The growth of the Internet and the spread of globalization have moved both society and economy from static and hierarchical structures to more dynamic and networked ones. These new structures influence the way in which economic and social players coordinate. The main objective of the COR project is to provide robust coordination mechanisms. That is, to provide computational models that increase the possibilities of reaching successful interactions.

COR is a coordinated project developed researchers of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute and the University of Barcelona. It is funded by the subprogramme of fundamental non-oriented research projects of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity, with codes TIN2012-38876-C02-01 and TIN2012-38876-C02-02 respectively.

The following innovative technology companies are promoting, collaborating in the development and following the results of the COR project:

Incondicionales Sport S.L.
Paradizo Exclusive Travel S.L.
Intelligent Software Components S.A.

The project proposes the development of pre-commercial prototype of a cloud-based and mobile service for strategic management of high performance sales teams in retail organizations. The final application will support continuous improvement of sales processes using Artificial Intelligence technologies such as trust and reputation technologies, "What-if" analysis and feasibility study based on optimization techniques; and “skill matching” techniques based on multi-attribute decision theory.

The new product will provide effective management of sales plans. Functionalities such as simulation of sales scenarios (What-if analysis) will determine which changes in sales plans will improve the key performance indicators. It will allow to detect similarities among sales areas in order to recommend plans that have already been successful in similar areas, and evaluate potential sales scenarios (viability) to determine whether or not expected goals could be achieved. Automatic control of sales teams will provide measures on people such as the trust on plans compliance (proposed for higher roles) and will compute the reputation gained by the salesman in their relationship, both within the company and with its customers. Using obtained knowledge while monitoring teams, lack of skills within the entire organization will be detected, and also the need for promotion, formation or recruitment would be suggested. All these measures, calculated automatically, could give a clearer inside and learning about the retail organization in order to improve its effectiveness.

Led by Careesma, the objective of this R&D project is to improve the experience of the job-search website users.

Currently, most of the job-search portals are very simple:

Candidates post Resumes/CV and search for a job following some criteria, applying to some job offers and finally wait for a response from the company.

Companies publish their job offers and wait for the applicants, then they need to evaluate manually the candidates to pick the correct one.

RIMAS explores new methods to change this working model:

For candidates: detect which of the vacancies existing on the site are best suited to your profile, work experience, academic background, skills, ...

For business: Identify the best candidates among the applicants for a job, rejecting those that do not match their expectations with a simple click. It also recommends the best candidates available in the database that have not applied to theoffer but who match all ( or most ) requirements for the job.

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.

La formulación de la Open Innovation ha supuesto una revolucionaria forma de plantearse el desarrollo de nuevas iniciativas: mediante la creación de entornos colaborativos, se logran sacar adelante proyectos novedosos, de una manera rápida y eficaz.

Ante el éxito de esta nueva filosofía de I+D, se hace posible abordar nuevas problemáticas. En este contexto es en el que emergen nuevas iniciativas, acordes con la situación actual. Por otra parte, también nos debemos situar en un contexto en el que los conceptos de ecología y sostenibilidad empiezan a posicionarse dentro del ámbito de las empresas. De este hecho nace una nueva filosofía de negocio sostenible, en la que se sitúan nuevos proyectos que buscan no sólo ser tolerantes con el medio ambiente, sino jugar un papel activo en lo que al beneficio medioambiental se refiere.

De esta manera surge el concepto de Green Open Innovation, liderado e impulsado por organizaciones pioneras, destinadas a encontrar nuevas maneras de optimizar las tecnologías para así lograr una mayor eficiencia energética (con la futura reducción de costes que ello conlleva) al mismo tiempo que se comparten y proponen acciones ecológicas. En esta línea, tener un entorno de simulación donde implementar ideas de la I+D y transferirlas al mercado dará valor añadido y minimizará los riesgos de aplicación de estas ideas a la realidad, a través de herramientas de generación de informes y análisis de parámetros, gran laguna en este tipo de procesos. En tiempos de crisis, para mejorar o prevenirlos, conseguir herramientas que favorezcan la gestión sostenible y eficiente de los recursos y la generación de valor para las PYMES son la mejor estrategia.

Open Innovation presenta un modelo donde los nuevos productos provienen tanto de fuentes internas como externas, y donde éstas pueden entrar a formar parte del proceso de innovación en todos los puntos de la cadena hasta llegar al producto final. Es decir, la innovación abierta no contempla las innovaciones sólo como input en el proceso, sino también como output.

Alcance
El proyecto que se desarrollará en la presente propuesta tiene como objetivo el estudio, diseño y desarrollo de una plataforma tecnológica basada en las tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones e integrada en el marco del Internet 2.0, para crear un entorno económico alrededor de la sostenibilidad y el medio ambiente, principalmente orientado a PYMES pero también hacia la gran Empresa, sobre una plataforma socio-tecnológica (plataforma de Green Open Innovation) desarrollada en el medio Internet.

El entorno económico ha de facilitar la emergencia de iniciativas conjuntas entre distintas Empresas para la generación e intercambio de ideas y la organización de proyectos conjuntos de I+D+i bajo el paradigma de la Innovación Abierta.

La plataforma se especializará en iniciativas de desarrollo económico (nuevas oportunidades de negocio, nuevos modelos de colaboración) en el marco de la sostenibilidad y la mejora del medio ambiente.

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.

Creating software applications that foster web-based social interaction is still very hard and currently beyond the capabilities of end-users, since highly skilled web application developers are needed. Consequently, the cost of community formation and evolution beyond those based on simple, general and stable interaction patterns is still too high. Individuals, however, looking either for new, partially formed, or already standing communities whose interactions are much more domain specific and specialised need software tools and platforms that support the formation of and the adjustment to communities, as well as the adaptation to new, perhaps dynamically evolving, events during a community’s lifespan.

CBIT aims at transcending the current level of social software applications and platforms for community building into the meta-level for which today’s applications will arise as particular instances. For this we shall approach community building as an iterative process consisting of community formation, interaction, and growth. In CBIT a community is understood as a group of peers whose interactions are defined via agreements on social contracts on behaviour, meaning, and reliability, and represented in a community charter. Consequently, community building will be subject to the mechanisms to be developed in the scope of this project for charter specification and selection, charter grounding and enactment, and charter revision and modification. To concretise this approach, we shall realise it for a community-building process that fosters collaboration in the generation of digital educational contents.