This study investigates whether an agent-based Negotiation Training System (NTS) can teach women Strategic Empathy - a recently introduced negotiation strategy based on perspective taking - and whether this can improve their negotiation performance. Developed and tested through an interaction-based real-time experiment was a NTS that integrated instructions on how to utilize Strategic Empathy. Women in the experimental group showed significantly higher levels of perspective-taking compared to the control group, and their understanding and use of Strategic Empathy increased over time. Also, a significant positive effect was found of Strategic Empathy on women's self-efficacy. No significant positive effect was found of Strategic Empathy on persistence. The high cognitive load of the experiment and a lack of intrinsic motivation may have caused this finding. Overall, this work demonstrates the applicability of using NTS to teach Strategic Empathy, and its effectiveness for enhancing women's self-efficacy in salary negotiations.

Location-based activities can challenge citizens to explore their neighbourhood in new playful ways. This paper presents a classification of such playful activities based on the literature and experience gained (1) in co-creation sessions and (2) gameplay for neighbourhood exploration with citizens in the Hague. The location-based game designed for this purpose encouraged neighbourhood exploration and social interaction that went beyond the everyday normal. Results showed that citizens are specifically interested in activities that allow them to discover new information about, and places in, their neighbourhood when these are related to their own life. The results of this paper provide new knowledge on game design to inform designers on which type of interactions and activities foster neighbourhood exploration and social interaction.

Abstract COVID-19 has urged researchers to explore new options for distributed participatory design, as physical meetings and workshops became unfeasible. This situation posed new challenges but also opportunities, in particular with respect to engagement and inclusion. This paper focuses on distributed PD with Irish teenagers to support place-making during this period: to build relationships with each other and the community. In a two-week online summer school, teenagers explored a concern or highlighted a unique aspect of their local community and designed digital artworks in response. Activities and materials were designed to support reflection, empowerment, inclusiveness, emergence, and playfulness for participatory place-making. Analysis of the summer school provides insights and guidance on the design of online PD for engaging experiences, especially in the context of place-making.

Social interaction is part of the fabric of society and is essential to challenge many types of social barriers. Location-based games (LBGs) provide a means to foster such interaction in local communities. The design of such games is currently based primarily on designer experience and on the literature on game design in general, and not on an understanding of user requirements. This article explores the preferences and desires of adolescents in neighborhoods of Rotterdam South to socially interact with others and engage with their own neighborhood via LBGs. Adolescents are informants in the exploration of gaming activities for social interaction, which, when subjected to expert review with the mechanics-dynamics-aesthetics framework, produce gameplay requirements for the desired purpose: social interaction in public space. Such requirements provide researchers and game designers insights on the game dynamics best suited to foster location-based social interaction.

Validation of serious games tends to focus on evaluating their design as a whole. While this helps to assess whether a particular combination of game mechanics is successful, it provides little insight into how individual mechanics contribute or detract from a serious game's purpose or a player's game experience. This study analyses the effect of game mechanics commonly used in casual games for engagement, measured as a combination of player behaviour and reported game experience. Secondly, it examines the role of a serious game's purpose on those same measures. An experimental study was conducted with 204 participants playing several versions of a serious game to explore these points. The results show that adding additional game mechanics to a core gameplay loop did not lead to participants playing more or longer, nor did it improve their game experience. Players who were aware of the game's purpose, however, perceived the game as more beneficial, scored their game experience higher, and progressed further. The results show that game mechanics on their own do not necessarily improve engagement, while the effect of perceived value deserves further study.

Disaster communication has made immense progress in the last thirty years. At present, disaster research focuses on bottom-up approaches such as civilian inclusion in disaster response. With the advent of smartphones, citizen-based emergency communication has become possible. Present ad hoc communication technologies typically form a fully connected mesh network, which connects all phones that are within each other's transmission range. This facilitates low-latency direct communication between citizens, but it quickly drains the battery of phones. Alternative ad hoc communication networks form an adaptive energy-efficient network topology, that is most draining to batteries of phones that have a higher charge, while low-energy phones are spared from relaying messages, thereby preserving battery and thus maintaining their connection with the rescue communication network. Both of these approaches have their own advantages. Which one is best for communication needs depends on the context. This position paper discusses the possibility of a decision model as an approach to automatically switch between the two alternative ad hoc communication networks. This ensures that citizens in disasters can make use of the optimal communication system at all times.

