Frank Dignum

Frank Dignum
Utrecht University | UU · Department of Information and Computing Sciences

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523
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Publications

Publications (523)
Article
Full-text available
Theory of mind refers to the human ability to reason about the mental content of other people, such as their beliefs, desires, and goals. People use their theory of mind to understand, reason about, and explain the behaviour of others. Having a theory of mind is especially useful when people collaborate, since individuals can then reason on what th...
Book
Full-text available
This volume presents the proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence (HHAI 2024), held in Malmö, Sweden, from 10–14 June 2024. The focus of HHAI 2024 was on artificially-intelligent systems The following list of topics is illustrative, not exhaustive: ● Human-AI interaction and collaboration ● Adaptive hu...
Preprint
Full-text available
Human-AI coevolution, defined as a process in which humans and AI algorithms continuously influence each other, increasingly characterises our society, but is understudied in artificial intelligence and complexity science literature. Recommender systems and assistants play a prominent role in human-AI coevolution, as they permeate many facets of da...
Chapter
Norms are a crucial part of human behavior that received a lot of attention within the social simulation community. However, some aspects—up until now—have not been addressed in existing agent architectures, such as their motivational aspects and their importance and impact in planning and action selection. In this paper we present an agent archite...
Chapter
We want to understand in which circumstances identity fusion occurs. We propose a model in which individual needs and interactions between agents and their social environment come together. We argue the personal identity of an agent will fuse with a group when it has a high need for significance and he is member of a group providing a means to gain...
Preprint
Full-text available
The rise of large-scale socio-technical systems in which humans interact with artificial intelligence (AI) systems (including assistants and recommenders, in short AIs) multiplies the opportunity for the emergence of collective phenomena and tipping points, with unexpected, possibly unintended, consequences. For example, navigation systems' suggest...
Chapter
In agent-based social simulations (ABSS), an artificial population of intelligent agents that imitate human behavior is used to investigate complex phenomena within social systems. This is particularly useful for decision makers, where ABSS can provide a sandpit for investigating the effects of policies prior to their implementation. During the Cov...
Preprint
Full-text available
As the impact of AI on various scientific fields is increasing, it is crucial to embrace interdisciplinary knowledge to understand the impact of technology on society. The goal is to foster a research environment beyond disciplines that values diversity and creates, critiques and develops new conceptual and theoretical frameworks. Even though resea...
Chapter
Norms influence behaviour in many ways. In situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic where the effect of policies on the spread of the virus is evaluated, this leads to disputes about their effectiveness. In order to build agent-based social simulations that give proper support for this evaluation process we need agents that properly deal with norms...
Article
Full-text available
The general feeling is that no predictions can be made based on agent-based social simulations. The outcomes of social simulations are based on the behaviors of individuals and their interactions. Behavioral models are always incomplete and often, also incorrect with respect to real behavior and thus the outcomes of agent-based social simulations c...
Conference Paper
An important issue in deploying an autonomous system is how to enable human users and stakeholders to develop an appropriate level of trust in the system. It has been argued that a crucial mechanism to enable appropriate trust is the ability of a system to explain its behaviour. Obviously, such explanations need to be comprehensible to humans. Due...
Preprint
Full-text available
This paper describes the model of social practice as a theoretical framework to manage conversation with the specific goal of training physicians in communicative skills. To this aim, the domain reasoner that manages the conversation in the Communicate! \cite{jeuring} serious game is taken as a basis. Because the choice of a specific Social Practic...
Preprint
Full-text available
Multi-agent models are a suitable starting point to model complex social interactions. However, as the complexity of the systems increase, we argue that novel modeling approaches are needed that can deal with inter-dependencies at different levels of society, where many heterogeneous parties (software agents, robots, humans) are interacting and rea...
Preprint
Within social simulation, we often want agents to interact both with larger systems of norms, as well as respond to their own and other agents norm violations. However, there are currently no norm specifications that allow us to interact with all of these components. To address this issue, this paper introduces the concept of violation modalities i...
Chapter
Full-text available
We propose a context-sensitive deliberation framework where the decision context does not deliver an action straight away, but where rather the decision context and agent characteristics influence the type of deliberation and type of information evaluated which will affect the final decision. The framework is based on the Contextual Action Framewor...
Chapter
For agent-based social simulations to be a powerful tool for policy makers and other decision makers in a given context (e.g. the current COVID-19 pandemic), they need to be socially realistic and thus, appropriately represent complex social concepts, such as social rules. In this paper, we focus on norms. Norms describe ‘normal’ behavior and aim a...
