Michael Luck (photo by Russel Sach) King's College London Keynote title : Toward Electronic Order |
Abstract
In this talk I will argue against the notion of social coordination as metaphor in computational systems, and suggest instead that computational systems offer new insights into, techniques for, and realisations of both existing instantiations of social coordination and complex novel approaches to social coordination that extend the reach of the concept and our understanding of it. While some such computational techniques may be inspired and informed by social coordination in natural systems, in many cases the techniques are more sophisticated and complex than can easily be accommodated in natural systems. I will illustrate the argument with reference to the use of norms and contracts in different systems and suggest how techniques for social coordination may be applied to real-world scenarios (such as P2P and eBusiness systems).
Short Bio
Michael Luck is Professor of Computer Science and Head of the School of Natural and Mathematical Sciences at King's College London. He was Deputy Head of NMS in 2013, and Head of the Department of Informatics from 2011 to 2013, where he also works in the Agents and Intelligent Systems group, undertaking research into agent technologies and intelligent systems. He is Scientific Advisor to the Board for Aerogility.
His work has sought to take a principled approach to the development of practical agent systems, and spans: formal models for intelligent agents and multi-agent systems; formalisation of existing practical agent systems and theories; information-based agent applications in domains such as genome analysis; norms and institutions; trust and reputation; agent infrastructure; declarative programming of agent systems; agent-oriented software engineering; application to Grid computing; and industrial deployment and technology forecasting. He led work at King's on the IST CONTRACT project, concerned with distributed electronic business systems on the basis of dynamically generated, cross-organisational contracts, on a BAe Systems Defence Technology Centre project on norm and organisaton based practical reasoning, and on an EPSRC Bridging the Gaps project in Interdisciplinary Informatics.
He is a director of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (IFAAMAS), co-founder of the European Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS) workshop series (and served as its Steering Committee's first Chair), and a Steering Committee member for the Central and Eastern European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (CEEMAS). Professor Luck was a member of the Executive Committee of AgentLink III, the European Network of Excellence for Agent-Based Computing, having previously been the Director of AgentLink II. He is an editorial board member ofAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, the International Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, Web Intelligence and Agent Systems, and ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, as well as for the SpringerBriefs in Intelligent Systems series, having previously been series editor for Artech House's Agent Oriented Systems book series. He was also general co-chair of the Ninth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010), held in Toronto, Canada in May 2010.