Publications

@inproceedings{soton418869,

title = {The multimodal speech and visual gesture (mSVG) control model for a practical patrol, search, and rescue aerobot},

author = {Opeyemi Abioye Ayodeji and Stephen Prior and Trevor Thomas and Peter Saddington and Sarvapali D. Ramchurn},

url = {https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/418869/},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-07-01},

booktitle = {19th Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS) Conference 2018},

volume = {10965},

pages = {423--437},

publisher = {Springer},

abstract = {This paper describes a model of the multimodal speech and visual gesture (mSVG) control for aerobots operating at higher nCA autonomy levels, within the context of a patrol, search, and rescue application. The developed mSVG control architecture, its mathematical navigation model, and some high level command operation models were discussed. This was successfully tested using both MATLAB simulation and python based ROS Gazebo UAV simulations. Some limitations were identified, which formed the basis for the further works presented.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{soton423060,

title = {Automated negotiation for opportunistic energy trading between neighbouring wireless sensor networks},

author = {Andre P Ortega and Geoff Merrett and Sarvapali Ramchurn},

url = {https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/423060/},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-07-01},

booktitle = {2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids (31/10/18)},

abstract = {As the Internet of Things grows, the number of wireless sensor networks deployed in close proximity will continue to increase. By nature, these networks are limited by the battery supply that determines their lifetime and system utility. To counter such a shortcoming, energy harvesting technologies have become increasingly investigated to provide a perpetual energy source; however, new problems arise as a result of their wide spatio-temporal variation. In this paper, we propose opportunistic energy trading, which enables otherwise independent networks to be sustained by sharing resources. Our goal is to provide a novel cooperation model based on negotiation to solve coordination conflicts between energy harvesting wireless sensor networks. Results show that networks are able to satisfy their loads when they agree to cooperate.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{soton418871,

title = {Quantifying the effects of varying light-visibility and noise-sound levels in practical multimodal speech and visual gesture (mSVG) interaction with aerobots},

author = {Opeyemi Abioye Ayodeji and Stephen Prior and Trevor Thomas and Peter Saddington and Sarvapali Ramchurn},

url = {https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/418871/},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-06-01},

booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Applied System Innovation (IEEE ICASI) 2018},

pages = {842--845},

publisher = {IEEE},

abstract = {This paper discusses the research work conducted to quantify the effective range of lighting levels and ambient noise levels in order to inform the design and development of a multimodal speech and visual gesture (mSVG) control interface for the control of a UAV. Noise level variation from 55 dB to 85 dB is observed under control lab conditions to determine where speech commands for a UAV fails, and to consider why, and possibly suggest a solution around this. Similarly, lighting levels are varied within the control lab condition to determine a range of effective visibility levels. The limitation of this work and some further work from this were also presented.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{soton420541,

title = {Algorithms for fair load shedding in developing countries},

author = {Ifeoluwa Oluwasuji Olabambo and Obaid Malik and Jie Zhang and Sarvapali Ramchurn},

url = {https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/420541/},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)},

pages = {1590-1596},

abstract = {Due to the limited generation capacity of power stations, many developing countries frequently resort to disconnecting large parts of the power grid from supply, a process termed load shedding. During load shedding, many homes are left without electricity, causing them inconvenience and discomfort. In this paper, we present a number of optimization heuristics that focus on pairwise and groupwise fairness, such that households (i.e. agents) are fairly allocated electricity. We evaluate the heuristics against standard fairness metrics in terms of comfort delivered to homes, as well as the number of times they are disconnected from electricity supply. Thus, we establish new benchmarks for fair load shedding schemes.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{soton420127,

title = {Algorithms to manage load shedding events in developing countries},

author = {Ifeoluwa Oluwasuji Olabambo and Obaid Malik and Jie Zhang and Sarvapali Ramchurn},

url = {https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/420127/},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS)},

