Agents
Predicting the Prediction Market:Would Smart Agents Help?
Chen, Shu Heng (National Chengchi University)
When market works and when it fails has been an issue long pursued by economists. While to an extreme extent the view, as characterized by the “invisible hand” or “market mechanism”, has been so dominant in economics education and public policy debates, it is generally acceptable that markets are not out there and have to designed properly so as to work (McMillan, 2004). The significance of designs has been further illustrated by experimental economics. As opposed to designs, what, however, has been drawn less attention is the role of traders, their characteristics and behavior. To one extreme, one may consider that a good design is so dominant that there leaves little room for individual traders to play a role. The literature inspired by the zero-intelligence agent (Gode and Sunder, 1993) provides a good background of this issue, and many later studies do cast doubt on the sufficiency of this minimal intelligence and propose different versions of additional intelligence.
Game Theory for Security: A Real-World Challenge Problem for Multiagent Systems and Beyond
Tambe, Milind (University of Southern California) | An, Bo (University of Southern California)
In all of these problems, we have limited with researchers in other disciplines, be "on the ground" security resources which prevent full security coverage with domain experts, and examine real-world constraints at all times; instead, limited security resources must be deployed and challenges that cannot be abstracted away. Together as intelligently taking into account differences in priorities an international community of multiagent researchers, we of targets requiring security coverage, the responses of can accomplish more! the adversaries to the security posture and potential uncertainty over the types, capabilities, knowledge and priorities
Using Autonomous Agent-Based Systems to Counter Asymmetric Threats from Non-State Sponsored Terror Organizations
Gibson, Gregory O. (Naval Research Laboratory) | Hyden, Paul D. (Naval Research Laboratory)
This would allow teams to have an objective currency for trust transactions. These systems would allow another surface for autonomous Ali, A.S., Rana, O., and Walker, D.W. (2004): "WS-QoC: agents to integrate the social fabric with information Measuring Quality of Service Compliance," International gathered in virtual environments. Further, the system would Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC04), New increase illumination of dark networks engaged in illicit York, NY. covert activity. Participants would be assigned a score Allbeck, J., and Badler, N. (2002): "Toward Representing Agent similar to FICO scores; when an individual score falls Behaviors Modified by Personality and Emotion," Autonomous noticeably or falls below a threshold, further observation Agents and Multiagent Systems, Bologna, Italy.
Modeling the Effects of International Interventions with Nexus Network Learne
Duong, Deborah V. (Agent Based Learning Systems)
Nexus Network Learner is an intelligent agent based simulation used to study Irregular Warfare (IW) in several major studies at the Department of Defense (DoD). Heterogeneous autonomous agents, each with their own separated inductive learning mechanism, have initial attributes and behaviors in proportion to demographic groups in the simulated population, and learn new behaviors as they serve culturally based goals. Nexus agents create a dynamic role-based network, and learn how to choose partners as well as what behaviors they should have with their network partners. As Nexus agents coevolve, nexus models the emergence of social institutions from individual behaviors, the fundamental social aggregation challenge. Nexus models the formation of learned vicious and virtuous cycles of behavior, some of which have higher average utility for the agents than others, and can be used to test the effects of interventions on the natural motivation-based system. An experiment is presented that uses Nexus to model the vicious cycle of corruption in an African country, from the first Irregular Warfare Analytical baseline at the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Messer 2009).
Component Trust for Web Service Compositions
Motallebi, Mohammad Reza (University of Tokyo) | Ishikawa, Fuyuki (University of Tokyo) | Honiden, Shinichi (University of Tokyo)
The concept of trust in web services describes the degree of belief that a client or a group of clients have over services functioning satisfactorily and providing the expected results. As services are usually invoked in composition with other services, judging on their trustworthiness gets more complicated, yet computing their trustworthy becomes a desired goal. Existing work only take the trust of each individual service into account, regardless of the context of the composition. They also do not use the data gained from other clients for selecting the most trustful composition and preparing for possible service failures. In our work we first introduce the concept of Combination Reputation, which reflects the commonness and popularity of invoaction of a pair or group of services among other clients. By interpreting the trust and reputation values as subjective probability, we define the Component Trust of the services in the composition, which reflects the degree of belief the client has over components of services performing satisfactorily. We model the web service composition as a Bayesian network and integrate the above trust values into the network and show how to compute the global trust of the composition.
Adaptive Learning Agents for Sustainable Building Energy Management.
Mamidi, Sunil K. (University of Southern California) | Chang, Yu-Han (University of Southern California) | Maheswaran, Rajiv (University of Southern California)
Nearly 20% of total energy consumption in the United States is accounted for in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Smart sensing and adaptive energy management agents can greatly decrease the energy usage of HVAC systems in many building applications, for example by enabling the operator to shut off HVAC to unoccupied rooms. We implement a multimodal sensor agent that is nonintrusive and low-cost, combining information such as motion detection, CO2 reading, sound level, ambient light,and door state sensing. We show that in our live test bed at the USC campus, these sensor agents can be used to accurately estimate the number of occupants in each room using machine learning techniques, and that these techniques can also be applied to predict future occupancy by creating agent models of the occupants. These predictions will be used by control agents to enable the HVAC system increase its efficiency by continuously adapting to occupancy forecasts of each room.
