Publications

@inproceedings{Karanik2024SAC,

title = {On the relevance of value system structure for automated value-aligned decision-making},

author = {Marcelo Karanik and Holger Billhardt and Alberto Fernández and Sascha Ossowski},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3605098.3636057},

doi = {10.1145/3605098.3636057},

isbn = {9798400702433},

year  = {2024},

date = {2024-01-01},

urldate = {2024-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 39th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing},

pages = {679–686},

publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},

address = {Avila, Spain},

series = {SAC '24},

abstract = {Technological advances, especially in the field of artificial intelligence, raise subjects related to the behaviour of autonomous systems. The ability to judge how far some behaviour is ethically correct is inherent to humans, and one of the great challenges is to replicate such ability in artificial systems. Engineering, aware that human values must be considered in the decision-making process, is currently focused on developing mechanisms to embed these values into autonomous systems. This article proposes a decision model that enables autonomous intelligent agents to select actions that are aligned with their value system. It considers not only the relevance that different values have for an agent, and how much an action promotes a certain value, but also models in a rigorous manner the interaction of different values within a value system. An instantiation of the model is put forward, based on Schwartz's basic values theory, non-additive fuzzy measures, and the discrete Choquet integral. Then the performance of the approach is illustrated by determining the value alignment of different decisions using the well-known iterated prisoner's dilemma.},

keywords = {decision-making, value interaction, value system, value-aware engineering},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{VALE2023Lujak,

title = {On Value-Aligned Cooperative Multi-agent Task Allocation},

author = {Marin Lujak and Alberto Fernández and Holger Billhardt and Sascha Ossowski and Joaquín Arias and Aitor López Sánchez},

editor = {Nardine Osman and Luc Steels},

doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-58202-8_12},

isbn = {978-3-031-58202-8},

year  = {2024},

date = {2024-01-01},

urldate = {2024-01-01},

booktitle = {Value Engineering in Artificial Intelligence},

pages = {197–216},

publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},

address = {Cham},

abstract = {Ensuring trustworthy AI and adopting value-aware systems with ethical principles are essential for the harmonious coexistence of humans and intelligent systems. This paper proposes a value-aligned cooperative multi-agent task allocation model for a cooperative whose members jointly own and operate the organization, working towards common goals. The proposed approach instantiates human values into ethical and moral norms. We focus on value awareness through introducing ethical values like justice and fairness into a mathematical programming model for near-optimal multi-agent task allocation. Key performance indicators are modeled using diverse measures in the task sharing context. A simple use-case example demonstrates how value awareness integrates into a decision support system for multi-agent task allocation in a cooperative agri-robot fleet context.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{VALE2023Karanik,

title = {Exploiting Value System Structure for Value-Aligned Decision-Making},

author = {Marcelo Karanik and Holger Billhardt and Alberto Fernández and Sascha Ossowski},

editor = {Nardine Osman and Luc Steels},

doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-58202-8_11},

isbn = {978-3-031-58202-8},

year  = {2024},

date = {2024-01-01},

booktitle = {Value Engineering in Artificial Intelligence},

pages = {180–196},

publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},

address = {Cham},

abstract = {Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence faces a significant challenge in implementing ethical behaviour in autonomous agents. The development of technologies that consider human values in the decision-making process of such agents is crucial. While this feature should be included in the agent's design objectives, the primary goal is to build value-aware agents that act appropriately in changing environments. This requires the creation of mechanisms that support the agent's own value system. This paper presents a model of an agent that makes decisions based on its value system and a value promotion scheme for available actions. The model uses a fuzzy measure to represent the value system, and aggregation operators to determine the action that best aligns with the agent's preferences. Schwartz's basic value theory and Choquet's discrete integral are used as an example of model implementation. Finally, the model is illustrated by determining the value alignment of different decisions in a simplified tax-paying context.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{VALE2023Fernandez,

