Towards reactive navigation and attention skills for 3D intelligent characters

This paper presents a neural design which is able to provide the necessary reactive navigation and attention skills for 3D embodied agents (virtual humanoids or characters). Based on Grossberg's neural model of conditioning [6], as recently implemented by Chang and Gaudiando [7], and according to the Adaptative Resonance Theory (ART) and the neuroscientific concepts associated, the neural design introduced has been divided in two main phases. Firstly, an environmentcategorization phase, where an on-line pattern recognition and categorization of the current agent sensory input data is carried out by a self organizing neural network, which will finally provide the agent's short term memory la…

Jason Intentional Learning: An Operational Semantics

This paper introduces an operational semantics for defining Intentional Learning on Jason, the well known Java-based implementation of AgentSpeak(L). This semantics enables Jason to define agents capable of learning the reasons for adopting intentions based on their own experience. In this work, the use of the term Intentional Learning is strictly circumscribed to the practical rationality theory where plans are predefined and the target of the learning processes is to learn the reasons to adopt them as intentions. Top-Down Induction of Logical Decision Trees (TILDE) has proved to be a suitable mechanism for supporting learning on Jason: the first-order representation of TILDE is adequate t…

A simulation of disagreement for control of rational cheating in peer review

Understanding the peer review process could help research and shed light on the mechanisms that underlie crowdsourcing. In this paper, we present an agent-based model of peer review built on three entities - the paper, the scientist and the conference. The system is implemented on a BDI platform (Jason) that allows to define a rich model of scoring, evaluating and selecting papers for conferences. Then, we propose a programme committee update mechanism based on disagreement control that is able to remove reviewers applying a strategy aimed to prevent papers better than their own to be accepted (rational cheating). We analyze a homogeneous scenario, where all conferences aim to the same leve…

Simulating socially intelligent agents in semantic virtual environments

AbstractThe simulation of synthetic humans inhabiting virtual environments is a current research topic with a great number of behavioral problems to be tackled. Semantical virtual environments (SVEs) have recently been proposed not only to ease world modeling but also to enhance the agent–object and agent–agent interaction. Thus, we propose the use of ontologies to define the world’s knowledge base and to introduce semantic levels of detail that help the sensorization of complex scenes—containing lots of interactive objects. The object taxonomy also helps to create general and reusable operativity for autonomous characters—for example, liquids can be poured from containers such as bottles. …

Unlock ways to share data on peer review

Peer review is the defining feature of scholarly communication. In a 2018 survey of more than 11, 000 researchers, 98% said that they considered peer review important or extremely important for ensuring the quality and integrity of scholarly communication.

Measuring the Developmental Function of Peer Review: A Multi-Dimensional, Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of Peer Review Reports from 740 Academic Journals

Reviewers do not only help editors to screen manuscripts for publication in academic journals; they also serve to increase the rigor and value of manuscripts by constructive feedback. However, measuring this developmental function of peer review is difficult as it requires fine-grained data on reports and journals without any optimal benchmark. To fill this gap, we adapted a recently proposed quality assessment tool and tested it on a sample of 1.3 million reports submitted to 740 Elsevier journals in 2018–2020. Results showed that the developmental standards of peer review are shared across areas of research, yet with remarkable differences. Reports submitted to social science and economic…

Proyectos de ciencia ciudadana. Una oportunidad para la alfabetización científica y la educación en sostenibilidad

Des que va sorgir el terme  ciencia ciutadana  fins a l’actualitat, els projectes de participacio ciutadana han augmentat en quantitat i en diversitat d’arees d’actuacio. La ciencia ciutadana es descobreix aixi com un mecanisme per a implicar la societat, propiciar el seu interes en la ciencia i contribuir a la seua alfabetitzacio cientifica. A mes, cal destacar l’aportacio inherent dels projectes de ciencia ciutadana a l’assoliment dels Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible (ODS). En aquest article es revisen alguns exemples de projectes de ciencia ciutadana d’ambit internacional i es detallen projectes en actiu a Espanya, tant des de la perspectiva de l’ensenyament formal com des de la …

