Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu

• PhD
• Professor at University of Otago

Access to clean, affordable, and reliable energy services is a key requirement for global sustainability. The United Nations reports that 91% of the world’s population had access to electricity in 2021, up from 87% in 2015 ( https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal7#progress_and_info ). However, grid connection does not guarantee energy well-being, which Ne...

We propose a framework that integrates norm entrepreneurship from human society into the dynamics of an agent society. Most work in agent coordination in a distributed environment studies norms that are provided to agents as part of their specification or distributed from centralised agents. Exploring an alternate perspective, we focus on peer-to-p...

One of the principal focuses of normative multi-agent systems in a distributed environment is coordination among agents. Most work in this area has studied norms that are provided to agents as part of their specification or distributed from centralized agents. Diverging from this line of thought, we focus on peer-to-peer interaction by providing th...

Big data are key building blocks for creating information value. However, information systems are increasingly plagued with useless, waste, data that can impede their effective use and threaten sustainability objectives. Using a constructive design science approach, this work first, defines digital data waste. Then, it develops an ensemble artifact...

Cross-community learning incorporates data from different sources to leverage task-specific solutions in a target community. This approach is particularly interesting for low-resource or newly created online communities, where data formalizing interactions between agents (community members) are limited. In such scenarios, a normative system that in...

Social inclusion is a fundamental feature of thriving societies. This paper first investigates barriers for social inclusion in online Software Engineering (SE) communities, by identifying a set of 11 attributes and organising them as a taxonomy. Second, by applying the taxonomy and analysing language used in the comments posted by members in 189 G...

Social inclusion is a fundamental feature of thriving societies. This paper first investigates barriers for social inclusion in online Software Engineering (SE) communities, by identifying a set of 11 attributes and organising them as a taxonomy. Second, by applying the taxonomy and analysing language used in the comments posted by members in 189 G...

Group decision‐making (GDM) processes shape the evolution of open source software (OSS) products, thus playing an important role in the governance of open source software communities. While these GDM processes have attracted the attention of researchers, the rationale behind decisions, that is, how decisions are made that enhance the OSS, have not...

Good governance practices are pivotal to the success of Open Source Software (OSS) projects. However, the decision‐making processes that are made available to stakeholders are at times incomplete and may remain buried and hidden in large amounts of software repository data. This work bridges this gap by unearthing enacted decision‐making processes...

Social acceptance is essential to effective sustainable energy policy implementation. Social media offer new platforms to support policy work and, by allowing emotional expressions, help to create an emotion discourse. Emotions and the discourse around them impact social acceptance by influencing organizational legitimacy, supporting and disrupting...

App reviews often reflect end-users’ requests, issues or suggestions for supporting app maintenance and evolution. Hence, researchers have evaluated several classification approaches for identifying and classifying such app reviews. However, these classification approaches are driven by manually derived taxonomies. This is a limitation given the bu...

Information technology and software services are pervasive, occupying the centre of most aspects of contemporary societies. This has given rise to commonly expected norms and expectations around how such systems should work, appropriate penalties for violating these expectations, and more importantly, indicators of how to reduce the consequences of...

Context : App developers spend exhaustive manual efforts towards the identification and prioritization of informative end-user reviews. Informative reviews are those that express end-users’ requests for new features, bug fixes and possible enhancements. Problem Statement: While prior studies have proposed approaches to convert app reviews into acti...

Research on Bitcoin blockchain suggests that the inner-working of Bitcoin is not decentralized. Building on such findings from previous research, this paper identifies 'Bitcoin influencers' who are central to the operation of Bitcoin. These influencers are identified by performing social network analysis on the mailing list conversation during the...

Content marketing has become a mainstream channel for brands to engage the market with value propositions. Through content, brands control, instigate and co-create value with its target audience. However, the nature of value propositions embedded within the cycle of content co-creation and their impact on eWOM outcomes has received scant attention...

Software Engineering (SE) communities such as Stack Overflow have become unwelcoming, particularly through members' use of offensive language. Research has shown that offensive language drives users away from active engagement within these platforms. This work aims to explore this issue more broadly by investigating the nature of offensive language...

Governance has been highlighted as a key factor in the success of an Open Source Software (OSS) project. It is generally seen that in a mixed meritocracy and autocracy governance model, the decision-making (DM) responsibility regarding what features are included in the OSS is shared among members from select roles; prominently the project leader. H...

This paper presents a conceptual refinement of agent cognitive architecture inspired from the beliefs-desires-intentions (BDI) and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) models, with an emphasis on different belief facets. This enables us to investigate the impact of personality and the way that an agent weights its internal beliefs and social sanct...

Norms are general expectations of behavior in societies. Huge amount of computer-mediated interaction data available in the social media domain provides an opportunity to extract and study communication norms, both to understand their prevalence and to make informed decisions about adopting them. While interactions in social media platforms such as...

