "degree of trust" as the basis for a rational decision to delegate or not to another agent. The paper is intended to contribute both to the conceptual analysis and to the practical use of trust in social theory and MAS.

Sparrow argues that military robots capable of making their own decisions would be independent enough to allow us denial for their actions, yet too unlike us to be the targets of meaningful blame or praise—thereby fostering what Matthias has dubbed “the responsibility gap.” We agree with Sparrow that someone must be held responsible for all actions taken in a military conflict. That said, we think Sparrow overlooks the possibility of what we term “blank check” responsibility: A person of sufficiently high standing could accept responsibility for the actions of autonomous robotic devices—even if that person could not be causally linked to those actions besides this prior agreement. The basic intuition behind our proposal is that humans can impute relations even when no other form of contact can be established. The missed alternative we want to highlight, then, would consist in an exchange: Social prestige in the occupation of a given office would come at the price of signing away part of one's freedoms to a contingent and unpredictable future guided by another (in this case, artificial) agency.

In this paper a theory of delegation is presented. There are at least three reasons for developing such a theory. First, one of the most relevant notions of "agent" is based on the notion of "task" and of "on behalf of". In order to found this notion a theory of delegation among agents is needed. Second, the notion of autonomy should be based on different kinds and levels of delegation. Third, the entire theory of cooperation and collaboration requires the definition of the two complementary attitudes of goal delegation and adoption linking collaborating agents.
After motivating the necessity for a principled theory of delegation (and adoption) the paper presents a plan-based approach to this theory. We analyze several dimensions of the delegation/adoption (on the basis of the interaction between the agents, of the specification of the task, of the possibility to subdelegate, of the delegation of the control, of the help levels). The agent's autonomy and levels of agency are then deduced.
We describe the modelling of the client from the contractor's point of view and viceversa, with their differences, and the notion of trust that directly derives from this modelling. Finally, a series of possible conflicts between client and contractor are considered: in particular collaborative conflicts, which stem from the contractor's intention to help the client beyond its request or delegation and to exploit its own knowledge and intelligence (reasoning, problem solving, planning, and decision skills) for the client itself.

In Chapter 2 of Escape from Leviathan, Jan Lester defends two hypotheses: that instrumental rationality requires agents to maximise the satisfaction of their wants and that all agents actually meet this requirement. In addition, he argues that all agents are self-interested (though not necessarily egoistic) and he offers an account of categorical moral desires which entails that no agent ever does what he genuinely feels to be morally wrong. I show that Lester’s two hypotheses are false because they cannot accommodate weakness of will, because they are inconsistent with agency, which requires free will, because ends, obligations and values cannot be reduced to desires, and because maximisation is often not possible. Further, Lester’s claim that agents are self-interested is vacuous, his attempted reduction of moral behaviour to want-satisfaction fails, and his contention, that agents always do what they genuinely think to be morally required, seems untenable. A defence of freedom that depends on homo economicus is far from promising.

In this work, we approach the problem of a box transport by the robots that are requested to bring a box from an arbitrary initial to some preassigned target position. The robots are modeled as rational collaborative autonomous agents working on their movement coordination in a discrete state space. The proposed method for coordinating the multirobot system is a two-level control model in which on the upper level, a Virtual Structure (VS) agent calculates offline the box trajectory from the initial to the goal position with incomplete obstacles data and informs the robots of the nominal route. The robots on the lower level, on the basis of the preassigned positions and the data about the unforeseen obstacles sensed by limited range sensors and exchanged among all the robots, individually optimize their local movement objective functions to mutually push the box following a preassigned trajectory in a safe manner. When the robots, due to the unforeseen obstacles, move from the trajectory defined by the VS agent too far away, more than a predefined distance, they contact the VS agent for the recalculation of the same. The results of the proposed coordination model's simulation in 2D environment are described.

Background

Living systems are associated with Social networks — networks made up of nodes, some of which may be more important in various aspects as compared to others. While different quantitative measures labeled as “centralities” have previously been used in the network analysis community to find out influential nodes in a network, it is debatable how valid the centrality measures actually are. In other words, the research question that remains unanswered is: how exactly do these measures perform in the real world? So, as an example, if a centrality of a particular node identifies it to be important, is the node actually important?

Purpose

The goal of this paper is not just to perform a traditional social network analysis but rather to evaluate different centrality measures by conducting an empirical study analyzing exactly how do network centralities correlate with data from published multidisciplinary network data sets.

Method

We take standard published network data sets while using a random network to establish a baseline. These data sets included the Zachary's Karate Club network, dolphin social network and a neural network of nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Each of the data sets was analyzed in terms of different centrality measures and compared with existing knowledge from associated published articles to review the role of each centrality measure in the determination of influential nodes.

Results

Our empirical analysis demonstrates that in the chosen network data sets, nodes which had a high Closeness Centrality also had a high Eccentricity Centrality. Likewise high Degree Centrality also correlated closely with a high Eigenvector Centrality. Whereas Betweenness Centrality varied according to network topology and did not demonstrate any noticeable pattern. In terms of identification of key nodes, we discovered that as compared with other centrality measures, Eigenvector and Eccentricity Centralities were better able to identify important nodes.

The idea behind the semantic web is that documents will contain additional markup that make explicit the information content of unstructured media. We present here the Document Souls system which allows documents to become animate, actively searching the wider world for more information about their own contents, attaching relevant information to itself as additional markup. A Document Soul is a set of information requests that are attached to a document as annotation. A demon within the system polls these requests and activates search agents that asynchronously respond to unsatisfied requests. To control search and relevance, collections of information requests are packaged as personalities which filter out unwanted information. In this paper, we present the structure of the Document Souls architecture and the function of personalities for performing contextualized search.

