Fluency is an important metric in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) that describes the coordination with which humans and robots collaborate on a task. Fluency is inherently linked to the timing of the task, making temporal constraint networks a promising way to model and measure fluency. We show that the Multi-Agent Daisy Temporal Network (MAD-TN) formulation, which expands on an existing concept of daisy-structured networks, is both an effective model of human-robot collaboration and a natural way to measure a number of existing fluency metrics. The MAD-TN model highlights new metrics that we hypothesize will strongly correlate with human teammates' perception of fluency.

Distributed Pseudo-tree Optimization Procedure (DPOP) is a well-known message passing algorithm that has been used to provide optimal solutions of Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) -- a framework that is designed to optimize constraints in cooperative multi-agent systems. The traditional DCOP formulation does not consider those constraints that must be satisfied (also known as hard constraints), rather it concentrates only on soft constraints. However, the presence of both types of constraints are observed in a number of applications, such as Distributed Radio Link Frequency Assignment and Distributed Event Scheduling, etc. Although the combination of these types of constraints is recently incorporated in DPOP to solve DCOPs, scalability remains an issue for them as finding an optimal solution is NP-hard. Additionally, in DPOP, the agents are arranged as a DFS pseudo-tree. Recently it has been observed that the constructed pseudo-trees in this way often come to be chain-like and greatly impair the algorithm's performance. To address these issues, we develop an algorithm that speeds up the DPOP algorithm by reducing the size of the messages exchanged and increasing parallelism in the pseudo tree. Our empirical evidence suggests that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms by a significant margin.

From marketing to politics, exploitation of incomplete information through selective communication of arguments is ubiquitous. In this work, we focus on development of an argumentation-theoretic model for manipulable multi-agent argumentation, where each agent may transmit deceptive information to others for tactical motives. In particular, we study characterisation of epistemic states, and their roles in deception/honesty detection and (mis)trust-building. To this end, we propose the use of intra-agent preferences to handle deception/honesty detection and inter-agent preferences to determine which agent(s) to believe in more. We show how deception/honesty in an argumentation of an agent, if detected, would alter the agent's perceived trustworthiness, and how that may affect their judgement as to which arguments should be acceptable. 1 Introduction To adequately characterise multi-agent argumentation, it is important to model what an agent sees of other agents' argumentations ( Epistemic Aspect). It is also important to model how agents interact with others ( Agent-to-Agent Interaction). These two factors determine dynamics of multi-agent argumentation, and are thus central to: argumentation-based negotiations (Cf.

How did our agents perform as well as they did? First, we noticed that the agents had very fast reaction times and were very accurate taggers, which might explain their performance (tagging is a tactical action that sends opponents back to their starting point). Humans are comparatively slow to process and act on sensory input, due to our slower biological signalling. Here's an example of a reaction time test you can try yourself. Thus, our agents' superior performance might be a result of their faster visual processing and motor control.

While there are many examples in which robots provide social assistance, a lack of theory on how the robots should decide how to assist impedes progress in realizing these technologies. To address this deficiency, we propose a pair of computational models to guide a robot as it provides social assistance. The model of social autonomy helps a robot select an appropriate assistance that will help with the task at hand while also maintaining the autonomy of the person being assisted. The model of social alliance describes how a to determine whether the robot and the person being assisted are cooperatively working towards the same goal. Each of these models are rooted in social reasoning between people, and we describe here our ongoing work to adapt this social reasoning to human-robot interactions. Socially assistive robots (SARs) provide social assistance instead of physically intervening.

The work presented in this paper aims to explore how, and to what extent, an adaptive robotic coach has the potential to provide extra motivation to adhere to long-term rehabilitation and help fill the coaching gap which occurs during repetitive solo practice in high performance sport. Adapting the behavior of a social robot to a specific user, using reinforcement learning (RL), could be a way of increasing adherence to an exercise routine in both domains. The requirements gathering phase is underway and is presented in this paper along with the rationale of using RL in this context.

Human-supervision in multi-agent teams is a critical requirement to ensure that the decision-maker's risk preferences are utilized to assign tasks to robots. In stressful complex missions that pose risk to human health and life, such as humanitarian-assistance and disaster-relief missions, human mistakes or delays in tasking robots can adversely affect the mission. To assist human decision making in such missions, we present an alert-generation framework capable of detecting various modes of potential failure or performance degradation. We demonstrate that our framework, based on state machine simulation and formal methods, offers probabilistic modeling to estimate the likelihood of unfavorable events. We introduce smart simulation that offers a computationally-efficient way of detecting low-probability situations compared to standard Monte-Carlo simulations. Moreover, for certain class of problems, our inference-based method can provide guarantees on correctly detecting task failures.

Smart speakers and robots become ever more prevalent in our daily lives. These agents are able to execute a wide range of tasks and actions and, therefore, need systems to control their execution. Current state-of-the-art such as (deep) reinforcement learning, however, requires vast amounts of data for training which is often hard to come by when interacting with humans. To overcome this issue, most systems still rely on Finite State Machines. We introduce Petri Net Machines which present a formal definition for state machines based on Petri Nets that are able to execute concurrent actions reliably, execute and interleave several plans at the same time, and provide an easy to use modelling language. We show their workings based on the example of Human-Robot Interaction in a shopping mall.

Recent years have seen a rising interest in developing AI algorithms for real world big data domains ranging from autonomous cars to personalized assistants. At the core of these algorithms are architectures that combine deep neural networks, for approximating the underlying multidimensional state-spaces, with reinforcement learning, for controlling agents that learn to operate in said state-spaces towards achieving a given objective. The talk will first outline notable past and future efforts in deep reinforcement learning as well as identify fundamental problems that this technology has been struggling to overcome. Towards mitigating these problems (and open up an alternative path to general artificial intelligence), I will then summarize a brain computing model of intelligence, rooted in the latest findings in neuroscience. The talk will conclude with an overview of the recent research efforts in the field of multi-agent systems, to provide the future teams of humans and agents with the necessary tools that allow them to safely co-exist.

Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation has granted SEK 96 million to be shared by 16 research projects studying the impact of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems on our society and our behaviour. The 16 projects seek to answer a number of questions relating to ethics, society and behaviour in the technology shift that society is facing. Examples of these questions include: How does the labour market change when robots take over certain jobs? What does the growing use of facial and voice recognition technology entail? How is human behaviour affected by the increasing use of drones?