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Trust and reputation are central to effective interactions in open multi-agent systems (MAS) in which agents, that are owned by a variety of stakeholders, continuously enter and leave the system. This openness means existing trust and reputation models cannot readily be used since their performance suffers when there are various (unforseen) changes in the environment. To this end, this paper presents FIRE, a trust and reputation model that integrates a number of information sources to produce a comprehensive assessment of an agent's likely performance in open systems. Specifically, FIRE incorporates interaction trust, role-based trust, witness reputation, and certified reputation to provide trust metrics in most circumstances. FIRE is empirically evaluated and is shown to help agents gain better utility (by effectively selecting appropriate interaction partners) than our benchmarks in a variety of agent populations. It is also shown that FIRE is able to effectively respond to changes that occur in an agent's environment.

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Cite as:Reuben Binns, Max Van Kleek, Michael Veale, Ulrik Lyngs, Jun Zhao and Nigel Shadbolt (2018) 'It's Reducing a Human Being to a Percentage'; Perceptions of Justice in Algorithmic Decisions. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'18), April 21–26, Montreal, Canada. doi: 10.1145/3173574.3173951Data-driven decision-making consequential to individuals raises important questions of accountability and justice. Indeed, European law provides individuals limited rights to 'meaningful information about the logic' behind significant, autonomous decisions such as loan approvals, insurance quotes, and CV filtering. We undertake three experimental studies examining people's perceptions of justice in algorithmic decision-making under different scenarios and explanation styles. Dimensions of justice previously observed in response to human decision-making appear similarly engaged in response to algorithmic decisions. Qualitative analysis identified several concerns and heuristics involved in justice perceptions including arbitrariness, generalisation, and (in)dignity. Quantitative analysis indicates that explanation styles primarily matter to justice perceptions only when subjects are exposed to multiple different styles---under repeated exposure of one style, scenario effects obscure any explanation effects. Our results suggests there may be no 'best' approach to explaining algorithmic decisions, and that reflection on their automated nature both implicates and mitigates justice dimensions.

________________________________________________________________________We explore a novel ontological approach to user profiling within recommender systems, working on the problem of recommending on-line academic research papers. Our two experimental systems, Quickstep and Foxtrot, create user profiles from unobtrusively monitored behaviour and relevance feedback, representing the profiles in terms of a research paper topic ontology. A novel profile visualization approach is taken to acquire profile feedback. Research papers are classified using ontological classes and collaborative recommendation algorithms used to recommend papers seen by similar people on their current topics of interest. Two small-scale experiments, with 24 subjects over 3 months, and a large-scale experiment, with 260 subjects over an academic year, are conducted to evaluate different aspects of our approach. Ontological inference is shown to improve user profiling, external ontological knowledge used to successfully bootstrap a recommender system and profile visualization employed to improve profiling accuracy. The overall performance of our ontological recommender systems are also presented and favourably compared to other systems in the literature.

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The Critical Decision Method (CDM) is an approach to cognitive task analysis. The method involves multiple-pass event retrospection guided by probe questions. The CDM has been used in the elicitation of expert knowledge in diverse domains and for applications including system development and instructional design. The CDM research illustrates the sorts of knowledge representation products that can arise from cognitive task analysis (e.g., Situation Assessment Records, time lines, decision requirements). The research also shows how one can approach methodological issues surrounding cognitive task analysis, including questions about data quality and method reliability, efficiency, and utility. As cognitive task analysis is used more widely in the elicitation, preservation, and dissemination of expert knowledge and is used more widely as the basis for the design of complex cognitive systems, and as projects move into even more field applications and real-world settings, the issues we discuss become increasingly critical.

This paper presents recent developments in the Artequakt project which seeks to automatically extract knowledge about artists from the Web, populate a knowledge base, and use it to generate personalized narrative biographies. An overview of the system architecture is presented and the three key components of that architecture are explained in detail, namely knowledge extraction, information management and biography construction. An example experiment is detailed and further challenges are outlined.