Trust Alignment: A Sine Qua Non of Open Multi-agent Systems

In open multi-agent systems, linked data enables agents to communicate with each other and to gather knowledge for autonomous decision. Until now, trust is a factor for starting communications and ignores doubts about the content or context of ongoing communications. Several approaches are used to identify whom to trust and how human trust can be computationally modeled. Yet, they do not consider a change of context or of other agents’ behavior at runtime. The proposed doctoral work aims to support content- and context-related trust in open multi-agent systems using linked data. Existing trust models need to be surveyed with respect to content- and context-related trust. A framework based on a fitting trust model and working with linked data must be developed to establish and dynamically refine trust relationships on the autonomous agents’ point of view. This would enhance the applicability of decentralized systems without introducing central units as the history of the web demonstrates. Web engineers are hereby supported to work on a new level of abstraction using the decentralization, but not scrutinizing specific communication sequences.

Keratoconus, a dystrophy of unknown origin, remains an ophthalmic enigma. The contrast between the presence of marked structural changes and deformation of the corneal wall and the relative absence of specific genetic and biomolecular findings continues to intrigue ophthalmologists. In Marfan syndrome, where genetic and molecular abnormalities are well identified, and similar changes in collagen observed, the cornea tends not to be steeper, irregular or ectatic, but are globally flatter. This suggests that an external mechanical force may be necessary to induce the apparition and progression of the ectatic process in keratoconus. Eye rubbing has long been acknowledged as a risk factor for keratoconus and its progression, but could it in fact be the root cause? Many clinical observations and reports support the hypothesis of eye rubbing as a first and necessary hit for inducing progressive ectatic deformation of the corneal wall. Validating or refuting this hypothesis on the basis of patient admission may be impossible. It is difficult to document the frequency, duration and intensity of eye rubbing in patients with keratoconus, and virtually impossible to prove that every patient who denies the habit truly does not rub his eyes. Both the increase in incidence of atopy and the time spent in front of the computer screen in the general population may account for an increased tendency for eye rubbing, and lead to the perceived increased prevalence of keratoconus in both urban and non-urban areas. This paper explores the possibility that the mechanical stress imposed on the cornea by rubbing may not be as much a second hit evoking the structural changes of a predisposed cornea exhibiting unknown collagen progressive alteration, but rather the necessary trigger and sine qua non of the keratoconic process. Even if this provocative hypothesis is impossible to prove, it is equally difficult to refute, and acknowledging eye rubbing as a possible root cause increases awareness within the general population and if true, could dramatically reduce the incidence of keratoconus, and halt its progression in eyes already affected. How to cite this article Gatinel D. Eye Rubbing, a Sine Qua Non for Keratoconus? Int J Kerat Ect Cor Dis 2016;5(1):6-12.

There are significant differences between the methods used in Western and Eastern culture to discuss sex. Any topic related to sex in Eastern culture, specifically Indonesia, is often considered taboo compared to Western culture. This is due to the strong cultural and religious values prevalent in Eastern societies, making discussions about sex feel impolite and inappropriate. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the importance of sex education as a “sine qua non” in Indonesia and the consequences of treating sex education as a taboo. The exploration process would examine the role of parents, teachers, counselors, psychologists, and the community in sex education, new sex education policies, along with recommendations, implications, and directions for future investigations.

Tax Complexity: A Sine Qua None for Tax Fairness

Engineering trust alignment: Theory, method and experimentation

As one of the most important coordination mechanisms, contract net protocol (CNP) has been extensively studied in many fields, where many other techniques are also used to improve the decision quality. CNP suffers from multiple disadvantageous limitations in the open environment of MAS, so the trust model, a fundamental issue in large-scale open distributed systems, is introduced into CNP in this paper. Based on reviewing CNP and the trust model of the initiator side, we add the trust model, with direct trust and recommendation-based trust components, into CNP process. Experimental results show that the initiators with trust model almost steadily get the best participants no matter the environment is honest-dominated or dishonest-dominated. Even in the dishonest-dominated environment, this approach gets better results and is proved valuable.

