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Automated testing of computer games is a challenging problem, especially when lengthy scenarios have to be tested. Automating such a scenario boils down to finding the right sequence of interactions given an abstract description of the scenario. Recent works have shown that an agent-based approach works well for the purpose, e.g. due to agents' reactivity, hence enabling a test agent to immediately react to game events and changing state. Many games nowadays are multi-player. This opens up an interesting possibility to deploy multiple cooperative test agents to test such a game, for example to speed up the execution of multiple testing tasks. This paper offers a cooperative multi-agent testing approach and a study of its performance based on a case study on a 3D game called Lab Recruits.

Human-AI coevolution, defined as a process in which humans and AI algorithms continuously influence each other, increasingly characterises our society, but is understudied in artificial intelligence and complexity science literature. Recommender systems and assistants play a prominent role in human-AI coevolution, as they permeate many facets of daily life and influence human choices on online platforms. The interaction between users and AI results in a potentially endless feedback loop, wherein users' choices generate data to train AI models, which, in turn, shape subsequent user preferences. This human-AI feedback loop has peculiar characteristics compared to traditional human-machine interaction and gives rise to complex and often ``unintended'' social outcomes. This paper introduces Coevolution AI as the cornerstone for a new field of study at the intersection between AI and complexity science focused on the theoretical, empirical, and mathematical investigation of the human-AI feedback loop. In doing so, we: (i) outline the pros and cons of existing methodologies and highlight shortcomings and potential ways for capturing feedback loop mechanisms; (ii) propose a reflection at the intersection between complexity science, AI and society; (iii) provide real-world examples for different human-AI ecosystems; and (iv) illustrate challenges to the creation of such a field of study, conceptualising them at increasing levels of abstraction, i.e., technical, epistemological, legal and socio-political.

As the impact of AI on various scientific fields is increasing, it is crucial to embrace interdisciplinary knowledge to understand the impact of technology on society. The goal is to foster a research environment beyond disciplines that values diversity and creates, critiques and develops new conceptual and theoretical frameworks. Even though research beyond disciplines is essential for understanding complex societal issues and creating positive impact it is notoriously difficult to evaluate and is often not recognized by current academic career progression. The motivation for this paper is to engage in broad discussion across disciplines and identify guiding principles fir AI research beyond disciplines in a structured and inclusive way, revealing new perspectives and contributing to societal and human wellbeing and sustainability.

The complexity of computer games is ever increasing. In this setup, guiding an automated test algorithm to find a solution to solve a testing task in a game's huge interaction space is very challenging. Having a model of a system to automatically generate test cases would have a strong impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of the algorithm. However, manually constructing a model turns out to be expensive and time-consuming. In this study, we propose an online agent-based search approach to solve common testing tasks when testing computer games that also constructs a model of the system on-the-fly based on the given task, which is then exploited to solve the task. To demonstrate the efficiency of our approach, a case study is conducted using a game called Lab Recruits.

This paper describes the model of social practice as a theoretical framework to manage conversation with the specific goal of training physicians in communicative skills. To this aim, the domain reasoner that manages the conversation in the Communicate! \cite{jeuring} serious game is taken as a basis. Because the choice of a specific Social Practice to follow in a situation is non-trivial we use a probabilistic model for the selection of social practices as a step toward the implementation of an agent architecture compliant with the social practice model.

Multi-agent models are a suitable starting point to model complex social interactions. However, as the complexity of the systems increase, we argue that novel modeling approaches are needed that can deal with inter-dependencies at different levels of society, where many heterogeneous parties (software agents, robots, humans) are interacting and reacting to each other. In this paper, we present a formalization of a social framework for agents based on the concept of Social Practices as high level specifications of normal (expected) behavior in a given social context. We argue that social practices facilitate the practical reasoning of agents in standard social interactions. Thus they can support deliberations for complex situations just like conventions and norms. However, they also come with a social context that gives handles for social planning and deliberation in top of the normal functional deliberation. The main goal of this paper is to give a formalization of social practices that can be used as a basis for implementations and defining precise structures within which social learning can take place., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1809.08751

Within social simulation, we often want agents to interact both with larger systems of norms, as well as respond to their own and other agents norm violations. However, there are currently no norm specifications that allow us to interact with all of these components. To address this issue, this paper introduces the concept of violation modalities in CTL. These modalities do not only allow us to keep track of violations, but also allow us to define the usual deontic operators. On top of this, they give us a convenient way of linking together various different norms, and allow us to reason about norms with repeated violations and obligations. We will discuss various properties of the modalities and the deontic operators, and will also discuss some ways in which this formalization can guide an implementation of normative systems.

