Quality in its contemporary incarnation is commonly referred to as organizational excellence, enterprise excellence, business excellence, or performance excellence. While technology may serve as a key enabler of enterprise excellence, enterprise excellence itself is in large enabled by the human dimension both in terms of ideation and effort. The human dimension manifests in many ways, with peo...

The target article argues that whole groups can act as interactors in an evolutionary process. We believe that Smaldino's discussion would be advanced by a more thorough analysis of the appropriate replicators and lineages for this model. We show that cultural evolution is necessarily a separate process from cultural group selection, and we also illustrate that the two processes may influence e...

The interaction between age and culture can have various implications for cognition as age represents the effect of biological processes whereas culture represents the effect of sustaining experiences. Nevertheless, their interaction has rarely been examined. Thus, based on the fact that Asians are more intuitive in reasoning than Americans, we examined how this cultural difference might intera...

The study examines the relationship between the structure of cross-national relations and the dyadic cultural similarity of 19 countries over 10 years, based on the assumption that patterns of interaction between state, private sector, and civil society actors influence national cultures. The relations analyzed include trade, military alliances, IGO memberships, phone calls, and military confli...

This paper discusses the design and evaluation of the system MIXER (Moderating Interactions for Cross-Cultural Empathic Relationships), which applies a novel approach to the education of children in cultural sensitivity. MIXER incorporates intelligent affective and interactive characters, including a model of a Theory of Mind mechanism, in a simulated virtual world. We discuss the relevant peda...

In this paper, we describe a modeling framework which allows us to reason about the social-cultural behavior of humans in interaction scenarios. The objective is to provide explanatory and predictive power to an agent or robot which either witnesses or participates in the interaction: why have the human agents behaved the way they are and what kind of behavior can I expect as an answer to certa...

The paper aims at exploring the potential of using portable devices in managing interaction in (semi)Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) systems reconstructing cultural heritage objects and environments. The main advantage in this innovative mix of technologies is that portable devices are easily handled and enable a friendly interaction to the majority of users, with a reduction in learning time n...

The study reported in this paper explores the validity of the hypothesis that Human-Computer interaction displays the same dynamics as HumanHuman interaction. The study also addresses the issue of universality and cultural dependency of social responses in Human-Computer interactions. A series of psychological experiments are conducted both with American and Japanese participants on their socia...

Among various cultural models, the dichotomy of static versus dynamic models has provided a fertile ground for research. Although a number of static models are suggested, the dominant trend in almost all static models is provided by Hofstede who focuses on cultural differences along four major dimensions (power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity) and reduces “the co...