CAREER: Modeling Group Dynamics in Multi-agent Systems

预测一个人在众多人群中的行为，比如多人在线游戏中的玩家或城市场景中的行人，是一项艰巨的挑战。这是因为代理的行为受到环境中其他人的强烈影响，即使他们没有正式的共同目标或计划。先前关于多智能体行为识别的大部分工作要么忽略了智能体社会背景的影响，要么集中在紧密耦合的智能体团队上。相比之下，该奖项支持的研究通过创建群体身份的计算模型，为智能体的行动选择提供信息，在大型、松散耦合群体中的人类活动识别和合成方面取得了根本性进展。目前正在评估模型的问题，如识别视频片段中的群体成员，分析多人在线游戏中的玩家策略，以及其他社交模拟。这项研究的目的是在更好地理解群体动力学和人类心理过程方面取得重大进展。该奖项的教育倡议是向学生介绍令人兴奋的社会互动代理系统领域，使用基于代理的模拟来传播有关群体偏见和刻板印象的信息（提高对这些问题的认识已被证明可以减少偏见对决策的影响），继续开发多代理系统的课程，创建多代理社会互动的公共数据集，扩大面向计算机科学领域女性的拓展/指导项目。该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。

Predicting the behavior of an individual amidst a large number of other people, such as a player in a multiplayer online game or a pedestrian in an urban scene, poses a difficult challenge. This is because an agent's actions are strongly influenced by others in its environment, even though they do not formally share goals or plans. The majority of prior work on multi-agent behavior recognition has either ignored the influence of an agent's social context or has focused on tightly-coupled agent teams. In contrast, the research supported under this award is making fundamental progress in activity recognition and synthesis for humans in large, loosely-coupled groups by creating computational models of group identity that inform agent action selection. Models are being evaluated on problems such as recognizing group membership in video footage, analyzing player strategies in multiplayer online games, and other social simulations. This research aims to make strong progress towards a better understanding of group dynamics and processes in human psychology. Educational initiatives of this award are introducing students to the exciting area of socially-interactive agent systems, using agent-based simulations to disseminate information about group bias and stereotypes (raising awareness of these issues has been proven to reduce the impact of bias on decision-making), continued curriculum development on multi-agent systems, the creation of public datasets of multi-agent social interactions, and the expansion of outreach/mentoring programs for women in computer science.This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).