Team formation, i.e., allocating agents to roles within a team or subteams of a team, and the reorganization of a team upon team member failure or arrival of new tasks are critical aspects of teamwork. They are very important issues in RoboCupRescue where many tasks need to be done jointly. While empirical comparisons (e.g., in a competition setting as in RoboCup) are useful, we need a quantita...

Recent developments in museum visitors' guides focus on context awareness, personalization and multimodal and multimedia information presentation to individuals and groups of visitors. However, the modern museum is becoming an "Active Museum", which is a special example of an active environment that interacts with its inhabitants. Since recent museum visitors' guides have focused more on the ap...

The automated detection of aspects of spatial behaviour in an agent-based model is necessary for model testing and analysis. In this paper we compare four predictors of herding behaviour in a model of a grazing herbivore. We find that a) the mean number of neighbours adjusted to account for population variation and b) the mean Hamming distance between rows of the two-dimensional environment can...

Boolean games are a succinct representation of strategic games wherein a player seeks to satisfy a formula of propositional logic by selecting a truth assignment to a set of propositional variables under his control. The difficulty arises because a player does not necessarily control every variable on which his formula depends, hence the satisfaction of his formula will depend on the assignment...

The performance of many computer vision methods depends on the quality of the local features extracted from the images. For most methods the local features are extracted independently of the task and they remain constant through the whole process. To make features more dynamic and give models a choice in the features they can use, this work introduces a set of intermediate features referred as ...

Amid the flourish of various data services, the privacy problems on metadata have received sufficient attention. Generally, the identity is the most sensitive attribute in metadata as identity is the key linking all attributes together. Thus, quite a few methods, such as dummy and k-anonymity, have been applied to actual applications to protect the identity . However, we still argue that the id...

Consuming news articles is an integral part of our daily lives and news agencies such as The Washington Post (WP) expend tremendous effort in providing high quality reading experiences for their readers. Journalists and editors are faced with the task of determining which articles will become popular so that they can efficiently allocate resources to support a better reading experience. The rea...

The various existing agent models do not cover all the possible uses we consider for virtual reality applications. In this paper, we present an agent metamodel (Behave) based on an environment metamodel (Veha). This metamodel allows defining agents and organizing teams of agents in a virtual environment. The use of this metamodel is illustrated by the Gaspar application which simulates activiti...

With electric vehicles becoming a more attractive alternative to combustion vehicles, they appear as new volatile loads in the low voltage distribution grids. Until now, they are at the best only considered rudimentarily in the planning process. This paper presents the modelling of electric vehicles as agents in a multi-agent simulation environment for planning purposes. Integrating a model of ...

Twitter is often used in quantitative studies that identify geographically-preferred topics, writing styles, and entities. These studies rely on either GPS coordinates attached to individual messages, or on the user-supplied location field in each profile. In this paper, we compare these data acquisition techniques and quantify the biases that they introduce; we also measure their effects on li...