Decision-Making in the Context of Commitments to Team Activity

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project aims to provide the scientific basis for more complete theories of collaboration and to develop mechanisms for constructing collaboration-capable software agents. It is an inter-institutional collaborative research project of Harvard University and the University of Maryland. The research focuses on problems of constructing agents able to manage their plans and intentions in multi-agent contexts and to make decisions in the context of team activities.The proposed research comprises three activities: empirical investigations of different policies governing commitment to group activities and their influence on individual and group behavior and outcomes; development of a formal theory that may be used to address abstractly questions of intention reconciliation and to identify stable strategies and effective policies for it; and construction of more sophisticated collaboration-capable software agents. Four strands of previous research support this effort: specification of a formal model of collaboration, construction of prototype collaboration-capable systems, specification of models of negotiation, and development of a simulation framework for empirically investigating decision-making in the context of group activities.The project contributes to fundamental research in collaboration, to the development of collaboration-capable software agents and collaborative human-computer interface systems, and to the training of undergraduate and graduate students.