pages = {2034-2036},

abstract = {Due to the limited generation capacity of power stations, many developing countries frequently resort to disconnecting large parts of the power grid from supply, a process termed load shedding. This leaves homes without electricity, causing them discomfort and inconvenience. Because fairness is not a priority when shedding load, some homes bear the brunt of these effects. In this paper, we present our ongoing research into considering fairness when shedding load at the household level.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{soton417370,

title = {Learning from the veg box: Designing unpredictability in agency delegation},

author = {Manzano Verame Jhim Kiel and Enrico Costanza and Sarvapali Ramchurn and Joel Fischer and Andy Crabtree and Tom Rodden and Nick Jennings},

url = {https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/417370/},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-01-01},

booktitle = {CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},

publisher = {ACM},

abstract = {The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to enable applications that foster a more efficient, sustainable, and healthy way of life. If end-users are to take full advantage of these developments we foresee the need for future IoT systems and services to include an element of autonomy and support the delegation of agency to software processes and connected devices. To inform the design of such future technology, we report on a breaching experiment designed to investigate how people integrate an unpredictable service, through the veg box scheme, in everyday life. Findings from our semistructured interviews and a two-week diary study with 11 households reveal that agency delegation must be warranted, that it must be possible to incorporate delegated decisions into everyday activities, and that delegation is subject to constraint. We further discuss design implications on the need to support people?s diverse values, and their coordinative and creative practices.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/ijcai/VuAR18,

title = {A Decentralised Approach to Intersection Traffic Management},

author = {Huan Vu and Samir Aknine and Sarvapali D Ramchurn},

url = {https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/73},

doi = {10.24963/ijcai.2018/73},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on 

 Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2018, July 13-19, 2018, Stockholm, 

 Sweden.},

pages = {527--533},

crossref = {DBLP:conf/ijcai/2018},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{soton414077b,

title = {Wearable and autonomous computing for future smart cities: open challenges},

author = {Domenico Balsamo and Geoff V. Merrett and Bahareh Zaghari and Yang Wei and Sarvapali Ramchurn and Sebastian Stein and Alexander Weddell and Stephen Beeby},

url = {https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/414077/},

year  = {2017},

date = {2017-09-01},

booktitle = {25th International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks},

abstract = {The promise of smart cities offers the potential to change the way we live, and refers to the integration of IoT systems for people-centred applications, together with the collection and processing of data, and associated decision making. Central to the realization of this are wearable and autonomous computing systems. There are considerable challenges that exist in this space that require research across different areas of electronics and computer science; it is this multidisciplinary consideration that is novel to this paper. We consider these challenges from different perspectives, involving research in devices, infrastructure and software. Specifically, the challenges considered are related to IoT systems and networking, autonomous computing, wearable sensors and electronics, and the coordination of collectives comprising human and software agents.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{soton421970,

title = {Distributed negotiation for collective decision-making},

author = {Ndeye Arame Diago and Samir Aknine and Sarvapali Ramchurn and Onn Shehory and Mbaye Sene},

url = {https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/421970/},

year  = {2017},

date = {2017-06-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings - 2017 International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, ICTAI 2017},

volume = {2017-November},

pages = {913--920},

publisher = {IEEE Computer Society Press},

abstract = {ensuremathCollective decision-making is a process in which participants make a collective choice from several alternatives. In this paper, we focus on collective decision contexts in which more than two selfish agents negotiate over multiple issues. We specifically consider a case of joint household energy purchase where the concerned households have to define a collective energy contract. The households involved may each be interested only in a subset of the issues at stake. We devise an effective protocol to regulate the interactions among the (household) agents and reduce their reasoning complexity. The mechanism we introduce is fully decentralized, it facilitates multi-lateral negotiation, and it reduces the complexity of the solution despite the inherent complexity of the problem.ensuremath},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{seuken:etal:2017,

title = {Save Money or Feel Cozy? A Field Experiment Evaluation of a Smart Thermostat that Learns Heating Preferences},

