The terms “context” and “situation” are often used interchangeably or to denote a variety of concepts. This paper aims to show that these are two different but related concepts and it reifies their difference within the framework of design agents. The external world of an agent is described as the aggregation of all entities that the agent could possibly sense or effect, where context is from i...

This paper describes a methodology and supporting software tool that has been developed at AIAI for helping to model the decisions that people take in emergency situations o shore. We believe that this is the rst time that people's decision-making has been incorporated into egress and evacuation models. Our work is therefore an important rst step in the introduction of improved approaches to th...

Shared control (also known as continuous haptic guidance or haptically active controls) has recently been introduced in car driving. With shared control, the driver receives continuous force feedback on the gas pedal or steering wheel, so that human and machine conduct the driving task simultaneously. Experiments in driving simulators have shown that shared control reduces control variability a...

Article history: Received 21 November 2006 Revised 15 May 2008 Available online 11 April 2009

BACKGROUND Emotional context may play a crucial role in movement production. According to simulation theories, emotional states affect motor systems. The aim of this study was to compare postural responses assessed by posturography and electromyography when subjects were instructed to imagine themselves in a painful or a non-painful situation. METHODS Twenty-nine subjects (22.3 ± 3.7 years) p...

Looking at the operation of forming neat α-reducts as a functor, with α an infinite ordinal, we investigate when such a functor obtained by truncating ω dimensions, has a right adjoint. We show that the neat reduct functor for representable cylindric algebras does not have a right adjoint, while that of polyadic algebras is an equivalence. We relate this categorical result to several amalgamati...

The effects of utterances such as cue phrases, keep-turn markers, and grounding signals cannot be characterized as changes to a shared record of the propositions under discussed: the simplest (and arguably most natural) way of characterizing the meaning of these utterances is in terms of a theory in which the conversational score is seen as a record of the discourse situation, or at least of th...

We investigate Horty’s action constants and their functioning in action obligations of the form “In the interest of group F of agents, group G of agents ought to perform action K” and in conditional action obligations of the form “If group H of agents performs action L, then in the interest of group F of agents, group G of agents ought to perform action K”. We show that a straightforward Horty-...

We use the idea that actions performed in a conversation become part of the common ground as the basis for a model of context that reconciles in a general and systematic fashion the differences between the theories of discourse context used for reference resolution, intention recognition, and dialogue management. We start from the treatment of anaphoric accessibility developed in DRT, and we sh...