Arnor: Modeling Social Intelligence via Norms to Engineer Privacy-Aware Personal Agents

Nirav Ajmeri (North Carolina State University), Pradeep K. Murukannaiah (Rochester Institute of Technology), Hui Guo (North Carolina State University), Munindar P. Singh (North Carolina State University)

Abstract

We seek to address the challenge of engineering socially intelligent personal agents that are privacy-aware. We propose Arnor, a method, including a metamodel based on social constructs. Arnor incorporates social norms and goes beyond existing agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) methods by systematically capturing how a personal agent's actions influence the social experience it delivers. We conduct two empirical studies to evaluate Arnor. First, via a multiphase developer study, we show that Arnor simplifies application development. Second, via simulation experiments, we show that Arnor provides improved privacy-preserving social experience to end users than personal agents engineered using a traditional AOSE method.