author = {Mike Shann, Alper Alan, Sven Seuken, Enrico Costanza and Sarvapali Ramchurn},

year  = {2017},

date = {2017-05-02},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{eps398009,

title = {The potential of physical motion cues: changing people?s perception of robots? performance},

author = {Pedro Garcia Garcia and Enrico Costanza and Jhim Verame and Sarvapali D. Ramchurn},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/398009/},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-09-01},

booktitle = {UbiComp 2016: The 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing},

publisher = {ACM},

abstract = {Autonomous robotic systems can automatically perform actions on behalf of users in the domestic environment to help people in their daily activities. Such systems aim to reduce users' cognitive and physical workload, and improve wellbeing. While the benefits of these systems are clear, recent studies suggest that users may misconstrue their performance of tasks. We see an opportunity in designing interaction techniques that improve how users perceive the performance of such systems. We report two lab studies (N=16 each) designed to investigate whether showing physical motion, which is showing the process of a system through movement (that is intrinsic to the system's task), of an autonomous system as it completes its task, affects how users perceive its performance. To ensure our studies are ecologically valid and to motivate participants to provide thoughtful responses we adopted consensus-oriented financial incentives. Our results suggest that physical presence does yield higher performance ratings.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{eps396670,

title = {Interactive scheduling of appliance usage in the home},

author = {Ngoc Cuong Truong and Tim Baarslag and Sarvapali D. Ramchurn and Long Tran-Thanh},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/396670/},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-07-12},

booktitle = {25th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-16)},

pages = {869--875},

abstract = {We address the problem of recommending an appliance usage schedule to the homeowner which balances between maximising total savings and maintaining sufficient user convenience. An important challenge within this problem is how to elicit the the user preferences with low intrusiveness, in order to identify new schedules with high cost savings, that still lies within the user?s comfort zone. To tackle this problem we propose iDR, an interactive system for generating personalised appliance usage scheduling recommendations that maximise savings and convenience with minimal intrusiveness. In particular, our system learns when to stop interacting with the user during the preference elicitation process, in order to keep the bother cost (e.g., the amount of time the user spends, or the cognitive cost of interacting) minimal. We demonstrate through extensive empirical evaluation on real?world data that our approach improves savings by up to 35%, while maintaining a significantly lower bother cost, compared to state-of the-art benchmarks},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{eps396996,

title = {Planning search and rescue missions for UAV teams},

author = {Chris Baker and Sarvapali D. Ramchurn and Luke Teacy and Nicholas Jennings},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/396996/},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-06-01},

booktitle = {PAIS 2016: Conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems at ECAI 2016},

abstract = {The coordination of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to carry out aerial surveys is a major challenge for emergency responders. In particular, UAVs have to fly over kilometre-scale areas while trying to discover casualties as quickly as possible. To aid in this process, it is desirable to exploit the increasing availability of data about a disaster from sources such as crowd reports, satellite re- mote sensing, or manned reconnaissance. In particular, such information can be a valuable resource to drive the planning of UAV flight paths over a space in order to discover people who are in danger. However challenges of computational tractability remain when planning over the very large action spaces that result. To overcome these, we introduce the survivor discovery problem and present as our solution, the first example of a continuous factored coordinated Monte Carlo tree search algorithm. Our evaluation against state of the art benchmarks show that our algorithm, Co-CMCTS, is able to localise more casualties faster than standard approaches by 7% or more on simulations with real-world data.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{eps385056,

title = {"Just whack it on until it gets hot, then turn it off": Working with IoT Data in the Home},

author = {Joel Fisher and Andy Crabtree and Tom Rodden and James Colley and Enrico Costanza and Michael Jewell and Sarvapali Ramchurn},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/385056/},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-05-01},

booktitle = {The SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{eps388365,