Reputation or peer review? The role of outliers

We present an agent-based model of paper publication and consumption that allows to study the effect of two different evaluation mechanisms, peer review and reputation, on the quality of the manuscripts accessed by a scientific community. The model was empirically calibrated on two data sets, mono- and multi-disciplinary. Our results point out that disciplinary settings differ in the rapidity with which they deal with extreme events—papers that have an extremely high quality, that we call outliers. In the mono-disciplinary case, reputation is better than traditional peer review to optimize the quality of papers read by researchers. In the multi-disciplinary case, if the quality landscape is…

Fragments of peer review: A quantitative analysis of the literature (1969-2015)

This paper examines research on peer review between 1969 and 2015 by looking at records indexed from the Scopus database. Although it is often argued that peer review has been poorly investigated, we found that the number of publications in this field doubled from 2005. A half of this work was indexed as research articles, a third as editorial notes and literature reviews and the rest were book chapters or letters. We identified the most prolific and influential scholars, the most cited publications and the most important journals in the field. Co-authorship network analysis showed that research on peer review is fragmented, with the largest group of co-authors including only 2.1% of the wh…

Do editors have a silver bullet? an agent-based model of peer review

This paper presents an agent-based model of peer review that looks at the effect of different editorial policies of referee selection. We tested four author/referee matching scenarios as follows: random selection of referees, selection of referees with a similar status to submission authors, selection of higher-skilled and lower skilled referees. We tested these scenarios against three types of referee behaviour, i.e., fair, unreliable and strategic and measured their implications for the quality and efficiency of the process. Results show that in case of randomness of referee judgment, any editorial policy is detrimental for peer review. If referees behave strategically, certain matching p…

Tuning Java to Run Interactive Multiagent Simulations over Jason

Java-based simulation environments are currently used by many multiagent systems (MAS), since they mainly provide portability as well as an interesting reduction of the development cost. However, this kind of MAS are rarely considered when developing interactive applications with time response constraints. This paper analyses the performance provided by Jason, a well-known Java-based MAS platform, as a suitable framework for developing interactive multiagent simulations. We show how to tune both the heap size and the garbage collection of the Java Virtual Machine in order to achieve a good performance while executing a simple locomotion benchmark based on crowd simulations. Furthermore, the…

Coordination and Sociability for Intelligent Virtual Agents

This paper presents a multi-agent framework designed to simulate synthetic humans that properly balance task oriented and social behaviors. The work presented in this paper focuses on the social library integrated in BDI agents to provide socially acceptable decisions. We propose the use of ontologies to define the social relations within an artificial society and the use of a market based mechanism to reach sociability by means of task exchanges. The social model balances rationality, to control the global coordination of the group, and sociability, to simulate relations (e.g. friendliness) and reciprocity among agents. The multi-agent framework has been tested successfully in dynamic envi…

Effects of seniority, gender and geography on the bibliometric output and collaboration networks of European Research Council (ERC) grant recipients.

Assessing the success and performance of researchers is a difficult task, as their grant output is influenced by a series of factors, including seniority, gender and geographical location of their host institution. In order to assess the effects of these factors, we analysed the publication and citation outputs, using Scopus and Web of Science, and the collaboration networks of European Research Council (ERC) starting (junior) and advanced (senior) grantees. For this study, we used a cohort of 355 grantees from the Life Sciences domain of years 2007-09. While senior grantees had overall greater publication output, junior grantees had a significantly greater pre-post grant award increase in …

Author response: Large-scale language analysis of peer review reports

Assessing Peer Review by Gauging the Fate of Rejected Manuscripts: the case of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation

This paper investigates the fate of manuscripts that were rejected from JASSS-The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, the flagship journal of social simulation. We tracked 456 manuscripts that were rejected from 1997 to 2011 and traced their subsequent publication as journal articles, conference papers or working papers. We compared the impact factor of the publishing journal and the citations of those manuscripts that were eventually published against the yearly impact factor of JASSS and the number of citations achieved by the JASSS mean and top cited articles. Only 10% of the rejected manuscripts were eventually published in a journal that was indexed in the Web of Sci…

