Page 1
Page 1
The Everyday Life of an Algorithm
This book begins with an algorithm–a set of IF…THEN rules used in the development of a new, ethical, video surveillance architecture for transport hubs. Readers are invited to follow the algorithm over three years, charting its everyday life. Questions of ethics, transparency, accountability and market value must be grasped by the algorithm in a series of ever more demanding forms of experimentation. Here the algorithm must prove its ability to get a grip on everyday life if it is to become an ordinary feature of the settings where it is being put to work. Through investigating the everyday life of the algorithm, the book opens a conversation with existing social science research that tends to focus on the power and opacity of algorithms. In this book we have unique access to the algorithm’s design, development and testing, but can also bear witness to its fragility and dependency on others.
Software Engineering for Multi-Agent Systems V ; Research Issues and Practical Applications ; Conference proceedings
Software is present in every aspect of our lives, pushing us inevitably towards a world of distributed computing systems. Agent concepts hold great promise for responding to the new realities of large-scale distributed systems. Multi-agent systems (MASs) and their underlying theories provide a more natural support for ensuring important agent properties, such as autonomy, environment heterogeneity, organization and openness. Nevertheless, a software agent is an inherently more complex abstraction, posing new challenges to software engineering. Without adequate development te- niques and methods, MASs will not be sufficiently dependable, thus making their wide adoption by the industry more difficult. The dependability of a computing system is its ability to deliver a service that can be justifiably trusted.
Observing justice : Digital transparency, openness and accountability in criminal courts
Examines how major but often under-scrutinised legal, social, and technological developments have affected the transparency and accountability of the criminal justice process. The book proposes a framework for open justice which prioritises public legal education and justice system accountability
Multi-Agent and Multi-Agent-Based Simulation ; Joint Workshop MABS 2004
The aim of the workshop was to provide a forum for work in both appli- tions of multi-agent-based simulation and the technical challenges of simulating large multi-agent systems (MAS). There has been considerable recent progress in modelling and analyzing multi-agent systems, and in techniques that apply MAS models to complex real-world systems such as social systems and organi- tions. Simulation is an increasingly important strand that weaves together this work. In high-risk, high-cost situations, simulations provide critical cost/benefit leverage, and make possible explorations that cannot be carried out in situ: – Multi-agent approaches to simulating complex systems are keytools in interdisciplinary studies of social systems. Agent-based social simulation (ABSS) research simulates and synthesizes social behavior in order to understand real social systems with properties of self-organization, scalability, robustness, and openness. – In the MAS community, simulation has been applied to awide range of MAS research and design problems, from models of complex individual agents - ploying sophisticated internal mechanisms to models of large-scale societies of relatively simple agents which focus more on the interactions between agents.
Impact of Information Society Research in the Global South
This book addresses two aspects— Impact of research: How is the research on ICTs in the Global South playing a role in creating an information society? (e.g. policy formulation, media coverage, implementation in practice) and Research on impact: What is the evidence for the impact of ICTs on society? (i.e. the objectives of socio-economic development). This volume brings together a multiplicity of voices and approaches from social scientific research to produce an engaging volume for a variety of stakeholders including academics, researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and those in the business and civil sectors of society.
Field-Based Coordination for Pervasive Multiagent Systems
Software systems involve autonomous and distributed software components that have to execute and interact in open and dynamic environments, such as in pervasive, autonomous, and mobile applications. The requirements with respect to dynamics, openness, scalability, and decentralization call for new approaches to software design and development, capable of supporting spontaneous configuration, tolerating partial failures, or arranging adaptive reorganization of the whole system.
Earth Observation Open Science and Innovation
The digital transformation is revolutionizing our ability to monitor our planet and transforming the way we access, process and exploit Earth Observation data from satellites.This book reviews these megatrends and their implications for the Earth Observation community as well as the wider data economy. It provides insight into new paradigms of Open Science and Innovation applied to space data, which are characterized by openness, access to large volume of complex data, wide availability of new community tools, new techniques for big data analytics such as Artificial Intelligence, unprecedented level of computing power, and new types of collaboration among researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs and citizen scientists. In addition, this book aims to provide readers with some reflections on the future of Earth Observation, highlighting through a series of use cases not just the new opportunities created by the New Space revolution, but also the new challenges that must be addressed in order to make the most of the large volume of complex and diverse data delivered by the new generation of satellites.
Declarative agent languages and technologies II ; 2nd international workshop, DALT 2004, New York, NY, USA, July 19, 2004, revised selected papers
Nearly 40 research groups worldwide were motivated to contribute to this event by submitting their most recent research achievements, covering a wide variety of the topics listed in the call for papers. More than 30 top researchers agreed to join the Program Committee, which then collectively faced the hard task of selecting the one-day event program. The fact that research in multi-agent systems is no longer only a novel and promising research horizon at dawn is, in our opinion, the main reason behind DALT’s (still short) success story. On the one hand, agent theories and app- cations are mature enough to model complex domains and scenarios, and to successfully address a wide range of multifaceted problems, thus creating the urge to make the best use of this expressive and versatile paradigm, and also pro?t from all the important results achieved so far. On the other hand, bui- ing multi-agent systems still calls for models and technologies that could ensure system predictability, accommodate ?exibility, heterogeneity and openness, and enable system veri?cation.
Coordination, organizations, institutions, and norms in agent systems II ; AAMAS 2006 and ECAI 2006 International Workshops, COIN 2006 Hakodate, Japan, May 9, 2006 Riva del Garda, Italy, August 28, 2006, Revised Selected Papers
In recent years, social and organizational aspects of agency have become major research topics in MAS. Recent applications of MAS on Web services, grid c- puting and ubiquitous computing highlight the need for using these aspects in order to ensure social order within such environments. Openness, heterogeneity, and scalability of MAS, in turn, pose new demands on traditional MAS int- action models and bring forward the need to look into the environment where agents interact and at di?erent ways of constraining or regulating interactions.it provide theoretically demanding and interdisciplinary research questions at d- ferent levels of abstraction.
Long-Run Growth Forecasting
Explores how to set up an empirical model that helps with forecasting long-term economic growth in a large number of countries. It offers a systematic approach to models of potential GDP that can also be used for forecasts of more than a decade. It is an attempt to fill the wide gap between the high demand for such models by commercial banks, international organizations, central banks and governments on the one hand and the limited supply on the other hand. Frequent forecast failures in the past (e.g. Japan 1990, Asia 1997) and the heavy economic losses they produced motivated the work. The book assesses the large number of different theories of economic growth, the drivers of economic growth, the available datasets and the empirical methods on offer. A preference is shown for evolutionary models and an augmented Kaldor model. The book uses non-stationary panel techniques to find pair-wise cointegration among GDP per capita and its main correlates such as physical capital, human capital and openness.
