The next generation of SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems must develop a set of autonomous and intelligent capabilities to address a number of pressing requirements. Problems presented by increasing process complexity, advances in sensor technologies, the increasing demand for integration with other enterprise solutions, increasingly inadequate security protection and a higher required standard of fault tolerance must all be solved.

To provide solutions to these problems, the proposed research focuses on the development of a novel Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture supporting SCADA systems, built on research on MAS carried out at IIIA in Barcelona. This architecture is to be integrated with an advanced event reasoning framework that has been partially developed at Queen's University Belfast which will fully exploit sensor data and domain knowledge, including treatment of inherent uncertainties, incompleteness and inconsistency to autonomously infer system state and crucially to inform human and autonomous decision makers in the system. Security issues related to multi-agent systems for large scale control problems will also be investigated and such technologies to be integrated into next generation MASs.

Principle researcher: Weiru Liu (CSIT, Queen's University Belfast)
Co-investigators: Sakir Sezer, Michael Loughlin, Jun Hong (CSIT, Queen's University Belfast)
Collaborators: Lluis Godo, Carles Sierra (IIIA-CSIC)

SINTELNET is a Coordination Action whose aim is to explore the interplay of future and emerging information technologies and the development of Philosophy, Humanities and the Social Sciences.

Traditional distinctions between the natural, the social and the artificial are becoming more and more blurred as radically new forms of Information Technology-enabled social environments are formed. These changes create the need to re-explore basic concepts of Philosophy, Humanities and Social Sciences.

The aim of the European Network for Social Intelligence is twofold:

- To look into those IT-enabled domains as a means for the critical examination of those basic concepts and,
- To propose new approaches to understand and develop future IT-enabled social situations, by adapting and applying traditional concepts.

SINTELNET stimulates debate and coordinates scientific research by
- Organising a series of inter-disciplinary, thematic workshops that bring together key players in diverse, relevant sub-areas.
- Hosting Working Groups who will deliver studies and position papers as well as identify emerging topics and important research challenges.
- Sponsoring short time academic visits and organization of related events
- Creating guidelines and policy documents.

This project is about exploiting the predominance of social networking using autonomic software agents to enrich, encourage and enliven engagement with online cultural artefacts such as from a museum or a gallery. With the current problems in the European financial debt, many cultural institutions are planning to shorten the length that visitors can physically enter. In the UK for example we have heard of plans that the British Museum will close earlier and possibly shut down completely for one day a week because of the massive cuts in funding that were presented in the UK Chancellors speech detailing reduction in money for the cultural sector. The basic idea is to have your friends, museums, art galleries and theatres all in your pocket through your handheld device.
In this project we will harness the power of autonomic agents that work on behalf of human users in an infrastructure that allows for these agents to communicate and negotiate on behalf of their human users to facilitate a collective and social experience of online cultural visits. For example, we could imagine a scenario where 4 students are visiting an art museum with the desire to purchase something (a print or a physical copy of an artefact for example) for a friend. They would wish to be able negotiate about what to see or experience online, what additional information they want to consider, what comments from what previous visitors over any commentary they individually or collectively want to leave for others and, eventually, over what they collectively choose to purchase for their friend.
We are concerned with the fundamental question of building autonomic agents that can represent their users needs, argue and negotiate on behalf of their users with other software and human agents, maintain models of the other autonomic agents in the system and proactively develop plans and scenarios for their human counterparts. In order for autonomic agents to interact in open systems such as those we are describing we will use the BDI agent architecture (arguably the most important symbolic agent architecture of the last 20 years) on a well-developed infrastructure (called electronic institutions) that facilitates autonomic agent interaction.
In short we believe BDI architectures represent the stronger and best-developed software engineering device for building autonomic agents, that electronic institutions is the best developed infrastructure for supporting the interaction of autonomous interaction, and that the idea of enabling richer social exploration of cultural artefacts online is a timely and critical case study to address.

MaToMUVI is a FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IRSES project (PIRSES-GA-2009- 247584)

The Liquid Publications Project is a Framework Program 7 (FP7) funded research project in the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) – OPEN series. This introduction to the project is intended to describe what we’re trying to accomplish in a more publicly accessible form. In the following sections we’ll cover the Liquid Publications Project’s motivation, objectives, potential benefits, challenges, and research plans.

Motivation

The production of scientific knowledge in the form of conference papers, journal articles, and textbooks has failed to keep pace with advances in Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The World-Wide Web and other advances in computer technologies have had noticeable effect on the ways scientific activity is conducted, but little effect on the ways scientific knowledge is produced, disseminated, evaluated, and consumed.

The Liquid Publications Project is based on the primary intuition that the evolution and use of scientific knowledge objects is similar to the evolution and use of open-source software. Both scientific knowledge and open-source software are complex, malleable, artistic creations of the human mind that evolve in multiple directions through collaboration. Further, just as computer software has become de-coupled from specific computer hardware, scientific knowledge has become de-coupled from the specific physical aspects of a scientific field through storage, manipulation, simulation, and recombination in electronic form.

While scientific collaborations and collaboration technologies have advanced, the collaborative evaluation of scientific knowledge has not. Scientific communities continue to evaluate scientific knowledge using essentially the same peer-review techniques used 100 years ago.

Project Objectives and Benefits

This project will explore how ICT and lessons from the software engineering and social web communities can be applied to provoke a radical paradigm shift shift in the way scientific knowledge is created, disseminated, evaluated, and maintained. This new paradigm will transform a scientific publication from a static artifact to a Liquid Publication that can take multiple forms, that evolves continuously, and is enriched by multiple sources. The expected benefits of this transformation are:

• Earlier and greater circulation of innovative ideas, hence, more effective dissemination.

• Collaborative research efforts built on previous knowledge.

• Optimization of the time researchers spend creating, assessing and disseminating knowledge while improving the quality of the paper selection processes for conferences and journals.

• Rationalization of credit attribution processes based on social networks, team and community work, collaborative problem solving, social reputation, and distribution of knowledge.

• Delivery of innovative products and services for publishers that add value to their traditional businesses.

Research Challenges

Achieving program objectives and realizing the benefits presents both technical and social research challenges. Technical challenges include how to identify a model for scientific knowledge creation and dissemination that encourages early release of results, facilitates collaboration, assigns credit fairly, and simplifies dissemination; how to model and structure digital objects that embody a variety of evolutionary and collaborative knowledge creation processes; and how to identify social, low-effort, and continuous quality assessment methods. The primary social challenge is to gain support from the scientific community who will have to depart from the current publication selection models and embrace a radical change in the way scientific contributions are created, managed, and evaluated.

Research Plan

We aim to overcome the research challenges and achieve the project objectives by modeling the three main interacting components: Scientific Knowledge Objects, People, and Processes.

Scientific Knowledge Objects (SKO for short) embody the digital aspects of a traditional scientific paper, plus the evolutionary, social, collaborative, composable, and evolving nature of scientific knowledge creation processes. Defining, implementing, and testing SKOs will form the basis of the research.

People are the agents involved in the scientific knowledge processes, playing various cooperating and competing roles. Investigating roles and role interations will be a primary research activity of the project.

Processes govern the creation, evaluation, and evolution of SKOs and, hence, manage their lifecycle. These processes include modification, evolution, management (for example: access, intellectual property concerns, or legal aspects), and assessment.

In summary, this project will examine the complex web of interactions between SKOs, people, roles, and processes.