Andrea Omicini

This paper introduces argumentation over defeasible preferences in Arg2P, an argumentation framework based on logic programming. A computational mechanism is first implemented in Arg2P according to Dung’s defeasible preference model, then generalised to enable arbitrary preference relations over arguments.

In this paper we focus on the expressiveness of smart contracts (SC) and its role in blockchain technologies (BCT), by presenting Tenderfone, a prototypical blockchain platform providing SC as pro-active, time-aware, and asynchronous entities.

Most of the emerging software-intensive systems nowadays are very large-scale ones, and inherently sociotechnical. In this position paper, we argue that the peculiar features of such emerging systems (up to millions of interacting components, lacking central control, mixing humans and artificial components) call for novel approaches to coordinate the overall activities and functionalities. Accordingly, we discuss the key challenges to be faced by research in coordination models and technologies, and try to sketch some promising research directions.

In spite of the growing influence of agent-based models and technologies, the event-based architectural style is still prevalent in the design of large-scale distributed applications. In this paper we discuss the role of environment in both EBS and MAS, and show how it could be used as a starting point for reconciling agent-based and event-based abstractions and techniques within a conceptually-coherent framework that could work as the foundation of a principled discipline for the engineering of complex software systems.

Features of blockchain technology (BCT) such as decentralisation, trust, fault tolerance, and accountability, are of paramount importance for multi-agent systems (MAS). In this paper we argue that a principled approach to MAS-BCT integration cannot overlook the foundational character of agency—that is, autonomy. Accordingly, we present a custom BCT implementation where autonomy is placed in smart contracts (SC) interpreted as software agents. We show how agency can enhance SC expressiveness with autonomy, situatedness, sociality, and intelligence, and highlight the limitations of state-of-art BCT in supporting MAS design and implementation.

Once precisely defined so as to include just the explanation’s act, the notion of explanation should be regarded as a central notion in the engineering of intelligent system—not just as an add-on to make them understandable to humans. Based on symbolic AI techniques to match intuitive and rational cognition, explanation should be exploited as a fundamental tool for inter-agent communication among heterogeneous agents in open multi-agent systems. More generally, explanation-ready agents should work as the basic components in the engineering of intelligent systems integrating both symbolic and sub-/non-symbolic AI techniques.

Welcome to the 19 th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2004) hosted by the University of Cyprus in Nicosia. On behalf of the organizing committee, thank you for participating in this international event dedicated to computer scientists, engineers, and practitioners seeking innovative ideas in various areas of computational applications.The Symposium is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP) whose mission is to further the interests of computing professionals engaged in the development of new computing applications, interdisciplinary applications areas, and applied research. SAC is devoted to the study of real-world problem applications using a variety of computational algorithms. It provides an avenue for discussion and exchange of new ideas, associated computational algorithms, and interesting complex applications. This goal is reflected in the spectrum of application areas and tutorials designed to provide a wide range of topics.Welcome to the 19th Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2004). Over the past 18 years, SAC has been an international forum for researchers and practitioners to present their findings and research results in the areas of computer applications and technology. The SAC 2004 Technical Program offers a wide range of tracks covering major areas of computer applications. Highly qualified referees with strong expertise and special interest in their respective research areas carefully reviewed the submitted papers. As part of the Technical Program, this year the Tutorial Program offers 6 half-day tutorials that were carefully selected form numerous proposals.SAC's open call for Track Proposals resulted in the submission of 31 track proposals. These proposals were carefully evaluated by the conference Program Chairs. Some proposals were rejected on the grounds of either not being appropriate for the areas that SAC covers traditionally or being of rather narrow and specialized nature. Some others were merged to form a single track, on the grounds of having substantial overlap with each other. Eventually, 26 tracks were established, which then went on to produce their own call for papers. In response to these calls, 787 papers were submitted, from which 280 papers were strongly recommended by the referees for acceptance and inclusion in the Conference Proceedings. This gives SAC 2004 an acceptance rate of 36% across all tracks. Furthermore, it makes SAC 2004 the most successful conference in the history of SAC so far, but also one of the most popular and competitive conferences in the international field of applied computing.

In the next decades, the emergence of complex intelligent systems is going to open a plethora of new opportunities for logic programmers, capable of injecting Prolog programs within adaptive, pervasive, self-organising, knowledge-intensive systems, and integrating them with all the sorts of different programming languages and paradigms, over computing platforms of any kind. Suitable tools are then required, which could promote multi-language integration and multi-platform deployment, while ensuring both conceptual and technical coherence. The tuProlog logic programming framework is precisely heading in that direction.