Article
An important issue in deploying an autonomous system is how to enable human users and stakeholders to develop an appropriate level of trust in the system. It has been argued that a crucial mechanism to enable appropriate trust is the ability of a system to explain its behaviour. Obviously, such explanations need to be comprehensible to humans. Due...
Chapter
Simulating human behaviour in times of crisis requires models of human decision that are include aspects beyond directly visible actions. In crisis times the behaviour of people will change based on the changing environment and needs. Without an underlying model that can represent how and when people will change their behaviour it becomes difficult...
Chapter
Creating simulations for a crisis is not new. However, there have been no agent based social simulations that have been used during a crisis. In this chapter we describe the impact one can have with a simulation result, but also the requirements this poses on the simulation process. Basically it requires that one can quickly and flexibly generate m...
Chapter
The general idea of tracking and tracing apps is that they track the contacts of users so that in case a user tests positive for COVID-19, all the other users that she has been in contact with get a warning signal that they have potentially been in contact with the COVID-19 virus. This is, to quarantine potential carriers of the virus even before t...
Chapter
Full-text available
In previous chapters we have described the results and analysis of social simulations for crisis situations based on the experiences of the ASSOCC framework. Whereas we managed to build an implementation in a very short time, based on many years of fundamental research, such an implementation is inherently limited due to the many tasks and challeng...
Chapter
In the previous chapters we have described our experiences in simulating for the COVID-19 crisis. We also described how we envision that we can get to a simulation platform that will be more supportive for simulating a next crisis. In this chapter we will recapture a number of the challenges that need to be faced in order to make social simulations...
Chapter
When creating (open) agent systems it has become common practice to use social concepts such as social practices, norms and conventions to model the way the interactions between the agents are regulated. However, in the literature most papers concentrate on only one of these aspects at the time. Therefore there is hardly any research on how these s...
Chapter
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...
Chapter
Jensen, MaartenDignum, FrankCocaine trafficking is starting to get modeled by supply chain theory. Supply chain theories are described in many economical papers. These theories are however not directly usable in analyzing illegal supply chains. In this paper we investigate the difference between legal and illegal supply chains. Where the difference...
Book
provisional info text: Simulating for a crisis is far more than creating a simulation of a crisis situation. In order for a simulation to be useful during a crisis, it should be created within the space of a few days to allow decision makers to use it as quickly as possible. Furthermore, during a crisis the aim is not to optimize just one factor,...
Chapter
Drawing on an ecological perspective, we contend that research into deception in AI needs to consider not only the cognitive structures of would-be deceptive agents but also the nature of the environments in which they act. To illustrate this approach, we report work-in-progress to design a game called MindTrails, played between a software agent an...
Chapter
Social norms are important as societal agreements of acceptable behavior. They can be seen as flexible, but stable constraints on individual behavior. However, social norms themselves are not completely static. Norms emerge from dynamic environments and changing agent populations. They adapt and in the end also get abrogated. Although norm emergenc...
Chapter
Interactions between agents are usually designed from a global viewpoint. However, the implementation of a multi-agent interaction is distributed. It is well known that this difference between the specification and the implementation levels can introduce problems, allowing designers to specify protocols from a global viewpoint that cannot be implem...
Chapter
When agents interact with humans, either through embodied agents or because they are embedded in a robot, it would be easy if they could use fixed interaction protocols as they do with other agents. However, people do not keep fixed protocols in their day-to-day interactions and the social environment is often dynamic, making it impossible to use f...
Article
Full-text available
During the COVID-19 crisis there have been many difficult decisions governments and other decision makers had to make. E.g. do we go for a total lock down or keep schools open? How many people and which people should be tested? Although there are many good models from e.g. epidemiologists on the spread of the virus under certain conditions, these m...
Preprint
Full-text available
During the COVID-19 crisis there have been many difficult decisions governments and other decision makers had to make. E.g. do we go for a total lock down or keep schools open? How many people and which people should be tested? Although there are many good models from e.g. epidemiologists on the spread of the virus under certain conditions, these m...
Preprint
When creating (open) agent systems it has become common practice to use social concepts such as social practices, norms and conventions to model the way the interactions between the agents are regulated. However, in the literature most papers concentrate on only one of these aspects at the time. Therefore there is hardly any research on how these s...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are being used to predict and assess behaviour in multiple domains which directly affect human well-being. However, if AI is to improve people’s lives, then people must be able to trust it, by being able to understand what the system is doing and why. Although transparency is often seen as the requirement i...
Preprint
Full-text available
Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are being used to predict and assess behaviour in multiple domains, such as criminal justice and consumer finance, which directly affect human well-being. However, if AI is to improve people's lives, then people must be able to trust AI, which means being able to understand what the system is doing and why....
