PLoS Biology | http://biology.plosjournals.org Symbiosis, an interdependent relationship between two species, is an important driver of evolutionary novelty and ecological diversity. Microbial symbionts in particular have been major evolutionary catalysts throughout the 4 billion years of life on earth and have largely shaped the evolution of complex organisms. Endosymbiosis is a specifi c type...

Effective and efficient requirements negotiation is a key to the success of software development efforts. For large projects, this can be especially difficult to do effectively and efficiently when combining input from non-co-located experts and reaching consensus among the different stakeholders (e.g., end-users, developers, software assurance, customers) as well as among the different aspects...

This paper addresses some issues involved in applying the eventcondition-action (ECA) rule paradigm of active databases to policies—collections of general principles specifying the desired behavior of a system. We use a declarative policy description language PDL, in which policies are formulated as sets of ECA rules. The main contribution of the paper is a framework for detecting action confli...

In a multiagent system, conflicts may arise because of two basic reasons: 1) different agents have contrasting goals; 2) different agents have inconsistent knowledge. This situation can originate when agents are autonomous and strongly motivated by their own interests, and when heterogeneous agents, with different skills, ‘histories’ and beliefs, coexist in a dynamic environment. This paper is ...

Conflict resolution is a classic field of Social Science research. However, with conflicts now also emerging in virtual environments, a new field of research has been developing in which Artificial Intelligence and particularly Ambient Intelligence are interesting. As result, the field of Online Dispute Resolution emerged as the use (in part or entirely) of technological tools to solve disputes...

Conflict resolution is the process of reaching a decision using the opinions of multiple knowledge sources as input. It integrates two closely related concepts: reasoning about uncertainty and constraint propagation as applied to problems involving knowledge integration. This paper introduces the concept of characteristic error conflict resolution which is unique in treating each knowledge sour...

This series focuses on the interface between indigenous culture and conflict resolution and peacebuilding. African culture, viewed as knowledge, practices and institutions, does not form a large part of the tools and mechanisms for resolving conflict and building peace in Africa. This is due to the prominence of external initiatives of conflict resolution and peace initiatives based on liberal ...

This paper discusses a number of ways of classifying inter-agent conflict, and offer an overview of the informal dialogue typology proposed by Walton and Krabbe [13]. A formalisation of this typology is summarised, and the account is shown to facilitate a coherent approach to the various classes of conflict.

The resolution of temporary syntactic ambiguity involves not only the reanalysis of syntactic structure but also the resolution of the conflict between the new correct interpretation and the initial incorrect parse. The current study investigated the contribution of domain-general conflict resolution ability as indexed by performance on an n-back task (with lures) and the online resolution of t...