One of the key challenges of augmented reality (AR) interfaces is to design effective hand-based interaction supported by computer vision. Hand-based interaction requires free-hands tracking to support user interaction in AR for which this article presents a novel approach. This approach makes it possible to compare different types of hand-based interaction in AR for navigating using a spatial user interface. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of a study with 25 subjects indicate that tangible interaction is the preferred type of interaction with which to determine the position of the user interface in AR and to physically point to a preferred option for navigation in augmented reality.

Knowledge management is a critical issue in today's business world. Knowledge is considered to be one of the most strategic resources of a firm and sources of competitive advantage. This paper identifies and ranks Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for implementation of knowledge management in the Iranian Energy Sector. Using the Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method the relative quantitative weights of 8 of the major CSFs for implementation of knowledge management are identified, based on analyses with KM designers in the Iranian energy sector. The outcomes of the research designate that the critical success factors in the order of importance are: corporate culture, human and financial resources, strategy and leadership, structures and procedures, meso environmental factors, knowledge management process, macro environmental factors, technology and infrastructure.

This paper addresses the challenges of providing customized collaboration support to teams of experts. Current groupware systems only provide support for workflow-based collaboration, avoiding new forms of collaboration such as emergent collaboration. Therefore this paper proposes a elastic collaboration approach and its implementation in a groupware system.

Service Level Agreements (SLA) are commonly used to define terms and conditions of service provisioning. WS-Agreement is an SLA specification that addresses the need of both producers and consumers of services to specify and negotiate terms and conditions of access to these services. This specification has gained wide acceptance in both the Grid computing and Web Services communities. WS-Agreement includes support for both negotiating and specifying penalties that arise from violation of these terms and conditions. It does not, however, include support for monitoring these agreements to determine if any such violations have occurred and, if so, determining which parties are responsible.This paper proposes a framework and design for secure and reliable monitoring of WS-Agreement specified SLAs. Modifications to WS-Agreement are necessary for effective monitoring. These modifications are outlined, along with an implementation of the framework in the AgentScape middle- ware system.

Anonymity can be of great importance in distributed agent applications such as e-commerce & auctions. This paper proposes and analyzes a new approach for anonymous communication of agents based on the use of handles as pseudonyms. A novel naming

Distributed management of complex, distributed systems is the focus of this paper. Adaptation through local deliberation by software agents within a hierarchical virtual organization is the approach taken. Global stabilization of resource utilization is the goal. Electricity networks are used to illustrate the potential of two fitness functions on the basis of which local choices for resource utilization are made: minimizing oscillations is the first function considered, reversing oscillations the second. Results reveal considerable increase in the stabilization of resource utilization compared to a system that utilizes resources in a greedy manner.

The use of digital dossiers in Courts of Law, although currently in the phase of study, will be common practice in the future. This paper introduces the notion of distributed digital dossiers supported by a multi-agent system architecture, developed in interaction with the Courts of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Management of such dossiers is core to the approach: consistency, completeness, integrity and security key concepts

Anonymity can be of great importance in distributed agent applications such as e-commerce & auctions. This paper proposes and analyzes a new approach for organized anonymity of agents based on the use of pseudonyms. A novel naming scheme is presented that can be used by agent platforms to provide automatic anonymity for all agents on its platform, or, alternatively, to provide anonymity on demand. The paper also introduces a new technique, based on the use of handles, that can be fully integrated in an agent platform. Performance measures for an anonymity service implemented for the AgentScape platform provides some insight in the overhead involved.

Documentation is essential to daily legal practice. On-line access is current practice. The conditions imposed by an information service provider with respect to access and use of this documentation determine the value of such documentation. This paper identifies the need to regulate on-line service access in more open environments: to specify the conditions that hold for each individual service, providing a basis for determination of conditions for configurations of services.

The emergence of digital dossiers in Courts of Law presents new opportunities to streamline the criminal prosecution chain. This papers proposes the use of agent technology to support automatic verification of consistency and completeness of data in such dossiers. It sketches how agent systems in combination with other AI technology, can be used to enforce consistency and completeness in digital dossiers in the context of the semiopen environment of the Courts.

