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AAAI presented the AAAI-04 workshop program on Sunday July 25 and Monday, July 26, 2004 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center and the adjacent headquarter hotel in San Jose, […], AAAI presented the AAAI-04 workshop program on July 25-26, 2004 in San Jose, California. This program included twelve workshops covering a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. The titles of the workshops were as follows: (1) Adaptive Text Extraction and Mining; (2) Agent Organizations: Theory and Practice; (3) Anchoring Symbols to Sensor Data; (4) Challenges in Game AI; (5) Fielding Applications of Artificial Intelligence; (6) Forming and Maintaining Coalitions in Adaptive Multiagent Systems; (7) Intelligent Agent Architectures: Combining the Strengths of Software Engineering and Cognitive Systems; (8) Learning and Planning in Markov Processes--Advances and Challenges; (9) Semantic Web Personalization; (10) Sensor Networks; (11) Spatial and Temporal Reasoning; and (12) Supervisory Control of Learning and Adaptive Systems.

In this work we propose a cognitive architecture, based on the Social Practice (SP) theory, aimed at the modeling of socially adaptive robots, able to interact with people, recognizing and interpreting the specific social context where it is acting. The proposed social robot is able to recognize and interpret social signs during ongoing social practices. The cognitive architecture is inspired by the well-known Psi model, and it is equipped with a Social Practice Engine that manages the whole conduct of the robot. The use of such an architecture simplifies and makes more natural the interaction between human beings and a robot. In particular, the scenario of a robot fulfilling the tasks of welcoming people in an office environment is being considered.

The research reported in this article formed part of an internationally funded project about the empowerment of Information Technology (IT) teachers in economically deprived rural schools in the North-West and KwaZulu-Natal provinces in South Africa. The current paper focused on the use of self-directed metacognitive (SDM) questioning in a pair programming context. The study sample consisted of five IT teachers and 99 Grade 10 IT learners at five schools. The teachers were trained to implement pair programming and to guide learners in the application of metacognitive regulation while doing pair programming. The learners used SDM questions during their subsequent pair programming tasks. Data-gathering was done through interviews with the teachers regarding their views on the use of the SDM questions, and the learners’ journals with their views on how they experienced the SDM questions to direct their thinking during execution of pair programming tasks. The results indicated that the teachers viewed the implementation of the SDM question difficult and time-consuming, and that they experienced the learners to be either reluctant or unwilling to engage in SDM questioning. However, the results of the learners’ journals indicated that the learners experienced the SDM questions to be helpful in directing their thinking during pair programming tasks.

Increasingly, software engineering involves opensystems consisting of autonomous and heterogeneous participants or agentswho carry out loosely coupled interactions. Accordingly, understanding and specifying communications among agents is a key concern. A focus on ways to formalize meaningdistinguishes agent communication from traditional distributed computing: meaning provides a basis for flexible interactions and compliance checking.Over the years, a number of approaches have emerged with some essential and some irrelevant distinctions drawn among them. As agent abstractions gain increasing traction in the software engineering of open systems, it is important to resolve the irrelevant and highlight the essential distinctions, so that future research can be focused in the most productive directions.This article is an outcome of extensive discussions among agent communication researchers, aimed at taking stock of the field and at developing, criticizing, and refining their positions on specific approaches and future challenges. This article serves some important purposes, including identifying (1) points of broad consensus; (2) points where substantive differences remain; and (3) interesting directions of future work.

Current approaches to the design and implementation of agents and multi-agent systems exhibit large differences both at conceptual and engineering levels. This paper argues that such differences result from different demands and characteristics of the domain. We substantiate this claim by a survey carried out online. The survey indicates that few agent systems are really built for industry. However, it also shows that the domain characteristics indicated have a high correlation to the type of agent systems that are used. Based on this evidence we classify agent systems using a few key components of agency. Using the survey, we give some systematic guidelines that support engineers on the assessment of the different approaches to choose an agent system type for a particular application domain. This forms the basis of a meta-methodology that starts from domain analysis and leads to a choice for the most appropriate agent methodology for that domain.

