We are engaged in a research project aimed at the synthesis of reactive plans [BDg0, GK91, Kabg0, Mitg0, DKKN93a]. Reactive plans are different from classical plans in that they are specified as a collection of rules or "reactions" of the form S =~ a, where S is a description (perhaps partial) of a situation or state and is an action executable by the agent (such rules have also been called sit...

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Using a theoretical cultural competency model, the effectiveness of a cultural competency learning assignment was examined to determine: 1) students' cultural competency levels as reflected through the assignment, and 2) the effectiveness of the assignment as a cultural competency learning activity. Third-year family medicine clerkship students completed a required project to research and refle...

We analyze customer’s brand choice of promotion effects on a High-tier brand and Low-tier brand products along dimensions of price and quality. Our empirical findings are based on a self-administered survey of some big grocery chain stores in one major city (Shanghai) in China between August 2006 to August 2008. The article raises a note of caution about promotion asymmetry effect and show that...

This paper describes DIVA, a decision-theoretic agent for recommending movies that contains a number of novel features. DIVA represents user preferences using pairwise comparisons among items, rather than numeric ratings. It uses a novel similarity measure based on the concept of the probability of conflict between two orderings of ̄ items. The system has a rich representation of preference, dis...

We discuss ways of improving navigation facilities in hypertext systems, considering theoretical and implementation issues, from a natural language processing research perspective. The key claim is that certain ideas from the theory of discourse structure can be exploited to improve the context-sensitivity of navigation facilities. In particular, (i) after a node is reached by a jump, links to ...