Human Cognitive Stigmergy

There has been considerable investigation into the nature, effectiveness and performance of virtual organizations, virtual teams and virtual collaboration (Cogburn, et al, 2011) based on the affordances of information and communications technology (ICT). The recent emergence of location-based social network technologies has resulted in new modes of ad hoc virtual organizations. Developers appear to improvise systems by cobbling together existing applications and technologies, almost overnight, with uncoordinated contributions rather than traditional designs or project plans. Heylighen theorizes that stigmergic self-organization explains this kind of system development (Heylighen, 2007). As defined by the biologist Grasse, stigmergy has been defined as a sequence of indirect stimulus and response behaviors that contribute to the coordination of actions among insects through their environment, for example termites coordinating their nest building activities (Theraulaz & Bonabeau, 1999). Heylighen likens human cognitive self-organization to stigmergy. In recent years, the advent of distributed ICTs like worldwide internet computing and pervasive ubiquitous networks have made traditional top-down techniques of system development increasingly irrelevant for software application development. Instead, modular, adaptable and self-managing end-user components are combined in “mash-ups” (Merrill, 2009). Similarly, software development teams are spontaneous and ad hoc, functioning as virtual organizations. In this study, the actions leading to the creation of the Ushahidi software platform and its subsequent adaptations are identified using longitudinal case study methodology and content analysis methods applied to newspaper, magazine, website, journal and social networking publications. Based on a socio-technical theoretical framework, the Ushahidi system is framed as a dynamic, ad hoc virtual organization in the context of emergency response. The actions leading to the instantiation of the Ushahidi system are examined as examples of human cognitive stigmergic response to critical incidents and naturalistic development of complex adaptive systems.

Discovered in the context of a research about insects, stigmergy – the indirect coordination mechanism that allows ant colonies to achieve intelligent behavior – has been extensively studied with the aim to create artificial, ant-like agents. Although stigmergic behavior has been also identified in human collectivities, there are relatively few reports about technological solutions that facilitate the emergence of such interactions between people. This paper proposes the concept of virtual pheromones, defined as engrams created by the agents not in the environment, but in a representation thereof – a map, and outlines several use cases, wherein pheromones embedded in maps are the key element for inducing stigmergic behavior in human multi-agent systems. Without proposing a theoretic generalization, this paper aims to emphasize the broad range of possible technological applications of human stigmergy, and, maybe, to mark a new starting point for a more in-depth study of this topic.

Margery J. Doyle retains all Intellectual Property and Copyrights © 2014 for any or all of these works.

ABSTRACT: To date it seemed that to simulate forces and or other entities in a virtual environment required also simulating the sensory, perception and cognition processes. A data gathering and parsing process that ranges from semi raw sensory information to perceptions, events, and actions to-be-taken in the world, but at the very least the perception, action, and decisions making cognitive/behavioral/ modality processes. To capture this type of information from the world some agents/models observe, orient, decide, and act (OODA) which is considered to be the needed to produce situation aware adaptive agents capable of operating in a Live Virtual Constructive, Distributed Mission Operations (LVC DMO) environment. However, to do so, as mentioned, this type of agent first must extract domain and situation knowledge/information from the environment about the state of affairs in the world in order to sense orient (observe - understand), decide to simulate an action (act in the world). Recently though, in an effort to not only improve military training simulation CGFs but to also establish a capability to rapidly develop models and agents for a multitude of uses to support the warfighter the Air Force Research Lab 711/HPW Warfighter Readiness Research Division RHAS, along with a few partners from industry have taken on and are proving success in use of a fresh approach toward this “Not-So-Grand-Challenge” (NSGC). The methodology entails the creation of a hierarchical knowledge-level structure to facilitate the speed by which new agent definitions can be developed or modified for use at multiple levels of abstraction. Formalizing the output of such an approach into a protocol or interface will afford the modeling and simulation (M&S) communities an agent development related architectural construct which promotes portability, usability, reusability, composeability, and marketability of establishing rapid development of LVC DMO training agents.

What does the Air Force stand to gain? Well, a few examples easily come to mind. The technology the NSGC project can bore might prove useful serving as an automated knowledge elicitation tool by way of post hoc mining of human-in-the-loop performance data looking for the nuances in human-system-syllabi-interactions during training, or as decision aid, or maybe even a scenario complexity scoring indexing tool for use in learning management systems. Envisioning that not only would such methods of abstraction and systems development prove to be fairly generalizable and portable to other domains of interest and inquiry but also be, more rapidly, readily and easily developed, integrated, tested, utilized and reutilized to support the warfighter. Championing new vistas in the “art-of-the-possible” the NSGC team decided to take a fresh look at these problems and decided to changed the situation up, in favor of adaptive, responsive, situated agent behaviors and architectures that utilize modular, reusable, composable, system components predicted to be more easily developed.