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In online social networks (OSNs), users are allowed to create and share content about themselves and others. When multiple entities start distributing content, information can reach unintended individuals and inference can reveal more information about ...

Evolutionary computation techniques have been widely studied to automate the synthesis of behavioural control for robots. In online evolution, an evolutionary algorithm is executed on the robots themselves during task execution so as to continuously ...

Emotive virtual agents are seen to be a valuable tool in various research domains, including human studies, training, entertainment, and medicine. However, systems that primarily focus on social-emotional agents are largely domain-focused, or require ...

In open multi-agent systems norms describe the behavior that can be performed, that must be performed, and that cannot be performed. One of the main challenges on developing normative systems is that norms may conflict with each other. Norms are in ...

A key challenge of institutions is how to guide their governing into being desirable. This is important from the perspective of an agent governed by an institution to maintain specific rights, and of cross-institutional policies that require ...

We present a novel data-driven agent-based modeling framework to study innovation diffusion. Our first step is to learn a model of individual agent behavior from individual adoption characteristics. We then construct an agent-based simulation with the ...

In the proposed thesis, we study Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs), which are problems where several agents coordinate with each other to optimize a global cost function. The use of DCOPs has gained momentum, due to their capability ...

One-sided matching is concerned with the allocation of indivisible objects to a set of agents, in the absence of monetary transfers. In contrast to many real-life scenarios such as shift scheduling or course assignment, traditional matching mechanisms ...

To make intelligent decisions, robots often use models of the effects of their actions on the world. Unfortunately, it is often infeasible to have the perfect knowledge and computational resources required to create globally accurate models. This may ...

Trust and reputation systems are widely used, facilitating interactions among agents based on trust evaluation. These systems may have robustness issues, which should be paid attention. Various attacks in existing trust and reputation systems have been ...

In multi robot navigation, robots need to move towards their goal positions while adapting their paths to account for potential collisions with other robots and static obstacles. Existing methods compute motions that are optimal locally but do not ...

This paper describes an architecture for robots interacting with non-expert humans to incrementally acquire domain knowledge. Candidate questions are generated using contextual information and ranked using different measures with the objective of ...

As the global population ages and the occurrence of single and "empty nest" elderly household increases, artificial companion agents will play a more important part in seniors' daily life to bridge some of the gaps left by the shortage of caregiving ...

Most state of the art learning algorithms do not fare well with agents (computer or humans) that change their behaviour in time. This is the case because they usually do not model the other agents' behaviour and instead make some assumptions that for ...

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a well-established paradigm for enabling autonomous agents to learn from experience. To enable RL to scale to any but the smallest domains, it is necessary to make use of abstraction and generalization of the state-action ...

My main research motivation is to develop complete autonomous agents that interact with people socially. For an agent to be social with respect to humans, it needs to be able to parse and process the multitude of aspects that comprise the human cultural ...

This paper heralds a paradigm that serves as a reference model for organizations of networked agents. This paradigm suggests modular components that can be combined to form a network organization. For network centricity in this paradigm, this paper ...

Renewable power sources such as wind and solar are inflexible in their energy production, which requires demand to rapidly follow supply in order to maintain energy balance. Promising controllable demands are air-conditioners and heat pumps which use ...

The facility location problem is arguably the prototypical problem in the mechanism design without money's research agenda. Motivated by the intrinsic limitations of the classical model on both (i) adequately modelling several real life scenarios and (...

Police patrols are used ubiquitously to deter crimes in urban areas. A distinctive feature of urban crimes is that criminals react opportunistically to patrol officers' assignments. Compared to strategic attackers (such as terrorists) with a well-laid ...