Communication in heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) is hampered by the lack of shared ontologies. Ontology negotiation offers an integrated approach that enables agents to gradually build towards a semantically integrated system by sharing parts of their ontologies. This solution involves a combination of a normal agent communication protocol with an ontology alignment protocol. For such a combination to be successful, it must satisfy several criteria. This paper discusses the goals and requirements that are important for any ontology negotiation protocol. Furthermore, we will propose some implementations that are constructed according to these criteria.

Abstract Despite all the research done in the last years on the development of methodologies for designing MAS, there is no methodology suitable for the specification and design of MAS in complex domains where both the agent view and the organizational view can be modeled. Current multiagent approaches either take a centralist, static approach to organizational design or take an emergent view in which agent interactions are not pre-determined, thus making it impossible to make any predictions on the behavior of the whole systems. Most of them also lack a model of the norms in the environment that should rule the (emergent) behavior of the agent society as a whole and/or the actions of individuals. In this paper, we propose a framework for modeling agent organizations, Organizational Model for Normative Institutions (OMNI), that allows the balance of global organizational requirements with the autonomy of individual agents. It specifies global goals of the system independently from those of the specific agents that populate the system. Both the norms that regulate interaction between agents, as well as the contextual meaning of those interactions are important aspects when specifying the organizational structure.

The realization that knowledge management (KM) is primarily a management science and not a computer science implies a different role for technology in KM. This role is concerned with supporting and extending human interaction and learning, and has therefore the need for intelligence-enhanced, integrated and personalized solutions including agent-based approaches. A people-centered view of KM requires support systems that enable the flexible integration of organizational and individual requirements and objectives. This paper introduces the OperA model for organizations that supports individual initiative and collaboration while prescribing a formal structure for organizational processes. The paper introduces the main aspects of the model and describes a case study where OperA is applied to the development of a knowledge-sharing support system.

One of the major issues involved in establishing new trading relationships is the lack of an a priori trust relationship between the parties. This is an old and well-known problem in international commerce. Unless it can be solved, establishing new trading relationships will be virtually impossible. One way to create the necessary trust is by using procedures that involve exchanges of documents between the trading partners to verify that each party has fulfilled its part of the agreement. The paper documents formerly used for this purpose are being replaced, in electronic commerce, by information exchanges. The issue of whether these are as trustworthy as paper documents remains a crucial question. It is easy to guarantee the uniqueness of ownership documents in the case of signed paper documents, but much harder with electronic messages. Electronic commerce will not succeed in international trade unless the trustworthiness of electronic versions of trade procedures can be demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt. This article presents a formal specification of a set of design principles for trustworthy trade procedures that adapts the basic principles of internal auditing within a company. This auditing method has already been implemented in INTERPROCS, a Prolog-based tool for representation and analysis of procedures. The formal specification of this auditing method can be used to verify audit principles, and in particular the INTERPROCS implementation of these principles. It is based on a combination of deontic, dynamic, and illocutionary modal logics.

Abstract:This paper considers the notion of deadlines in the context of continuous (dense) time. It shows that obligations and actions are essential elements in the specification of deadlines. These notions can be relatively easily combined when a discrete temporal framework is used. Once a dense time is introduced, however, several problems appear. They cannot be solved with the same framework and definitions as are used for discrete time. In the new framework a branching dense temporal framework is the basis for specifying both actions and obligations. Finally, all the types of deadlines defined for the discrete temporal framework can also be defined for continuous time. The formalisms are important for enforcing commitments in electronic commerce.

In this paper we present some concepts and their relations that are necessary for modeling autonomous agents in an environment that is governed by some (social) norms. We divide the norms over three levels: the private level the contract level and the convention level. We show how deontic logic can be used to model the concepts and how the theory of speech acts can be used to model the generation of (some of) the norms. Finally we give some idea about an agent architecture incorporating the social norms based on a BDI framework.