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.

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.

El projecte haurà de permetre la definició i la construcció d’una eina de suport a les decisions metodològiques dels mestres, que els hi proposi itineraris formatius amb els materials (activitats generadores d’aprenentatge) que s’hauran categoritzat i etiquetat en funció de la seves característiques en relació a com s’aprenen i que s’adaptaran a les característiques i condicionants de cada alumne.
El sistema, a més, permetrà l’autorregulació de l’aprenentatge per part dels alumnes, gràcies a eines que fomentin i estimulin la metacognició. D’aquesta manera, mitjançant un canvi tecnològic, es possibilita un canvi de paradigma metodològic a dues bandes: El professorat podrà atendre molt millor les diferències individuals de l’alumnat i els alumnes podran assumir el control del seu procés d’aprenentatge.
Per una altra banda el projecte pretén combatre l’alt percentatge de fracàs escolar i d’abandonament dels estudis obligatoris, gràcies, precisament a l’alta adaptabilitat dels continguts a les necessitats educatives específiques de cada perfil d’alumne.
Per últim, pretén compensar la fractura digital amb l’ús de les TIC, afavorint la seva incorporació a l’aula, integrant-les en la quotidianitat.

http://megatron.iiia.csic.es/llint