Now showing 1 - 10 of 24
  • Publication
    The refashion circular design strategy - Changing the way we design and manufacture clothes
    (Elsevier, 2023-06-30)
    Dan, M. Cristina
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    Approximately 65% of a garment's climate impact stems from fabric production. With 53 M tons of fibre produced every year and 87% ending in landfills, the fashion industry is polluting and wasting precious resources. Therefore, waste prevention and recapturing value become essential. Our research explores the development of a new circular design strategy (CDS)-Refashion, for service innovation through a design thinking process. Grounded in sustainable design strategies and advanced manufacturing technology, the Refashion CDS aims to enable multiple reutilization of fabric before fibre recycling. This is showcased via a proof-of-concept collection launched on the market in 2022, where three pre-designed multifunctional fabric blocks create 11 different garments, accompanied by a diagram showcasing the product-service system's closed-loop material flow.
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    Scopus© Citations 1
  • Publication
    A Step Toward Semantic Content Negotiation
    ( 2022-09-28)
    Taghzouti, Yousouf
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    Content negotiation aims at enabling a server to provide a client with a representation of a resource that meets its needs. However, client and server might desire to negotiate constraints that go beyond the media type or language of the alternative representation. This is especially true in the Semantic Web, as a resource can be described with a single media type, but with different vocabularies (FOAF, schema.org, etc.), and may match specific patterns. In this paper, we propose an approach to increase the flexibility when negotiating a representation between client and server. Our approach follows the goals of the World Wide Web and uses a set of existing technologies: SHACL and profile-based negotiation. We define the mechanism (in terms of protocol and algorithm) for clients to announce their expectations and for servers to react and respond to them. We then explain, through a use case, how the same approach could be used in Web-based Multi-Agent Systems to help autonomous agents achieve their goals on the Web.
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  • Publication
    Machine Capacity of Judgment: An interdisciplinary approach for making machine intelligence transparent to end-users
    (Elsevier, 2022-11-01)
    Tamo-Larrieux, Aurelia
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    Intelligent machines surprise us with unexpected behaviors, giving rise to the question of whether such machines exhibit autonomous judgment. With judgment comes (the allocation of) responsibility. While it can be dangerous or misplaced to shift responsibility from humans to intelligent machines, current frameworks to think about responsible and transparent distribution of responsibility between all involved stakeholders are lacking. A more granular understanding of the autonomy exhibited by intelligent machines is needed to promote a more nuanced public discussion and allow laypersons as well as legal experts to think about, categorize, and differentiate among the capacities of artificial agents when distributing responsibility. To tackle this issue, we propose criteria that would support people in assessing the Machine Capacity of Judgment (MCOJ) of artificial agents. We conceive MCOJ drawing from the use of Human Capacity of Judgment (HCOJ) in the legal discourse, where HCOJ criteria are legal abstractions to assess when decision-making and judgment by humans must lead to legally binding actions or inactions under the law. In this article, we show in what way these criteria can be transferred to machines.
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    Scopus© Citations 3
  • Publication
    Improving customer decisions in web-based e-commerce through guerrilla modding
    (Springer, 2021-12-15) ;
    Fuchs, Klaus
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    Lian, Jie
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    The provisioning of information about product attributes in e-commerce environments is today left entirely to owners of online platforms. Product transparency in online stores can be increased by client-side enrichment of retailer Web pages.
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    Scopus© Citations 3
  • Publication
    Autonomous Search in a Social and Ubiquitous Web
    (Springer, 2020-06-09) ; ;
    Bienz, Simon
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    Gandon, Fabien
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    Corby, Olivier
    Recent W3C recommendations for the Web of Things (WoT) and the Social Web are turning hypermedia into a homogeneous information fabric that interconnects heterogeneous resources: devices, people, information resources, abstract concepts, etc. The integration of multi-agent systems with such hypermedia environments now provides a means to distribute autonomous behavior in worldwide pervasive systems. A central problem then is to enable autonomous agents to discover heterogeneous resources in worldwide and dynamic hypermedia environments. This is a problem in particular in WoT environments that rely on open standards and evolve rapidly—thus requiring agents to adapt their behavior at run time in pursuit of their design objectives. To this end, we developed a hypermedia search engine for the WoT that allows autonomous agents to perform approximate search queries in order to retrieve relevant resources in their environment in (weak) real time. The search engine crawls dynamic WoT environments to discover and index device metadata described with the W3C WoT Thing Description, and exposes a SPARQL endpoint that agents can use for approximate search. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we implemented a prototype application for the maintenance of industrial robots in worldwide manufacturing systems. The prototype demonstrates that our semantic hypermedia search engine enhances the flexibility and agility of autonomous agents in a social and ubiquitous Web.
