Softening electronic institutions to support natural interaction

Abstract

A necessary feature of social networks is a model of interaction which is followed on the network---some structure which coordinates activity between the participants. These interaction models are typically implicit, making it a challenge to both design and communicate the protocols for interaction and coordination. Electronic institution systems are one of the principal ways in which multi-agent systems engineers address this issue of coordination in complex interactions between groups of agents. In electronic institutions, interaction models can be concisely specified as protocols which encode the norms which computational agents follow. However, the formality and the up-front costs of discovering and choosing to engage with these systems has limited their applicability to human interaction. The vast majority of human (and, increasingly, automated) social interaction is now taking place in social media systems where social norms are softer concepts regulated essentially by the people involved. Being able to leverage the power of electronic institutions in these systems would ease the application of computational intelligence in support of social tasks.We describe a method by which electronic institutions can act in synergy with these sorts of social media streams and, in doing so, we define a ``softer'' style of system that, nevertheless, retains connection to precise specifications of coordination. In addition, we question the tacit assumption that participating agents deliberately join appropriate institutions. Although our method is independent of choice of social media stream (given a few standard characteristics of these) we describe an implementation of the method using Twitter as a target media stream.We illustrate the utility of our approach with an example which benefits from computational coordination, but where the use of a traditional EI would have prohibitive up-front costs. As well as a trace of a synthetic version, we demonstrate the functioning of a complete implementation which can run the example, and discuss how minimal the end-user configuration to setup complex examples can be.

Coupling purposes with status-functions in artificial institutions

“…In the proposed model, purposes compose a system (i) explicit, as it is properly specified through institutional concepts and (ii) external, as it is persisted outside the agents mind. Such conception is in agreement with some authors that point that institutions can (or perhaps even should) be used for purposes that are beyond the normative ones [28,13,32,33,21,23]. In summary, our work proposes an interface to make different couplings in different institutions without changing the institutional specification or the coding of the agents.…”

A Conceptual Model for Situating Purposes in Artificial Institutions

“…Such conception is in agreement with some authors that signaled that an institution can (or perhaps even should) be used for purposes other than just normative. We were inspired in some works that suggest that an artificial institution has been used to other purposes without be normative [28,7,45,46,47,48]. In summary, our work proposes an interface to make different couplings in different institutions without changing the institutional specification or the coding of the agents.…”

Blockchain and Beyond: Understanding Blockchains Through Prototypes and Public Engagement

“…As with other aspects of distributed cryptographic systems, this builds on a rich history of work around how to structure, support and constrain interaction. Here, we start to see institutions emerge -collections of protocols that shape interactions by specifying what actions can be taken and what the implications are [106,126].…”

“…In parallel, there is a thread of work within computer science around electronic institutions [31,46,47], as attempts to algorithmically formalise the rules and norms by which interactions take place, in order to create a basis for societies of artiicial intelligent agents. Just as with blockchain systems, work continues on how to connect these kinds of formalisations of interaction within the messiness of human life [106], and how to open up the design of formal systems to a wider audience [105], in particular through the creation of 'social machines', in which network infrastructures support open and creative human interaction [112,128,129]. Two the key challenges these projects have addressed is how to form and communicate connections between formal systems and the world, as well as how to support users to the point where they can meaningfully design rules for formal systems.…”