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Cognitive Agents for Social Environments

Event Type: Seminar

Date: March 11, 2008

Time: 10:00AM - 11:30AM

Abstract:

In social environments, people interact with each other and form different societies. Previous research in modeling theory of agents and society has taken singly a point of view of society or agent. While the single societal view mainly concentrates on the centralist, static approach to organizational design and this limits system dynamics, on the other hand, the single agent view typically uses the traditional decision theory which relies on assumptions of rationality that people constantly violate. In this talk, I will introduce CASE (Cognitive Agents for Social Environments), a multi-agent architecture for simulating human social behaviors. CASE is designed to achieve two goals. First, it aims to model the "meso-view" of multi-agent interaction by capturing both the "societal view", i.e. an agent's decisions are influenced by the choices made by others, and the "agent view", i.e. an agent is an autonomous entity and has its own goals and beliefs in the environment. Second, CASE provides a computational decision model of the highly cognitive process wherein an individual agent's decision-making that sometimes follows intuition and bounded rationality. A serial of experiments were conducted to evaluate the concept, the model and their impacts on the evolution of the social systems.

Speaker: Yu Zhang

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Yu Zhang completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Texas A&M University in 2005. She obtained her B.S. and M.S in Computer Science from Central South University, China in 1995 and 1998 respectively. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Trinity University and the director of the Laboratory for Distributed Intelligent Agent Systems, the first interdisciplinary lab at Trinity. Dr.

Zhang's research falls within AI and Multi-Agent Systems. Her research is funded by NSF, ACS (Association of Colleges in South), CUR (Council On Undergraduate Research) and Trinity University. She is in the editorial board and program committee for over 30 journals, conferences and technical groups in this area and has regularly reviewed papers and proposals for journals, conferences and federal agencies. She has been active in IEEE Women In Engineering Central Texas Chapter, IEEE Computer Society Central Texas Chapter and IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society Central Texas Chapter.