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    Scopus© Citations 2
  • Publication
    Hypermedia to Connect them All - Autonomous Hypermedia Agents and Socio-Technical Interactions
    (Wiley, 2018-04-13) ; ;
    Ricci, Alessandro
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    Robles, Maria Ines
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    Kovatsch, Matthias
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    Croatti, Angelo
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  • Publication
    Domain-Expert Configuration of Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems in Industrial Use Cases
    Based on the analysis of two real-world use cases for agriculture and manufacturing, we suggest that Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are a viable option to interconnect and coordinate devices, services, machine-learning systems, and people in industrial scenarios. We propose and implement an architecture based on three components: an infrastructure that manages Web of Things environments and executes Hypermedia MAS, a visual development environment for programming agents, and a goal specification interface for end-users. While the infrastructure manages information flows between the system components and provides an environment for agents, the visual language enables domain experts to configure the behaviour of the system leveraging agent-oriented programming abstractions both at design time and run time, and the goal specification interface permits users to delegate goals to the running Hypermedia MAS while re-using domain vocabulary.
  • Publication
    Signifiers as a First-class Abstraction in Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems
    (International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2023-05-30) ; ; ;
    Hypermedia APIs enable the design of reusable hypermedia clients that discover and exploit affordances on the Web. However, the reusability of such clients remains limited since they cannot plan and reason about their interactions. This paper provides a conceptual bridge between hypermedia-driven affordance exploitation on the Web and methods for representing and reasoning about actions that have been extensively explored in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and, more broadly, Artificial Intelligence. We build on concepts and methods from Affordance Theory and Human-Computer Interaction to introduce signifiers as a first-class abstraction in Web-based MAS: Signifiers are designed with respect to the agent-environment context of their usage and enable agents with heterogeneous abilities to act and to reason about action. We define a formal model for the contextual exposure of signifiers in hypermedia environments that aims to drive affordance exploitation. We demonstrate our approach with a prototypical Web-based MAS where two agents with different reasoning abilities proactively discover how to interact with their environment by perceiving only the signifiers that fit their abilities. We show that signifier exposure based on the dynamic agent-environment context helps to facilitate effective and efficient interactions on the Web.
  • Publication
    HyperBrain: Human-inspired Hypermedia Guidance using a Large Language Model
    We present HyperBrain, a hypermedia client that autonomously navigates hypermedia environments to achieve user goals specified in natural language. To achieve this, the client makes use of a large language model to decide which of the available hypermedia controls should be used within a given application context. In a demonstrative scenario, we show the client's ability to autonomously select and follow simple hyperlinks towards a high-level goal, successfully traversing the hypermedia structure of Wikipedia given only the markup of the respective resources. We show that hypermedia navigation based on language models is effective, and propose that this should be considered as a step to create hypermedia environments that are used by autonomous clients alongside people.
  • Publication
    Agent-Oriented Visual Programming for the Web of Things
    ( 2022)
    Burattini, Samuele
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    Ricci, Alessandro
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    Croatti, Angelo
    In this paper we introduce and discuss an approach for multiagent-oriented visual programming. This aims at enabling individuals without programming experience but with knowledge in specific target domains to design and (re)configure autonomous software. We argue that, compared to procedural programming, it should be simpler for users to create programs when agent abstractions are employed. The underlying rationale is that these abstractions, and specifically the belief-desire-intention architecture that is aligned with human practical reasoning, match more closely with people’s everyday experience in interacting with other agents and artifacts in the real world. On top of this, we designed and implemented a visual programming system for agents that hides the technicalities of agent-oriented programming using a block-based visual development environment that is built on the JaCaMo platform. To further validate the proposed solution, we integrate the Web of Things (WoT) to let users create autonomous behaviour on top of physical mashups of devices, following the trends in industrial end-user programming. Finally, we report on a pilot user study where we verified that novice users are indeed able to make use of this development environment to create multi-agent systems to solve simple automation tasks.