The Ambient Calculus was developed by Cardelli and Gordon as a formal framework to study issues of mobility and migrant code. We present a type system for the calculus, parameterized by security constraints expressing where a given ambient may reside and where it may be dissolved. A subject reduction property then guarantees that a welltyped process never violates these constraints; additionall...

This thesis explores the relationship between phonetic reduction and the pragmatic organisation of conversation, and the treatment of this relationship in phonological representation. It reports on an empirical investigation of pragmatic constraints on reduction patterns in a corpus of spontaneous Dutch conversation, combining phonetic analysis and Conversation Analysis. The starting point of t...

For the successful management of interactions in open multiagent systems, a social framework is needed to complement a standard semantics and interaction protocols for agent communication. In this paper a rights-based framework in which interaction protocols and conversation policies acquire their meaning is presented. Rights improve interaction and facilitate social action in multi-agent domai...

While web service technology is becoming a de facto standard for integration of business applications, it is also rapidly emerging as an effective means for achieving inter-operability among the devices in network centric ubiquitous systems. When such a web service enabled device engages in a conversation with a service provider, it becomes necessary to define an interaction logic required betw...

Businesses deploy chatter bots to engage in text based conversations with customers that are intended resolve their issues. However, these chatter bots are only effective in exchanges consisting of question answer pairs, where the context may switch with every pair. I am designing a semantic architecture that enables chatter bots to hold short conversations, where context is maintained througho...

BACKGROUND Those attempting to implement changes in health care settings often find that intervention efforts do not progress as expected. Unexpected outcomes are often attributed to variation and/or error in implementation processes. We argue that some unanticipated variation in intervention outcomes arises because unexpected conversations emerge during intervention attempts. The purpose of th...

This article outlines a three-party conversation corpus built by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (Section 2) and introduces three analyses that contribute to the development of Conversational Informatics: The features of turn-taking in three-person conversation (Section 3); assessment sequential patterns that appeared in the data (Section 4); and shared knowl...

Over the past year, several hundred Army officers have discussed tactical and military management scenarios using an electronic collaborative learning environment. The scenarios were either “Think Like a Commander” scenarios developed at Ft. Leavenworth or “Tacit Knowledge of Military Leadership” scenarios developed jointly by the Army Research Institute and Yale University. A standard threaded...

Although it is conceded (as argued by many) that distinct knowledge domains do present particular problems of coming to know, in this paper it is argued that it is possible (and useful) to construct a domain independent model of the processes of coming to know, one in which observers share understandings and do so in agreed ways. The model in question is part of the conversation theory (CT) of ...