Sociable Behaviors in Virtual Worlds

When simulating three-dimensional environments populated by virtual humanoids, immersion requires the simulation of consistent social behaviors to keep the attention of the user/s while displaying realistic scenes. However, intelligent virtual actors still lack a kind of collective or social intelligence necessary to reinforce the roles they are playing in the simulated environment (e.g. a waiter, a guide, etc). Decision making for virtual agents has been traditionally modeled under self interested assumptions, which are not suitable for social multi-agent domains. Instead, artificial society models should be introduced to provide virtual actors with socially acceptable decisions, which are…

Disposición del alumnado al uso de herramientas de comunicación síncrona en la docencia universitaria

[EN] In recent years there have been numerous innovative educational initiatives that have proposed the use of synchronous communication tools to support university teaching. These proposals have proven their worth in specific application contexts such as: virtual tutoring, internationalization and mobility in masters and doctorates. However, their sometimes limited scope often makes it difficult to generalize results to other contexts and, thus, to pass from pilots to consolidated solutions. Within the framework of 2015 being declared as the International Year of Evaluation, this paper presents the results of a survey aimed to obtain the opinion of students regarding the use of synchronous…

Decision letter: Co-reviewing and ghostwriting by early-career researchers in the peer review of manuscripts

Special issue on pattern recognition techniques in data mining

Peer Reviewed

Classification Similarity Learning Using Feature-Based and Distance-Based Representations: A Comparative Study

Automatically measuring the similarity between a pair of objects is a common and important task in the machine learning and pattern recognition fields. Being an object of study for decades, it has lately received an increasing interest from the scientific community. Usually, the proposed solutions have used either a feature-based or a distance-based representation to perform learning and classification tasks. This article presents the results of a comparative experimental study between these two approaches for computing similarity scores using a classification-based method. In particular, we use the Support Vector Machine as a flexible combiner both for a high dimensional feature space and …

A J-MADeM Agent-Based Social Simulation to Model Urban Mobility

The mobility models followed within metropolitan areas, mainly based on the massive use of the car instead of the public transportation, will soon become unsustainable unless there is a change of citizens’ minds and transport policies. The main challenge related to urban mobility is that of getting free-flowing greener cities, which are provided with a smarter and accessible urban transport system. In this paper, we present an agent-based social simulation approach to tackle this kind of social-ecological systems. The Jason Multi-modal Agent Decision Making (JMADeM) library enable us to model and implement the social decisions made by each habitant about how to get to work every day, e.g., …

On the Macroeconomic Effect of Extortion: An Agent-Based Approach

This work proposes an agent-based approach to study the effect of extortion on macroeconomic aggregates, despite the fact that there is little data on this criminal activity given its hidden nature. We develop a Bottom-up Adaptive Macroeconomics (BAM) model that simulates a healthy economy, including a moderate inflation and a reasonable unemployment rate, and test the impact of extortion on various macroeconomic signals. The BAM model defines the usual interactions among workers, firms and banks in labour, goods and credit markets. Subsequently, crime is introduced by defining the propensity of the poorest workers to become extortionists, as well as the efficiency of the police in terms of…

Mechanism change in a simulation of peer review: from junk support to elitism

Abstract Peer review works as the hinge of the scientific process, mediating between research and the awareness/acceptance of its results. While it might seem obvious that science would regulate itself scientifically, the consensus on peer review is eroding; a deeper understanding of its workings and potential alternatives is sorely needed. Employing a theoretical approach supported by agent-based simulation, we examined computational models of peer review, performing what we propose to call redesign, that is, the replication of simulations using different mechanisms. Here, we show that we are able to obtain the high sensitivity to rational cheating that is present in literature. In additio…