title = {Fault tolerant mechanism design for general task allocation},

author = {Dengji Zhao and Sarvapali D. Ramchurn and Nicholas Jennings},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/388365/},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-05-01},

booktitle = {The 15th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2016)},

publisher = {International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems},

abstract = {We study a general task allocation problem, involving multiple agents that collaboratively accomplish tasks and where agents may fail to successfully complete the tasks assigned to them (known as execution uncertainty). The goal is to choose an allocation that maximises social welfare while taking their execution uncertainty into account (i.e., fault tolerant). To achieve this, we show that the post-execution verification (PEV)-based mechanism presented by Porter et al. (2008) is applicable if and only if agents' valuations are risk-neutral (i.e., the solution is almost universal). We then consider a more advanced setting where an agent's execution uncertainty is not completely predictable by the agent alone but aggregated from all agents' private opinions (known as trust). We show that PEV-based mechanism with trust is still applicable if and only if the trust aggregation is multilinear. Given this characterisation, we further demonstrate how this mechanism can be successfully applied in a real-world setting. Finally, we draw the parallels between our results and the literature of efficient mechanism design with general interdependent valuations.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{eps393725,

title = {Coordinating human-UAV teams in disaster response},

author = {Feng Wu and Sarvapali D. Ramchurn and Xiaoping Chen},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/393725/},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-04-01},

booktitle = {International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-16)},

pages = {524--530},

abstract = {We consider a disaster response scenario where emergency responders have to complete rescue tasks in dynamic and uncertain environment with the assistance of multiple UAVs to collect information about the disaster space. To capture the uncertainty and partial observability of the domain, we model this problem as a POMDP. However, the resulting model is computationally intractable and cannot be solved by most existing POMDP solvers due to the large state and action spaces. By exploiting the problem structure we propose a novel online planning algorithm to solve this model. Specifically, we generate plans for the responders based on Monte-Carlo simulations and compute actions for the UAVs according to the value of information. Our empirical results confirm that our algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art both in time and solution quality.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{eps393649,

title = {Factored Monte-Carlo tree search for coordinating UAVs in disaster response},

author = {Chris Baker and Gopal Ramchurn and Luke Teacy and Nicholas Jennings},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/393649/},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-04-01},

booktitle = {Distributed and Multi-Agent Planning},

publisher = {ICAPS},

abstract = {The coordination of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to carry out surveys is a major challenge for emergency responders. In particular, UAVs have to fly over kilometre-scale areas while trying to discover casualties as quickly as possible. However, an increase in the availability of real-time data about a disaster from sources such as crowd reports or satellites presents a valuable source of information to drive the planning of UAV flight paths over a space in order to discover people who are in danger. Nevertheless challenges remain when planning over the very large action spaces that result. To this end, we introduce the survivor discovery problem and present as our solution, the first example of a factored coordinated Monte Carlo tree search algorithm to perform decentralised path planning for multiple coordinated UAVs. Our evaluation against standard benchmarks show that our algorithm, Co-MCTS, is able to find more casualties faster than standard approaches by 10% or more on simulations with real-world data from the 2010 Haiti earthquake.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{eps385069b,

title = {The Effect of Displaying System Confidence Information on the Usage of Autonomous Systems for Non-specialist Applications: A Lab Study},

author = {Jhim Kiel M. Verame and Enrico Costanza and Sarvapali Ramchurn},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/385069/},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-01-01},

booktitle = {The SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},

abstract = {Autonomous systems are designed to take actions on behalf of users, acting autonomously upon data from sensors or online sources. As such, the design of interaction mechanisms that enable users to understand the operation of autonomous systems and flexibly delegate or regain control is an open challenge for HCI. Against this background, in this paper we report on a lab study designed to investigate whether displaying the confidence of an autonomous system about the quality of its work, which we call its confidence information, can improve user acceptance and interaction with autonomous systems. The results demonstrate that confidence information encourages the usage of the autonomous system we tested, compared to a situation where such information is not available. Furthermore, an additional contribution of our work is the methodology we employ to study users' incentives to do work in collaboration with the autonomous system. In experiments comparing different incentive strategies, our results indicate that our translation of behavioural economics research methods to HCI can support the study of interactions with autonomous systems in the lab.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{eps385045b,

