ABSTRACT Valuations of Possible States (VPS) A Quantitative Framework for Analysis of Priva.pdfVIP

Valuations of Possible States (VPS): A Quantitative Framework for Analysis of Privacy Loss Among Collaborative Personal Assistant Agents Rajiv T. Maheswaran, Jonathan P. Pearce, Pradeep Varakantham, Emma Bowring and Milind Tambe University of Southern California (maheswar,jppearce,varakant,bowring, tambe)@ ABSTRACT ity by performing routine or mundane tasks and expediting coordi- For agents deployed in real-world settings, such as businesses, uni- nated activities [1]. To effectively accomplish these tasks, agents must be endowed with information about their users, that would versities and research laboratories, it is critical that agents protect their individual users’ privacy when interacting with others entities. preferably be kept private. However, in domains where humans Indeed, privacy is recognized as a key motivating factor in design and their agent counterparts have to collaborate with other human- of several multiagent algorithms, such as distributed constraint op- agent pairs, and agents are given the autonomy to negotiate on their timization (DCOP) algorithms. Unfortunately, rigorous and gen- users’ behalves, the exchange of private information is necessary eral quantitative metrics for analysis and comparison of such mul- to achieve a good team solution. Some of these situations include tiagent algorithms with respect to privacy loss are lacking. This meeting scheduling, where users’ valuations of certain blocks of paper takes a key step towards developing a general quantitativ