Agents and Computational Autonomy: Potential, Risks, and Solutions

Eduardo Alonso, Esther Mondragón (auth.), Matthias Nickles, Michael Rovatsos, Gerhard Weiss (eds.)3540224777, 9783540224778, 9783540259282

This volume contains the postproceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Autonomy – Potential, Risks, Solutions (AUTONOMY 2003), held at the 2nd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agentSystems(AAMAS2003),July14,2003,Melbourne,Australia.Apart from revised versions of the accepted workshop papers, we have included invited contributions from leading experts in the ?eld. With this, the present volume represents the ?rst comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art of research on autonomy, capturing di?erent theories of autonomy, perspectives on autonomy in di?erent kinds of agent-based systems, and practical approaches to dealing with agent autonomy. Agent orientation refers to a software development perspective that has evolved in the past 25 years in the ?elds of computational agents and multiagent systems. The basic notion underlying this perspective is that of a computational agent, that is, an entity whose behavior deserves to be called ?exible, social, and autonomous. As an autonomous entity, an agent possesses action choice and is at least to some extent capable of deciding and acting under self-control. Through its emphasis on autonomy, agent orientation signi?cantly di?ers from traditional engineering perspectives such as structure orientation or object o- entation. These perspectives are targeted on the development of systems whose behavior is fully determined and controlled by external units (e.g., by a p- grammer at design time and/or a user at run time), and thus inherently fail to capture the notion of autonomy.

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Table of contents :
Front Matter….Pages –
Agency, Learning and Animal-Based Reinforcement Learning….Pages 1-6
Agent Belief Autonomy in Open Multi-agent Systems….Pages 7-16
Dimensions of Adjustable Autonomy and Mixed-Initiative Interaction….Pages 17-39
Founding Autonomy: The Dialectics Between (Social) Environment and Agent’s Architecture and Powers….Pages 40-54
Agent Autonomy Through the 3 M Motivational Taxonomy….Pages 55-67
A Taxonomy of Autonomy in Multiagent Organisation….Pages 68-82
Autonomy and Reasoning for Natural and Artificial Agents….Pages 83-94
Types and Limits of Agent Autonomy….Pages 95-102
Autonomy in Multi-agent Systems: A Classification Attempt….Pages 103-113
Autonomy and Agent Deliberation….Pages 114-127
Requirements for Achieving Software Agents Autonomy and Defining Their Responsibility….Pages 128-139
Agent Design from the Autonomy Perspective….Pages 140-150
From Individual Based Modeling to Autonomy Oriented Computation….Pages 151-169
Toward Quantum Computational Agents….Pages 170-186
Adjustable Autonomy Challenges in Personal Assistant Agents: A Position Paper….Pages 187-194
Autonomy in an Organizational Context….Pages 195-208
Dynamic Imputation of Agent Cognition….Pages 209-226
I am Autonomous, You are Autonomous….Pages 227-236
Agents with Initiative: A Preliminary Report….Pages 237-248
A Teamwork Coordination Strategy Using Hierarchical Role Relationship Matching….Pages 249-260
A Dialectic Architecture for Computational Autonomy….Pages 261-273
Back Matter….Pages –