title = {It is too hot: an in-situ study of three designs for heating},

author = {Alper Turan Alan and Mike Shann and Enrico Costanza and Sarvapali Ramchurn and Sven Seuken},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/385045/},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-01-01},

booktitle = {The SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},

abstract = {Smart technologies are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and consequently transforming our lives. Domestic energy use is one of the most talked domain that people may greatly benefit from these technologies. Given this, it is important to understand interactions with smart systems within people?s everyday lives. To this end, we developed and deployed the first heating system that allows its users to control their home heating with real-time prices. In particular, we implemented three different designs of our heating system, and evaluated them with 30 UK households in a four-week in the wild study. Our findings through thematic analysis show that our participants formed different understandings and expectations of the system, and used it in various ways to effectively respond to real-time prices while maintaining their thermal comfort. These findings contribute to our understanding of interactions with smart energy systems and provide key design implications for developing them.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{eps386417,

title = {An Axiomatic Framework for Ex-Ante Dynamic Pricing Mechanisms in Smart Grid},

author = {Sambaran Bandhyopadhyay and Ramasuri Narayanam and Pratyush Kumar and Sarvapali Dyanand Ramchurn and Vijay Arya},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/386417/},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of 30th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)},

publisher = {AAAI Press},

abstract = {In electricity markets, the choice of the right pricing regime is crucial for the utilities because the price they charge to their consumers, in anticipation of their demand in real-time, is a key determinant of their profits and ultimately their survival in competitive energy markets. Among the existing pricing regimes, in this paper, we consider ex-ante dynamic pricing schemes as (i) they help to address the peak demand problem (a crucial problem in smart grids), and (ii) they are transparent and fair to consumers as the cost of electricity can be calculated before the actual consumption. In particular, we propose an axiomatic framework that establishes the conceptual underpinnings of the class of ex-ante dynamic pricing schemes.We first propose five key axioms that reflect the criteria that are vital for energy utilities and their relationship with consumers. We then prove an impossibility theorem to show that there is no pricing regime that satisfies all the five axioms simultaneously.We also study multiple cost functions arising from various pricing regimes to examine the subset of axioms that they satisfy. We believe that our proposed framework in this paper is first of its kind to evaluate the class of ex-ante dynamic pricing schemes in a manner that can be operationalised by energy utilities.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{cailliere:hal-01329606,

title = {Managing energy markets in future smart grids using bilateral contracts},

author = {Calliere, Romain and Aknine, Samir and Nongaillard, Antoine and Ramchurn, Sarvapali},

url = {https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01329606},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-01-01},

booktitle = {European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI)},

address = {The Hague, Netherlands},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/smartgridcomm/KoufakisRBR16,

title = {Towards an optimal EV charging scheduling scheme with V2G and 

 V2V energy transfer},

author = {Alexandros - and Emmanouil S Rigas and Nick Bassiliades and Sarvapali D Ramchurn},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/SmartGridComm.2016.7778778},

doi = {10.1109/SmartGridComm.2016.7778778},

year  = {2016},

date = {2016-01-01},

booktitle = {2016 IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications, 