Attitudes of referees in a multidisciplinary journal: An empirical analysis

This paper looks at 10 years of reviews in a multidisciplinary journal, The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS), which is the flagship journal of social simulation. We measured referee behavior and referees' agreement. We found that the disciplinary background and the academic status of the referee have an influence on the report time, the type of recommendation and the acceptance of the reviewing task. Referees from the humanities tend to be more generous in their recommendations than other referees, especially economists and environmental scientists. Second, we found that senior researchers are harsher in their judgments than junior researchers, and the latter ac…

J-MADeM, a market-based model for complex decision problems

This paper presents J-MADeM, a multi-modal decision making mechanism to provide agents in a Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) with a market-based model for complex decision problems. J-MADeM is now available as an open source library fully integrated into Jason, the successful interpreter for the AgentSpeak programming language. The aim of this work is to improve Jason by incorporating an agent decision-making module able to merge multiple information sources received from the rest of the agents. This information is modeled as a set of utility functions expressing the preferences of the agents for a specific problem. Then, J-MADeM agents use one-round sealed-bid combinatorial auctions as the main p…

Publishing: Journals could share peer-review data

An Agents and Artifacts Approach to Distributed Data Mining

This paper proposes a novel Distributed Data Mining (DDM) approach based on the Agents and Artifacts paradigm, as implemented in CArtAgO [9], where artifacts encapsulate data mining tools, inherited from Weka, that agents can use while engaged in collaborative, distributed learning processes. Target hypothesis are currently constrained to decision trees built with J48, but the approach is flexible enough to allow different kinds of learning models. The twofold contribution of this work includes: i) JaCA-DDM: an extensible tool implemented in the agent oriented programming language Jason [2] and CArtAgO [10,9] to experiment DDM agent-based approaches on different, well known training sets. A…

Multiagent System for Detecting and Solving Design-Time Conflicts in Civil Infrastructure

One typical source of problems in the Civil Infrastructure domain is the distributed and collaborative nature of the projects in which different profiles of engineers contribute with designs devoted to the interest of their field of expertise. Thus, situations in which there are different conflicts of interests are quite common. A conflict refers to a situation in which the actions of an engineer collide with the interests of other engineers. In this paper, we present a multi-agent system that, thanks to the use of ontologies and rules on those ontologies, is able to detect profilespecific conflict situations and solve them according to the preferences of the parties involved in the conflic…

A Multiagent Framework to Animate Socially Intelligent Agents

This paper presents a multiagent framework designed to animate groups of synthetic humans that properly balance task oriented and social behaviors. The work presented in this paper focuses on the BDI agents and the social model integrated to provide socially acceptable decisions. The social model provides rationality, to control the global coordination of the group, and sociability, to simulate relations (e.g. friends) and reciprocity between members. The multiagent based framework has been tested successfully in dynamic environments while simulating a virtual university bar, where several types of agents (groups of waiters and customers) can interact and finally display complex social beha…

Game-based learning supported by audience response tools: game proposals and preliminary assessment

The so-called game-based learning strategies are based on introducing games in the classrooms to improve aspects such as student performance, concentration and effort. Currently, they provide a very useful resource to increase the motivation of university students, generating a better atmosphere among peers and between student and teacher, which in turn is generally translated into better academic results. However, the design of games that successfully achieve the desired teaching-learning objectives is not a trivial task. This work focuses on the design of games that allow the assessment of ICT-related university subjects. Specifically, three different games are proposed, all based on stud…

Design of an ICT Tool for Decision Making in Social and Health Policies

The governance requires technical support regarding the complexity in deciding health policies to assist people who require long-term care. Long-term care policies require the use of ICT simulation tools that can provide policy makers with the option of going into a decision theatre and virtually knowing the consequences of different policies prior to finally determining the real policy to be adopted. In this sense, there is an absence of simulation tools for decision making about long-term care policies. In this chapter, the authors propose the foundations and guidelines of SSIMSOWELL, a new scalable, multiagent simulation tool that increases the prediction capacity of governance in the lo…

Distributed Cognition Learning in Collaborative Civil Engineering Projects Management

