Children hold the belief that social categories have essences. We investigatedwhat kinds of properties children feel licensed to infer about a person based on social category membership. Seventy-two 4–6-year-oldswere introduced tonovel social categories defined as having one internal – psychological or biological – and one external – behavioral or physical – property. For half of the participan...

The Problem: One of the fundamental social skills for humans is a theory of other minds. This set of skills allows us to attribute beliefs, goals, and desires to other individuals. To take part in normal human social dynamics, a robot must not only know about the properties of objects, but also the properties of animate agents in the world. This research project attempts to implement basic soci...

Taking inspiration from real-life friendship formation patterns, we propose a new generative model of evolving social networks. Each person in the network has a distribution over social interaction spheres, which we term “contexts.” The model allows for birth and death of links and addition of new people. Model parameters are learned via Gibbs sampling, and results are demonstrated on real soci...

Simulation is increasingly being used to examine epidemic behaviour and assess potential management options. The utility of the simulations rely on the ability to replicate those aspects of the social structure that are relevant to epidemic transmission. One approach is to generate networks with desired social properties. Recent research by Keeling and his colleagues has generated simulated net...

In this paper we address the problem of defining social roles in MAS. Social roles provide the basic structure of social institutions and organizations. We start from the properties attributed to roles both in the MAS and the Object Oriented community, and we use them in an ontological analysis of the notion of social role. We thus identify as the main properties of social roles being definitio...

The rapid growth of social networking sites enables people to connect to each other more conveniently than ever. With easy-to-use social media, people contribute and consume contents, leading to a new form of human interaction and the emergence of online collective behavior. In this chapter, we aim to understand group structures and properties by extracting and profiling communities in social m...

In this paper we take a step towards using Argumentation in Social Networks and introduce Social Abstract Argumentation Frameworks, an extension of Dung’s Abstract Argumentation Frameworks that incorporates social voting. We propose a class of semantics for these new Social Abstract Argumentation Frameworks and prove some important non-trivial properties which are crucial for their applicabilit...

Social intelligence in natural and artificial systems is usually measured by the evaluation of associated traits or tasks that are deemed to represent some facets of social behaviour. The amalgamation of these traits is then used to configure the intuitive notion of social intelligence. Instead, in this paper we start from a parametrised definition of social intelligence as the expected perform...

AIMS AND METHOD To develop a scale to measure social satisfaction in people with substance use disorders and to test its psychometric properties. The rationale is that social satisfaction is more universal and relevant to treatment planning than assessing social problems. The new Social Satisfaction Questionnaire (SSQ) was derived from an existing social problems questionnaire and validation wa...