Norms are behavioral expectations in communities. Online communities are also expected to abide by the established practices that are expressed in the code of conduct of a system. Even though community authorities continuously prompt their users to follow the regulations, it is observed that hate speech and abusive language usage are on the rise. I...

Text mining approaches are being used increasingly for business analytics. In particular, such approaches are now central to understanding users' feedback regarding systems delivered via online application distribution platforms such as Google Play. In such settings, large volumes of reviews of potentially numerous apps and systems means that it is...

It is known that user involvement and user-centered design enhance system acceptance, particularly when end-users' views are considered early in the process. However, the increasingly common method of system deployment, through frequent releases via an online application distribution platform, relies more on post-release feedback from a virtual com...

A sound Decision-Making (DM) process is key to the successful governance of software projects. In many Open Source Software Development (OSSD) communities, DM processes lie buried amongst vast amounts of publicly available data. Hidden within this data lie the rationale for decisions that led to the evolution and maintenance of software products. W...

This paper investigates the impact of changes in agents’ beliefs coupled with dynamics in agents’ meta-roles on the evolution of institutions. The study embeds agents’ meta-roles in the BDI architecture. In this context, the study scrutinises the impact of cognitive dissonance in agents due to unfairness of institutions. To showcase our model, two...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, MABS 2020, held in Auckland, New Zealand, in May 2020 collocated with 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2020). Due to COVID-19 the workshop has been held online...

Social norms constrain behavior of individuals either through obligating or prohibiting certain types of behavior. Norm-based mechanisms have only recently found applications in enhancing decisions of knowledge workers in an automated business process management context. The norms inferred in the context of business process executions are then reco...

Powered by the Internet, the online review market has grown exponentially, providing a trove of information to customers and business. However, cracks have started to appear around the economic, social and environmental sustainability of online reviews and surrounding processes. The root of these concerns lies in the number of reviews having no inf...

Platforms such as Stack Overflow are available for software practitioners to solicit solutions to their challenges and knowledge needs. The practices therein have in recent times however triggered quality related concerns. This is a noteworthy issue when considering that the Stack Overflow platform is used by numerous software developers. Academic...

Requirements prioritisation deals with the ranking or classification of user requirements based on their importance. This process is central to releasing a software product with features most favoured by users. While studies have explored the efforts that are dedicated to this cause, these tend to focus on a subset of the solutions that are availab...

App reviews often reflect end-users’ requests, issues or suggestions for supporting app maintenance and evolution. Hence, researchers have evaluated several classification approaches for identifying and classifying such app reviews. However, these classification approaches are driven by manually derived taxonomies. This is a limitation given the bu...

User generated app reviews provide valuable information to multiple stakeholders, however, the exploding number of reviews creates practical business and environmental problems. We propose a new approach for making reviews more environmentally sustainable-reducing waste at source. Many app reviews are 'trash', containing little or no potential info...

This paper investigates the impact of changes in agents' beliefs coupled with dynamics in agents' meta-roles on the evolution of institutions. The study embeds agents' meta-roles in the BDI architecture. In this context, the study scrutinises the impact of cognitive dissonance in agents due to unfairness of institutions. To showcase our model, two...

Community Question and Answer (CQA) platforms use the power of online groups to solve problems, or gain information. While these websites host useful information, it is critical that the details provided on these platforms are of high quality, and that users can trust the information. This is particularly necessary for software development, given t...

This paper presents a conceptual refinement of agent cognitive architecture inspired from the beliefs-desires-intentions (BDI) and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) models, with an emphasis on different belief facets. This enables us to investigate the impact of personality and the way that an agent weights its internal beliefs and social sanct...

Norms are behavioral expectations in communities. Online communities are also expected to abide by the rules and regulations that are expressed in the code of conduct of a system. Even though community authorities continuously prompt their users to follow the regulations, it is observed that hate speech and abusive language usage are on the rise. I...

Open source software (OSS) communities are often able to produce high quality software comparable to proprietary software. The success of an open source software development (OSSD) community is often attributed to the underlying governance model, and a key component of these models is the decisionmaking (DM) process. While there have been studies o...

This research aims to design and develop a new requirements prioritization approach for analyzing and prioritizing stakeholders requirements which are mentioned in the feedback for software products. This paper presents a PhD research agenda and preliminary outcomes from the early analysis. A roadmap to the proposed research methodology that is to...

Enterprises are always on the lookout for tools that analyze end-users perspectives on their products. In particular, app reviews have been assessed as useful for guiding improvement efforts and software evolution, however, developers find reading app reviews to be a labor intensive exercise. If such a barrier is eliminated, however, evidence shows...