Due to the diversity and complexity of its projects, the Civil Engineering domain has historically encompassed very heterogeneous disciplines. From the beginning, any Civil Infrastructure project is systematically divided into smaller subprojects in order to reduce or isolate the overall complexity. However, as a parallel design work, these subdesigns may experience divergences which often lead to design conflicts when they are merged back to the global design. If a high-quality design is desired, these conflicts need to be detected and solved.We present a Multiagent system able to manage these design conflicts by detecting them, by assisting the engineers in the negotiation of solutions, a…

Towards an Agent-Based Model for the Analysis of Macroeconomic Signals

This work introduces an agent-based model for the analysis of macroeconomic signals. The Bottom-up Adaptive Model (BAM) deploys a closed Walrasian economy where three types of agents (households, firms and banks) interact in three markets (goods, labor and credit) producing some signals of interest, e.g., unemployment rate, GDP, inflation, wealth distribution, etc. Agents are bounded rational, i.e., their behavior is defined in terms of simple rules finitely searching for the best salary, the best price, and the lowest interest rate in the corresponding markets, under incomplete information. The markets define fixed protocols of interaction adopted by the agents. The observed signals are em…

Combining feature extraction and expansion to improve classification based similarity learning

Abstract Metric learning has been shown to outperform standard classification based similarity learning in a number of different contexts. In this paper, we show that the performance of classification similarity learning strongly depends on the data format used to learn the model. We then present an Enriched Classification Similarity Learning method that follows a hybrid approach that combines both feature extraction and feature expansion. In particular, we propose a data transformation and the use of a set of standard distances to supplement the information provided by the feature vectors of the training samples. The method is compared to state-of-the-art feature extraction and metric lear…

A Windowing strategy for Distributed Data Mining optimized through GPUs

Abstract This paper introduces an optimized Windowing based strategy for inducing decision trees in Distributed Data Mining scenarios. Windowing consists in selecting a sample of the available training examples (the window) to induce a decision tree with an usual algorithm, e.g., J48; finding instances not covered by this tree (counter examples) in the remaining training examples, adding them to the window to induce a new tree; and repeating until a termination criterion is met. In this way, the number of training examples required to induce the tree is reduced considerably, while maintaining the expected accuracy levels; which is paid in terms of time performance. Our proposed enhancements…

The effect of publishing peer review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals

To increase transparency in science, some scholarly journals are publishing peer review reports. But it is unclear how this practice affects the peer review process. Here, we examine the effect of publishing peer review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals involved in a pilot study at Elsevier. By considering 9,220 submissions and 18,525 reviews from 2010 to 2017, we measured changes both before and during the pilot and found that publishing reports did not significantly compromise referees’ willingness to review, recommendations, or turn-around times. Younger and non-academic scholars were more willing to accept to review and provided more positive and objective recommend…

When Competition Is Pushed Too Hard. An Agent-Based Model Of Strategic Behaviour Of Referees In Peer Review

This paper examines the impact of strategic behaviour of referees on the quality and efficiency of peer review. We modelled peer review as a process based on knowledge asymmetry and subject to evaluation bias. We built two simulation scenarios to investigate largescale implications of referee behaviour and judgment bias. The first one was inspired by “the luck of the reviewer draw” idea. In this case, we assumed that referees randomly fell into Type I and Type II errors, i.e., recommending submissions of low quality to be published or recommending against the publishing of submissions which should have been published. In the second scenario, we assumed that certain referees tried intentiona…

Integrating miniMin-HSP agents in a dynamic simulation framework

In this paper, we describe the framework created for implementing AI-based animations for artificial actors in the context of IVE (Intelligent Virtual Environments). The minMin-HSP (Heuristic Search Planner) planner presented in [12] has been updated to deal with 3D dynamic simulation environments, using the sensory/actuator system fully implemented in UnrealTM and presented in [10]. Here, we show how we have integrated these systems to handle the necessary balance between the reactive and deliberative skills for 3D Intelligent Virtual Agents (3DIVAs). We have carried out experiments in a multi-agent 3D blocks world, where 3DIVAs will have to interleave sensing, planning and execution to be…

