The dynamics of intention in collaborative activity

Abstract

An adequate formulation of collective intentionality is crucial for understanding group activity and for modeling the mental state of participants in such activities. Although work on collective intentionality in philosophy, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science has many points of agreement, several key issues remain under debate. This paper argues that the dynamics of intention-in particular, the interrelated processes of plan-related group decision making and intention updatingplay crucial roles in an explanation of collective intentionality. Furthermore, it is in these dynamic aspects that coordinated group activity differs most from individual activity. The paper specifies a model of the dynamics of agent intentions in the context of collaborative activity. Its integrated treatment of group decision making and coordinated updating of group-related intentions fills an important gap in prior accounts of collective intentionality, thus helping to resolve a long-standing debate about the nature of intentions in group activity. The paper also defines an architecture for collaboration-capable computer agents that satisfies the constraints of the model and is a natural extension of the standard architecture for resource-bounded agents operating as individuals. The new architecture is both more principled and more complete than prior architectures for collaborative multi-agent systems.

Impact of cultural dynamics on conservation of Suakin, Sudan

“…Previous efforts have indeed attempted to join Suakin's stakeholders together in the formation of stakeholder committees (Salim, 1997) and a workshop event concerning the Suakin development plan (NCAM, 2007), yet neither of these attempts included the stakeholders within the design of the research being conducted or in future intentions resulting from the data obtained. The outcomes generated through previous efforts thus lacked a collective stakeholder understanding and input towards Suakin's conservation, which is vital to generate shared goals and a collective responsibility towards future action (Grosz and Hunsberger, 2006;Perkin, 2010) and which was addressed in this research.…”

“…However, a clear differentiation can be made between those 'shared intentions' derived from individual initiatives (but commonly shared) and those derived from collective actions and commitment (Gilbert, 2009). It can be argued that collectively derived shared intentions underwrite collaborative activity and a shared responsibility towards a common goal (Grosz and Hunsberger, 2006;Perkin, 2010;Tomasello and Carpenter, 2007). To help generate shared intentions, effective communication and understanding needs to be facilitated between stakeholders to convince all parties of the merits of working together (Bott et al, 2011;Grimwade and Carter, 2000;Zancheti and Hidaka, 2011).…”

A Flexible Framework for SharedPlans

“…The approach addresses the computational concerns of team-oriented programming, such as how agents in a team agree on the form and structure of the team, how they synchronize their actions with one another, how and when they communicate with one another, how they monitor the execution of their joint plans and activities, and how they agree to abandon infeasible joint activities -in a manner consistent with SharedPlans theory. Our framework thus goes much further than the work of Grosz and Kraus [8], who describe an implementation of SharedPlans in a "Truckworld" environment, and that of Grosz and Hunsberger [5], who propose a SharedPlans extension (unimplemented) to the IRMA architecture of Bratman, Israel and Pollack [3], as both these approaches present general-purpose algorithms, but which are domain independent only for the formation of SharedPlans. The main contribution of our approach is a teamoriented programming language for specifying team plans, and domain-independent mechanisms, inherited from JACK, for SharedPlan execution and monitoring.…”

Group Intention Is Social Choice with Commitment

“…Work on collaborative group activities [9,12,16] and group decision-making protocols [10] focus on how to define collective intentionality and how to distribute the collective intentions over the agents. We define group intention to be the collective acceptance of a group goal and focus on defining commitment strategies for the collective acceptances.…”

“…We would expect that in order for groups to act, jointly or by coordinating their activities, they need to establish what to believe i.e., form epistemic attitudes, and what to aim for, i.e., to form motivational attitudes. In existing frameworks for collaborative activities [9,12,16] and group decision-making protocols [10], the formation of group attitudes is defined only for a specific type of groups. These groups consist of agents that engage in pursuing a group goal only when the members have the same beliefs regarding this goal, or when they are successful in reaching an agreement on a given set of beliefs.…”