RI: Small: Principles of Normative Multiagent Systems for Decentralized Applications

Emerging technologies such as blockchain and the Internet of Things offer opportunities for multiple autonomous parties (people or organizations) to collaborate in new ways that respect everyone's interests. This consideration applies as well to building software applications involving multiple agents, however our ways of building these software applications have not kept up with these opportunities. Most current approaches focus on data and control from the unitary perspective of a single organization. This project seeks to overcome two conceptual challenges in multiagent system design: over-constrained interactions that interfere with participants' autonomy, and the characterization of interactions in a manner that is not meaningful to humans. This project, dubbed Mia, aims to enable innovative applications that promote users' autonomy with anticipated benefits in the quality of life for users as well as gains in efficiency for users and enterprises. In particular, enabling decentralization without compromising on rigor could lead to new ways of realizing scientific and business interactions and thereby provide new pathways for value generation in society.

This project seeks to support interoperation of autonomous parties for decentralized applications by investigating theoretical models and programming techniques for multiagent systems. The Mia framework seeks to model interactions between autonomous parties via communication protocols that specify messages in support of fully decentralized enactments. First, Mia will investigate ways to specify multiagent protocols such that a protocol can be effectively enacted by decentralized participants, each acting autonomously based on its local knowledge and private decision making, and one participant can verify the compliance of another participant with respect to the protocol. Second, Mia will investigate how autonomous parties may achieve alignment on their joint activities through a formalization of norms modeled as directed deontic constructs. Third, Mia will investigate ways in which to elicit stakeholder requirements that respects their autonomy; mine norms from logged interactions; and systematically induce flexible protocols from a model formulated in terms of norms.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.