Sarvapali D. Ramchurn
A disaster response system based on human-agent collectives
Ramchurn, Sarvapali D.; Huynh, Trung Dong; Wu, Feng; Ikuno, Yuki; Flann, Jack; Moreau, Luc; Fischer, Joel E.; Jiang, Wenchao; Rodden, Tom; Simpson, Edwin; Reece, Steven; Roberts, Stephen; Jennings, Nicholas R.
Authors
Trung Dong Huynh
Feng Wu
Yuki Ikuno
Jack Flann
Luc Moreau
JOEL FISCHER Joel.Fischer@nottingham.ac.uk
Professor of Human-Computer Interaction
Wenchao Jiang
TOM RODDEN TOM.RODDEN@NOTTINGHAM.AC.UK
Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Research & Knowledge Exchange
Edwin Simpson
Steven Reece
Stephen Roberts
Nicholas R. Jennings
Abstract
Major natural or man-made disasters such as Hurricane Katrina or the 9/11 terror attacks pose significant challenges for emergency responders. First, they have to develop an understanding of the unfolding event either using their own resources or through third-parties such as the local population and agencies. Second, based on the information gathered, they need to deploy their teams in a flexible manner, ensuring that each team performs tasks in the most effective way. Third, given the dynamic nature of a disaster space, and the uncertainties involved in performing rescue missions, information about the disaster space and the actors within it needs to be managed to ensure that responders are always acting on up-to-date and trusted information. Against this background, this paper proposes a novel disaster response system called HAC-ER. Thus HAC-ER interweaves humans and agents, both robotic and software, in social relationships that augment their individual and collective capabilities. To design HAC-ER, we involved end-users including both experts and volunteers in a several participatory design workshops, lab studies, and field trials of increasingly advanced prototypes of individual components of HAC-ER as well as the overall system. This process generated a number of new quantitative and qualitative results but also raised a number of new research questions. HAC-ER thus demonstrates how such Human-Agent Collectives (HACs) can address key challenges in disaster response. Specifically, we show how HAC-ER utilises crowdsourcing combined with machine learning to obtain most important situational awareness from large streams of reports posted by members of the public and trusted organisations. We then show how this information can inform human-agent teams in coordinating multi-UAV deployments, as well as task planning for responders on the ground. Finally, HAC-ER incorporates an infrastructure and the associated intelligence for tracking and utilising the provenance of information shared across the entire system to ensure its accountability. We individually validate each of these elements of HAC-ER and show how they perform against standard (non-HAC) baselines and also elaborate on the evaluation of the overall system.
Citation
Ramchurn, S. D., Huynh, T. D., Wu, F., Ikuno, Y., Flann, J., Moreau, L., …Jennings, N. R. (2016). A disaster response system based on human-agent collectives. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 57, 661-708. https://doi.org/10.1613/jair.5098
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Dec 10, 2016 |
Online Publication Date | Dec 31, 2016 |
Publication Date | Dec 31, 2016 |
Deposit Date | Apr 12, 2017 |
Publicly Available Date | Apr 12, 2017 |
Journal | Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research |
Print ISSN | 1076-9757 |
Electronic ISSN | 1943-5037 |
Publisher | AI Access Foundation |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 57 |
Pages | 661-708 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1613/jair.5098 |
Public URL | https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/832132 |
Publisher URL | http://www.jair.org/papers/paper5098.html |
Related Public URLs | http://www.aaai.org/ |
Additional Information | c2016 AI Access Foundation |
Contract Date | Apr 12, 2017 |
Files
ramchurn_5098_hac-er_opt.pdf
(1.4 Mb)
PDF
You might also like
Doing the laundry with agents: a field trial of a future smart energy system in the home
(2014)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Social implications of agent-based planning support for human teams
(2014)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Supporting team coordination on the ground: requirements from a mixed reality game
(2014)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Energy advisors at work: charity work practices to support people in fuel poverty
(2014)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
A study of human-agent collaboration for multi-UAV task allocation in dynamic environments
(2015)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Downloadable Citations
About Repository@Nottingham
Administrator e-mail: discovery-access-systems@nottingham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search