We aligned two fundamentally different models of smallpox transmission after a bioterrorist attack: A location-explicit multi-agent model (BioWar) and the conventional epidemiological box model, called a SIR model for Susceptible-Infected-Recovered. The purpose of this alignment is part of a greater validation process for BioWar. From this study we were able to contribute to the overall validat...

Developers of pedestrian models often overlook the fact that pedestrians are subjected to a multitude of influences when walking. The majority of existing models only focus on a single aspect, typically the avoidance of obstructions or other pedestrians. PEDFLOW, a microscopic, agent-based model, uses an implementation of context-mediated behavior to enable the agents to deal with multiple caus...

We present a comparison of five different models built upon the same individual behavior hypothesis of a collective phenomenon present in peerto-peer file exchange networks: “free-riding”. We study a global analytical model and four agent based models. Multi-agent models include the space and time dimensions rarely seen in the literature discussing aggregated models of the collective phenomenon...

We participate in the RoboCup four-legged league, and view this as a testbed for the use of multiagent coordination techniques. While the techniques we currently use are rather straightforward, our longterm goal is to adopt some of the more complex mechanisms we have been developing in other research. This paper describes these mechanisms, our work with RoboCup to date, and sketches the directi...

This paper proposes a combined mechanism for coordinating agents in timed normative multi-agent systems. Timing constraints in a multi-agent system make it possible to force action execution to happen before certain time invariants are violated. In such multiagent systems we achieve coordination at two orthogonal levels with respect to states and actions. On the one hand, the behaviour of indiv...

The consideration of security requirements in the development of multi-agent systems is a very difficult task. However, only few approaches have been proposed that try to integrate security issues as internal part of the development process. Amongst them, secure Tropos has been proposed as a structured approach towards the consideration of security issues in the development of multiagent system...

The paper presents a multi-agent algorithm implementing semantic analysis of unstructured data based on ontology. In this multiagent model agents of two kinds interact: the instance agents correspond to meaningful units of the information being retrieved, and the rule agents implement rules of a given ontology. An original solution for the termination detection of this multi-agent algorithm is ...

We investigate the potential of adversarial evaluation methods for open-domain dialogue generation systems, comparing the performance of a discriminative agent to that of humans on the same task. Our results show that the task is hard, both for automated models and humans, but that a discriminative agent can learn patterns that lead to above-chance performance.