Influence of Context on Decision Making during Requirements Elicitation

Requirements engineers should strive to get a better insight into decision making processes. During elicitation of requirements, decision making influences how stakeholders communicate with engineers, thereby affecting the engineers' understanding of requirements for the future information system. Empirical studies issued from Artificial Intelligence offer an adequate groundwork to understand how decision making is influenced by some particular contextual factors. However, no research has gone into the validation of such empirical studies in the process of collecting needs of the future system's users. As an answer, the paper empirically studies factors, initially identified by AI literature, that influence decision making and communication during requirements elicitation. We argue that the context's structure of the decision should be considered as a cornerstone to adequately study how stakeholders decide to communicate or not a requirement. The paper proposes a context framework to categorize former factors into specific families, and support the engineers during the elicitation process.Comment: appears in Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Acquisition, Representation and Reasoning with Contextualized Knowledge (ARCOE), 2012, Montpellier, France, held at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-12

Intuitions and the modelling of defeasible reasoning: some case studies

The purpose of this paper is to address some criticisms recently raised by John Horty in two articles against the validity of two commonly accepted defeasible reasoning patterns, viz. reinstatement and floating conclusions. I shall argue that Horty's counterexamples, although they significantly raise our understanding of these reasoning patterns, do not show their invalidity. Some of them reflect patterns which, if made explicit in the formalisation, avoid the unwanted inference without having to give up the criticised inference principles. Other examples seem to involve hidden assumptions about the specific problem which, if made explicit, are nothing but extra information that defeat the defeasible inference. These considerations will be put in a wider perspective by reflecting on the nature of defeasible reasoning principles as principles of justified acceptance rather than `real' logical inference.Comment: Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning (NMR'2002), Toulouse, France, April 19-21, 200

A Plausibility Semantics for Abstract Argumentation Frameworks

We propose and investigate a simple ranking-measure-based extension semantics for abstract argumentation frameworks based on their generic instantiation by default knowledge bases and the ranking construction semantics for default reasoning. In this context, we consider the path from structured to logical to shallow semantic instantiations. The resulting well-justified JZ-extension semantics diverges from more traditional approaches.Comment: Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning (NMR 2014). This is an improved and extended version of the author's ECSQARU 2013 pape

(WP 2017-04) Behavioral Economics and the Positive-Normative Distinction: Sunstein’s \u3cem\u3eChoosing Not to Choose\u3c/em\u3e and Behavioral Economics Imperialism

This paper examines behavioral economics’ use of the positive-normative distinction in its critique of standard rational choice theory as normative, and argues that it departs from Robbins’ understanding of that distinction in ways that suggest behavioral economists themselves do not observe that distinction. One implication of this is that behavioral economists generally do not recognize Putnam’s fact-value ‘entanglement thesis’ while a second implication is that the charge that rational choice theory is descriptively inadequate paradoxically appears to mean that it does not employ the implicit value basis and normative vision that behavioral economics recommends, thus actually violating Robbins’ distinction. This latter argument is developed through an examination of Sunstein’s Choosing Not to Choose which uses nudge policy in the form of default rules to advance a different conception of freedom than standard choice theory employs. The paper goes on to argue that behavioral economics imperialism, particularly in the form of behavioral development economics imperialism, is more about promoting its implicit value basis and normative vision over that promoted by standard rational choice theory than about advancing an alternative conception of economics for social science. A final section comments on economics’ status and relation to the other social sciences

Social working memory: neurocognitive networks and directions for future research.

Navigating the social world requires the ability to maintain and manipulate information about people's beliefs, traits, and mental states. We characterize this capacity as social working memory (SWM). To date, very little research has explored this phenomenon, in part because of the assumption that general working memory systems would support working memory for social information. Various lines of research, however, suggest that social cognitive processing relies on a neurocognitive network (i.e., the "mentalizing network") that is functionally distinct from, and considered antagonistic with, the canonical working memory network. Here, we review evidence suggesting that demanding social cognition requires SWM and that both the mentalizing and canonical working memory neurocognitive networks support SWM. The neural data run counter to the common finding of parametric decreases in mentalizing regions as a function of working memory demand and suggest that the mentalizing network can support demanding cognition, when it is demanding social cognition. Implications for individual differences in social cognition and pathologies of social cognition are discussed