Imagine a robot that is executing a program on-line, and, insofar as it is reasonable to do so, it wishes to continue with this on-line program execution, no matter what exogenous events occur in the world. Execution monitoring is the robot's process of observing the world for discrepancies between the actual world and its internal representation of it, and recovering from such discrepancies. W...

Presented as the Distinguished Lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 1, 2008, this article rethinks central assumptions of the interaction order as conceptualized by Goffman and others with respect to global domains of activity.1 It proposes two new concepts, that of the synthetic situation and that of time transac...

Applying techniques from Machine Learning to real-world domains and problems often requires considerable processing of the input data, to both remove noise and to augment the amount and type of information present. We describe our work in the task of situation assessment in the domain of US Army training exercises involving hundreds of agents interacting in real-time over the course of several ...

This quotation from John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman concludes Ray’s 1980 paper, “A Logic for Default Reasoning,” one of the most influential and widely cited papers in all AI. The quotation captures what was special about Ray: He had an adventurer’s desire to go beyond the boundaries of our current understanding, together with a mathematician’s insistence on precision. Ray the adven...

This bachelor thesis summarises Hamm and van Lambalgen’s book ”The proper treatment of events”. The main points are addressed to provide an overview of the Event Calculus and its usage in natural language semantics. The Event Calculus is a formal system derived from the Situation Calculus that allows for the representation of overlapping events and partial changing objects. Its ontology compris...

object that actually exists but is uninstantiated. (p. 121) No one has gone further to develop the idea that there are two conceptions of possible worlds than van Inwagen in [1986]. He says: . . . Lewis did not content himself with saying that there were entities properly called ‘ways things could have been’; nor did he content himself with implying that ‘possible world’ was a heuristically use...

In my paper I will elucidate why ‘situation’ is a constructive unit of analysis for the study of both identity and the impact of technologies (particularly ICTs) on identity. Further, I will use a situational perspective to show some of the ways in which the ‘definition of situations’ may be affected by such technologies. I will conduct a conceptual analysis of the ‘definition of a situation’, ...