New Zealand

Akira Minematsu (May 9th 2012). Epidemiology, Low Back Pain, Ali Asghar Norasteh, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/35748. 

Nuno Lunet (March 13th 2012). The Use of Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis in Modern Epidemiology, Epidemiology - Curren

Francis Oloo (November 4th 2019). Sensor-Driven, Spatially Explicit Agent-Based Models, Swarm Intelligence - Recent Advances, New Perspectives and Applications, Javier Del Ser, Esther Villar and Eneko Osaba, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.89830.

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**Abstract:**

In epidemiology science, the importance to explore innovative modeling tools for acutely analyzing epidemic diffusion is turning into a big challenge considering the myriad of real-world aspects to capture. Typically, equation-based models, such as SIS and SIR, are used to study the propagation of diseases over a population. Improved approaches also include human-mobility patterns as network information to describe contacts among individuals. However, there still is the need to incorporate in these models information about different types of contagion, geographical information, humans habits, and environmental properties.
In this paper, we propose a novel approach that takes into account: 1. direct and indirect epidemic contagion pathways to explore the dynamics of the epidemic, 2. the times of possible contagions, and 3. human-mobility patterns. We combine these three features exploiting time-varying hypergraphs, and we embed this model into a design-methodology for agent-based models (ABMs), able to improve the correctness in the epidemic estimations of classical contact-network approaches. We further describe a diffusion algorithm suitable for our design-methodology and adaptable to the peculiarities of any disease spreading policies and models.
Finally, we tested our methodology by developing an ABM, realizing the SIS epidemic compartmental model, for simulating an epidemic propagation over a population of individuals. We experimented with the model using real user-mobility data from the location-based social network Foursquare, and we demonstrated the high-impact of temporal direct and indirect contagion pathways.


AAMAS 2020

A Design-Methodology for Epidemic Dynamics via Time-Varying Hypergraphs

location-based social networks

direct and indirect infection

time-varying hypergraph

agent-based model

epidemiology

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
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Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

technical paper

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally-respected archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

Browse keynotes, discussions, panels and over 300 presentations.


AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). 

Collective learning can be greatly enhanced when agents effectively exchange knowledge with their peers. In particular, recent work studying agents that learn to teach other teammates has demonstrated that action advising accelerates team-wide learning. However, the prior work has simplified the learning of advising policies by using simple function approximations and only considered advising with primitive (low-level) actions, limiting the scalability of learning and teaching to complex domains. This paper introduces a novel learning-to-teach framework, called hierarchical multiagent teaching (HMAT), that improves scalability to complex environments by using the deep representation for student policies and by advising with more expressive extended action sequences over multiple levels of temporal abstraction. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that HMAT improves team-wide learning progress in large, complex domains where previous approaches fail. HMAT also learns teaching policies that can effectively transfer knowledge to different teammates with knowledge of different tasks, even when the teammates have heterogeneous action spaces.

Learning Hierarchical Teaching Policies for Cooperative Agents

In classical elections, voters only submit their ballot once, whereas, in iterative voting, the ballots may be changed iteratively. Following the work by Wilczynski [2019], we consider the case where a social network represents an underlying structure between the voters, meaning that each voter can see her neighbors’ ballots. In addition, there is a polling agency, which publicly announces the result for the initial vote. This paper investigates the manipulative power of the polling agency. Previously, Wilczynski [2019] studied constructive manipulation for the plurality rule. We introduce destructive manipulation and extend the study to the veto rule. Several restricted variants are considered with respect to their parameterized complexity. The theoretical results are complemented by experiments
using different heuristics.

Manipulation of Opinion Polls to Influence Iterative Elections

Off Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning with Analogous Disentangled Exploration

Reinforcement learning (RL), like any on-line learning method, inevitably faces the exploration-exploitation dilemma. When a learning algorithm requires as few data samples as possible, it is called sample efficient. The design of sample-efficient algorithms is an important area of research. Interestingly, all currently known provably efficient model-free RL algorithms utilize the same well-known principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty. We unite these existing algorithms into a single general model-free optimistic RL framework. We show how this facilitates the design of new optimistic model-free RL algorithms by simplifying the analysis of their efficiency. Finally, we propose one such new algorithm and demonstrate its performance in an experimental study.