The notion of coordination is more and more pervading many research fields both inside and outside Computer Science. In particular, areas such as software engineering, intelligent systems, agent technologies, Internet applications, programming languages, parallel and distributed computing, all raise issues that concern the interaction among different kinds of entities–processes, objects, components, agents–as well as its management. Despite their apparent diversity, this wide and heterogeneous range of problems actually exhibit large ...

Abstract The emergence of coordination models and languages for the design and development of today multi-component software systems calls for a precise understanding and definition of what coordination is, what coordination models and languages are. and what they are meant to. In this paper, we aim at providing a conceptual framework for coordination, as well as an operational framework for the semantic characterisation of coordination models and languages. The main go+ of this framework are (i) to deal with ...

One of the fundamental factors driving the (self-)organisation of complex social systems — such as human organisations, animal societies, and multi-agent systems — is the interaction of individuals mediated by the environment: sharing a workspace, mutually perceiving each other's actions, and modifying a common environment are simple yet powerful mechanisms that enable social coordination. In this article, we recall and classify some of the main sorts of environment-based coordination, and discuss their impact on the engineering of complex socio-technical systems.

The aim of this work is to present a computational model based on logic programming where constrained computations can be performed over application domains described through an object-oriented data model. This model is essentially based on two kind of constraints: and . Provability constraints concern the truth value of a formula with respect to a given logic theory, which is bounded to satisfy the formula. Message passing is then re-interpreted in a declarative way as a relation constraining speci c object properties. Hierarchical constraints make it ...

The application of Artificial Intelligence to the industrial world and its appliances has recently grown in popularity. Indeed, AI techniques are now becoming the de-facto technology for the resolution of complex tasks concerning computer vision, natural language processing and many other areas. In the last years, most of the the research community efforts have focused on increasing the performance of most common AI techniques—e.g., Neural Networks, etc.—at the expenses of their complexity. Indeed, many works in the AI field identify and propose hyper-efficient techniques, targeting high-end devices. However, the application of such AI techniques to devices and appliances which are characterised by limited computational capabilities, remains an open research issue. In the industrial world, this problem heavily targets low-end appliances, which are developed focusing on saving costs and relying on—computationally—constrained components. While some efforts have been made in this area ...

One of the most stimulating research lines in software engineering today, process engineering is currently a hot topic in agentoriented software engineering research [1–4]. A number of methodologies have been designed such as ADELFE, ASPECS, INGENIAS, MaSE, PASSI, Prometheus, SODA, Tropos,. . . , each of which with their own specificities. Sometimes, when a multi-agent application has to be designed, the methodology chosen does not completely fit for the whole development process. The current proposed approach is to take benefits to all existing methodologies and to reuse during the development process those parts that are the most relevant in order to build a new process engineering. There, process engineering aims at building libraries of suitable methods from/for agent oriented methodologies, thus helping in cataloguing current processes, assessing their utility, and rebuilding them according to developer needs. In this paper, we first provide a general view over the area of Soft...

We introduce Spatial Tuples, an extension of the basic tuple‐based model for distributed multi‐agent system coordination where (a) tuples are conceptually placed in regions of the physical world and possibly move anchored to a mobile computational device, (b) the behaviour of standard Linda coordination primitives is extended so as to depend on the spatial properties of the coordinating agents, tuples, and the topology of space, and (c) the tuple space can be conceived as a virtual layer augmenting physical reality. Motivated by the needs of mobile augmented‐reality applications, Spatial Tuples explicitly aims at supporting space‐aware and space‐based coordination in agent‐based pervasive computing scenarios. This paper presents the coordination model, its formalization as a process algebra, a library of patterns of coordination it enables, and a discussion of application scenarios, challenges, and open issues for future works.

The pervasive computing scenario provides a diffused presence of technological appliances distributed in the environment and interacting by means of wired or wireless networks. These computational units should be able to fruitfully exploit interactions with other components (e.g. information sources) in order to supply context aware services and support advanced forms of interaction among users. The aim of this paper is to show how models and frameworks for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) can be exploited to design and implement pervasive computing systems, focusing on the Agent and Artifact (A&A) approach. Artifacts are a conceptual, formal and computational framework supporting the realization of function-oriented elements of a MAS. After a description of a scenario, the paper briefly introduces the A&A framework and shows how it can be used to define an infrastructure supporting complex interaction schemes provided by the scenario

The increasing need to access and elaborate dynamic and heterogeneous informationsources distributed over Internet calls for new models and paradigms for application designand development. The mobile agent paradigm promotes the design of applications whereagents roam through Internet sites to locally access ad elaborate information and resources, possibly cooperating with each other. This paper focuses on mobile agent coordination, and discusses the TuCSoN coordination model for Internet ...

mobilecomponentsImplicit access (to agent-owntuple space) Linda Limited form ofprogrammabilityMARS Java mobileagentsImplicit access (to local tuplespace) OO (Java) LindaprimitivesProgrammable (Java reactions) TuCSoN Heterogeneous (possibly mobile) Internet agentsimplicit access (to local tuplespace)+ URLreferencingLogic-orientedLindaProgrammable (FOL reactions) PageSpacePageSpacen TU Berlin & University of Bolognan Tuple-based middleware for coordinatingcomponents and agents ...

