Reports of the AAAI 2012 spring symposia

The focus of the AI, The Fundamental Social Aggregation Challenge, and the Autonomy of Hybrid Agent Groups symposium was to explore issues associated with the control of teams of humans, autonomous machines, and robots working together as hybrid agent groups. Bill Lawless of Paine College kicked off the meeting by pointing out the need for a new theory of social dynamics. He showed that majority rule is far better than consensus for group decision processes and proposed a new mathematical model for characterizing social group dynamics based on interdependence. Albert-Lazlo Barabasi of Northeastern University showed how scale-free networks are very common, and that they are robust to random failures but susceptible to targeted attacks. The hubs in social networks are often not the managers or people in charge. He then explored how to control complex networks. He showed that spare and heterogeneous networks are harder to control than homogeneous networks. Jonathan Barzilai of Dalhousie University pointed out that the current prevailing mathematical foundations of the social sciences are in error because ordinal elements are not vectors, cannot be added or multiplied, do not live in vector spaces, and cannot be differentiated. Copyright © 2012, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.

Duke Scholars

Author George Dimitri Konidaris Computer Science