Current Projects

The following are descriptions of things I and my students are currently working on. Most of these activities relate to one or more of my research interests and typically they cut across funded projects in the Agents Lab.

Argumentation-based dialogues between agents

Since much human communication is argumentation-based, that is based on the exchange of reasons for and against believing things, it seems that there are advantages to making communication between agents argumentation based as well. My work in this area has developed formal models of argumentation, and evaluating their usefullness for inter-agent communication.

This work is currently funded as part of the International Technology Alliance.

Selected Publications

Nielsen, S. and Parsons, S. An application of formal argumentation: Fusing Bayesian networks in multi-agent systems, Artificial Intelligence, 171(10-15), 754-775, 2007.

Parsons, S., Wooldridge, M., and Amgoud, L. Properties and complexity of formal inter-agent dialogues. Journal of Logic and Computation, 13(3), 347-376, 2003.

McBurney, P. and Parsons, S. Games that agents play: A formal framework for dialogues between autonomous agents. Journal of Logic, Language and Information, 11(3), 315-334.

Tang, Y., Norman, T., and Parsons, S. Agent-based dialogues to support plan execution by human teams, Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of the International Technology Alliance, London, 2008.

Parsons, S., McBurney, P., Sklar, E. and Wooldridge, M. On the relevance of utterances in formal inter-agent dialogues Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Honolulu, 2007.

Parsons, S., Wooldridge, M., and Amgoud, A. On the outcomes of formal inter-agent dialogues, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Melbourne, 2003.

Automated mechanism design

Auctions are an increasingly popular approach to ecommerce and general resource allocation.

One of the problems in deploying auctions is knowing what kind of auction to use for a particular task, a problem exacerbated by the fact that it seems that different tasks require different auctions. I have been looking at the use of evolutionary computing as a means of generating auction mechanisms. This approach it possible to customise auctions to specific tasks, and can make the choice of auction robust against exploitation by traders who use the auction.

This work was funded under the MechDesign project.

Selected Publications

Parsons, S., Rodriguez-Aguilar, J. A. and Klein, M. Auctions and bidding: A guide for computer scientists, ACM Computing Surveys (to appear).

Tuyls, K. and Parsons, S. What evolutionary game theory tells us about multiagent learning, Artificial Intelligence, 171(7), 406--416, 2007.

Niu, J., Cai, K., Gerding, E., McBurney, P. and Parsons, S. Characterizing effective auction mechanisms: Insights from the 2007 TAC market design competition, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Estoril, Portugal, 2008.

Niu, J., Cai, K., McBurney, P., and Parsons, S. An analysis of entries in the first TAC market design competition, Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology, Sydney, Australia, 2008.

Phelps, S., Cai, K., McBurney, P., Niu, J., Parsons, S., and Sklar, E. Auctions, evolution, and multi-agent learning, Proceedings of the Symposium on Adaptive Learning Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Maastricht, 2007.

Phelps, S., Marcinkiewicz, M., Parsons, S. and McBurney, P. A novel method for automated strategy acquisition in n-player non-zero-sum games, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Hakodate, Japan, 2006.

Qualitative probabilistic models

I have a long standing interest in investigating how probabilistic models can be used in the absence of detailed quantitative data.

One ongoing aspect of this work is exploring the limits of argumentation systems as a mechanism for representing and reasoning with probabilistic information, and investigating the trade-offs between the use of fully qualitative information (as in Wellman's Qualitative Probabilistic Networks (QPNs)), and less qualitative models such as the kappa calculus.

Another aspect of this work is our investgation into the correspondances between logical control models of agents, such as the BDI model, and decision theoretic models like MDPs.

Selected Publications

Parsons, S. Qualitative methods for reasoning under uncertainty, MIT Press, 2001.

Parsons, S. On precise and correct qualitative probabilistic reasoning,, International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, 35, 111-135, 2004.

Rennoij, S., van der Gaag, L., and Parsons, S. Context-specific sign propagation in qualitative probabilistic networks. Artificial Intelligence, 140, 207-230, 2002.

McBurney, P. J. and Parsons, S. Representing epistemic uncertainty by means of dialectical argumentation, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 32(1), 125-169, 2001.

Robotics

For someone interested in agent coordination,and reasoning under uncertainty, robots are the perfect platform for experiment. Since September 2002, I have been involved in a RoboCup Standard Platform League team, MetroBots which took part in a number of RoboCup competitions, and subsequently have started working on new approaches to walking in legged robots.

I also use robots, this time the lowly Lego Mindstorms platform, in my teaching, and have been studying what students think of this.

The work on new approaches to walking is funded by the Bipedal project.

Selected Publications

Sklar, E., Parsons, S. and Stone, P. Using RoboCup in university-level computer science education, Journal on Educational Resources in Computing, 4(2), 2004.

Kaushik, R., Marcinkiewicz, M., Xiao, J., Parsons, S., and Raphan, T. Implementation of bio-inspired vestibular-ocular reflex in a quadrupedal robot, Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Rome, 2007.

Marcinkiewicz, M., Kunin, M., Parsons, S., Sklar, E., and Raphan, T. Towards a methodology for stabilizing the gaze of a quadrupedal robot, Proceedings of the International RoboCup Symposium, Bremen Germany, 2006.

Datamining

I am working with George Hripsak of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University on extracting and reasoning with information from a large database of patient records. In particular, this work is currently focusing on representing and reasoning with temporal data.

Selected Publications

Zhou, L., Parsons, S., and Hripcsak, G. The evaluation of a temporal reasoning system in processing clinical discharge summaries, Journal of the Medical Informatics Association, 15(1):99-106, 2008.

Melton, G. B., Parsons, S., Morrison, F. P., Rothschild, A. S., Markatou, M. and Hripcsak, G. Inter-patient distance metrics using SNOMED CT defining relationships, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 39(6), 697-705, 2006.

Hripcsak, G., Zhou, L., Melton, G., and Parsons, S., A temporal constraint structure for extracting temporal information from clinical narrative, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 39(4), 424-439, 2006.