The sacred values of a community are critical in understanding cultural conflict. When an attempt is made to trade a sacred value with a secular good, it evokes feelings of anger (tabootradeoff) but less so when that sacred value is traded off with another sacred value (tragic). Previous work has shown that participants who expressed sacred values for an issue were more resistant to taboo than ...

Billions of people rely on correct and efficient execution of large systems, such as the distributed systems that power Google and Facebook. Yet these systems are enormously complex and are challenging to build and understand. My research aims to improve the design, implementation, and operation of large systems by using techniques from the areas of systems and software engineering. I design, i...

Ivan Sag died on September 10, 2013, after a long illness. He is survived by his wife, Stanford sociolinguistics professor Penny Eckert. In a career spanning four decades, he published over 100 articles and 10 books, centered on the theme of developing precise, implementable, testable, psychologically plausible, and scalable models of natural language, especially syntax and semantics. Sag earne...

Almost 30 years have passed since the initial publication of Ivan Illich’s Limits to Medicine. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health. A medieval historian who has been described as one of the world’s great thinkers, Illich introduced his iconoclastic work with the indictment, “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.” The book makes a passing reference to radiology ...

The present paper aims for the most part to prove the fact that religious and spiritual places and above all, mosques play major roles within Islamic urban areas. They are in fact the basis of civil infrastructures. A historical analysis focusing on where mosques stand in Islamic urban areas reveals that mosques have always been the center of development and growth and that they must be studied...

This paper describes IVAN (Integrated Virtual Agent Network), a project that proposes to improve online marketplaces, specifically those that involve the trading of nontangible goods and services. IVAN is an intermediary architecture intended as a generalized platform for the specification and brokering of heterogeneous goods and services. IVAN makes it possible for both buyers and sellers alik...

Matthias Anlauff, Kestrel Institute, USA Cristian Borcea, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA Bart Dhoedt, University of Gent, Belgium Laura Marie Feeney, SICS, Kista, Sweden Bertil Folliot, University of Paris, France Isabelle Guerin Lassous, INRIA, France Gilles Grimaud, University of Lille, France Jean-Louis Lanet, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, France Stephan Olariu, Old Dominion University, U...