title = {Value-Based Reasoning Scenario in Employee Hiring and Onboarding Using Answer Set Programming},

author = {Carmen Fernández-Martínez and Alberto Fernández},

editor = {Nardine Osman and Luc Steels},

doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-58202-8_15},

isbn = {978-3-031-58202-8},

year  = {2024},

date = {2024-01-01},

booktitle = {Value Engineering in Artificial Intelligence},

pages = {251–260},

publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},

address = {Cham},

abstract = {Privacy is one of the values that can be considered in value-based reasoning, mainly to avoid disclosing personal information and prevent, among others, age or gender discrimination. We propose a scenario of practical legal and ethical reasoning based on values that protect against the infringement of labour laws, social conventions, and moral norms in personnel selection and onboarding. It is envisaged as a mix of ethical and legal reasoner. The ethical reasoner focuses on two central human values: trustworthiness and privacy. This paper introduces a Legal and ethical reasoner based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) that enables explainable and trustworthy outcomes in recruiting processes whilst safeguarding users' privacy and disclosing avoidance of protected attributes (gender, religion, pregnancy status, etc.).},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{Karanik2023SSCt,

title = {Edge Service Allocation Based on Clustering Techniques},

author = {Marcelo Karanik and Iván Bernabé-Sánchez and Alberto Fernández},

editor = {Luis Fernando Castillo Ossa and Gustavo Isaza and Óscar Cardona and Omar Danilo Castrillón and Juan Manuel Corchado Rodriguez and Fernando De la Prieta Pintado},

doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-36957-5_37},

isbn = {978-3-031-36957-5},

year  = {2023},

date = {2023-01-01},

urldate = {2023-01-01},

booktitle = {Trends in Sustainable Smart Cities and Territories},

pages = {429–441},

publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},

address = {Cham},

abstract = {The expansion of the Internet of Things is leading to the emergence of new IoT environments where devices not only act as sensors or actuators but also provide computing, storage and network resources. These resources are close to the local network and have a great potential to deploy IoT services, this is called fog computing. One of the challenges in this context is deciding the allocation of services to suitable computing nodes where they can run. In this paper, we propose a clustering-based method to allocate services to computing nodes along edge-cloud computing environments considering both functional and computational capacities. Additionally, the proposed framework is explained and an experimental example is used to test four clustering strategies. The results show that the proposed clustering approach is an efficient method for service allocation to computing nodes and depending on the selected strategy different workload distributions are obtained. Finally, we present some considerations about the proposed model.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/paams/BrunsDDO22,

title = {A Collaborative Approach to Mobile Crowdsourcing Based on Data Stream 

 Learning},

author = {Ralf Bruns and Jeremias Dötterl and Jürgen Dunkel and Sascha Ossowski},

editor = {Alfonso González-Briones and Ana Almeida and Alberto Fernández and Alia El Bolock and Dalila Durães and Jaume Jordán and Fernando Lopes},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18697-4_7},

doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-18697-4_7},

year  = {2022},

date = {2022-01-01},

booktitle = {Highlights in Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, 

 and Complex Systems Simulation. The PAAMS Collection - International 

 Workshops of PAAMS 2022, LÁquila, Italy, July 13-15, 2022, Proceedings},

volume = {1678},

pages = {83--94},

publisher = {Springer},

series = {Communications in Computer and Information Science},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/paams/Bernabe0BO22,

title = {Towards Semantic Modelling of the Edge-Cloud Continuum},

author = {Iván Bernabé and Alberto Fernández and Holger Billhardt and Sascha Ossowski},

editor = {Alfonso González-Briones and Ana Almeida and Alberto Fernández and Alia El Bolock and Dalila Durães and Jaume Jordán and Fernando Lopes},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18697-4_6},

doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-18697-4_6},

year  = {2022},

date = {2022-01-01},

booktitle = {Highlights in Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, 

 and Complex Systems Simulation. The PAAMS Collection - International 

 Workshops of PAAMS 2022, LÁquila, Italy, July 13-15, 2022, Proceedings},

volume = {1678},

pages = {71--82},

publisher = {Springer},

series = {Communications in Computer and Information Science},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{10.1007/978-3-031-18697-4_8,

title = {On Balancing Fairness and Efficiency of Task Assignment in Agent Societies},

author = {Kendal Cousy and Marin Lujak and Alessio Salvatore and Alberto Fernández and Stefano Giordani},

editor = {Alfonso González-Briones and Ana Almeida and Alberto Fernandez and Alia El Bolock and Dalila Dur aes and Jaume Jordán and Fernando Lopes},

doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-18697-4_8},

year  = {2022},

date = {2022-01-01},

urldate = {2022-01-01},

booktitle = {Highlights in Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Complex Systems Simulation. The PAAMS Collection},

pages = {95--107},

publisher = {Springer International Publishing},

address = {Cham},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{10.1007/978-3-030-57799-5_13,

title = {Estimating Expected Student Academic Performance},

author = {Walter Orozco and Miguel Ángel Rodríguez-García and Alberto Fernández},

editor = {Álvaro Herrero and Carlos Cambra and Daniel Urda and Javier Sedano and Héctor Quintián and Emilio Corchado},

doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-57799-5_13},

isbn = {978-3-030-57799-5},

year  = {2020},

date = {2020-09-01},

booktitle = {The 11th International Conference on EUropean Transnational Educational (ICEUTE 2020)},

pages = {121--131},

publisher = {Springer International Publishing},

address = {Cham},

abstract = {In recent decades, society has a primary need for improving education systems. Predicting the performance of students has become a reference topic very analyzed by the research community. Currently, there are several cutting-edge technologies that make very easy to collect educational data in institutional systems due to the new information management systems where almost everything is digitalized. The analysis of this information offers unique opportunities that have a direct impact on students, instructors and academic institutions programs. Concretely, we propose a modular system to evaluate teaching performance by considering several primary factors related to students learning process. In this work, we present the first module, a statistical model that aims at obtaining the expected student's achievements in a particular course. We first analyzed students' performance primary factors on Higher Education Systems. To identify these factors, we have conducted a literature review. Then, we examine three different techniques to build the prediction model: Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). To select the suitable technique, we carried out a variety of experiments by using a real dataset from University of Santa Elena (Ecuador). The achieved experiments revealed promising results.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{10.1007/978-3-030-51999-5_30,

title = {Legal Implications of Novel Taxi Assignment Strategies},

author = {Holger Billhardt and José-Antonio Santos and Alberto Fernández and Mar Moreno-Rebato and Sascha Ossowski and José A Rodríguez-García},

editor = {De La Prieta F. et al.},

doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-51999-5_30},

isbn = {978-3-030-51999-5},

year  = {2020},

date = {2020-07-06},

booktitle = {Highlights in Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Trust-worthiness. The PAAMS Collection},

pages = {361--372},

publisher = {Springer International Publishing},

address = {Cham},

abstract = {In the last years, many novel applications have appeared that promote the provision of services or activities in a collaborative way. Examples of such proposals are collaborative transportation services (uber, glovo, amazon flex, etc.), crowdsourcing, exchange help services among citizens, and others. The intrinsic idea behind such systems is to take advantage of existing ``capacities'' for providing new services or incrementing the efficiency of daily tasks of people at a low cost. Also, many researchers have focused and are analysing novel ideas and approaches in this direction. The concept of Smart Cities is a clear representation of this hype and provides a playground for novel approaches where the aim is to provide a high level of services to citizens in an optimized and thus, more efficient way. As a result of this research effort, many proposals have been and are suggested that could be deployed in the real world. However, such proposals also bring up multiple non-technical issues that need to be tackled before they can be actually implemented in practice. In this sense, in this paper we analyse legal implications of a proposal for collaborative service provision. In particular, we analyse the legal issues related to a recent work on taxi assignments with compensation from the standpoint of the Spanish legislation. From this exercise, we extract a set of topics and requirements, which need to be addressed so as to pave the way for the potential real-world deployment of such a system in a future.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{10.5555/3398761.3399025,

