Dear all,
I would like to advertise that my PhD thesis is finally available for
downloading. My PhD was taken at the Department of Computer Science,
University College London, under the supervision of Prof. John A. Campbell; I
finished it by the end of February, but only recently I had the time to set up
a web page with instructions on downloading and printing my PhD Thesis. The
title is "Contributions to an Anthropological Approach to the Cultural
Adaptation of Migrant Agents" and its official abstract is included below. If
you are interested, you can access my home page at
http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~bordini where you will find a link to the downloading
page. As I say on that page, any comments are very welcome.
Kindest regards,
Rafael Bordini
________________
Abstract:
This thesis proposes the use of Cultural Anthropology as a source of
inspiration for solutions to the problem of adaptation of autonomous,
intelligent, computational agents that migrate to societies of agents with
distinctive features from the ones of the society where those agents were
originally conceived. This has implications for interoperation of disparate
Multi-Agent Systems. In particular, the cognitive approach to anthropology is
argued to be a suitable theoretical foundation for this topic. Fieldwork
practice in social anthropology is also indicated as a useful source of ideas.
A pragmatic theory of intensionality is incorporated in this anthropological
approach, resulting in a mechanism that allows agents to ascribe intensional
ontologies of terms to societies that use unfamiliar means of communication;
also, taxonomical relations among the terms in such ontologies can be
retrieved, by means of a process inspired by the counterpart activity of
ethnographers. This is presented using the Z notation for formal specification
of systems, and illustrated on a set of terms from the game of cricket.
Subsequently, a simulation of a game of cricket is described where one of the
players is unfamiliar with the game, and therefore needs to learn the game by
observing the other players. A reasonable behaviour for such a player is
obtained, and the simulation offers grounds for further
anthropologically-based studies. Further, a study of theories of moral
sentiments is presented, and the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is used in
simulations based on those ideas. The results of the simulations show clearly
the positive impact, on groups of agents, of altruistic behaviour; this can
only be coherently obtained in autonomous agents by modelling emotions, which
are relevant for this project as anthropologists recognise them as an
essential cross-cultural link. Finally, the consequences of this project to
conceptions of Distributed Artificial Intelligence are discussed.
--
Dr. Rafael Heitor Bordini
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Department of Computer Science - UFRGS
http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~bordini
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