Building Agents that Plan and Argue in a Social Context

In order for one agent to meet its goals, it will often need to influence another to act on its behalf, particularly in a society in which agents have heterogenous sets of abilities. To effect such influence, it is necessary to consider both the social context and the dialogical context in which influence is exerted, typically through utterance. Both of these facets, the social and the dialogical, are affected by, and in turn affect, the plan that the influencing agent maintains, and the plans that the influenced agents may be constructing. The i-Xchange project seeks to bring together three closely related areas of research: in distributed planning, in agentbased social reasoning, and in inter-agent argumentation, in order to solve some of the problems of exerting influence using socially-aware argument.