purplecat

This paper derives from the work of one of my PGR students - one who has just passed his viva (yay!). I'm not sure how much interest it carries outside the field of beliefs-desire-intentions agent programming. In that particular paradigm agents select plans of action from a set generally provided by a programmer. Peter looked at how those plans could be automatically adapted if the actions stopped working properly - e.g., if some part of a robot's machinery wore down. The idea was to track the outcomes of actions against descriptions of what an action should do and then swap them in and out of plans based on their descriptions.

We had a successful day, mind you, about which I may blog in due course.

Incidentally, I've always quite fancied doing one of those question memes except that my life doesn't work in a way where I can say "pick a day next month on which you would like me to answer your question in a blog post." On the other hand I can manage, "leave me a question and I'll answer it in a blog post in my own sweet time." Since the whole Doctor Who rewatch is on hiatus until we can figure out a way to watch Blink which doesn't involve NLSS Child refusing to take a shower ever again (see last post) I thought it might be fun to fill the gap with question answers so, you know, ask away!!

NB. I do not promise to answer everything but I'll give anything that doesn't seem overly embarrassing or personal a shot.

We (meaning my research group) have recently become interested in "ethical autonomy". From our point-of-view our interest is quite prescribed. Having formalised the "rules of the air" and created autonomous programs that can be shown to obey them we then got faced with the issue of when you want a pilot to deliberately break the rules of the air because there is some compelling ethical reason to do so (one of the examples we look at is when another aircraft is failing to obey the rules of the air, potentially maliciously, by moving left to avoid a collision instead of moving right. If the autonomous pilot continues to move right then eventually the two planes will collide where a human pilot would have deduced the other aircraft was breaking the rules and eventually would have moved left instead, thus breaking the rules of the air but nevertheless taking the ethical course of action).

Since ethical autonomy is obviously part of a much wider set of concerns my boss got involved in organising a seminar on Legal, Ethical, and Social Autonomous Systems as part of a cross-disciplinary venture with the departments of Law, Psychology and Philosophy.

It was an interesting day. From my point of view the most useful part was meeting Kirsten Eder from Bristol. I knew quite a bit about her but we'd not met before. She's primarily a verification person and her talk looked at the potential certification processes for autonomous systems and pointed me in the direction of Runtime Verification which I suspect I shall have to tangle with at some point in the next few years.

There was a moment when one of the philosophers asserted that sex-bots were obviously unethical and I had to bite my tongue. I took the spur of the moment decision that arguing about the ethics of what would, presumably, be glorified vibrators with a philosopher while my boss was in the room was possibly not something I wanted to get involved in.

The most interesting ethical problem raised was that of anthropomorphic or otherwise lifelike robots. EPSRC have, it transpires, a set of roboticist principles which include the principle: "Robots are manufactured artefacts: the illusion of emotions and intent should not be used to exploit vulnerable users." The problem here is that there is genuine therapeutic interest in the use of robots that mimic pets to act as companions for the elderly, especially those with Alzheimers. While this is partially to compensate for the lack of money/people to provide genuine companionship, it's not at all clear-cut that the alternative should be rejected out of hand. Alan Winfield, who raised the issue and helped write EPSRC's set of principles, confessed that he was genuinely conflicted about the ethics here . In the later discussion we also strayed into whether the language of beliefs, desires and intentions used to describe cognitive agent programs, also carried with it the risk that people would over-anthropomorphise the program.

100 Current Papers in Artificial Intelligence, Automated Reasoning and Agent Programming. Number 1.

Catholijn M. Jonker, Viara Popova, Alexei Sharpanskykh, Jan Treur, and Pınar Yolum. Formal Framework to Support Organizational Design. Knowledge-Based Systems 31:89-105, 2012.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2012.02.011
Open Access?: Sadly no.

I was half hoping to start these posts with a terribly exciting AI paper but sadly nothing terribly exciting caught my eye in the various Tables of Contents last week. However this is very much a bread-and-butter AI paper and so in some ways I'm not so sorry to be starting out with it, since it gives a good impression of what a lot of AI types do when they are not trying to develop machines that will take over the world and wipe-out humanity.

( More Under the Cut )

So there you go, not terribly exciting, but a fairly typical current paper in artificial intelligence.

In which we show that using AI/Agent based approaches let's you write shorter code, which I will confess, isn't really news in the AI/Agent community but this has gone to a "Space" conference (albeit Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Automation in Space).

Reviewers' Comments in their entirety:

This is a quite simple approach; not academically sophisticated.
Interesting: related to efficient coding of control algorithms by means of BDI..

It's always nice to know the peer review process is rigourous and robust.

I vaguely threatened to write up my trip to Schloss Dagstuhl when I posted about visiting Trier. I don't really feel up to an account of even the most interesting talks but I thought a bit of general waffle might not go amiss.

( waffle )

We are delighted to inform you that your paper entitled "A Common Basis for Agent Organisation in BDI Languages",
submitted to EUMAS-2007, has been accepted for presentation at the workshop
(recall that the proceedings are only informally published).

This is actually a reheat of our LADS paper but M. assures A. and myself that EUMAS is intended for re-heats and work in progress and the presentations are supposed merely to form a basis for the exchange of ideas. This means that A. gets to go to Tunisia in six weeks' time. M. said I could go too but I felt two weeks before christmas was cutting things a bit fine.

"Isn't that where they filmed Star Wars?" I said. A. and M. looked at me blankly.

New Architecture absurdly simple and now implemented. Email received from Durham end of project

since we have achieved almost all deliverables in one morning, we need to find another project to work on.

People are always telling me that my usual languages, like Prolog, are silly or, at the very least, impractical, but Java has just got me flummoxed.

I have a list (of logical formulae as it happens) and I want to know if my agent believes everything in the list. To complicate matters the the list can contain variables so the agent might believe them in different ways. So my list might be - do I believe there is something, x say, such that 1) x is blue and 2) x has four legs and the answer might be "blue cow is blue and blue cow has four legs"* but I might also believe that the sky is blue and any number of other things are blue. The object is to find something that I believe is blue and which I also believe has four legs.

This is incredibly easy in Prolog. I just go through the list of formulae one at a time creating a candidate answer, if the answer fails at any point then the programming language automatically back tracks up the list looking for alternatives.

Java doesn't do back tracking. I'm going to have to do something complicated involving keeping track of where I am in the list and which of the alternative candidates I have explored and then zipping back and forth in a sensible fashion. I've appealed to B. who is supposed to be a bit of a dab hand with imperative languages and he looked a bit blank and then started talking about custom iterators.

* with apologies to those of you don't watch CBeebies.