Multicultural situations are not a new phenomenon in the World history : in the Middle East and the Mediterranean World, a multiplicity of cultures coexisted in rural areas as well as in cities since Antiquity. From the time of Alexander the Great, Greek speaking urban elites dominated lower groups pertaining to a wide variety of languages, religions and cultural traditions from Egypt to Centra...

In seeking to understand the root causes of the events of 9/11 many accounts have turned to Samuel P. Huntington’s provocative and controversial thesis of a ‘clash of civilizations’, arousing strong debate. Evidence from the 1995-2001 waves of the World Values Study allows us, for the first time, to examine an extensive body of empirical evidence relating to this debate. Comparative analysis of...

In the context of a homogeneous universe, we note that the appearance of aggressively expanding advanced life is geometrically similar to the process of nucleation and bubble growth in a first-order cosmological phase transition. We exploit this similarity to describe the dynamics of life saturating the universe on a cosmic scale, adapting the phase transition model to incorporate probability d...

In this short essay, we discuss some basic features of cognitive activity at several different space-time scales: from neural networks in the brain to civilizations. One motivation for such comparative study is its heuristic value. Attempts to better understand the functioning of"wetware"involved in cognitive activities of central nervous system by comparing it with a computing device have a lo...

Afghanistan has held a strategic position throughout history. It has been inhabited since the Paleolithic and later became a crossroad for expanding civilizations and empires. Afghanistan's location, history, and diverse ethnic groups present a unique opportunity to explore how nations and ethnic groups emerged, and how major cultural evolutions and technological developments in human history h...

In this work, we investigate whether the cultural idiosyncrasies found in humanhuman interaction may be transferred to human-computer interaction. With the aim of designing a culture-sensitive dialogue system, we designed a user study creating a dialogue in a domain that has the potential capacity to reveal cultural differences. The dialogue contains different options for the system output acco...

This paper introduces a new learning technology for classroom learning. The system and practice is called “Livenotes” and is motivated by the empirical success of peer learning methods, and by theoretical considerations of distributed dialogue among student peers as a facilitator of learning. The technical part of Livenotes is a shared whiteboard running on wireless handheld computers. We descr...

Argumentation has proved to be a very influential reasoning mechanism particularly in the context of multi agent systems. In this paper we introduce PADUA (Protocol for Argumentation Dialogue Using Association Rules), a novel argumentation formalism that dynamically mines Association Rules (ARs) from the case background as a means to: (i) generate the arguments exchanged among dialogue particip...

Recent years have seen a growing recognition of the central role of affect and motivation in learning. In particular, nonverbal behaviors such as posture and gesture provide key channels signaling affective and motivational states. Developing a clear understanding of these mechanisms will inform the development of personalized learning environments that promote successful affective and motivati...