Creating Socially Conscious Agents: Decision-Making in the Context of Group Commitments

Abstract

With growing opportunities for individually motivated agents to work collaboratively to satisfy shared goals, it becomes increasingly important to design agents that can make intelligent decisions in the context of commitments to group activities. In particular, agents need to be able to reconcile their intentions to do group-related actions with other, conflicting actions. In this thesis, I present the framework for the SPIRE experimental system that al lows the process of intention reconciliation in team contexts to be simulated and studied. I define a measure of social consciousness and show how it can be incorporated into the SPIRE system. Using SPIRE, I then investigate the effect of infinite and limited time horizons on agents with varying levels of social consciousness, as well as the resulting effect on the utility of the group as a whole. Using these experiments as a basis for theoretic conclusions, I suggest preliminary principles for designers of collaborative agents.