HUMAN-AGENT COLLECTIVES: FROM FOUNDATIONS TO APPLICATIONS [ORCHID]

With a reported 5 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, access to communication technologies has reached unprecedented levels and has fundamentally altered the ways in which we experience computational systems. Once delivered through a desktop machine to an office worker, computing has become an interwoven feature of everyday life across the globe in a way that profoundly affects us all. We are now interconnected using mobile devices; we routinely invoke remote services through a global cloud infrastructure and increasingly rely on computational devices in our everyday life. Computational devices monitor our health, entertain us, guide us and keep us safe and secure. However, this explosive growth in these devices and on-line services is only a precursor to an era of ubiquity, where each of us will routinely rely upon a plethora of smart and proactive computers that we carry with us, access at home and at work, and that are embedded into the world around us. As computation increasingly pervades the world around us, it will profoundly change the ways in which we work with computers. Rather than issuing instructions to passive machines, we will increasingly work in partnership with highly inter-connected computational components (aka agents) that are able to act autonomously and intelligently. Specifically, humans and software agents will continually and flexibly establish a range of collaborative relationships with one another, forming human-agent collectives (HACs) to meet their individual and collective goals. This vision of people and computational agents operating at a global scale offers tremendous potential and, if realised correctly, will help us meet the key societal challenges of sustainability, inclusion, and safety that are core to our future. However, these benefits are mirrored by the potential of equally concerning pitfalls as we shift to becoming increasingly dependent on systems that interweave human and computational endeavour.As systems based on human-agent collectives grow in scale, complexity and temporal extent, we will increasingly require a principled science that allows us to reason about the computational and human aspects of these systems if we are to avoid developments that are unsafe, unreliable and lack the appropriate safeguards to ensure societal acceptance.Delivering this science is the core research objective of this Programme. In more detail, it seeks to establish the new science that is needed to understand, build and apply HACs that symbiotically interleave human and computer systems to an unprecedented degree. To this end, it brings together three world-leading academic groups from the Universities of Southampton, Oxford and Nottingham (with multi-disciplinary expertise in the areas of artificial intelligence, agent-based computing, machine learning, decentralised information systems, participatory systems, and ubiquitous computing) with industrial collaborators (initially BAE Systems, PRI Ltd and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics) to collectively establish the foundational scientific underpinnings of these systems and drive these understandings to real-world applications in the critical domains of future energy networks, and disaster response.

A key component of ORCHID is the close connection and inter-play between world-leading fundamental research, the demonstration of this research in compelling real-world application scenarios, and the involvement of collaborating partners whose future lies in exploiting such research in these application areas. This provides the ideal environment for producing high impact research across a broad set of areas including: - Advances in knowledge of direct relevance to those involved in understanding the design, construction and use of systems that exploit HACs. These advances will be reflected in new concepts and theories, new interactive techniques and new platforms to support human-agent collaboration (i.e. the new science of HACs). - Novel technologies and demonstrators that showcase the use of HACs in a number of application areas which will show which methods, models and technologies are effective. In particular, the proof of concepts, working prototypes, simulations and studies will provide empirical evidence of the theoretical concepts, the technical feasibility of their construction and the social acceptability of the technologies. - Open source sets of code, toolkits and competitions that encourage a wider community to share and contribute to the research. This will target a broad set of industrial research labs and advanced developers exploring the ways in which increasingly large scale agent arrangements might be exploited. Particularly, relevant in this regard is the Horizon Digital Economy hub with which we will co-promote events and so gain access to their extensive network of partners. This work is of potential interest to a broad set of beneficiaries. In particular, the focus on reducing environmental impact seeks to enhance the quality of life for the everyday citizen and the planet and the work on disaster response seeks to exploit technology to rescue and preserve life. In order to identify where research can be applied, and also for identifying new areas for HAC systems and new collaboration partners, a dedicated Knowledge Transfer Officer will be employed. As part of ORCHID's regular management process, we will reflect upon and update the knowledge transfer strategy by reviewing the key target audiences and the mechanisms used to deliver to them. Our initial set of communities to engage include: - Our collaborating partners, who will benefit from access to the leading researchers in this new area, the ability to shape the ongoing research as it happens, the exchange of researchers through inward and outward secondments, and the ability to demonstrate and evaluate the work in scenarios that closely align with their applications of interest. In recognition of this fact, all of these partners will make a significant investment, which at present, totals over 2M. - Charities concerned with promoting the reduction of carbon emissions and response to disasters, such as the Carbon Trust, Energy Saving Trust, Ushahidi, and the Disasters Emergency Committee, who will benefit from the abilities of HAC technologies to aid in energy reduction and disaster response and the ability to more directly involve people in helping with these issues. - Policy makers and the general public who will benefit from an understanding of the capabilities and issues to emerge from human-agent collectives. For example, the shift to increasingly open access to data, through initiatives such as data.gov.uk, has highlighted innovation in this space and placed issues of access, availability and control of data on the political agenda. The next decade will require a still closer partnership between researchers and law-makers as we establish the key principles of governance in this domain, and we will exploit our links with the James Martin 21st Century School to do so.