Market research in developed countries is condition sine qua none business of successful companies. On the other hand, market orientation as the key mechanism of allocation of limited economic resources in the countries of transition is still in the implementation phase. This paper deals with the issues of market research in the function of business decisions, on the example of companies in the South Backa region (Republic of Serbia). The many-year transition process (it has been going on for 20 years now), the insufficiently developed market mechanisms, the problems imminent to the nature of transition – monopoles, slow decentralization and non-efficient institutional system resulted in the fact that companies are relatively slow in the implementation of modern business methods. The first part of the paper aims to define market research on theoretical-methodological level. The second part of the paper deals with the influence of research on company businesses, as well as the implementation of the research on company decision-making. The third part of the paper presents certain aspects of market research of companies in the South Backa region. The aim of the research implies the representation of market research analysis as a modern business method. The informative significance that company management attaches to market research results in the context of business decision-making has also been analyzed. The fourth part of the paper is reserved for the research results. Key words: Market research, companies, business decisions, business.

Agents frequently collaborate to achieve a shared goal or to accomplish a task that they cannot do alone. However, collaboration is difficult in open multi-agent systems where agents share constrained resources to achieve both individual and shared goals. In current approaches to collaboration, agents are organised into disjoint groups and social reasoning is used to capture their capabilities when selecting a qualified set of collaborators. These approaches are not useful when agents are in multiple, overlapping groups; depend on each other when using shared resources; have multiple goals to achieve simultaneously; and have to share the overall costs and benefits. In this article, agents use social reasoning to enhance their understanding of other agents’ goals and their dependencies, and self-adaptive techniques to adapt their level of self-interest in a collaborative process, with a view to contributing to lowering shared costs or increasing shared benefits. This model aims at improving the extent to which agents’ goals are met while improving shared resource usage efficiency. For example, in a public transport system where each mode of transport has limited capacity, commuters will be enabled to make choices that avoid over-capacity in different modes, or in a smart energy grid with limited capacity, users can make choices as to when they increase their demand. The model simultaneously helps avoid overloading a shared resource while allowing users to achieve their own goals. The proposed model is evaluated in an open multi-agent system with 100 agents operating in multiple overlapping groups and sharing multiple constrained resources. The impact of agents’ varying levels of social dependencies, mobility, and their groups’ density on their individual and shared goal achievement is analysed.

Open Multiagent Systems, in which heterogeneous agents interact with each other and organize themselves into Virtual Organizations, demand infrastructures supporting these features. In these systems, dynamic and complex interactions between agents may arise. Interaction Protocols allow the definition of communication patterns. However in open systems, dynamic and complex interactions may also require these patterns be modified at execution time. We propose a support for modelling complex, concurrent and dynamic interactions between agents in terms of conversations. Conversations between agents follow predefined Interaction Protocols that can be dynamically modified without restarting the system. This support is provided at agent level and is integrated into the Magentix Multiagent Platform.

Globalisation is full of paradox, however it features a strong feedback with the localization and regionalism which can be observed at all levels of political and social and economic life. Due to variability of actions impacting the quality of education at different levels, the objective of this elaboration is to focus on dependencies taking place mainly in two different dimension of establishing the quality of university level education; basically, in the global and local dimension (partially, also in the regional one). The main objective of this elaboration is an attempt to reply to the question whether the nature and kind of this type of connections and theory impact on the quality of university level education.

Software agents’ ability to interact within different open systems, designed by different groups, presupposes an agreement on an unambiguous definition of a set of concepts, used to describe the context of the interaction and the communication language the agents can use. Agents’ interactions ought to allow for reliable expectations on the possible evolution of the system; however, in open systems interacting agents may not conform to predefined specifications. A possible solution is to define interaction environments including a normative component, with suitable rules to regulate the behaviour of agents. To tackle this problem we propose an application-independent metamodel of artificial institutions that can be used to define open multiagent systems. In our view an artificial institution is made up by an ontology that models the social context of the interaction, a set of authorizations to act on the institutional context, a set of linguistic conventions for the performance of institutional actions and a system of norms that are necessary to constrain the agents’ actions.

