The study of the human immune system is an important research area with results that can help improve public health. The human immune system is a natural multiagent system. It is, therefore, liable to be simulated by a corresponding artificial multiagent system. The purpose of this study is to propose a multiagent system for conducting experiments that contribute to highlighting the role of humoral immunity in post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis (PSGN). We identified the requirements for extending the AutoSimmune simulator to simulate key phenomena involved in the emergence of PSGN. Two environments were included: kidney and upper respiratory tract. We also included simulation of neutrophil cells. Furthermore, we simulated the administration of antimicrobials, reporting the consequent reduction of PSGN risk.

Improved collaboration techniques for tasks executed collectively by multiple agents can lead to increased amount of information available to the agents, increased efficiency of resource utilization, reduced interference among the agents, and faster task completion. An example of a multiagent task that benefits from collaboration is Collective Transport with Obstacle Avoidance: the task of multiple agents jointly moving an object while navigating around obstacles. We propose a new approach to sharing and aggregation of information among the transporting agents that entails (1) considering all available information instead of only their own most pressing concerns through establishing objectively valued system needs and (2) being persuadable instead of stubborn, through assessing how these needs compare to the needs established by their peers. Our system extends and improves upon the work in (Ferrante et al. 2013), leading to better informed agents making efficient decisions that cause less inter-agent interference and lead to faster and more reliable completion of the collective task.

This paper presents an ontology-based application for mobile devices which is responsible for supporting groups of people with the management of their shared tasks. The ontology stores the domain knowledge about collaborative tasks, which is used to support task recognition and relocation. Such knowledge is used by a multi-agent system that consists of a group of agents representing each person in the group. The agents use plan recognition techniques to monitor the execution of tasks according to the schedules and negotiate task allocation when needed. Our techniques have been applied in a healthcare scenario which consists of a family group that takes care of an elderly person. This paper presents an ontology-based application for mobile devices which is responsible for supporting groups of people with the management of their shared tasks. % in a healthcare scenario.The ontology stores the domain knowledge about collaborative tasks, which is used to support task recognition and relocation.Such knowledge is used by a multi-agent system that consists of a group of agents representing each person in the group.The agents use plan recognition techniques to monitor the execution of tasks according to the schedules and negotiate task allocation when needed.Our techniques have been applied in a healthcare scenario which consists of a family group that takes care of an elderly person.

In this paper, we examine the effects of probabilistic response on a task allocation problem for a decentralized multi-agent system (MAS) and how such a mechanism may be used to tune the level of redundancy in an MAS. Redundancy refers to a back up pool of agents, beyond the necessary number required to act on a task, that have experience on that task. We present a formal analysis of a response threshold based system in which agents act probabilistically and show that we can estimate the response probability value needed to ensure that a given number of agents will act and that we can estimate the response probability value needed to achieve a given level of redundancy in the system. We perform an empirical study using an agent-based simulation to verify expectations from the formal analysis.

Accurate multiagent social simulation requires a computational model of how people incorporate their observations of real-world events into their beliefs about the state of their world. Current methods for creating such agent-based models typically rely on manual input that can be both burdensome and subjective. In this investigation, we instead pursue automated methods that can translate available data into the desired computational models. For this purpose, we use a corpus of real-world events in combination with longitudinal public opinion polls on a variety of opinion issues. We perform two experiments using automated methods taken from the literature. In our first experiment, we train maximum entropy classifiers to model changes in opinion scores as a function of real-world events. We measure and analyze the accuracy of our learned classifiers by comparing the opinion scores they generate against the opinion scores occurring in a held-out subset of our corpus. In our second experiment, we learn Bayesian networks to capture the same function. We then compare the dependency structures induced by the two methods to identify the event features that have the most significant effect on changes in public opinion.

Planning air missions for a team flying in hostile environments is a complex task, since multiple interrelated goals need to be considered, e.g., performing the mission tasks and avoiding enemy fire. The target assignment and route planning for the team should therefore be performed in a coordinated way. The mission planner suggested in this work combines genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization in order to solve these two problems in an interconnected manner. Simulations are used for testing and analyzing the approach. It is concluded that the mission planner is able to suggest suitable plans in complex scenarios with three interrelated objectives: low risk exposure, high mission effectiveness and short route length.

For those betting on the 142nd Kentucky Derby on Saturday, there are several ways to approach the strategy. Last year, Jimmy Fallon's puppies took a stab at it--and correctly predicted the winner, American Pharoah. Or, you could rely on the experts from the Bleacher Report. Maybe you want to study up on your own, or see which horses are looking good that day. Go with TechRepublic's Steve Ranger on an inside look at the gold-plated gadget market that's received a big boost from Apple.

The world of automation is growing quickly and I am thrilled to be a part of it. As you may already know, true robotic process automation (RPA) is rules-based, and involves training the bots to recognize structured data and respond accordingly within the workflow solution. "Where can you best implement machine learning in your organization?" Machine learning takes this to the next level, by working with unstructured data to provide solutions, within certain parameters, that it has been trained to recognize. The software analyzes data and learns from the ways in which humans complete a process or solve a problem.

We consider a distributed learning setup where a network of agents sequentially access realizations of a set of random variables with unknown distributions. The network objective is to find a parametrized distribution that best describes their joint observations in the sense of the Kullback-Leibler divergence. Apart from recent efforts in the literature, we analyze the case of countably many hypotheses and the case of a continuum of hypotheses. We provide non-asymptotic bounds for the concentration rate of the agents' beliefs around the correct hypothesis in terms of the number of agents, the network parameters, and the learning abilities of the agents. Additionally, we provide a novel motivation for a general set of distributed Non-Bayesian update rules as instances of the distributed stochastic mirror descent algorithm.

This study suggests a new prediction model for chaotic time series inspired by the brain emotional learning of mammals. We describe the structure and function of this model, which is referred to as BELPM (Brain Emotional Learning-Based Prediction Model). Structurally, the model mimics the connection between the regions of the limbic system, and functionally it uses weighted k nearest neighbors to imitate the roles of those regions. The learning algorithm of BELPM is defined using steepest descent (SD) and the least square estimator (LSE). Two benchmark chaotic time series, Lorenz and Henon, have been used to evaluate the performance of BELPM. The obtained results have been compared with those of other prediction methods. The results show that BELPM has the capability to achieve a reasonable accuracy for long-term prediction of chaotic time series, using a limited amount of training data and a reasonably low computational time.