Seminar by Virginia Dignum (TU Delft) 20/5 10-12
Jørgen Villadsen
Our guest Virginia Dignum gives two talks on Tuesday 20 May 2014 in auditorium 306/38:
10:00-10:45: Modeling Agent Organisations
In the last years, social and organizational aspects of agency have become a major issue in MAS research. Recent applications of MAS on Web Services, Grid Computing and Ubiquitous Computing enforce the need of using these aspects in order to ensure some social order within these systems. One of the ways to assure such a social order is through multi-agent organizations. Multi-agent organizations can be seen from two perspectives: either the organization emerges from the activity of the individual agents or it is orchestrated designed to facilitate and guide some specific global behaviour. In the latter case, systems are characterized by the autonomy of the individual participants that however must be able to collaboratively achieve predetermined global goals, within a globally constrained environment. However, there is still a lack of a comprehensive view of the diverse concepts, models and approaches related to multi-agent organizations. Moreover, most designers have doubts about how to put these concepts in practice, i.e., how to program them.
11:00-11:45: Cognitive Agents for Social Simulation
Simulation is increasingly being used to analyse and predict important economic and sociological phenomena. These simulations must take into account the complex interactions resulting from how one perceives other people (social cognition) and how one forms own opinions and beliefs (individual cognition). In capturing such dynamics it is essential to formalize both how agents perceive, learn about and restructure their social environments, as well as how they adapt their own attitudes and opinions as resulting from these interactions. That is, in order to fully capture the complexity of social interaction, richer cognitive behaviour is needed. In this way, social relations and individual differences can be understood in terms of the mental models and reasoning rules used by agents to form their decisions. In this tutorial, we will introduce different approaches to agent reasoning in social simulation, present an extensible cognitive architecture that includes personality, normative, cultural and emotional aspects, and discuss the conditions under which increased cognitive expressiveness is necessary.
All are welcome.
Hosts: Andreas Schmidt Jensen & Jørgen Villadsen, DTU Compute, AlgoLoG Section
Bio: Virginia Dignum (1964) is Associate Professor at Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. Before joining academia she worked in consultancy and system development for more than 12 years. In 2004 she got her PhD in Computer Science from Utrecht University. Her research focuses on agent-based models of organizations, and the interaction between people and intelligent systems and teams. In 2006 she was awarded the prestigious Veni grant from NWO (Dutch Organization for Scientific Research). She has organized many international conferences and workshops, and has more than 150 peer-reviewed publications and books.