Automated support for management of complex distributed object-oriented systems is a challenge: self-management the goal. A self-management system needs to reason about the behaviour of the distributed entities in a system, and act when necessary. The knowledge needed is multi-leveled: different levels of concepts and rules need to be represented. This paper explores the requirements that hold for representing this knowledge in self-managed distributed object-oriented systems, and explores the potential of semantic Web technology in this context. A model for self-management knowledge and a simplified version of a real-life use case are used to illustrate the potential

As the number of Web services in repositories on the World Wide Web increases so do the number of complex configurations of Web services. However, as the World Wide Web is dynamic, Web services come and go, temporarily or for good. As a result, complex Web service configurations need to be reconfigured on demand. To this purpose, complex Web service configurations need to include local knowledge about (1) the function, structure and behaviour of each component in a configuration; and (2) the dependencies between components at each level of composition. Templates are proposed as a means to represent such knowledge. To illustrate the process of reconfiguration, an example is given of reconfiguration of a complex Web service, for which a template is used specifying both types of local knowledge.

Open multi-agent systems need to cope with the characteristics of the Internet, e.g., dynamic availability of computational resources, latency, and diversity of services. Large-scale multi-agent systems employed on wide-area distributed systems are susceptible to both hardware and software failures. This paper describes AgentScape, a multi-agent system support environment, DARX, a framework for providing fault tolerance in large scale agent systems, and a design for the integration of the two.

We explore the use of an agent factory for the composition of Web services. Previously we proposed a structuring approach for automated reconfiguration of agents by an agent factory. The question is whether the same approach can be applied to Web service composition, i.e. whether DAML-S descriptions of Web services offer enough structure for automated configuration by the agent factory. An example trace of the agent factory for configuration of DAML-S Web services illustrates this approach.

The combination of peer-to-peer networking and agent-based computing seems to be a perfect match. Agents are cooperative and communication oriented, while peer-to-peer networks typically support distributed systems in which all nodes have equal roles and responsibilities. AgentScape is a framework designed to support large-scale multi-agent systems. Pole extends this framework with peer-to-peer computing. This combination facilitates the development and deployment of new agent-based peer-to-peer applications and services.

Dynamics are an important aspect of agent models. Control of dynamics requires specific methods of specification that have their own specific semantics. This paper addresses specification and semantics of dynamics and control in component-based agent models. Specification is based on a dedicated formal design specification language for agent models. Semantics of the dynamics are defined using temporal traces with composite states. It is shown in what manner control aspects can be specified, and what their semantics is in terms of the temporal traces. An agent model for controlled diagnostic reasoning processes is used to illustrate the approach. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

In this paper we present work in progress on a worldwide, scalable multi-agent system, based on a paradigm of hyperlinked rooms. The framework offers facilities for managing distribution, security and mobility aspects for both active elements (agents) and passive elements (objects) in the system. Our framework offers separation of logical concepts from physical representation, distribution support, mobility support, and a security architecture.

Evolution of automated systems, in particular evolution of automated agents based on agent deliberation, is the topic of this paper. Evolution is not a merely material process, it requires interaction within and between individuals, their environments and societies of agents. An architecture for an individual agent capable of (1) deliberation about the creation of new agents, and (2) (run-time) creation of a new agent on the basis of this, is presented. The agent architecture is based on an existing generic agent model, and includes explicit formal conceptual representations of both design structures of agents and (behavioural) properties of agents. The process of deliberation is based on an existing generic reasoning model of design. The architecture has been designed using the compositional development method DESIRE, and has been tested in a prototype implementation.

In this paper, one of the informally described models of agent cooperation (Jennings, 1995) has been used to develop and formally specify a generic model of a cooperative agent (GCAM). The compositional development method for multi-agent systems DESIRE supported the principled design of this model of cooperation. To illustrate reusability of the generic model, two application domains have been addressed: collaborative engineering design, and Call Center support.

Emerging technologies allowing two-way communication between utility companies and their customers, as well as with smart equipment, are changing the rules of the energy market. Deregulation makes it even more demanding for utility companies to create new business processes for mutual benefit. Dynamic load management of the power grid is essential to make better and more cost-effective use of electricity production capabilities, and to increase customer satisfaction. The compositional development method DESIRE has been used to analyse, design, implement and verify a multi-agent system capable of negotiation for load management.

This paper discusses an example of the application of a high-level modelling framework which supports both the specification and implementation of a system's conceptual design. This framework, DESIRE (framework for DEsign and Specification of Interacting REasoning components), explicitly models the knowledge, interaction, and coordination of complex tasks and reasoning capabilities in agent systems. For the application domain addressed in this paper, an operational multi-agent system which manages an electricity transportation network for a Spanish electricity utility, a comprehensible specification is presented.