Since its birth the Internet has always been characterised by a twofoldaspect of a distributed information repository, to store, publish, and retrieve programand data files, and an interaction medium, including a variety of communicationservices. An important current trend consists of merging the two aspectsdescribed above, and envision the Internet as a globally distributed computing platformwhere communication and computation can be freely intertwined. However, traditional distributed programming models fall short in this context, ...

3—Software will grow increasingly and be an “eternal beta” The standard notion of software is (slowly) shifting No longer a big monolithic engineering artifact.. but rather a mash-up of services and data [6] similarly, the development cycle will become much different No longer analysis-design-development-deployment.. but rather it starts with initial services, and through years.... new simple services are injected.. existing services are updated by small changes.. even the availability of data and users will make the difference there is a feeling ...

The notion of agent coordination context has beenintroduced as a means to model and shape the space of agent interactionand communication, and the agent presence in a situatedenvironment. This paper describes experiments in modellingand developing the notion of agent coordination context within theTuCSoN model for agent coordination, and discusses the relatedbenefits in terms of the engineering of multiagent system organisationand integration with service-oriented infrastructures.

This document briefly describes simpA-WS, a Javabased agent-oriented computing technology to flexibly and effectively implement WS-I compliant SOA/WS applications---i.e. Web-Service applications with a Service-Oriented Architecture--- both on the user side and the service side.

The blockchain is a novel approach to support distributed systems enabling a common, consistent view of a shared state among distributed nodes. There, smart contracts are computer programs that allow users to deploy arbitrary computations, in charge of automatically regulate state transitions and enforce properties. In this paper we speculate on how the blockchain and smart contracts could take advantage of a logic programming approach, and, complementarily, on how logic programming can benefit from the blockchain infrastructure. Accordingly, we discuss some possible research directions and open questions for future research.

We discuss the problem of cooperative argumentation in multi-agent systems, focusing on the computational model. An actor-based model is proposed as a first step towards cooperative argumentation in multi-agent systems to tackle distribution issues—illustrating a preliminary fully-distributed version of the argumentation process completely based on message passing.

Open distributed multi-agent systems featuring autonomous components demand coordination mechanisms for both functional and non-functional properties. Heterogeneity of requirements regarding interaction means and paradigms, stemming from the diverse nature of components, should not affect the effectiveness of coordination. Along this line, in this paper we share our pragmatical experience in the integration of objective and subjective, synchronous and asynchronous, reactive and proactive coordination approaches within two widely-adopted agentoriented technologies (JADE and Jason), enabling coordinating components to dynamically adapt their interaction means based on static preference or run-time contingencies.

A common practice in modern explainable AI is to post-hoc explain black-box machine learning (ML) predictors – such as neural networks – by extracting symbolic knowledge out of them, in the form of either rule lists or decision trees. By acting as a surrogate model, the extracted knowledge aims at revealing the inner working of the black box, thus enabling its inspection, representation, and explanation. Various knowledge-extraction algorithms have been presented in the literature so far. Unfortunately, running implementations of most of them are currently either proof of concepts or unavailable. In any case, a unified, coherent software framework supporting them all – as well as their interchange, comparison, and exploitation in arbitrary ML workflows – is currently missing. Accordingly, in this paper we present PSyKE, a platform providing general-purpose support to symbolic knowledge extraction from different sorts of black-box predictors via many extraction algorithms. Notably, P...

This issue of the journal reports some selected contributions from the workshops BioConcur 2004 chaired by Anna Ingolfsdottir and Hanne Riis Nielson and BioConcur 2005 chaired by Bud Mishra and Corrado Priami. There are three contributions from BioConcur 2004. The first one is by Calder, Gilmore and Hillston on the modelling of signalling pathways using the stochastic process algebra PEPA. The second contribution is by Kuttler and Niehren on gene regulation in π-calculus. The last contribution is by Remy, Ruet, Mendoza, Thieffry ...