Preprint
When agents interact with humans, either through embodied agents or because they are embedded in a robot, it would be easy if they could use fixed interaction protocols as they do with other agents. However, people do not keep fixed protocols in their day-to-day interactions and the environments are often dynamic, making it impossible to use fixed...
Preprint
Interactions between agents are usually designed from a global viewpoint. However, the implementation of a multi-agent interaction is distributed. This difference can introduce issues. For instance, it is possible to specify protocols from a global viewpoint that cannot be implemented as a collection of individual agents. This leads naturally to th...
Article
Full-text available
In this work, starting from the social practice theory, we identified two kinds of creativity: a situational creativity that takes place when, starting from a defined situation, a social practice is played; and a creativity of habit that concerns the agents' capacity for generating new practices from habit when the situation is not defined or is un...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Social norms are important as societal agreements of acceptable behavior. They can be seen as flexible, but stable constraints on individual behavior. However, social norms themselves are not completely static. Norms emerge from dynamic environments and changing agent populations. They adapt and in the end also get abrogated. Although norm emergenc...
Article
Full-text available
This paper presents a simulation model and derives from it a theory to explain how known cultural influences on individual decisions lead to collective cultural phenomena. This simulation models the evolution of a business organization, replicating key micro-level cultural influences on individual decisions (such as allocating and accepting tasks)...
Preprint
Multi-agent models are a suitable starting point to model complex social interactions. However, as the complexity of the systems increase, we argue that novel modeling approaches are needed that can deal with inter-dependencies at different levels of society, where many heterogeneous parties (software agents, robots, humans) are interacting and rea...
Article
In this work we propose a cognitive architecture, based on the Social Practice (SP) theory, aimed at the modeling of socially adaptive robots, able to interact with people, recognizing and interpreting the specific social context where it is acting. The proposed social robot is able to recognize and interpret social signs during ongoing social prac...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Existing approaches and frameworks for modeling virtual dialogue tend to be designed with dyadic interactions in mind, and are often built to serve solely in task-oriented domains. However, modeling realistic action and turn-taking in more general scenarios remains a challenge. In this paper we propose a generic framework to aid in development of m...
Book
Full-text available
In the area of consumer robots that need to have rich social interactions with humans, one of the challenges is the complexity of computing the appropriate interactions in a cognitive, social and physical context. We propose a novel approach for social robots based on the concept of Social Practices. By using social practices robots are able to be...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Using values as drivers of behavior has already been done in previous research. One of the most well known universal theories of values is Schwartz's theory of abstract values. According to his theory, a universal set of abstract values can be imputed to people. As the values used in his system are very abstract, there is a need to translate the ab...
Preprint
Full-text available
Starting from the social practice theory, we identify the features required for a conversational agent to show a form of "social intelligence ." Accordingly, we analyze some of the most known open source technologies, focusing on their potential to implement a social chatbot.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Research in chatbots is already more than fifty years old, starting with the famous Eliza example. Although current chatbots might perform better, overall, than Eliza the basic principles used have not evolved that much. Recent advances are made through the use of massive learning on huge amounts of resources available through Internet dialogues. H...
Chapter
One of the effects of population ageing is the increase in the proportion of long-term chronic diseases, which require new therapeutical models that mostly take place at the patients’ home rather than inside a health care institution. This requires that patients autonomously follow their prescribed treatment, which can be especially difficult for p...
Conference Paper
Autonomous agents are increasingly required to be able to make moral decisions. In these situations, the agent should be able to reason about the ethical bases of the decision and explain its decision in terms of the moral values involved. This is of special importance when the agent is interacting with a user and should understand the value priori...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this paper, the rationale and requirements are presented for an e-coaching system in the domain of intensive cardiac rehabilitation. It is argued that there is a need for a personalized program with close monitoring of the patient based on medical needs and needed lifestyle changes in a setting with other participants such as family and a human...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
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...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Although there have been many simulations of ecological systems that include social aspects of the persons involved, very little have considered the social aspects of the communities themselves as a separate system. In this paper we will integrate social, economic and ecological models in order to simulate a more realistic fishery community. We nee...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Several serious games have been proposed to practice communication strategies in formal contexts. Intelligent virtual agents (IVA) can be used to show the player the effects of a conversational move. In this paper we discuss the key role of using social context for the virtual agents in these serious games. Social practices are exploited to bundle...