Norms are dynamic entities that exist in open multi-agent systems to control agents' behavior. For norms to be effective in a domain, agents must first detect the norms' existence. Recent works in this area have proposed mechanisms to endow agents with a norm detection capability. However, existing works in norms detection entail agents to consider only one norm in a particular event. In reality, one event may have more than one set of norms existing in a domain. In a more recent study, a norm detection mechanism reports that more than one norm can co-exist in a society. Thus, we argue that the existing approaches do not help agents to decide which norms to adopt in cases of multiple norms. To solve this problem, we propose the concept of norms trust to help agents to decide which detected norms are trustable from a set of norms that exist in an environment. The proposed trust-based norms evaluation consists of two-tier assessment; a credible agent evaluation that involves the task of evaluating the neighboring agents' trust and a norms trust evaluation which is the aggregation of norm adoption ratio, norm adoption risk, and norms salience. The evaluation framework is then reinforced with a working scenario to illustrate the process.

The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) enables cross-organisational collaboration for various industrial applications. However, evaluating trust models within such environments remains challenging due to context-dependent dynamics in SIoT environments. Existing evaluation platforms often rely on overly domain-specific or generic datasets, overlooking the inherent uncertainty and dynamicity of real-world SIoT settings. Additionally, there is a lack of practical platforms to assess the feasibility and effectiveness of trust models across diverse scenarios. In this study, we present the Realistic Trust Model Evaluation Platform for the Social Internet of Things (REACT-SIoT) to rigorously assess trust models in SIoT environments, thereby facilitating trustworthy collaboration for sustainable IoT transformations. REACT-SIoT addresses 21 identified requirements essential for simulating a realistic SIoT environment, including categories of heterogeneity, dynamicity, incompleteness, uncertainty, interdependency, and authentic real-world dynamics. We developed a configurable evaluation procedure that mitigates dataset bias and supports the assessment of both existing and newly developed trust models under various scenario-dependent settings. A real-world example demonstrates the platform’s capability to satisfy these requirements effectively. Our analysis reveals that REACT-SIoT meets all defined requirements and outperforms existing evaluation environments based on accuracy, trust convergence, and robustness criteria. The platform has been successfully applied to existing trust models, showcasing its applicability and enabling comparative assessments that were previously constrained by disparate evaluation settings and datasets. In conclusion, REACT-SIoT offers a highly- adaptable evaluation framework that ensures unbiased and comprehensive trust model assessments in SIoT environments. This platform bridges a critical gap in trust evaluation research, enabling the comparison and validation of trust models across diverse, realistic scenarios, thereby supporting the development of more resilient and trustworthy collaborative SIoT systems. • Definition of a realistic Social Internet of Things (SIoT) environment for trust evaluation. • Proposed a trust model evaluation platform that implements a realistic SIoT environment. • Proposed a Canberra Transportation Case Study as a concrete instance to evaluation trust models. • Comprehensive evaluation of trust models in the context of the Canberra Transportation Case Study.

FEATURES: A2/AD Myths: Chinese & Russian – "Anti-Access Strategies in the Pacific: The United States and China" by Sam J. Tangredi. "Russia's A2/AD Capabilities: Real and Imagined" by Keir Giles and Mathieu Boulegue. Enhancing Security & Stability – "Human Security in the Arctic: Implications for the United States Army" by C. Anthony Pfaff. "Projecting Stability: A Deployable NATO Police Command" by Massimo Pani and Karen J. Finkenbinder. On Strategic Foundations – "Analogical Thinking: The Sine Qua Non for Using History Well" by Richard A Lacquement, Jr. "Reconsidering Sun Tzu" by John F. Sullivan. Commentary and Reply. Book Reviews

Lost in Translation? Bill 21, Human Rights and The Margin of Appreciation