In this paper, we study the English East India Company (EIC) and Armenian traders of New-Julfa (Julfa) that were active during 17th and 18th centuries. Both were successful trading cooperatives that relied on different institutional parameters and mechanisms to coordinate their activities. In this work, we explore a selection of those aspects (five...

Presentation Slides used in ECIS2019

Social Media facilitates a two-way channel between brands and customers, whereby value co-creation is enabled through customer engagement (CE) with brand value propositions. Brands proposition their values to their customers and this Marketer-Generated-Content (MGC) is propagated through social-media. The corresponding CE enables the creation of Us...

App reviews are important as they contain valuable information for improving the quality of such software systems. To this end, most users providing app reviews expect a response; to the extent that prior research has shown that when developers respond to app reviews these responses improve app ratings and users' satisfaction. However, unfortunatel...

Context: Contributors to Open Source Software (OSS) development projects use social media to discuss personal and work-related issues. While there has been some interest in studying social media posts of developers, the investigation of the use of this medium by core contributors has not received much attention. Such an investigation could be usefu...

This research aims to design and develop a new requirements prioritization approach for analyzing and prioritizing stakeholders' requirements which are mentioned in the feedback for software products. This paper presents a PhD research agenda and preliminary outcomes from early analysis. A roadmap to the proposed research methodology that is to be...

In recent years the notion of electrical energy micro-grids, in which communities share their locally-generated power, has gained increasing interest. Typically, the energy generated comes from renewable resources, which means that its availability is variable–sometimes there may be energy surpluses and at other times energy deficits. This energy v...

In many open source software development communities, a significant proportion of development is undertaken by a relatively small number of individuals, the "core members". The stability and longevity of this group of most active developers are crucial for the success of the project. While there has been prior work on identifying key individuals in...

The concept of electric energy micro-grids, in which communities share their locally-generated power, is receiving greater attention day by day. Intrinsic to this idea of energy micro-grids is that the energy is generated and consumed locally from intermittent renewable energy sources. Because of the variability of renewable resources, though, some...

Requirements engineering is assessed as the most important phase of the software development process. This process is especially challenging for app developers, who tend to gather crowd-based feedback after releasing their apps. This feedback is often voluminous, posing prioritization challenges for developers identifying features to fix or add. Wh...

Context: Open Source Software (OSS) developers use mailing lists as their main forum for discussing the evolution of a project. However, the use of mailing lists by developers for decision-making has not received much research attention. Objective: We have explored this issue by studying developers' email discussions around Python Enhancement Propo...

Platforms such as Stack Overflow are available for software practitioners to solicit help and solutions to their challenges and knowledge needs. This community's practices have in recent times however caused quality-related concerns. Academic work tends to provide validation for the practice and processes of these forums, however, previous work did...

Social norms constrain behavior of individuals either through obligating or prohibiting certain types of behavior. Norm-based mechanisms have only recently found applications in enhancing decisions of knowledge workers in an automated business process management context. The norms inferred in the context of business process executions are then reco...

Objective: There is little research that characterises knee pain related information disseminated via social media. However, variances in the content and quality of such sources could compromise optimal patient care. This study explored the nature of the comments on YouTube videos related to non-specific knee pain, to determine their helpfulness t...

Norms are general expectations of behaviour in societies. Huge amount of computer-mediated interaction data available in the social media domain provides an opportunity to extract and study communication norms. While interactions in social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been studied, only recently researchers have started examini...

User-reviews of mobile applications provide information that benefits other users and developers. Even though reviews contain feedback about an app's performance and problematic features, users and app developers need to spend considerable effort reading and analyzing the feedback provided. In this work, we introduce and evaluate QuickReview, an in...

To understand the operation of the informal social sphere in human or artificial societies, we need to be able to identify their existing behavioural conventions (institutions). This includes the contextualisation of seemingly objective facts with subjective assessments, especially when attempting to capture their meaning in the context of the anal...

Brand owners have increasingly adopted social media for propositioning the values of products and services. This work scrutinizes the nature of 'values' embedded in the tweets as propositioned by brand owners. We extract and analyse the tweets (658 of them) posted by the owners of the top-10 coffee chains in a period of three months (August to Octo...

With information technology mediating most aspects of contemporary societies, it is important to explore how human-oriented concepts may be leveraged to explore human actions in this new dispensation. One such concept is expectation violations. Expectations govern nearly all aspect of human interactions. However, while this phenomenon has been stud...

Decision-making processes in proprietary software development are often well-captured. In contrast, stakeholders participating in open source software development (OSSD) projects often do not understand the decision-making processes at work, as these are either captured poorly or remain hidden. Using Python as the case study of an OSS project where...

Successful software development often depends on the ability of specifically skilled individuals to cooperate effectively in order to achieve the project goals. This cooperative ability goes beyond the individual technical skills of the team participants and concerns how easy it is for people to work together as a team. The primary goal of this pap...

