Stochastic games provide a framework for interactions among multi-agents and enable a myriad of applications. In these games, agents decide on actions simultaneously, the state of an agent moves to the next state, and each agent receives a reward. However, finding an equilibrium (if exists) in this game is often difficult when the number of agents become large. This paper focuses on finding a mean-field equilibrium (MFE) in an action coupled stochastic game setting in an episodic framework. It is assumed that the impact of the other agents' can be assumed by the empirical distribution of the mean of the actions. All agents know the action distribution and employ lower-myopic best response dynamics to choose the optimal oblivious strategy. This paper proposes a posterior sampling based approach for reinforcement learning in the mean-field game, where each agent samples a transition probability from the previous transitions. We show that the policy and action distributions converge to the optimal oblivious strategy and the limiting distribution, respectively, which constitute a MFE.

In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting. Moreover, scenarios such as committee or board elections require voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent may vote for as many candidates as they wish. Winners are chosen by tallying up the votes and choosing the top-$k$ candidates receiving the most votes. An agent may manipulate the vote to achieve a better outcome by voting in a way that does not reflect their true preferences. In complex and uncertain situations, agents may use heuristics to strategize, instead of incurring the additional effort required to compute the manipulation which most favors them. In this paper, we examine voting behavior in multi-winner approval voting scenarios with complete information. We show that people generally manipulate their vote to obtain a better outcome, but often do not identify the optimal manipulation. Instead, voters tend to prioritize the candidates with the highest utilities. Using simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of these heuristics in situations where agents only have access to partial information.

Successful AI-powered customer service systems will depend on bots working with humans, not replacing them. Customer service is traditionally considered a cost center, so many organizations have focused their customer improvement efforts on reducing costs. This proves to be a critical mistake, as everyone is left unhappy. Even as customers are sick of pressing two for reservations and three for service, service reps are sick of answering the same questions over and over. The latest technology for service is virtual agents: Automated systems, trained on service transcripts, that can use AI to recognize and respond to customer requests whether by phone or chat.

One might easily say about the notion of the ethics of disruptive technology–much like Mark Twain's misattributed missive about the weather–that "everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything." But IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, is doing something. Freshly minted from their Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, is the 290-page first edition of Ethically Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritizing Human Well-Being with Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. If that title sounds like a mouthful, it ought to. The issues that need to be addressed, to prevent the summoning of the demon that Elon Musk warns of, are complex.

With increase in capabilities of artificial intelligence, over the last decade, a significant number of researchers have realized importance in creating not only capable intelligent systems, but also making them safe and secure [1-6]. Unfortunately, the field of AI Safety is very young, and researchers are still working to identify its main challenges and limitations. Impossibility results are well known in many fields of inquiry [7-13], and some have now been identified in AI Safety [14-16]. In this paper, we concentrate on a poorly understood concept of unpredictability of intelligent systems [17], which limits our ability to understand impact of intelligent systems we are developing and is a challenge for software verification and intelligent system control, as well as AI Safety in general. In theoretical computer science and in software development in general, many well-known impossibility results are well established, some of them are strongly related to the subject of this paper, for example: Rice's Theorem states that no computationally effective method can decide if a program will exhibit a particular nontrivial behavior, such as producing a specific output [18].

Automatic service composition in mobile and pervasive computing faces many challenges due to the complex and highly dynamic nature of the environment. Common approaches consider service composition as a decision problem whose solution is usually addressed from optimization perspectives which are not feasible in practice due to the intractability of the problem, limited computational resources of smart devices, service host's mobility, and time constraints to tailor composition plans. Thus, our main contribution is the development of a cognitively-inspired agent-based service composition model focused on bounded rationality rather than optimality, which allows the system to compensate for limited resources by selectively filtering out continuous streams of data. Our approach exhibits features such as distributedness, modularity, emergent global functionality, and robustness, which endow it with capabilities to perform decentralized service composition by orchestrating manifold service providers and conflicting goals from multiple users. The evaluation of our approach shows promising results when compared against state-of-the-art service composition models.

A major challenge in cognitive science and AI has been to understand how autonomous agents might acquire and predict behavioral and mental states of other agents in the course of complex social interactions. How does such an agent model the goals, beliefs, and actions of other agents it interacts with? What are the computational principles to model a Theory of Mind (ToM)? Deep learning approaches to address these questions fall short of a better understanding of the problem. In part, this is due to the black-box nature of deep networks, wherein computational mechanisms of ToM are not readily revealed. Here, we consider alternative hypotheses seeking to model how the brain might realize a ToM. In particular, we propose embodied and situated agent models based on distributed adaptive control theory to predict actions of other agents in five different game theoretic tasks (Harmony Game, Hawk-Dove, Stag-Hunt, Prisoner's Dilemma and Battle of the Exes). Our multi-layer control models implement top-down predictions from adaptive to reactive layers of control and bottom-up error feedback from reactive to adaptive layers. We test cooperative and competitive strategies among seven different agent models (cooperative, greedy, tit-for-tat, reinforcement-based, rational, predictive and other's-model agents). We show that, compared to pure reinforcement-based strategies, probabilistic learning agents modeled on rational, predictive and other's-model phenotypes perform better in game-theoretic metrics across tasks. Our autonomous multi-agent models capture systems-level processes underlying a ToM and highlight architectural principles of ToM from a control-theoretic perspective.

The incorporation of macro-actions (temporally extended actions) into multi-agent decision problems has the potential to address the curse of dimensionality associated with such decision problems. Since macro-actions last for stochastic durations, multiple agents executing decentralized policies in cooperative environments must act asynchronously. We present an algorithm that modifies generalized advantage estimation for temporally extended actions, allowing a state-of-the-art policy optimization algorithm to optimize policies in Dec-POMDPs in which agents act asynchronously. We show that our algorithm is capable of learning optimal policies in two cooperative domains, one involving real-time bus holding control and one involving wildfire fighting with unmanned aircraft. Our algorithm works by framing problems as "event-driven decision processes," which are scenarios in which the sequence and timing of actions and events are random and governed by an underlying stochastic process. In addition to optimizing policies with continuous state and action spaces, our algorithm also facilitates the use of event-driven simulators, which do not require time to be discretized into time-steps. We demonstrate the benefit of using event-driven simulation in the context of multiple agents taking asynchronous actions. We show that fixed time-step simulation risks obfuscating the sequence in which closely separated events occur, adversely affecting the policies learned. In addition, we show that arbitrarily shrinking the time-step scales poorly with the number of agents.

Kapitonov discusses the advantages of using blockchain, use cases including a fully autonomous vending machine, and the Robonomics technology stack. Below are two videos showing the Robonomics Platform in action via a fully autonomous robot artist and drones for environmental monitoring. Aleksandr Kapitonov is a "robot economics" academic society progressor at Airalab (the team behind Robonomics Platform), an assistant professor of Control Systems and Robotics at ITMO University, and regional coordinator of the Erasmus IOT-OPEN.EU project for researching and developing IoT education practices. His research focuses on navigation, computer vision, control of mobile robots and communication for multi-agents systems.

Digital transformation is rapidly disrupting current industry models. The adoption of new technologies is particularly accelerating in the logistics and manufacturing sector due to the benefits it offers enterprises, and is resulting in wider implementation of smart industry solutions. As the manufacturing and logistics sectors undergo major transformation, digital twins, artificial intelligence, the industrial internet of things, and warehouse robotization rank among the leading smart industry trends for 2019 and the coming years. Digital transformation of industry continues to move forward. A study by the German branch of the company PwC indicates that 91% of the industrial companies that participated in the research are investing or plan to invest in digital factories in Europe.