tant will behave as a shark with regard to potential partners, always looking for the most convenient transaction, thereby infringing on existing commitments. Other difficult tasks, more generally, are how to obtain a robust performance in teamworks (Cohen and Levesque 1990); how to prevent agents from dropping their commitments ; or better, how to regulate agents dropping their commitments to ...

Two approaches have been advocated for the design and modeling of (social) norms in multi agent systems: in the coordination strategy, multi agent systems are defined as a set of entities regulated by mechanisms of social order and created by more or less autonomous actors to achieve common goals; in the cooperation strategy, agents model specific roles in the society and interact with each oth...

A common objection to adaptationist accounts of human emotions is that they ignore the influence of culture. If complex emotions like guilt, shame and romantic jealousy are largely culturally determined, how could they be biological adaptations? Dual inheritance models of gene/culture coevolution provide a potential answer to this question. If complex emotions are developmentally ‘scaffolded’ b...

Online communities such as newsgroups and mailinglists are constructed around a common interest and a shared set of norms that regulates communication. These communicative norms can be studied either by observing the communicative practice of the participants or by analyzing what group members say about correct and appropriate behavior in that community (referred to as metacommunication). This ...

The sparse coding hypothesis has generated significant interest in the computational and theoretical neuroscience communities, but there remain open questions about the exact quantitative form of the sparsity penalty and the implementation of such a coding rule in neurally plausible architectures. The main contribution of this work is to show that a wide variety of sparsity-based probabilistic ...