In this paper, we describe a framework for specifying communicative multi-agent systems, using a theory of action based on the situation calculus to describe the effects of actions on the world and on the mental states of agents; and the concurrent, logic programming language ConGolog to specify the actions performed by each agent. Since ConGolog has a well-defined semantics, the specifications...

We view group decision making as a collaborative process, where decision makers can establish a common belief on the dimensions of the problem by following a series of well-de®ned communicative actions. Having ®rst de®ned these actions, this paper reports on the exploitation of recent advances in information and communication technology, which can be used to: (i) remove the communication impedi...

Children are judicious social learners. They may be particularly sensitive to communicative actions done pedagogically for their benefit, as such actions may mark important, generalizable information. Three experiments (N = 224) found striking differences in preschoolers' inductive generalization and exploration of a novel functional property, depending on whether identical evidence for the pro...

This paper discusses a planner of the semantics of utterances, whose essential design is an epistemic theorem prover. The planner was designed for the purpose of planning communicative actions, whose effects are famously unknowable and unobservable by the doer/speaker, and depend on the beliefs of and inferences made by the recipient/hearer. The fully implemented model can achieve goals that do...

Believability is necessary for agents to establish intimate, real-time collaborations with humans in an interactive game environment. In this paper, the authors model sophisticated interaction patterns to improve believability by adapting Herbert Clark’s joint activity theory. The authors use virtual basketball as an environment, where many communicative scenarios occur and common ground knowle...

Teaching with evaluative feedback involves expectations about how a learner will interpret rewards and punishments. We formalize two hypotheses of how a teacher implicitly expects a learner to interpret feedback – a reward-maximizing model based on standard reinforcement learning and an action-feedback model based on research on communicative intent – and describe a virtual animal-training task...

Within multiagent teams research, existing approaches commonly assume agents have perfect knowledge regarding the decision process guiding their teammates’ actions. More recently, ad hoc teamwork was introduced to address situations where an agent must coordinate with a variety of potential teammates, including teammates with unknown behavior. This paper examines the communication of intentions...

In this paper we present a formal framework for social agents. The social agents consist of four components: the information component (containing knowledge and belief), the action component, the motivational component (where goals, intentions, etc. play a role) and the social component (containing aspects of speech acts and relations between agents). The main aim of this work was to describe a...

In this paper, we develop a formal framework for analysing the flow of information and knowledge through social networks. Specifically, we propose a multi-agent epistemic logic in which we can represent and reason about communicative actions based on social networks and the resulting knowledge and ignorance of agents. We apply this logic to formally analyse the “Revolt or Stay-at-home” problem ...

Building animated conversational agents requires developing a fine-grained analysis of the motions and meanings available to interlocutors in face-to-face conversation and implementing strategies for using these motions and meanings to communicate effectively. In this paper, we sketch our efforts to characterize people’s facial displays of uncertainty in face-to-face conversation. We analyze em...