No Tickets for Women in the COVID-19 Race? A Study on Manuscript Submissions and Reviews in 2347 Elsevier Journals during the Pandemic

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the submission rate to scholarly journals increased abnormally. Given that most academics were forced to work from home, the competing demands for familial duties might have penalised the scientific productivity of women. To test this hypothesis, we looked at submitted manuscripts and peer review activities for all Elsevier journals between February and May 2018-2020, including data on over 5 million authors and referees. Results showed that during the first wave of the pandemic, women submitted proportionally fewer manuscripts than men. This deficit was especially pronounced among younger cohorts of women academics. The rate of the peer-rev…

Learning Similarity Scores by Using a Family of Distance Functions in Multiple Feature Spaces

There exist a large number of distance functions that allow one to measure similarity between feature vectors and thus can be used for ranking purposes. When multiple representations of the same object are available, distances in each representation space may be combined to produce a single similarity score. In this paper, we present a method to build such a similarity ranking out of a family of distance functions. Unlike other approaches that aim to select the best distance function for a particular context, we use several distances and combine them in a convenient way. To this end, we adopt a classical similarity learning approach and face the problem as a standard supervised machine lea…

A comparative study of partitioning methods for crowd simulations

The simulation of large crowds of autonomous agents with realistic behavior is still a challenge for several computer research communities. In order to handle large crowds, some scalable architectures have been proposed. Nevertheless, the effective use of distributed systems requires the use of partitioning methods that can properly distribute the workload generated by agents among the existing distributed resources. In this paper, we analyze the use of irregular shape regions (convex hulls) for solving the partitioning problem. We have compared a partitioning method based on convex hulls with two techniques that use rectangular regions. The performance evaluation results show that the conv…

A Saturation Avoidance Technique for Peer-to-Peer Distributed Virtual Environments

This paper presents a multi-agent framework oriented to animate groups of synthetic humans that properly balance task-oriented and social behaviors. We mainly focus on the social model designed for BDI-agents to display socially acceptable decisions. This model is based on an auction mechanism used to coordinate the group activities derived from the character's roles. The model also introduces reciprocity relations between the members of a group and allows the agents to include social tasks to produce realistic behavioral animations. Furthermore, a conversational library provides the set of plans to manage social interactions and to animate from simple chats to more complex negotiations. Th…

Towards a Simulator of Integrated Long-Term Care Systems for Elderly People

In this paper, we propose a simulator for integrated long-term care systems using as a starting point a holistic model of care systems for people that need long term care, the Sustainable Socio-Health Model (SSHM). The implementation of the simulator on the Jason multi-agent platform allows the tool to include the human interactions, preferences, and social abilities that take place between elderly people and the staff of healthcare systems (doctors, social workers and nurses). In addition, the use of this multi-agent platform provides the required scalability for simulating population sizes of different orders of magnitude. The paper shows the model to be implemented in the simulator, the…

The peer review game: an agent-based model of scientists facing resource constraints and institutional pressures

This paper looks at peer review as a cooperation dilemma through a game-theory framework. We built an agent-based model to estimate how much the quality of peer review is influenced by different resource allocation strategies followed by scientists dealing with multiple tasks, i.e., publishing and reviewing. We assumed that scientists were sensitive to acceptance or rejection of their manuscripts and the fairness of peer review to which they were exposed before reviewing. We also assumed that they could be realistic or excessively over-confident about the quality of their manuscripts when reviewing. Furthermore, we assumed they could be sensitive to competitive pressures provided by the ins…

Social Animation in Complex Environments

This work presents a market-based social model to produce good quality behavioral animations for groups of intelligent virtual agents. The social model coordinates the activities of groups of virtual characters and also includes social actions in the agent decision-making. We follow the Multi-Agent Resource Allocation approach presented in [2], where agents express their preferences using utility functions. The dynamics of social interactions is inspired by the theory of Piaget [3] over which we have implemented reciprocal task exchanges.