[agents] [Call for Participation] Agents Living in Augmented Worlds (ALAW @ ECAI)

[Alessandro Ricci]

Call for Participation: ALAW @ ECAI 2016

1st International Workshop on Agents Living in Augmented Worlds
The Hague (The Netherlands) - August 29, 2016
http://alaw2016.apice.unibo.it

=====  Contributions (partial list)  =====

	• A. Ricci and L. Tummolini - Agents Living in Augmented Worlds - Setting the Stage
	• A. Campbell - Exploring the advantages of an Agent oriented approach to developing Augmented Reality worlds
	• Antônio Carlos da Rocha Costa - Symbolic Environments and the Cultural Aspects of Augmented Worlds
	• F. Dignum - Realistic agents in augmented reality
	• N. Osman - The Collective Mind in an Augmented World
	• W. Stirling - A Framework for Coordinated Agency in Augmented Worlds
	• C. Castelfranchi - to be announced
	• P. Noriega - to be announced

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Title: Agents Living in Augmented Worlds - Setting the stage
Speakers: A. Ricci and L. Tummolini

The impressive development of technologies is reducing the gulf between the physical and the digital matter, reality and virtuality. The fruitful integration of pervasive computing, wearable computing and mixed/augmented reality as enabling technologies is setting up the stage for designing multi-agent systems where software agents and agent societies shape the "augmented worlds" where human users are immersed, extending their perception of the physical world, their action as well as the capability of reasoning, decision making, communication, collaboration. In this talk we aim at providing an multi-disciplinary overview about agent-based augmented worlds, introducing some concepts and views, and making connections with related research themes.  

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Title: Exploring the advantages of an Agent oriented approach to developing Augmented Reality worlds
Speaker: Abraham Campbell, UCD

This talk will discuss the future requirements for creating Augmented Reality applications, highlighting the synergy between an Agent Oriented Approach and the software requirement specifications inherit in Augmented Reality development. Due to this synergy, many Augmented Reality frameworks will simply be reinventing the wheel if they ignore the large body of work already present within the Agent community. Correspondingly the Agent community needs to develop tools to combine Agents within commonly used integrated development environments that currently exist for Augmented Reality development. If such an integration takes places an Agent Oriented approach could speed up the development of smart objects with Augmented Reality worlds, thus aiding in the creation of a truly ubiquitous computing ecosystem. How these smart objects interact and are programmed should not just be left to developers, but through the higher level abstractions allowed for by an agent oriented approach they should give access to anyone to create and develop within this new mirror world.  

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Title: Symbolic Environments and the Cultural Aspects of Augmented Worlds
Speaker: Antônio Carlos da Rocha Costa

This paper adopts a concept of augmented world as an augmented reality
that encompasses social actors and their cultural systems,
computationally realized, and submits that a particular form of agent
society can be fruitfully used as a general agent-based model for
augment worlds taken in that sense. The paper examines how the
symbolic environments of agent societies may participate in the
constitution of augmented worlds. In particular, it examines how the
symbolic systems of symbolic environments may represent cultural
aspects (understood in a very wide sense: morality, legality,
politics, religion, ethnicity, etc.) in augmented worlds. In a short
case study, the paper shows how one may expect augmented worlds to
treat the symbolic conducts of their social actors.

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Title: The Collective Mind in an Augmented World
Speaker: Nardine Ossman, IAAA-CSIC

This talk introduces the novel notion of an operational Collective Mind and its application to augmented reality. A collective mind is the mind of a group of intelligent beings (biological and artificial) that enhances the behaviour of the group by perceiving their individual cognitive, emotional, and physical state, learning the individual and collective needs, building a collective state, and acting upon those beings and their environment to modify their collective state in such a way that their needs are satisfied. We illustrate how a Collective Mind can be applied to augmented reality, how it can influence the augmentation, as well as how it can result in more effective individual and collective human/agent actions in the augmented worlds.   

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Title: Realistic agents in augmented reality
Speaker: F. Dignum, TU Delf

Although the intuitions of agents usually fit well to model characters in virtual and augmented reality, the agent technology does not live up to expectations when one actually starts implementing them. The agent platforms support agents that are for a large part autistic or seem to have no will of their own. In these environments the support of finding a right balance between pro-active and reactive behavior is crucial to create characters that might behave interesting enough to add to the experience. In the presentation I will touch upon a number of issues that have to be solved in order for agent technology to be usable for ALAW.

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Title: A Framework for Coordinated Agency in Augmented Worlds
Speaker: Wynn Stirling

In order to appropriately interact in augmented worlds, human and artificial agents will need to fit together and to behave in a systematic manner relative to each other and to the mixed human-artificial groups that they will form. Game theory has proven to be a powerful tool to analyze interactive decision making both in the social sciences and in computer science. As an analytical tool,game theory has been used to reduce a reality (actual human behavior) to an abstraction (a mathematical model). In contrast, in computer science, factors that are deemed relevant to the desired function of an artificial system are encoded into a mathematical model (an abstraction) which is then used to create a reality (the desired behavior of an artificial social system). Both as an analytical and as a synthetic tool, however, traditional game theory is incomplete, lacking the power to take social relationships between individuals into account and to explain or induce systematic group behavior. Arguably, however, social relationships between humans and artificial agents will form in augmented worlds, and mixed teams of players will be enabled. Conditional game theory provides a framework within which social relationships between human and artificial agents can be directly encoded, thereby providing a mechanism to model rational behavior in terms of both individual and
social benefit. Rather than exogenously imposing rational behavior on the artificial agents, systematic group behaviors in mixed teams emerge endogenously as a result of the social relationships between them.

===== ALAW @ ECAI 2016