HUMAN-AGENT COLLECTIVES: FROM FOUNDATIONS TO APPLICATIONS [ORCHID]

据报道，全球有50亿移动用户，通信技术的使用达到了前所未有的水平，并从根本上改变了我们体验计算系统的方式。一旦通过台式机交付给上班族，计算已经成为全球日常生活中交织在一起的特征，以一种深刻影响我们所有人的方式。我们现在使用移动设备互联；我们经常通过全球云基础设施调用远程服务，并在日常生活中越来越依赖计算设备。计算设备监控我们的健康，娱乐我们，引导我们，确保我们的安全。然而，这些设备和在线服务的爆炸性增长只是无处不在时代的先兆，在这个时代，我们每个人都将例行公事地依赖过多的智能和主动计算机，这些计算机可以在家里和工作中访问，嵌入到我们周围的世界中。随着计算日益渗透到我们周围的世界，它将深刻地改变我们使用计算机的方式。我们将越来越多地与高度互联的计算组件(又名代理)合作，而不是向被动机器发出指令，这些组件能够自主和智能地行动。具体地说，人类和软件代理将持续且灵活地彼此建立一系列协作关系，形成人类-代理集体(HAC)以满足他们的个人和集体目标。这种人和计算代理在全球范围内运作的愿景提供了巨大的潜力，如果实现正确，将帮助我们应对对我们的未来至关重要的可持续发展、包容和安全等关键社会挑战。然而，随着我们转向越来越依赖交织人类和计算努力的系统，这些好处也反映在潜在的同样令人担忧的陷阱中。随着基于人-主体集体的系统在规模、复杂性和时间范围上的增长，我们将越来越需要一门原则性的科学，使我们能够推理这些系统的计算和人类方面，如果我们要避免不安全、不可靠和缺乏适当保障以确保社会接受的发展。提供这项科学是本计划的核心研究目标。更详细地说，它寻求建立理解、建立和应用HAC所需的新科学，HAC以前所未有的程度共生地交叉连接人类和计算机系统。为此，它汇集了来自南安普顿大学、牛津大学和诺丁汉大学的三个世界领先的学术小组(在人工智能、基于代理的计算、机器学习、分散式信息系统、参与式系统和无所不在的计算领域具有多学科专业知识)与工业合作者(最初是BAE系统公司、PRI有限公司和澳大利亚现场机器人中心)共同建立这些系统的基础科学基础，并将这些理解转化为未来能源网络和灾难应对等关键领域的现实应用。

With a reported 5 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, access to communication technologies has reached unprecedented levels and has fundamentally altered the ways in which we experience computational systems. Once delivered through a desktop machine to an office worker, computing has become an interwoven feature of everyday life across the globe in a way that profoundly affects us all. We are now interconnected using mobile devices; we routinely invoke remote services through a global cloud infrastructure and increasingly rely on computational devices in our everyday life. Computational devices monitor our health, entertain us, guide us and keep us safe and secure. However, this explosive growth in these devices and on-line services is only a precursor to an era of ubiquity, where each of us will routinely rely upon a plethora of smart and proactive computers that we carry with us, access at home and at work, and that are embedded into the world around us. As computation increasingly pervades the world around us, it will profoundly change the ways in which we work with computers. Rather than issuing instructions to passive machines, we will increasingly work in partnership with highly inter-connected computational components (aka agents) that are able to act autonomously and intelligently. Specifically, humans and software agents will continually and flexibly establish a range of collaborative relationships with one another, forming human-agent collectives (HACs) to meet their individual and collective goals. This vision of people and computational agents operating at a global scale offers tremendous potential and, if realised correctly, will help us meet the key societal challenges of sustainability, inclusion, and safety that are core to our future. However, these benefits are mirrored by the potential of equally concerning pitfalls as we shift to becoming increasingly dependent on systems that interweave human and computational endeavour.As systems based on human-agent collectives grow in scale, complexity and temporal extent, we will increasingly require a principled science that allows us to reason about the computational and human aspects of these systems if we are to avoid developments that are unsafe, unreliable and lack the appropriate safeguards to ensure societal acceptance.Delivering this science is the core research objective of this Programme. In more detail, it seeks to establish the new science that is needed to understand, build and apply HACs that symbiotically interleave human and computer systems to an unprecedented degree. To this end, it brings together three world-leading academic groups from the Universities of Southampton, Oxford and Nottingham (with multi-disciplinary expertise in the areas of artificial intelligence, agent-based computing, machine learning, decentralised information systems, participatory systems, and ubiquitous computing) with industrial collaborators (initially BAE Systems, PRI Ltd and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics) to collectively establish the foundational scientific underpinnings of these systems and drive these understandings to real-world applications in the critical domains of future energy networks, and disaster response.