DON’T CANCEL MY BARCELONA TRIP : Adjusting autonomy of agent proxies in human organizations

Teams of heterogeneous agents working within and alongside human organizations offer exciting possibilities for streamlining processes in ways not possible with conventional software[4, 6]. For example, personal software assistants and information gathering and scheduling agents can coordinate with each other to achieve a variety of coordination and organizational tasks, e.g. facilitating teaming of experts in an organization for crisis response and aiding in execution and monitoring of such a response[5]. Inevitably, due to the complexity of the environment, the unpredictability of human beings and the range of situation with which the multi-agent systems must deal, there will be times when the system does not produce the results it’s users desire. In such cases human intervention is required. Sometimes simple tweaks are required due to system failures. In other cases, perhaps because a particular user has more experience than the system, the user will want to “steer” the entire multi-agent system on a different course. For example, some researchers at USC/ISI, including ourselves, are currently focused on the Electric Elves project (http://www.isi.edu/agents-united). In this project humans will be agentified by providing agent proxies to act on their behalf, while entities such as meeting schedulers will be active agents that can communicate with the proxies to achieve a variety of scheduling and