In mobile computing, communicative acts are not free. Costs such as power and bandwidth consumption are prominent issues. In addition, resources vary widely across hardware and operating context. Agents in these settings must account for these costs and adapt to available capabilities. This poster presents a planning optimization formalization of this problem, enabling service-based agents to r...

After an initial functional analysis of a participant's aggression showed unclear outcomes, we conducted preference and reinforcer assessments to identify preferred forms of attention that may maintain problem behavior. Next, we conducted an extended functional analysis that included a modified attention condition. Results showed that the participant's aggression was maintained by access to pre...

Gestural communication is a modality considered in the literature as a candidate for determining the ancestral prerequisites of the emergence of human language. As reported in captive chimpanzees and human children, a study in captive baboons revealed that a communicative gesture elicits stronger degree of right-hand bias than non-communicative actions. It remains unclear if it is the communica...

The Social Performance Framework describes an approach to modularize the design of Embodied Conversational Agents. The focus is on the problem of generating verbal and nonverbal behavior that carries out an agent’s communicative intent. The framework proposes modules and corresponding XML based interfaces that make a very clear distinction between intent and behavior. This division of labor bet...

The issue of representing speech rhythm is understood in this paper as the search for relevant primary parameters that will allow the formalisation of speech rhythm. Current speech synthesisers show that phonological models are not satisfactory with respect to the modelling of speech rhythmicity. Our analysis indicates that this may be in part related to the formalisation of rhythmic representa...

The paper addresses the problem of agents compatibility and their conformance to protocols. We assume that the specification of protocols is given in an action theory by means of temporal constraints and, in particular, communicative actions are defined in terms of their effects and preconditions on the social state of the protocol. We show that the problem of verifying the conformance of an ag...

The theory of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) is typically concerned with a definition of the rational processes within the agents, or the communicative processes between agents. In this paper we are primarily interested in the latter, and in particular the problem of ensuring the correctness of communication. We address the problem by applying model checking techniques to protocols which express int...

This paper briefly outlines observa.tions fi'om texts made with respect to rhetorical relations and communicative goals. Then it will be shown how these ol)servations have been encoded into knowledge resources which are part of an integrated architecture for the gelmration of multimedia output. Both communicative goals and rhetorical relations are virtual constructs surface signals hint at thei...

Gestures are an integral part of speaking. They allow expression of thoughts that are difficult to articulate. They promote fluency of speech. Can gestures also facilitate reasoning, problem solving, and other cognitive processes? In the present task, people assembled an object and then made a video explaining how to assemble, using speech and gesture or gesture alone. A control group merely re...