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1 - Inventing Communities of Communication
Conviviality in Digital CitiesBackground StudyProject status: The project ICC was initiated by the University of Luxembourg. It started April 1, 2006. The City of Luxembourg acts as a co-partner (test bed). The city plan is to create a digital city by transforming their current city web site into a centralized online administration the e-City integrated into eLuxembourg. The goal is to provide citizens and visitors with a suite of electronic services as well as to give them online access to the main official forms generated by the city and interact with them. This is part of the eEurope strategy as first defined in Lisbon (2000). Conviviality: There is neither a clear model nor any singular vision of conviviality and the definitions are domain specific. Generally speaking, a convivial place or group is one in which individuals are welcome and feel at ease, for example a city portal with text in the languages spoken by the constitutive communities of the city. There are therefore many kinds of conviviality. In [1], conviviality is a social relationship based on the acceptance of others. It describes a multi-agent recommendation system that finds matches between students in difficulty and students who can help them as tutors. It uses a utility function based on “structure measures” such as students’ social profile, sociability degree, mood states, acceptance degree. In [2], reputation is found to be a necessary condition for conviviality. This work defines a functional ontology of reputation for multi-agent systems. It defines reputation roles played by agents to evaluate, propagate and receive reputation. In [3], Conviviality is not the summ of local characteristics (criteria) but a global chracteristic that emerges from the system. A convivial agent is rational and cooperative. This means it can negotiate with users, offer responses and suggestions based on contextual interpretation, is flexible when interacting with users and allows their contestations and feedbacks, it offers cooperative reactions to users’requests anticipating their needs and finally offers responses in a form useful to them. Conviviality as a set of constraints on behavior following social conventions can be considered as a norm. Research questions How to model the social concept of conviviality? What aspects will we address? How to apply such model to digital cities? Scope Digital cities are multi-facetted and complex entities. Our focus will be on the city web portal. The obvious question is to evaluate the model experimentally. Sub questions - What is the role of conviviality in literature? - What is the most appropriate model for conviviality? - How to define measures? - How to evaluate the model? Motivation for the city Users go to city web portals to fulfill needs they have (information gathering, filling up a form, entertainment, etc.). However, while trying to reach their goals, users have to fight against constraints and must find compromises. Constraints can be: - Imposed by the needs or behaviors of other users (system use, misuse, abuse, etc.) - Imposed by the objectives of the city administration (control over information, identification requirements, etc.) - Technical (system overload, lack of functionality, etc.) Application in CS/agent context Agents assist users in getting their needs satisfied in the best possible ways while taking constraints into account. Methodology - Write a literature survey of conviviality - Create a multi agent organizational model of conviviality (AGR [4], Moise+ [5], etc.) - Define criteria for specific contexts (administration, themes, etc.) - Apply test cases from the city of Luxembourg to the model Examples of criteria: Security and trust; Interface flexibility and adaptability (personalization, customization, etc.); Ergonomics (web site design and heuristics); System scalability, efficiency and speed; Density of users in any given location, groups stability. Benchmarking data is expected from the run of use case scenarios experiments on the City of Luxembourg portal. Success criteria - Generality of our model - Evaluation and measures of conviviality Expected problems
With for example a social sciences research group involved with similar empirical research to address questions such as:
List of PublicationsReferencesPhD. Work plan: 3-year TimetableFirst Year: March 2006 - February 2007Research - Domain definition - State-of-the-Art and background research: digital cities; Conviviality - Formalism Implementation - A conviviality scenario using agent systems (AGR, Agent-Group-Role/Madkit; Moise; …) Simulations - Testing conviviality scenario with agent systems (AGR, Agent-Group-Role/Madkit; Moise; …) Publications Accepted papers:
Second Year: March 2007 - February 2008Research - Environment, context, structure - Group: Organization, equilibrium, set hypothesis for the added-value of conviviality - Individuals: social distance, goals of individual vs group, roles - variables and measurements to compute conviviality - Formalism Implementation - Conviviality scenarios using agent systems (AGR, Agent-Group-Role/Madkit; Moise; …) - Running Prototype - Model interaction with applications Simulations Testing using agent systems (AGR, Agent-Group-Role/Madkit; Moise; …) with ICC scenarios. - Conviviality rules: definition, enforcement, relaxation - Group organizations: verify hypothesis Publications, Visits - At least one paper submission - Workshop Participations to accepted 2006 submission - Visits Third Year: March 2008 - February 2009Research - Finish Research: conviviality model ICC - User induced conviviality Implementation - Finish agent systems implementation - Experiment with eventual additional research findings: user induced conviviality Simulations Test scenarios using Luxembourg city as test bed Thesis - Write and finalize thesis document - Defense presentation - Publication TBD Publication Article summarizing ICC model and prototype Short Curriculum Vitae
This work plan fits my particular expertise as it builds on ... (ex: organizational model, java, etc.) Books & References "1 - Inventing Communities of Communication" is mentioned on: Patrice Caire |