Reason Maintenance - State of the Art

This paper describes state of the art in reason maintenance with a focus on its future usage in the KiWi project. To give a bigger picture of the field, it also mentions closely related issues such as non-monotonic logic and paraconsistency. The paper is organized as follows: first, two motivating scenarios referring to semantic wikis are presented which are then used to introduce the different reason maintenance techniques

Mass Media and Moral Discourse: Social Class and the Rhetoric of Abortion

Also CSST Working Paper #82.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51244/1/478.pd

Arts-based methods for facilitating meta-level learning in management education: Making and expressing refined perceptual distinctions

Arts-based methods are increasingly used to facilitate meta-level learning in management education. Such increased use suggests that these methods are relevant and offer a unique contribution meeting a need in today’s management education. Yet, the literature is not clear on what this unique contribution may be even though it abounds with suggestions of varying quality. To explore this matter, I conduct a systematic literature review focused on arts-based methods, management education, and meta-level learning. I find that the unique contribution of arts-based methods is to foreground the process of making and expressing more refined perceptual distinctions, not to get accurate data, but as integral to our thinking/learning. This finding is important, because it imply that certain (commonly applied) ways of using arts-based methods may limit their potential. Finally, I suggest that future research regarding arts-based methods should focus on exploring the impact the process of learning to make and express more refined perceptual distinctions may have on managerial practice to further understand the relevance of these methods to managers

Developmental process in mental handicap: a generative structure approach

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.A radical argument is presented that it is plausible to look at the condition of mental handicap as entailing dynamic cognitive processes which may be available to some degree of therapeutic intervention at a fundamental level. An overview of some broad aspects of mental handicap is presented and it is argued that much of the subject of mental handicap is based on assumptions which may not be justified. On the assumption that in normal infancy play is a powerful medium for promoting developmental change, aspects of the mentally handicapped child's inability to play is examined and discussed. This is done by adopting the Piagetian notion of decentration and showing how the concept has explanatory value for looking at change in the severely, or profoundly mentally handicapped child. A model of aspects of the process is developed and implemented as a computer simulation. This model entails he processes of "Integration and Differentiation" of hierarchical chunks. The prospects and usefulness of a developmental curriculum as a framework within which to work with the profoundly and severely mentally retarded is discussed. The notions of Integration and Differentiation are applied to systems of sensori-motor competence and presented as a candidate for a curriculum. A presentation of the Uzgiris & Hunt scales serves to provide the user with the means to understand where the child is "at" in the curriculum. The computer simulation is further developed to show how it could be extended to provide explanations for the effects of success and failure upon developmental process. The model provides an insight into the nature of stereotypy and the implications of the model are explored in a therapy undertaked with a mentally handicapped and withdrawn child. The relationship between the understanding gained here and the processes of normal mothering is introduced. The theme of the mothering process is develcped apd explored as a means of providing the mentally Nandi Gaped child with the experience of success that section 3 suggests is the means for promoting change. This is demonstrated via several case accounts. The transactional interface between the intractable organic and the potentially more plastic cognitive/social process is tentatively explored by a discussion of "eye contact". Finally an evaluative framework for the possible implications of the work are discussed

Spatio-temporal Negotiation Protocols

Canonical problems are simplified representations of a class of real world problems. They allow researchers to compare algorithms in a standard setting which captures the most important challenges of the real world problems being modeled. In this dissertation, we focus on negotiating a collaboration in space and time, a problem with many important real world applications. Although technically a multi-issue negotiation, we show that the problem can not be represented in a satisfactory manner by previous models. We propose the Children in the Rectangular Forest (CRF) model as a possible canonical problem for negotiating spatio-temporal collaboration. In the CRF problem, two embodied agents are negotiating the synchronization of their movement for a portion of the path from their respective sources to destinations. The negotiation setting is zero initial knowledge and it happens in physical time. As equilibrium strategies are not practically possible, we are interested in strategies with bounded rationality, which achieve good performance in a wide range of practical negotiation scenarios. We design a number of negotiation protocols to allow agents to exchange their offers. The simple negotiation protocol can be enhanced by schemes in which the agents add additional information of the negotiation flow to aid the negotiation partner in offer formation. Naturally, the performance of a strategy is dependent on the strategy of the opponent and the iii characteristics of the scenario. Thus we develop a set of metrics for the negotiation scenario which formalizes our intuition of collaborative scenarios (where the agents’ interests are closely aligned) versus competitive scenarios (where the gain of the utility for one agent is paid off with a loss of utility for the other agent). Finally, we further investigate the sophisticated strategies which allow agents to learn the opponents while negotiating. We find strategies can be augmented by collaborativeness analysis: the approximate collaborativeness metric can be used to cut short the negotiation. Then, we discover an approach to model the opponent through Bayesian learning. We assume the agents do not disclose their information voluntarily: the learning needs to rely on the study of the offers exchanged during normal negotiation. At last, we explore a setting where the agents are able to perform physical action (movement) while the negotiation is ongoing. We formalize a method to represent and update the beliefs about the valuation function, the current state of negotiation and strategy of the opponent agent using a particle filter. By exploring a number of different negotiation protocols and several peer-to-peer negotiation based strategies, we claim that the CRF problem captures the main challenges of the real world problems while allows us to simplify away some of the computationally demanding but semantically marginal features of real world problems

The influence of the nominalist movement on the scientific thought of Bacon, Boyle and Locke

Imperial Users onl