Smart Society’s M. Rovatsos has won second prize for best challenge and vision paper in AAMAS 2014!

Abstract: This paper proposes social computation, i.e. large-scale man-machine collaboration mediated by digital interaction media, as a vision for future intelligent systems, and as a new challenge for multiagent systems research. We claim that the study of social computation suggests a re-interpretation of many traditional AI endeavours, has huge potential application benefits, and presents the field of multiagent systems with novel, exciting research questions. We introduce an abstract model of social computation that helps capture some of its core research problems more precisely. We explore the potential contribution of multiagent systems technologies to the solution of these problems by exposing the close relationship between social computation and existing methods in multiagent systems. We describe how these methods could be reused in this novel application context, what methodological implications this has, and argue that the resulting cross-fertilisation will be highly beneficial for both sides.

Keywords: social computation, human-based computation, crowdsourcing, collective intelligence.

doi: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2617388.2617432

Citation: M. Rovatsos. Multiagent Systems for Social Computation (challenge paper), Thirteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2014), May 5-9, 2014.

Download: http://bit.ly/1W9uFYU

Abstract. For solving complex problems, in many cases, software alone might not be sufficient and we need hybrid systems of software and humans in which humans not only direct the software performance but also perform computing and vice versa. Therefore, we advocate constructing “social computers” which combine software and human services. However, to date, human capabilities cannot be easily programmed into complex applications in a similar way like software capabilities. There is a lack of techniques to conceptualize and program human and software capabilities in a unified way. In this paper, we explore a new way to virtualize, provision and program human capabilities using cloud computing concepts and service delivery models. We propose novel methods for conceptualizing and modeling clouds of human-based services and combine human-based services with software-based services to establish clouds of hybrid services. In our model, we present common APIs, similar to well-developed APIs for software services, to access individual and team-based compute units in clouds of humanbased services. Based on that, we propose a framework for utilizing software-based and human-based services to solve complex problems. We present several programming primitives for hybrid services, also covering forming hybrid solutions consisting of software and humans. We illustrate our concepts via some examples of using our cloud APIs and existing cloud APIs for software.

Keywords: hybrid services, cloud computing, human-based computation, service computing.

doi: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0218843013410037

Citation: Hong-Linh Truong, Schahram Dustdar,Kamal Bhattacharya “Conceptualizing and Programming Hybrid Services in the Cloud”, International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, (c)World Scientific Publishing, 2013, Accepted.

Download: http://bit.ly/268Qa0N