This study is a contrastive one on the speech act of request in British English and Mandarin Chinese. It investigates the similarities and differences in request modifications used by native speakers of both languages on the bases of nine designed situations. The choice of modifications in each situation is determined to some degree by the social variables of power and distance. However, a deep...

This paper presents a novel fragile watermarking scheme based on an artificial neural network (ANN). The fragile watermark is designed according to the characteristics of the original image. If the image is modified, the alteration can be detected via the fragile watermark without original image. Based on the type of alteration, we can determine what modifications have been performed. An artifi...

The study of language evolution has benefitted enormously from the contribution made by computational simulations of the cultural transmission of language over the past ten years. However, we still have not explored or confirmed these findings empirically in a human population. This thesis presents a novel experimental method for investigating the emergence and cultural transmission of language...

Abstract— The air traffic conflict resolution represents a real time problem. Thus, it must be interesting to apply methods which their computing time is negligible. In this study, we use cultural algorithms to solve an artificial conflict involving five aircrafts. These algorithms present the advantage to evolve 10 times faster than genetic algorithms. We assume that the trajectories of all ai...

In today’s age of globalization, cultural awareness has become a challenge for designers of tutoring systems to include the cultural dimension in the tutoring strategy and in the learning environment. Nevertheless, cultural awareness is also a domain to be learned by a student, and a competency that can be assessed. Research on cultural intelligence has provided a new perspective and presented ...

The concept of ‘social situatedness’, i.e. the idea that the development of individual intelligence requires a social (and cultural) embedding, has recently received much attention in cognitive science and artificial intelligence research, in particular work on social or epigenetic robotics. The work of Lev Vygotsky who put forward this view already in the 1920s has influenced the discussion to...

The term Smart City is tipically applied to urban and metropolitan areas where Information and Communication Technologies provide ways to enable social, cultural and urban development, improving social and political capacities and/or efficiency. In this paper we will show the potential of Artificial Intelligence techniques for augmenting ICT solutions to both increase the cities competiveness b...