title = {A Decentralized Multi-Agent Coordination Method for Dynamic and Constrained Production Planning},

author = {Marin Lujak and Alberto Fernandez and Eva Onaindia},

url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3398761.3399025},

isbn = {9781450375184},

year  = {2020},

date = {2020-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems},

pages = {1913–1915},

publisher = {International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems},

address = {Auckland, New Zealand},

series = {AAMAS ’20},

keywords = {artificial intelligence, distributed optimization, multi-agent systems},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{Fern_ndez_Mart_nez_2019,

title = {AI in Recruiting. Multi-agent Systems Architecture for Ethical and Legal Auditing},

author = {María Carmen Fernández-Martínez and Alberto Fernández},

doi = {10.24963/ijcai.2019/903},

isbn = {978-0-9992411-4-1},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-08-10},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Doctoral Consortium Track},

pages = {6428-6429},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{10.1007/978-3-030-17294-7_16,

title = {Balancing Strategies for Bike Sharing Systems},

author = {Alberto Fernández and Holger Billhardt and Sandra Timón and Carlos Ruiz and Óscar Sánchez and Iván Bernabé},

editor = {Marin Lujak},

doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-17294-7_16},

isbn = {978-3-030-17294-7},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-01-01},

booktitle = {Agreement Technologies},

pages = {208--222},

publisher = {Springer International Publishing},

address = {Cham},

abstract = {The increase of population in big cities has produced several problems related to mobility of humans in the city, such as congestions, CO2 emissions, etc. Lately, governments are trying to mitigate this situation by promoting the use of greener means of transportation such as electrical vehicles or bikes. In this paper, we focus on station-based bike sharing systems (BSS). This type of infrastructure (bikes and parking docks) is shared by many users. However, there are some inefficiencies in their management due to imbalanced situations in which some stations fail to provide the service (bike hires or returns) because they are empty or full. We tackle this problem by suggesting users to take (or return) bikes from stations with the goal of keeping the system as balanced as possible. We evaluate our proposal with Bike3S, a bike sharing system simulator developed for testing these types of strategies.},

keywords = {MAS},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{10.1007/978-3-030-17294-7_14,

title = {Dynamic Delivery Plan Adaptation in Open Systems},

author = {Miguel Ángel Rodríguez-García and Alberto Fernández and Holger Billhardt},

editor = {Marin Lujak},

doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-17294-7_14},

isbn = {978-3-030-17294-7},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-01-01},

booktitle = {Agreement Technologies},

pages = {190--198},

publisher = {Springer International Publishing},

address = {Cham},

keywords = {MAS},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{10.1007/978-3-030-24299-2_30,

title = {Inclusive AI in Recruiting. Multi-agent Systems Architecture for Ethical and Legal Auditing},

author = {Carmen Fernández and Alberto Fernández},

editor = {Fernando De La Prieta and Alfonso González-Briones and Pawel Pawleski and Davide Calvaresi and Elena Del Val and Fernando Lopes and Vicente Julian and Eneko Osaba and Ramón Sánchez-Iborra},

doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-24299-2_30},

isbn = {978-3-030-24299-2},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-01-01},

booktitle = {Highlights of Practical Applications of Survivable Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. The PAAMS Collection},

pages = {326--329},

publisher = {Springer International Publishing},

address = {Cham},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{Martnez2019OntologiesAA,

title = {Ontologies and AI in Recruiting. A Rule-Based Approach to Address Ethical and Legal Auditing},

author = {Carmen Fernández-Martínez and Alberto Fernández},

url = {http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2548},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium of the 18th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2019)},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}