Generalized Optimistic Q-Learning with Provable Efficiency

A patrol of robot teams, where the robots are required to repeatedly visit a target area, is a useful tool in detecting an adversary trying to penetrate. In this work we examine the Closed Perimeter Patrol problem, in which the robots travel along a closed perimeter and the adversary is aware of the robots' patrol policy. The goal is to maximize the probability of penetration detection. Previous work dealt with symmetric tracks, in which all parts of the track have similar properties, and suggested non-deterministic patrol schemes, characterized by a uniform policy along the entire area. We consider more realistic scenarios of asymmetric tracks, with various parts of the track having different properties, and suggest a patrol policy with a non-uniform policy along different points of the track. We compare the achievements of both models and show the advantage of the non-uniform model. We further explore methods to efficiently calculate the attributes needed to maximize the probability of penetration detection and compare their implementation in various scenarios.


Non-Uniform Policies for Multi-Robot Asymmetric Perimeter Patrol in Adversarial Domains

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) plays an important role in many real-life applications where autonomous agents must coordinate to reach their goals without collisions. MAPF problems often take place in structured environments that are usually assumed to be static and known in advance. In this paper, we introduce C-MAPF, i.e., MAPF in Configurable environments, a novel variant of the MAPF problem in which the environment is configurable, namely its structure and topology can be controlled within some given constraints. Consider, for instance, a warehouse logistics application: the environment can be changed (at least to some degree) by the managers of the warehouse, for example by re-arranging the positions of the shelves or by removing or adding temporary walls. We study the properties of the C-MAPF problem and we devise two algorithms for solving it, both based on Conflict-Based Search (CBS), a state-of-the-art MAPF algorithm. First, we present Parallel CBS (P-CBS), that searches for a solution by simultaneously considering all the possible configurations of the environment. We then present Abstract CBS (A-CBS), an extended version of the CBS algorithm that solves C-MAPF problems by introducing a new type of conflict on the allowable configurations of the environment. We prove that our solvers are both complete and optimal and we experimentally assess their performance in different settings.


Multi-Agent Path Finding in Configurable Environments

In many settings where multiple agents interact, the optimal choices for each agent depend heavily on the choices of the others.
These coupled interactions are well-described by a general-sum differential game, in which players have differing objectives, the state evolves in continuous time, and optimal play may be characterized by one of many equilibrium concepts, e.g., a Nash equilibrium.
Often, problems admit multiple equilibria.
From the perspective of a single agent in such a game, this multiplicity of solutions can introduce uncertainty about how other agents will behave.
This paper proposes a general framework for resolving ambiguity between equilibria by reasoning about the equilibrium other agents are aiming for.
We demonstrate this framework in simulations of a multi-player human-robot navigation problem that yields two main conclusions:
First, by inferring which equilibrium humans are operating at, the robot is able to predict trajectories more accurately, and second, by discovering and aligning itself to this equilibrium the robot is able to reduce the cost for all players.


Inference-Based Strategy Alignment for General-Sum Differential Games

Multiagent teams have been shown to be effective in many domains that require coordination among team members. However, finding valuable joint-actions becomes increasingly difficult in tightly-coupled domains where each agent's performance depends on the actions of many other agents. Reward shaping partially addresses this challenge by deriving more "tuned" rewards to provide agents with additional feedback, but this approach still relies on agents randomly discovering suitable joint-actions. In this work, we introduce Counterfactual Agent Suggestions (CAS) as a method for injecting knowledge into an agent's learning process within the confines of existing reward structures. We show that CAS enables agent teams to converge towards desired behaviors more reliably. We also show that improvement in team performance in the presence of suggestions extends to large teams and tightly-coupled domains.


The Power of Suggestion

Reinforcement learning systems require good representations to work well. For decades practical success in reinforcement learning was limited to small domains. Deep reinforcement learning systems, on the other hand, are scalable, not dependent on domain specific prior knowledge and have been successfully used to play Atari, in 3D navigation from pixels, and to control high degree of freedom robots. Unfortunately, the performance of deep reinforcement learning systems is sensitive to hyper-parameter settings and architecture choices. Even well tuned systems exhibit significant instability both within a trial and across experiment replications. In practice, significant expertise and trial and error are usually required to achieve good performance. One potential source of the problem is known as catastrophic interference: when later training decreases performance by overriding previous learning. Interestingly, the powerful generalization that makes Neural Networks (NN) so effective in batch supervised learning might explain the challenges when applying them in reinforcement learning tasks. In this paper, we explore how online NN training and interference interact in reinforcement learning. We find that simply re-mapping the input observations to a high-dimensional space improves learning speed and parameter sensitivity. We also show this preprocessing reduces interference in prediction tasks. More practically, we provide a simple approach to NN training that is easy to implement, and requires little additional computation. We demonstrate that our approach improves performance in both prediction and control with an extensive batch of experiments in classic control domains.

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