Projects I am currently involved in

I am developing an algorithm that is able to perform automated multilateral negotiations under hard and realistic circumstances:

• The number of agents involved in the negotiations is larger than 2.
• Agents are completely selfish.
• The other agents are unknown, cannot be trusted and can be either human or software agents.
• Utility is defined as a non-linear function or only as a preference relation.
• Calculating the utility of an offer is hard and time consuming.
• The space of possible agreements is extremely large.
• Time is limited, so an exhaustive search is unfeasible.
• The negotiation protocol is a free as possible: agents are allowed to make, accept and reject offers at anytime and are always allowed to remain silent.

The Algorithm applies A Branch and Bound search to explore the space of all possible agreements and find near-optimal solutions.

We are developing a system that enhances the social experience of browsing the internet. This involves the synchronization of the visual output of several webbrowsers on different devices, the aggregation of preferences of the several users in a socially acceptable way (every user is happy with the result), automated argumentation and the implementation of a Peer2Peer Electronic Institution that can be published and adapted online. ACE