Player experience (PX) evaluation has become a field of interest in the game industry. Several manual PX techniques have been introduced to assist developers to understand and evaluate the experience of players in computer games. However, automated testing of player experience still needs to be addressed. An automated player experience testing framework would allow designers to evaluate the PX requirements in the early development stages without the necessity of participating human players. In this paper, we propose an automated player experience testing approach by suggesting a formal model of event-based emotions. In particular, we discuss an event-based transition system to formalize relevant emotions using Ortony, Clore, & Collins (OCC) theory of emotions. A working prototype of the model is integrated on top of Aplib, a tactical agent programming library, to create intelligent PX test agents, capable of appraising emotions in a 3D game case study. The results are graphically shown e.g. as heat maps. Emotion visualization of the test agent would ultimately help game designers in creating content that evokes a certain experience in players., Comment: This is a preprint of an article with the same title, accepted in 9th International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2021) which was held as a part of 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2021)

During the COVID-19 crisis there have been many difficult decisions governments and other decision makers had to make. E.g. do we go for a total lock down or keep schools open? How many people and which people should be tested? Although there are many good models from e.g. epidemiologists on the spread of the virus under certain conditions, these models do not directly translate into the interventions that can be taken by government. Neither can these models contribute to understand the economic and/or social consequences of the interventions. However, effective and sustainable solutions need to take into account this combination of factors. In this paper, we propose an agent-based social simulation tool, ASSOCC, that supports decision makers understand possible consequences of policy interventions, bu exploring the combined social, health and economic consequences of these interventions.

When creating (open) agent systems it has become common practice to use social concepts such as social practices, norms and conventions to model the way the interactions between the agents are regulated. However, in the literature most papers concentrate on only one of these aspects at the time. Therefore there is hardly any research on how these social concepts relate and when each of them emerges or evolves from another concept. In this paper we will investigate some of the relations between these concepts and also whether they are fundamentally stemming from a single social object or should be seen as different types of objects altogether.

The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the phase 2 of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens' privacy and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking. We advocate the conceptual advantage of a decentralized approach, where both contact and location data are collected exclusively in individual citizens' "personal data stores", to be shared separately and selectively, voluntarily, only when the citizen has tested positive for COVID-19, and with a privacy preserving level of granularity. This approach better protects the personal sphere of citizens and affords multiple benefits: it allows for detailed information gathering for infected people in a privacy-preserving fashion; and, in turn this enables both contact tracing, and, the early detection of outbreak hotspots on more finely-granulated geographic scale. Our recommendation is two-fold. First to extend existing decentralized architectures with a light touch, in order to manage the collection of location data locally on the device, and allow the user to share spatio-temporal aggregates - if and when they want, for specific aims - with health authorities, for instance. Second, we favour a longer-term pursuit of realizing a Personal Data Store vision, giving users the opportunity to contribute to collective good in the measure they want, enhancing self-awareness, and cultivating collective efforts for rebuilding society., Comment: Revised text. Additional authors

Current AI approaches have frequently been used to help personalize many aspects of medical experiences and tailor them to a specific individuals' needs. However, while such systems consider medically-relevant information, they ignore socially-relevant information about how this diagnosis should be communicated and discussed with the patient. The lack of this capability may lead to mis-communication, resulting in serious implications, such as patients opting out of the best treatment. Consider a case in which the same treatment is proposed to two different individuals. The manner in which this treatment is mediated to each should be different, depending on the individual patient's history, knowledge, and mental state. While it is clear that this communication should be conveyed via a human medical expert and not a software-based system, humans are not always capable of considering all of the relevant aspects and traversing all available information. We pose the challenge of creating Intelligent Agents (IAs) to assist medical service providers (MSPs) and consumers in establishing a more personalized human-to-human dialogue. Personalizing conversations will enable patients and MSPs to reach a solution that is best for their particular situation, such that a relation of trust can be built and commitment to the outcome of the interaction is assured. We propose a four-part conceptual framework for personalized social interactions, expand on which techniques are available within current AI research and discuss what has yet to be achieved.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are being used to predict and assess behaviour in multiple domains, such as criminal justice and consumer finance, which directly affect human well-being. However, if AI is to improve people's lives, then people must be able to trust AI, which means being able to understand what the system is doing and why. Even though transparency is often seen as the requirement in this case, realistically it might not always be possible or desirable, whereas the need to ensure that the system operates within set moral bounds remains. In this paper, we present an approach to evaluate the moral bounds of an AI system based on the monitoring of its inputs and outputs. We place a "glass box" around the system by mapping moral values into explicit verifiable norms that constrain inputs and outputs, in such a way that if these remain within the box we can guarantee that the system adheres to the value. The focus on inputs and outputs allows for the verification and comparison of vastly different intelligent systems; from deep neural networks to agent-based systems. The explicit transformation of abstract moral values into concrete norms brings great benefits in terms of explainability; stakeholders know exactly how the system is interpreting and employing relevant abstract moral human values and calibrate their trust accordingly. Moreover, by operating at a higher level we can check the compliance of the system with different interpretations of the same value. These advantages will have an impact on the well-being of AI systems users at large, building their trust and providing them with concrete knowledge on how systems adhere to moral values., Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, conference paper

