In this paper we present a framework for conversational awareness and conflict resolution in spoken dialogue systems for home care assistance. Conversational awareness is supported through OWL ontologies for capturing conversational modalities, while interpretation and incremental context enrichment is facilitated through Description Logics reasoning. Conflict resolution further assists the int...

This paper reports on the on-going development of a hybrid approach for dispatching and conflict-free routing of automated guided vehicles used for material handling in manufacturing. The approach combines Constraint Programming for scheduling and Mixed Integer Programming for routing without conflict. The objective of this work is to provide a reliable method for solving instances with a large...

Guided by a family stress perspective, we examined the hypothesis that discussing money would be associated with the handling of marital conflict in the home. Analyses were based on dyadic hierarchical linear modeling of 100 husbands' and 100 wives' diary reports of 748 conflict instances. Contrary to findings from previous laboratory-based surveys, spouses did not rate money as the most freque...

In conflict-affected situations, aid-funded livelihood interventions are often tasked with a dual imperative: to generate material welfare benefits and to contribute to peacebuilding outcomes. There may be some logic to such a transformative agenda, but does the reality square with the rhetoric? Through a review of the effectiveness of a range of livelihood promotion interventions--from job cre...

Composing aspectual concerns with base concerns may raise conflicting situations that need to be identified and resolved. A conflict is detected whenever two or more concerns that contribute negatively to each other and have the same importance need to be composed together. This paper discusses the use of Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods to support aspectual conflict management ...

In virtually every forum in which I’ve been asked to speak on a gender-related subject over the past 25 years (about 100 academic health centers and 20 professional societies), I am asked some version of ‘‘Why do women treat each other so badly?’’ The turmoil resulting from feeling undermined or cut by a trusted woman seems to have more negative impact than women’s conflicts with men have. Desp...