The rigorous and comprehensive verification of communication-based software is an important engineering challenge in distributed systems. Drawn from our industrial collaborations [33,28] on Scribble, a choreography description language based on multiparty session types, this paper proposes a dynamic verification framework for structured interruptible conversation programming. We first present o...

In 1969, Gordon Pask published a paper that explicitly proposed a vital connection between cybernetics and architecture. “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics” (Pask, 1969) was one outcome of an extraordinary series of debates and presentations centred around the theme of limits to science presented at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London. The proceedings we...

We would like to argue for a uni ed formal theory to represent and allow automated reasoning about both the semantic and the pragmatic aspects of conversational context, particularly the common ground between conversational participants. Central to this theory is the hypothesis that speech act occurrences are recorded in the common ground and can serve as the basis for a model of language proce...

In this paper, we present a set of measures to quantify certain properties of threaded discussions, which are ubiquitous in online learning platforms. In particular, we address how to measure the redundancy of posts, the compactness of topics, and the degree of hierarchy in sub-threads. This preliminary work would very much benefit from discussion and serves as a starting point for ultimately c...

The rapid growth of the Internet, coupled with improved multimedia capabilities in computing, has expanded the options for using technology to support collaborative learning. Asynchronous electronic conferencing is commonly used to support distributed discourse-based learning. Mind Bridges is a Web-based threaded discussion forum with support for embedded multimedia content. This paper describe...

Inspired by a European project, PHEME, that requires the close analysis of Twitter-based conversations in order to look at the spread of rumors via social media, this paper has two objectives. The first of these is to take the analysis of microblogs back to first principles and lay out what microblog analysis should look like as a foundational programme of work. The other is to describe how thi...