AGENTS VIC Meeting

Friday, 30 April 2010 @ 9:30AM.
Coffee, tea and refreshments from 9:15.

RMIT Intelligent Systems Group area, Level 8, Building 14

Minyi Li, Swinburne

An Efficient Majority-Rule-based Approach for Collective Decision Making with CP-nets

In this talk, I will study the problem of collective decision making in the case where the agents' preferences are represented by CP-nets (Conditional Preference Networks). Most existing works either do not consider the computational issues, or depend on a strong assumption that all the agents share a common preferential independence structure. To this end, we propose an efficient approach, called CDMCP (Collective Decision Making with CP-nets), for aggregating multiple agents' preferences according to majority rule. The proposed approach allows the agents to have different preferential independence structures and is computationally efficient.

Jens Pfau, UoM

Culture in Multi-Agent Systems

Culture shapes the behaviour and cognition of its bearer by prescribing a constrained world view and a range of predefined behaviours. On the one hand, culture thus entails stereotyping, racial conflicts, and other unwanted phenomena, which makes its analysis particularly interesting to the social sciences. On the other hand, however, culture also facilitates reasoning by reducing the number of possibilities a person has to consider in its decision-making. Agent-based modeling has recently gained increasing attention as a suitable tool for studying the emergence of social structures such as culture. However, most existing models are simplistic and do not support the emergence of cultural concepts that are rich enough to engage in agents' cognition. In this seminar, I will describe our recent work that extends Axelrod's model with an explicit distinction between social and physical space in addition to cultural space. Importantly, the interactions between individuals are reframed in terms of the grounding model of cultural transmission, which suggests how to represent the effect of cultural information exchange on the quality of a social tie. I will discuss the simulation results, focussing on the effects of varying physical and social mobility on cultural diversity.