RI: Medium: Collaborative Research: Creating Organizationally Adept Software Agents and their Organizations

RI：媒介：协作研究：创建组织熟练的软件代理及其组织

• 批准号: 0964590
• 负责人: Victor Lesser
• 金额: $ 72万
• 依托单位: University of Massachusetts Amherst
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-06-15 至 2013-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0964590&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: RI; Medium; Collaborative; Research; Creating

The centerpiece of this project is the design, development, and evaluation of computational representations and algorithms for making software agents that are organizationally adept. An organizationally-adept agent is not only aware of its role(s) in an organization, but can also monitor how well it is fulfilling its organizational responsibilities and can proactively adapt its behaviors to meet organizational needs better. Organizationally adept agents evaluate their behaviors based not on their (agent-centric) self-interests but rather on their (organization-centric) responsibilities to each other, and autonomously adapt to achieve organizational objectives emergently. Elaboration and adaptation by organizationally adept agents means that the ultimate organization design is formed by a combination of top-down design (to produce a "ballpark" organization) and emergent refinement processes. Further, this combination can be iterative and ongoing, where organizationally adept agents can detect tension between top-down and emergent influences, and inform the design processes of runtime interaction patterns and environmental tendencies that suggest useful top-down organization restructurings. The intellectual problems being pursued are central to practical issues in scaling multi-agent systems to help solve complex, long-term, global problems. Many critical challenges facing society including climate change, health care, and sustainable energy|require a prolonged commitment to monitoring and managing distributed activities. Networked computer systems populated by software agents, which can be constantly measuring, comparing, and interpreting information to understand and respond to wide-scale phenomena, promise to address such challenges, but need the kinds of innovations proposed in this project. Second, while the project is specifically looking at organizations for computational agents, our results will inform, and be informed by, research on human organizations. To stimulate sharing insights and results, the investigators will organize a multi-disciplinary symposium on organization-centric reasoning, and will train an inter-disciplinary cohort of graduate students.

该项目的核心是设计、开发和评估计算表示和算法，以制作组织上熟练的软件代理。善于组织的代理不仅了解自己在组织中的角色，还可以监控其履行组织职责的情况，并可以主动调整其行为以更好地满足组织需求。善于组织的代理人评估自己的行为不是基于他们（以代理人为中心）的自身利益，而是基于他们（以组织为中心）对彼此的责任，并自动适应以实现组织目标。组织熟练的代理人的精心设计和适应意味着最终的组织设计是通过自上而下的设计（产生“大致”组织）和紧急细化过程的结合而形成的。此外，这种组合可以是迭代和持续的，其中组织熟练的代理可以检测自上而下和紧急影响之间的紧张关系，并告知运行时交互模式和环境趋势的设计过程，从而建议有用的自上而下的组织重组。正在研究的智力问题是扩展多智能体系统以帮助解决复杂、长期、全球性问题的实际问题的核心。社会面临的许多重大挑战，包括气候变化、医疗保健和可持续能源|需要长期致力于监测和管理分布式活动。由软件代理填充的网络计算机系统可以不断测量、比较和解释信息以理解和响应大规模现象，有望解决此类挑战，但需要本项目中提出的各种创新。其次，虽然该项目专门研究计算代理的组织，但我们的结果将为人类组织的研究提供信息，并从中获取信息。为了促进分享见解和结果，研究人员将组织一次关于以组织为中心的推理的多学科研讨会，并将培训跨学科的研究生群体。