 SmartGridComm 2016, Sydney, Australia, November 6-9, 2016},

pages = {302--307},

crossref = {DBLP:conf/smartgridcomm/2016},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{eps382948,

title = {CrowdAR: augmenting live video with a real-time crowd},

author = {Elliot Salisbury and Sebastian Stein and Sarvapali Ramchurn},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/382948/},

year  = {2015},

date = {2015-11-01},

booktitle = {HCOMP 2015: Third AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing},

abstract = {Finding and tracking targets and events in a live video feed is important for many commercial applications, from CCTV surveillance used by police and security firms, to the rapid mapping of events from aerial imagery. However, descriptions of targets are typically provided in natural language by the end users, and interpreting these in the context of a live video stream is a complex task. Due to current limitations in artificial intelligence, especially vision, this task cannot be automated and instead requires human supervision. Hence, in this paper, we consider the use of real-time crowdsourcing to identify and track targets given by a natural language description. In particular we present a novel method for augmenting live video with a real-time crowd.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{bistaffaetal2015,

title = {Recommending Fair Payments for Large-Scale Social Ridesharing},

author = {Filippo Bistaffa, Georgios Chalkiadakis, Alessandro Farinelli, and Sarvapali D. Ramchurn},

url = {http://www.sramchurn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2015recsys.pdf},

year  = {2015},

date = {2015-09-16},

booktitle = {ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (Recsys)},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{eps378696,

title = {Managing energy tariffs with agents: a field study of a future smart energy system at home},

author = {Alper T. Alan and Enrico Costanza and Sarvapali Ramchurn and Joel Fischer and Tom Rodden and N. R. Jennings},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/378696/},

year  = {2015},

date = {2015-07-01},

booktitle = {Adjunct Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{eps378696b,

title = {Managing energy tariffs with agents: a field study of a future smart energy system at home},

author = {Alper T. Alan and Enrico Costanza and Sarvapali Ramchurn and Joel Fischer and Tom Rodden and N. R. Jennings},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/378696/},

year  = {2015},

date = {2015-07-01},

booktitle = {Adjunct Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (Ubicomp)},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{fischer:etal:2015,

title = {Building a Bird's Eye View: Collaborative Work },

author = {Joel E. Fischer, Stuart Reeves, Tom Rodden, Steven Reece, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn, and David Jones},

url = {http://www.sramchurn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/pn1018-fischerA.pdf},

year  = {2015},

date = {2015-05-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of SIGCHI (To appear)},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{tranh:Etal:2015,

title = {Crowdsourcing Complex Workflows under Budget Constraints},

author = {Long Tran-Thanh, Trung Dong Huynh, Avi Rosenfeld, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn, Nicholas R. Jennings},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/372107/},

year  = {2015},

date = {2015-01-25},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the AAAI Conference},

publisher = {AAAI},

abstract = {We consider the problem of task allocation in crowdsourc- ing systems with multiple complex workflows, each of which consists of a set of inter-dependent micro-tasks. We propose Budgeteer, an algorithm to solve this problem under a bud- get constraint. In particular, our algorithm first calculates an efficient way to allocate budget to each workflow. It then de- termines the number of inter-dependent micro-tasks and the price to pay for each task within each workflow, given the cor- responding budget constraints. We empirically evaluate it on a well-known crowdsourcing-based text correction workflow using Amazon Mechanical Turk, and show that Budgeteer can achieve similar levels of accuracy to current benchmarks, but is on average 45% cheaper.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{bistaffa:etal:2015,

title = {Sharing Rides with Friends: a Coalition Formation Algorithm for Ridesharing},

author = {Filippo Bistaffa, Alessandro Farinelli, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/372048/},

year  = {2015},

date = {2015-01-25},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the AAAI Conference},

abstract = {We consider the Social Ridesharing (SR) problem, where a set of commuters, connected through a social network, ar- range one-time rides at a very short notice. In particular, we focus on the associated optimisation problem of forming cars to minimise the travel cost of the overall system mod- elling such problem as a graph constrained coalition forma- tion (GCCF) problem, where the set of feasible coalitions is restricted by a graph (i.e., the social network). Moreover, we significantly extend the state of the art algorithm for GCCF, i.e., the CFSS algorithm, to solve our GCCF model of the SR problem. Our empirical evaluation uses a real dataset for both spatial (GeoLife) and social data (Twitter), to validate the ap- plicability of our approach in a realistic application scenario. Empirical results show that our approach computes optimal solutions for systems of medium scale (up to 100 agents) providing significant cost reductions (up to −36.22%). More- over, we can provide approximate solutions for very large systems (i.e., up to 2000 agents) and good quality guarantees (i.e., with an approximation ratio of 1.41 in the worst case) within minutes (i.e., 100 seconds).},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{zhao:etal:2015,