When agents interact with humans, either through embodied agents or because they are embedded in a robot, it would be easy if they could use fixed interaction protocols as they do with other agents. However, people do not keep fixed protocols in their day-to-day interactions and the environments are often dynamic, making it impossible to use fixed protocols. Deliberating about interactions from fundamentals is not very scalable either, because in that case all possible reactions of a user have to be considered in the plans. In this paper we argue that social practices can be used as an inspiration for designing flexible and scalable interaction mechanisms that are also robust. However, using social practices requires extending the traditional BDI deliberation cycle to monitor landmark states and perform expected actions by leveraging existing plans. We define and implement this mechanism in Jason using a periodically run meta-deliberation plan, supported by a metainterpreter, and illustrate its use in a realistic scenario., Comment: An extended abstract of this paper has been accepted for the Eighteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2019

Interactions between agents are usually designed from a global viewpoint. However, the implementation of a multi-agent interaction is distributed. This difference can introduce issues. For instance, it is possible to specify protocols from a global viewpoint that cannot be implemented as a collection of individual agents. This leads naturally to the question of whether a given (global) protocol is enactable. We consider this question in a powerful setting (trace expression), considering a range of message ordering interpretations (what does it mean to say that an interaction step occurs before another), and a range of possible constraints on the semantics of message delivery, corresponding to different properties of underlying communication middleware.

Multi-agent models are a suitable starting point to model complex social interactions. However, as the complexity of the systems increase, we argue that novel modeling approaches are needed that can deal with inter-dependencies at different levels of society, where many heterogeneous parties (software agents, robots, humans) are interacting and reacting to each other. In this paper, we present a formalization of a social framework for agents based in the concept of Social Practices as high level specifications of normal (expected) behavior in a given social context. We argue that social practices facilitate the practical reasoning of agents in standard social interactions.

Organization concepts and models are increasingly being adopted for the design and specification of multi-agent systems. Agent organizations can be seen as mechanisms of social order, created to achieve global (or organizational) objectives by more or less autonomous agents. In order to develop a theory on the relation between organizational structures, organizational objectives and the actions of agents fulfilling roles in the organization a theoretical framework is needed to describe organizational structures and actions of (groups of) agents. Current logical formalisms focus on specific aspects of organizations (e.g. power, delegation, agent actions, or normative issues) but a framework that integrates and relates different aspects is missing. Given the amount of aspects involved and the subsequent complexity of a formalism encompassing them all, it is difficult to realize. In this paper, a first step is taken to solve this problem. We present a generic formal model that enables to specify and relate the main concepts of an organization (including, activity, structure, environment and others) so that organizations can be analyzed at a high level of abstraction. However, for some aspects we use a simplified model in order to avoid the complexity of combining many different types of (modal) operators.

Making a computational agent 'social' has implications for how it perceives itself and the environment in which it is situated, including the ability to recognise the behaviours of others. We point to recent work on social planning, i.e. planning in settings where the social context is relevant in the assessment of the beliefs and capabilities of others, and in making appropriate choices of what to do next., Comment: Presented at "2nd Workshop on Cognitive Architectures for Social Human-Robot Interaction 2016 (arXiv:1602.01868)"

A normative system is defined as any set of interacting agents whose behavior can usefully be regarded as norm-directed. Most organizations, and more specifically institutions, fall under this definition. Interactions in these normative systems are regulated by normative templates that describe desired behavior in terms of deontic concepts (obligations, prohibitions and permissions), deadlines, violations and sanctions. Agreements between agents, and between an agent and the society, can then be specified by means of contracts. Contracts provide flexible but verifiable means to integrate society requirements and agent autonomy. and are an adequate means for the explicit specification of interactions. From the society perspective, it is important that these contracts adhere to the specifications described in the model of the organization. If we want to automate such verifications, we have to formalize the languages used for contracts and for the specification of organizations. The logic LCR is based on deontic temporal logic. LCR is an expressive language for describing interaction in multi-agent systems, including obligations with deadlines. Deadlines are important norms in most interactions between agents. Intuitively, a deadline states that an agent should perform an action before a certain point in time. The obligation to perform the action starts at the moment the deadline becomes active. E.g. when a contract is signed or approved. If the action is not performed in time a violation of the deadline occurs. It can be specified independently what measure has to be taken in this case. In this paper we investigate the deadline concept in more detail. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 defines the variant of CTL we use. In section 3, we discuss the basic intuitions of deadlines. Section 4 presents a first intuitive formalization for deadlines. In section 5, we look at a more complex model for deadlines trying to catch some more practical aspects. Finally, in section 6 we present issues for future work and our conciusions.

Norms specifying constraints over institutions are stated in such a form that allows them to regulate a wide range of situations over time without need for modification. To guarantee this stability, the formulation of norms need to abstract from a variety of concrete aspects, which are instead relevant for the actual operationalization of institutions. If agent institutions are to be built, which comply with a set of abstract requirements, how can those requirements be translated in more concrete constraints the impact of which can be described directly in the institution? In this work we make use of logical methods in order to provide a formal characterization of the translation rules that operate the connection between abstract and concrete norms. On the basis of this characterization, a comprehensive formalization of the notion of institution is also provided.