App reviews contain valuable feedback about what features should be fixed and improved. This feedback could be 'mined' to facilitate app maintenance and evolution. While requirements are routinely extracted from post-release users' feedback in traditional projects, app reviews are often generated by a much larger client-base with competing needs an...

The process by which norms are developed to become policies, the normative decision-making process, is not often explicit to stakeholders of Open Source Software (OSS) projects. Understanding the normative decision-making process is crucial for members if such projects are to evolve and succeed. In this paper, we investigated aspects of the normati...

Open Source Software Development (OSSD) often suffers from conflicting views and actions due to the perceived flat and open ecology of an open source community. This often manifests itself as a lack of codified knowledge that is easily accessible for community members. How decisions are made and expectations of a software system are often described...

Text mining approaches are being used increasingly for business analytics. In particular, such approaches are now central to understanding users' feedback regarding systems delivered via online application distribution platforms such as Google Play. In such settings, large volumes of reviews of potentially numerous apps and systems means that it is...

When entering a system, an agent should be aware of the obligations and prohibitions (collectively norms) that affect it. Existing solutions to this norm identification problem make use of observations of either norm compliant, or norm violating, behaviour. Thus, they assume an extreme situation where norms are typically violated, or complied with....

Agent-based Modelling appears as a promising analytical tool when it comes to a lasting question: in how far did different institutions affect the social and economic outcomes of societies? Taking an incremental step to address this question, we present a refined approach that combines existing institution representations (the structure) with a nor...

The energy micro-grid, which is a local energy network that generates and consumes its own electricity, has become an effective method for the rural electrification. Typically a micro-grid is also connected to the nearby external utility grid to sell and buy power. Any failures of the utility grid usually have negative implications on the micro-gri...

In recent years the notion of electrical energy micro-grids, in which communities share their locally-generated power, has gained increasing interest. Typically the energy generated comes from renewable resources, which means that its availability is variable-sometimes there may be energy surpluses and at other times energy deficits. This energy va...

Optimizing the performance of teams in modern organizations is an important managerial function, and particularly so in contexts where new teams must continually be formed voluntarily, such as with software development, crowd-sourcing platforms, and even the formation of scientific collaborative teams. In many such cases, team performance is signif...

The success or failure of software development group work depends on the group members' personalities, as well as their skills in performing various tasks associated with the project. Moreover, in the reality, tasks have a dynamic nature and their requirements change over time. Therefore, the effect of task dynamics on the teamwork must be taken in...

It is known that user involvement and user-centered design enhance system acceptance, particularly when end-users' views are considered early in the process. However, the increasingly common method of system deployment, through frequent releases via an online application distribution platform, relies more on post-release feedback from a virtual com...

The diminishing availability of fossil fuels will necessitate a shift toward renewable energy resources to supply vital electrical energy needs in the future. Two abundant renewable energy sources, solar and wind, are increasingly cost-competitive and also offer the potential of decentralized, and hence more robust, sourcing. However, the intermitt...

The society has irrevocably changed. Just walking around a city makes this apparent. Single or in a group, people are accompanied by at least one electronic device which is able to communicate. The communication on the fly is intense and the communication industry is a multi-billion dollar marketplace ranging from tele communication infrastructure,...

When entering a system, an agent should be aware of the obligations and prohibitions (collectively norms) that will affect it. Several solutions to this norm identification problem have been proposed, which make use of observations of either other’s norm compliant, or norm violating, behaviour. These solutions fail in situations where norms are typ...

When entering a system, an agent should be aware of the obligations and prohibitions (collectively norms) that will affect it. Existing solutions to this norm identification problem make use of observations of either other's norm compliant, or norm violating, behaviour. However, they assume an extreme situation where norms are typically violated ,...

While collaborative learning has long been believed to hold a great value for organizations and classrooms, Modeling this learning in small, short-term project teams is a challenge. This paper describes the development of an agent-based modeling approach that can assist in understanding the collaborative learning of such project teams. A key aspect...

Huge amounts of news items are being published from various sources around the world. Our interest in this paper is from the perspective of peace keeping organizations such as United Nations and Red Cross that can benefit from information aggregated from different sources to make important decisions. GDELT project is one such source where data abou...

Most work on convention propagation have focused on single-layer networks. This work a) highlights the need for studying convention propagation in multi-layer networks, b) presents results comparing the speed of convention propagation in single-layer vs. multi-layer networks and c) demonstrates the role of influencer agents in convention propagatio...

Although most electric power is presently generated using fossil fuels, two abundant renewable and clean energy sources, solar and wind, are increasingly cost-competitive and offer the potential of decentralized (and hence more robust) sourcing. However, the intermittent nature of solar and wind power presents difficulties in connection with integr...