1,720,952 research outputs found
Tools for Developing Cognitive Agents
Agent-oriented programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm introduced roughly thirty years ago as an approach to problems in Artificial Intelligence (AI). An agent is a piece of software that can perceive its environment (e.g., through sensors) and act upon that environment (e.g., through actuators). A cognitive agent is a specific type of agent that executes a decision cycle in which it processes events and selects actions based on cognitive notions such as beliefs and goals. Often, multiple agents are used, which is referred to as a multi-agent system (MAS). MAS is generally advertised an approach to handling problems that require multiple problem solving methods, multiple perspectives, and multiple problem solving entities. Tools and techniques for the programming of cognitive agents need to be based on the underlying agent-oriented paradigm, which is a significant challenge, as unlike more traditional paradigms, they should for example take into account that agents execute a specific decision cycle and operate in non-deterministic environments. Therefore, in this thesis, we take existing AOP theories a step further by designing tools for the development of cognitive agent programs with an explicit focus on usability. Each development tool we propose is extensively evaluated on hundreds of (novice) agent programmers. In the context of AOP, the process of detecting, locating and correcting mistakes in a computer program, known as debugging, is particularly challenging. As large part of the effort of a programmer consists of debugging a program, efficient debugging is an essential factor for both productivity and program quality. In this thesis, we contribute both to the process of locating mistakes in agent programs as well as the process of identifying misbehaviour of an agent in the first place...Interactive Intelligenc
A fully integrated development environment for GOAL in Eclipse
For the GOAL agent programming platform, a new, full-fledged IDE was created that provides support for all phases in the agent program development process, with the concepts of integration and adaptation at its base. Using the DLTK framework, a plug-in for the Eclipse platform was created in multiple iterations, continuously evaluating the usability during this process using SUS evaluations. Besides an editing framework, based on newly developed ANTLRv4 grammars, a fully integrated debugging environment was designed and developed. As agent programming languages are based on very different concepts than the more widely supported and documented programming languages like Java and C, this process was not straight-forward. The mapping of popular existing concepts and the creation of new AOP-specific standards has been documented in this work. Besides improving the development support for all different kinds of GOAL developers, this thesis aims to set a new standard in the field of multi-agent programming. Care has been taken to explain all steps in detail, and this work has been made as generally applicable within the multi-agent programming field as possible. Therefore, this thesis is also a full guide to the design and development of a mature and professional IDE for multi-agent programming. The full process of the creation of this IDE is presented in this thesis, with an evaluation of the state-of-the-art through literature and existing IDEs at its foundation. Additionally, a prototype was developed to increase the understanding of the requirements for such an environment.Interactive Intelligence GroupIntelligent SystemsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
Designing a source-level debugger for cognitive agent programs
When an agent program exhibits unexpected behaviour, a developer needs to locate the fault by debugging the agent’s source code. The process of fault localisation requires an understanding of how code relates to the observed agent behaviour. The main aim of this paper is to design a source-level debugger that supports single-step execution of a cognitive agent program. Cognitive agents execute a decision cycle in which they process events and derive a choice of action from their beliefs and goals. Current state-of-the-art debuggers for agent programs provide insight in how agent behaviour originates from this cycle but less so in how it relates to the program code. As relating source code to generated behaviour is an important part of the debugging task, arguably, a developer also needs to be able to suspend an agent program on code locations. We propose a design approach for single-step execution of agent programs that supports both code-based as well as cycle-based suspension of an agent program. This approach results in a concrete stepping diagram ready for implementation and is illustrated by a diagram for both the Goal and Jason agent programming languages, and a corresponding full implementation of a source-level debugger for Goal in the Eclipse development environment. The evaluation that was performed based on this implementation shows that agent programmers prefer a source-level debugger over a purely cycle-based debugger.Interactive Intelligenc
CHAINels: The business network
For a Computer Science Bachelor project, two students worked on the ICT for CHAINels: a brand new concept to create an online business-to-business network. In this report, every step in the creation of this system is described.Software TechnologyElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Recognising and explaining bidding strategies in negotiation support systems
To improve a negotiator's ability to recognise bidding strategies, we pro-actively provide explanations that are based on the opponent's bids and the negotiator's guesses about the opponent's strategy. We introduce an aberration detection mechanism for recognising strategies and the notion of an explanation matrix. The aberration detection mechanism identifies when a bid falls outside the range of expected behaviour for a specific strategy. The explanation matrix is used to decide when to provide what explanations. We evaluated our work experimentally in a task in which participants are asked to identify their opponent's strategy in the environment of a negotiation support system, namely the Pocket Negotiator (PN). We implemented our explanation mechanism in the PN and experimented with different explanation matrices. As the number of correct guesses increases with explanations, indirectly, these experiments show the effectiveness of our aberration detection mechanism. Our experiments with over 100 participants show that suggesting consistent strategies is more effective than explaining why observed behaviour is inconsistent.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Interactive Intelligenc
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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