User problems with large information spaces multiply in complexity when we enter the digital domain. Virtual information environments can offer 3-D representations, reconfigurations and access to large databases that can overwhelm many users’ abilities to filter and represent. As a result, users frequently experience disorientation in navigating large digital spaces to locate and use informatio...

The term “believability” is often used to describe the expectations concerning virtual agents. In this paper we analyze which factors influence the believability of the agent acting as software assistant. We consider several factors such as embodiment, communicative behavior, as well as emotional capabilities. We conduct a perceptive study where we analyze the role of plausible and/or appropria...

The emergence of dialogue on social medial neccessitates the development of new dialogue processing models. We argue that to address coherence and to infer the implicatures of social dialogue it is vital to understand the social aspirations of the dialogue participants. One key aspect of understanding social dialogue is to understand the intentions and goals of participants. In this paper, we p...

Socio-cognitive action reproduces and changes both social and cognitive structures. The analytical distinction between these dimensions of structure provides us with richer models of scientific development. In this study, I assume that (i) social structures organize expectations into belief structures that can be attributed to individuals and communities; (ii) expectations are specified in scho...

The Dynamic Trust-based Resources (DyTR) system applies a dynamic notion of trust to ad hoc network resources. DyTR continuously assesses the trustworthiness of entities over time based on system events and controls network resources according to current levels of trust. For dynamic trust assessment, DyTR utilizes a socio-cognitive model of trust, a formal model of the essential concepts and ch...

The social intelligence hypothesis, which posits that the challenges of life in complex social environments drive cognitive evolution, enjoys widespread theoretical and empirical support. Recent years have seen the emergence of a novel variant of this hypothesis, suggesting that cooperative breeding is associated with the elaboration of socio-cognitive abilities. With this cooperative breeding ...

Literature about Industrial Districts has largely emphasized the importance of both economic and social factors in determining the competitiveness of these particular firms' clusters. For thirty years, the Industrial District productive and organizational model represented an alternative to the integrated model of fordist enterprise. Nowadays, the district model suffers from competitive gaps, l...

Collaborative work is considered as a way to improve productivity and value generation in construction. However, recent research demonstrates that socio-cognitive factors related to fragmentation of specialized knowledge may hinder team performance. New methods based on theories of practice are emerging in Computer Supported Collaborative Work and organisational learning to break these knowledg...

This paper reports on the ongoing work and research involved in the development of a socio-technical model of urban water systems. Socio-technical, means the model is not so much concerned with the technical or biophysical aspects of urban water systems, but rather with the social and institutional implications of the urban water infrastructure and vice versa. A socio-technical model, in the vi...

The increased diffusion of the Internet has made computer-mediated communication (CMC) very popular. However, a difficult question arises for psychologists and communication researchers: "What are the communicative characteristics of CMC?" According to the "cues-filtered-out" approach, CMC lacks the specifically relational features (social cues), which enable the interlocutors to identify corre...