Video games are high emotional vectors. They play with the emotions of players by eliciting and increasing them. The importance of the induction of basic emotions has been a long forestay and is favoured by video game publishers, as they are quite easily mobilized. Video game publishers look to produce more complex social emotions like empathy, and compassion. In games framework with narrative context, designers frequently use cinema movies methods, like cinematic non-interactive Cutscenes. These methods temporarily exclude the player from interactivity to leave his first viewpoint view and move the camera focusing on the narrative stimuli. Cutscenes were used abundantly and are now rejected, the new development wave is often trying to develop in a “zero cinematic” way. For the same reason, cinematics are also not usable in new Virtual Reality. If VR games and simulations provides a high level of presence, VR environments needs certain rules related in particular to the continuation...

AUTOMATED SPACECRAFT MONITORING David J. Atkinson, Mark L. James, Denise Lawson, R. Gaius ... decade there will be an increasing number of planetary exploration spacecraft flying ... increasing load on mission operations, JPL has established a Space Flight Operations ...

Video games are high emotional vectors. They play with the emotions of players by eliciting and increasing them. The importance of the induction of basic emotions has been a long forestay and is favoured by video game publishers, as they are quite easily mobilized. Video game publishers look to produce more complex social emotions like empathy, and compassion. In games framework with narrative context, designers frequently use cinema movies methods, like cinematic non-interactive Cutscenes. These methods temporarily exclude the player from interactivity to leave his first viewpoint view and move the camera focusing on the narrative stimuli. Cutscenes were used abundantly and are now rejected, the new development wave is often trying to develop in a “zero cinematic” way. For the same reason, cinematics are also not usable in new Virtual Reality. If VR games and simulations provides a high level of presence, VR environments needs certain rules related in particular to the continuation...

Morse Command is the command center for running experiments on Morse Stations. (See Morse Station User Guide for instructions for using Morse Station for experimental subjects at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~softagents/morse/MORSE_User_Guide1.PDF). In addition to its scenario editing functions (see Morse Scenario Editing Guide), Morse Command is the GUI for registering the Morse Station and Command agents with an Agent Name Server (ANS), a directory of agents. An ANS allows Morse Station agents to find and communicate with each other in a multiagent system. (See the Retsina ANS documentation at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~softagents/ans/ANSv2.9.PDF for more information on the function and use of ANS). Morse Command allows Morse Stations (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.) to be added to scenarios for inclusion in an experiment.

Morse Command is also an editing tool for Morse scenarios. This function of Morse Command is not discussed here. We discuss the Morse Scenario Editor in another document. The purpose of this document is to allow users to install and set up Morse Command and Morse Station, in order to run experiments on Morse Stations.

There are many arguments for and against the use of autonomous-agents in ambient intelligence and intelligent environments. Some researchers maintain that it is vital to restrict autonomy of agents so that users have complete control over the system; whereas, many others maintain that there is a greater benefit to be gained by employing autonomous-agents to take some of the work load off the user and increase user convenience. Both of these approaches have their distinct advantages but they are not suitable for all since people’s opinions and concerns regarding autonomy are highly individual and can differ greatly from person to person. This work explores how it is possible to make intelligent environments more dynamic and personalisable by equipping them with adjustable autonomy, which allows the user to increase or decrease agent autonomy in order to find a comfortable sweet-spot between relinquishing/maintaining control and gaining/losing convenience. This chapter discusses how adjustable autonomy can be achieved in intelligent environments, reports on a recent online survey conducted to gauge people’s opinions of different levels of in intelligent environments, and discusses a user study for which an experimental adjustable autonomy enabled intelligent environment was developed. This work aims to raise awareness of the issues with using static (and extreme) levels of autonomy amongst researchers of intelligent environments and ambient intelligent environments.

This paper describes a research about fuzzy controllers for the positioning of the goalkeeper without the ball in the 2d simulated robot soccer. The goal of this research was to improve the behavior of the goalkeeper, raising the number of catches and decreasing the number of goals, improving its positioning to catch the ball. To validate the research, 30 matches were simulated against some of the best teams of the world that participate of the RoboCup. The achieved results are presented, the conclusions are discussed and future works are suggested.

This article explores the question: Why are students of worth? Educationally, an answer often involves a Kantian response: They are of worth because they are always ends and never means. This response is usually connected to a notion of autonomy interpreted as individual, rational self-determination. The article argues for a different answer. The essay begins with a recent educational example of construing worth as rational autonomy. Meira Levinson, in her book The Demands of Liberal Education (1999), argues for a version of rational autonomy which is taken in the essay as a Kantian response to the question. The essay then turns to Kant’s own understanding of intrinsic human worth as ends. Although the essay agrees in general with the notion of end, it criticizes Kant’s version of rational autonomy. Instead, it argues for a notion of worth as irreplaceable singularity. Both the critique of the Kantian answer and theessay’salternative are shaped by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Here technical notions of “the other,” proximity and singularity are brought to bear on the question of human worth. The Levinasian alternative, so the essay argues, better answers the question of student worth by highlighting the incomparability of the student as a singular other.

Cristiano Castelfranchi discusses the weaknesess and the possible crisis of the agents paradigm. I examine some potentialities and ambitions of such an approach, which shouldn't be reduced to a technology. He disagrees with Hewitt identifying agents with cognitive (BDIA; beliefs, desires, intentions, and affect) agents, and with his opposition to agents organizations, which in fact presuppose agents and might be conceived as agents.