Conference Paper
Cooperative problem solving involves four key phases: (1) finding potential members to form a team, (2) forming the team, (3) formulating a plan for the team, and (4) executing the plan. We extend recent work on multi-agent epistemic planning and apply it to the problem of team formation in a blocksworld scenario. We provide an encoding of the firs...
Conference Paper
This paper describes the model of social practice as a theoretical framework to manage conversation with the specific goal of training physicians in communicative skills. To this aim, the domain reasoner that manages the conversation in the Communicate! [1] serious game is taken as a basis. Because the choice of a specific Social Practice to follow...
Article
Full-text available
Psychologists and cognitive scientists have long drawn insights and evidence from stage magic about human perceptual and attentional errors. We present a complementary analysis of conjuring tricks that seeks to understand the experience of impossibility that they produce. Our account is first motivated by insights about the constructional aspects o...
Chapter
Traditional chatbots lack the capability to correctly manage conversations according to the social context. However a dialogue is a joint activity that must consider both individual and social processes. In this work we propose a model of a social chatbot able to choose the most suitable dialogue plans according to what in sociological literature i...
Article
Full-text available
Making a computational agent 'social' has implications for how it perceives itself and the environment in which it is situated, including the ability to recognise the behaviours of others. We point to recent work on social planning, i.e. planning in settings where the social context is relevant in the assessment of the beliefs and capabilities of o...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Recently, considering social aspects and its consequences on ecology and economy attracts much attention in the fields of natural resource management like fishery management. One important question is that what is the role of social aspects like values on other aspects (e.g. economy and ecology) of such a system. Various social aspects are involved...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Opportunism is a social behavior that achieves own gains at the expense of others. In this study, we propose a formal model of opportunism, which consists of the properties knowledge asymmetry, value opposition and intention, based on situation calculus.
Conference Paper
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In social interactions, it is common for one party to possess more or better knowledge about a specific transaction than others. In this situation, parties who are more knowledgeable might perform oppor-tunistic behavior to others, which is against others' interest thus leading to relationship deterioration. In this study, we propose formal models...
Article
Full-text available
Socially interconnected systems should be able to exhibit, understand, and reason about social behaviour, in order to support lasting interconnections that show realistic and desirable properties. We claim that a fundamental new approach based on social concepts is needed to build agents functioning in these socially interconnected systems. In this...
Conference Paper
Intelligent agents increasingly need to be aware of the social aspects of their context in order to take the appropriate action. However, existing techniques and platforms only provide partial solutions for this problem which do not take into account the full consequences of the social context. In this paper we propose to use ideas from social prac...
Article
Full-text available
An important feature of BDI agent systems is number of different ways in which an agent can achieve its goals. The choice of means to achieve the goal in made by the system at run time, depending on contextual information that is not available in advance. In this article, we explore ways that the user of an agent system can specify preferences whic...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper describes an agent-based model to investigate the origins of gender differences in social status. The agents' basic behaviour is modelled according to Kemper's sociological status-power theory. Differences in the socializing forces of the surrounding society are modelled using Hofstede's dimensions of culture. Particulars of play behavio...
Article
Full-text available
In highly regulated environments, where a set of norms de- nes accepted behaviour, protocols provide a way to reduce complex- ity by giving direct, step by step guidelines for behaviour, as long as the protocols comply with the norms. In this work we propose a formal framework to design a protocol from a normative specication. In order to be able t...
Article
Full-text available
Creating agents that are capable of emulating similar sociocultural dynamics to those found in human interaction remains as one of the hardest challenges of artificial intelligence. This problem becomes particularly important when considering embodied agents that are meant to interact with humans in a believable and empathic manner. In this article...
Chapter
In Sociology, the concept of formal model of culture refers to “an output from a quantitative study of collected data that seeks to describe, explain, interpret, or otherwise represent some feature, aspect, or content of culture. As a model, the output has been transformed into a summary or a representation (in reduced form) of the data that purpor...
Conference Paper
Socially interconnected systems should be able to exhibit, understand, and reason about social behavior, in order to support lasting interconnections that show realistic and desirable properties. We claim that a fundamental new approach based on social concepts is needed to build agents functioning in these socially interconnected systems. In this...
Article
Full-text available
The difficulty of learning to program has long been identified amongst novices. This study explored the benefits of teaching a problem solving strategy by comparing students’ perceptions and attitudes towards problem solving before and after the strategy was implemented in secondary schools. Based on self-efficacy theory, students’ problem solving...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This article proposes a model of culturally influenced decision processes. In particular, cultures influence individual motivation, jointly with human nature and personality. The use of this model is then illustrated by a simulation model of the impact of cultural differences on organizational performance (efficiency, flexibility and member satisfa...