title = {Balanced Trade Reduction for Dual-Role Exchange Markets},

author = {Dengji Zhao, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn, Enrico H. Gerding, and Nicholas R. Jennings},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/372050/},

year  = {2015},

date = {2015-01-25},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the AAAI Conference},

abstract = {We consider dual-role exchange markets, where traders can offer to both buy and sell the same commodity in the exchange but, if they transact, they can only be either a buyer or a seller, which is determined by the market mechanism. To design desirable mechanisms for such exchanges, we show that existing solutions may not be incentive compatible, and more importantly, cause the market maker to suffer a significant deficit. Hence, to combat this problem, following McAfee’s trade reduc- tion approach, we propose a new trade reduction mech- anism, called balanced trade reduction, that is incen- tive compatible and also provides flexible trade-offs be- tween efficiency and deficit.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{eps375287,

title = {Real-time opinion aggregation methods for crowd robotics},

author = {Elliot Salisbury and Sebastian Stein and Sarvapali Ramchurn},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/375287/},

year  = {2015},

date = {2015-01-01},

booktitle = {Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2015)},

abstract = {Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly becoming instrumental to many commercial applications, such as transportation and maintenance. However, these applications require flexibility, understanding of natural language, and comprehension of video streams that cannot currently be automated and instead require the intelligence of a skilled human pilot. While having one pilot individually supervising a UAV is not scalable, the machine intelligence, especially vision, required to operate a UAV is still inadequate. Hence, in this paper, we consider the use of crowd robotics to harness a real-time crowd to orientate a UAV in an unknown environment. In particular, we present two novel real-time crowd input aggregation methods. To evaluate these methods, we develop a new testbed for crowd robotics, called CrowdDrone, that allows us to evaluate crowd robotic systems in a variety of scenarios. Using this platform, we benchmark our real-time aggregation methods with crowds hired from Amazon Mechanical Turk and show that our techniques outperform the current state-of-the-art aggregation methods, enabling a robotic agent to travel faster across a fixed distance, and with more precision. Furthermore, our aggregation methods are shown to be significantly more effective in dynamic scenarios},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{eps374070,

title = {HAC-ER: A disaster response system based on human-agent collectives},

author = {Sarvapali Ramchurn and Edwin Simpson and Joel Fischer and Trung Dong Huynh and Yuki Ikuno and Steven Reece and Wenchao Jiang and Feng Wu and Jack Flann and S.J. Roberts and Luc Moreau and T. Rodden and N.R. Jennings},

url = {http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/374070/},

year  = {2015},

date = {2015-01-01},

booktitle = {14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems},

abstract = {

This paper proposes a novel disaster management system called HAC-ER that addresses some of the challenges faced by emer- gency responders by enabling humans and agents, using state-of- the-art algorithms, to collaboratively plan and carry out tasks in teams referred to as human-agent collectives. In particular, HAC- ER utilises crowdsourcing combined with machine learning to ex- tract situational awareness information from large streams of re- ports posted by members of the public and trusted organisations. We then show how this information can inform human-agent teams in coordinating multi-UAV deployments as well as task planning for responders on the ground. Finally, HAC-ER incorporates a tool for tracking and analysing the provenance of information shared across the entire system. In summary, this paper describes a pro- totype system, validated by real-world emergency responders, that combines several state-of-the-art techniques for integrating humans and agents, and illustrates, for the first time, how such an approach can enable more effective disaster response operations.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}