Security Games with Limited Surveillance: An Initial Report
An, Bo (University of Southern California) | Kempe, David (University of Southern California) | Kiekintveld, Christopher (University of Texas, El Paso) | Shieh, Eric (University of Southern California) | Singh, Satinder (University of Michigan) | Tambe, Milind (University of Southern California) | Vorobeychik, Yevgeniy (Sandia National Laboratories)
Stackelberg games have been used in several deployed applications of game theory to make recommendations for allocating limited resources for protecting critical infrastructure. The resource allocation strategies are randomized to prevent a strategic attacker from using surveillance to learn and exploit patterns in the allocation. An important limitation of previous work on security games is that it typically assumes that attackers have perfect surveillance capabilities, and can learn the exact strategy of the defender. We introduce a new model that explicitly models the process of an attacker observing a sequence of resource allocation decisions and updating his beliefs about the defender's strategy. For this model we present computational techniques for updating the attacker's beliefs and computing optimal strategies for both the attacker and defender, given a specific number of observations. We provide multiple formulations for computing the defender's optimal strategy, including non-convex programming and a convex approximation. We also present an approximate method for computing the optimal length of time for the attacker to observe the defender's strategy before attacking. Finally, we present experimental results comparing the efficiency and runtime of our methods.
Strategy Representation Analysis for Patrolling Games
Bosansky, Branislav (Czech Technical University in Prague) | Vanek, Ondrej (Czech Technical University in Prague) | Pechoucek, Michal (Czech Technical University in Prague)
This paper considers the problem of patrolling multiple targets in a Euclidean environment by a single patrolling unit. We use game-theoretic approach and model the problem as a two-player zero-sum game in the extensive form. Based on the existing work in the domain of patrolling we propose a novel mathematical non-linear program for finding strategies in a discretized problem, in which we introduce a general concept of internal states of the patroller. We experimentally evaluate game value for the patroller for various graphs and strategy representations. The results suggest that adding internal states for the patroller yields better results in comparison to adding choice nodes in the used discretization.
BECCA: Reintegrating AI for Natural World Interaction
Rohrer, Brandon (Sandia National Laboratories)
Natural world interaction (NWI), the pursuit of arbitrary goals in unstructured physical environments, is an excellent motivating problem for the reintegration of artificial intelligence. It is the problem set that humans struggle to solve. At a minimum it entails perception, learning, planning, and control, and can also involve language and social behavior. An agent's fitness in NWI is achieved by being able to perform a wide variety of tasks, rather than being able to excel at one. In an attempt to address NWI, a brain-emulating cognition and control architecture (BECCA) was developed. It uses a combination of feature creation and model-based reinforcement learning to capture structure in the environment in order to maximize reward. BECCA avoids making common assumptions about its world, such as stationarity, determinism, and the Markov assumption. BECCA has been demonstrated performing a set of tasks which is non-trivially broad, including a vision-based robotics task. Current development activity is focused on applying BECCA to the problem of general Search and Retrieve, a representative natural world interaction task.
The Mathematics of Aggregation, Interdependence, Organizations and Systems of Nash Equilibria: A Replacement for Game Theory
Lawless, William Frere (Paine College Departments of Mathematics &) | Sofge, Donald A. (Psychology)
Traditional social science research has been unable to satisfactorily aggregate individual level data to group, organization and systems levels, making it one of social science’s biggest challenges (Giles, 2011). For game and social theory, we believe that the fault can be attributed to the lack of valid distance measures (e.g., the arbitrary ordering of cooperation and competition precludes a Hilbert space distance metric for the ordering of and gradations between these social behaviors, making game theory normative). Alternatively, we offer a theory of social interdependence with countable mathematics based on bistable or multi-stable perspectives and linear algebra. The evidence that is available is supportive. It indicates that meaning is a one-sided, stable, classical interpretation, not only making the correspondence between beliefs and objective reality in social settings incomplete, raising questioning about static theories from earlier eras (i.e., Axelrod’s evolution of cooperation; Simon’s bounded rationality). The result indicates for open systems (democracies) that interpretations evolve naturally to become orthogonal (Nash equilibria), that orthogonal interpretations generate the information to drive social evolution, but that in closed systems (dictatorships), dependent on the enforcement of social cooperation and the suppression of opposing points of view, evolution slows or stops (e.g., China, Iran or Cuba), causing capital and energy to be wasted, misdirected or misallocated as leaders suppress the interpretations that they alone have the authority to label as unethical, immoral, or irreligious. We conclude that a mathematics based on NE is feasible.