@conference {1509594,
	title = {Valuations of Possible States (VPS): A Quantitative Framework for Analysis of Privacy Loss Among Collaborative Personal Assistant Agents},
	booktitle = {Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS)},
	year = {2005},
	abstract = {For agents deployed in real-world settings, such as businesses, universities and research laboratories, it is critical that agents protect
their individual users{\textquoteright} privacy when interacting with others entities.
Indeed, privacy is recognized as a key motivating factor in design
of several multiagent algorithms, such as distributed constraint optimization (DCOP) algorithms. Unfortunately, rigorous and general quantitative metrics for analysis and comparison of such multiagent algorithms with respect to privacy loss are lacking. This
paper takes a key step towards developing a general quantitative
model from which one can analyze and generate metrics of privacy loss by introducing the VPS (Valuations of Possible States)
framework. VPS is shown to capture various existing measures of
privacy created for specific domains of distributed constraint satisfactions problems (DCSPs). The utility of VPS is further illustrated
via analysis of DCOP algorithms, when such algorithms are used
by personal assistant agents to schedule meetings among users. In
addition, VPS allows us to quantitatively evaluate the properties of
several privacy metrics generated through qualitative notions. We
obtain the unexpected result that decentralization does not automatically guarantee superior protection of privacy.},
	author = {Rajiv T. Maheswaran and Jonathan P. Pearce and Varakantham, Pradeep and Bowring, Emma and Tambe, Milind}
}
