Semantic technologies for open interaction systems

Open interaction systems play a crucial role in agreement technologies because they are software devised for enabling autonomous agents (software or human) to interact, negotiate, collaborate, and coordinate their activities in order to establish agreements and manage their execution. Following the approach proposed by the recent literature on agent environments those open distributed systems can be efficiently and effectively modeled as a set of correlated physical and institutional spaces of interaction where objects and agents are situated. In our view in distributed open systems, spaces are fundamental for modeling the fact that events, actions, and social concepts (like norms and institutional objects) should be perceivable only by the agents situated in the spaces where they happen or where they are situated. Institutional spaces are also crucial for their active functional role of keeping track of the state of the interaction, and for monitoring and enforcing norms. Given that in an open distributed and dynamic system it is fundamental to be able to create and destroy spaces of interaction at run-time, in this paper we propose to create them using Artificial Institutions (AIs) specified at design time. This dynamic creation is a complex task that deserves to be studied in all details. For doing that, in this paper, we will first define the various components of AIs and spaces using Semantic Web Technologies, then we will describe the mechanisms for using AIs specification for realizing spaces of interaction. We will exemplify this process by formalizing the components of the auction Artificial Institution and of the spaces created for running concrete auction

Participants’ reflections on being interviewed about risk and sexual behaviour: implications for collection of qualitative data on sensitive topics

In this article, we explore how those taking part in an interview about sex and risk reflected on their participation and what, if any, impact it had on them. All 22 individuals who were interviewed in an initial study were invited to document their thoughts and feelings about the research process in a short follow-up exercise. The data relating to the 11 people who shared their reflections on the interview were subjected to a thematic analysis. The themes that emerged describe the value participants placed on honest and open interaction within neutral and non-judgmental environments. They also illustrate how being interviewed about prior behaviour can facilitate a sense-making process and might provide some degree of cathartic benefit. The findings help improve our understanding of how individuals reflect on their interview participation, which can in turn help to inform the development of ethically sensitive qualitative data collection

Organizational Information in the Cloud of Interaction

Responding to renewed interest in the concept of information among IS scholars, I reconsider a concept of organizational information, a particular form of information more broadly, articulated decades ago, and elaborate on it in the light of newer developments. I argue that the basic concept, centered in human communication, remains viable, but should be extended such that machines, not just humans, are included as participants in what may be portrayed on the whole as an open interaction network in which organizational information is generated, maintained, and propagated to guide actions. I apply the extended concept to the illustrative example of university admissions

Using Technology to Improve Student Experience with Critique

Technology has radically changed the way educators can exchange information and interact with students. While higher education teaching systems have adapted to changes in technological innovation, the fashion design studio, organized in traditional Beaux- Arts format, remains constant in its face-to-face, active-learning experience approach. An emerging teaching format is blended learning, that involves both traditional face-to-face instruction, as well as communication via the Internet. If well-guided, an online environment used in conjunction with an existing studio class provides an alternative medium for improving communication, supporting creative collaboration and open interaction

Cooperative Gating and Spatial Organization of Membrane Proteins through Elastic Interactions

Biological membranes are elastic media in which the presence of a transmembrane protein leads to local bilayer deformation. The energetics of deformation allow two membrane proteins in close proximity to influence each other's equilibrium conformation via their local deformations, and spatially organize the proteins based on their geometry. We use the mechanosensitive channel of large conductance (MscL) as a case study to examine the implications of bilayer-mediated elastic interactions on protein conformational statistics and clustering. The deformations around MscL cost energy on the order of 10 kT and extend ~3nm from the protein edge, as such elastic forces induce cooperative gating and we propose experiments to measure these effects. Additionally, since elastic interactions are coupled to protein conformation, we find that conformational changes can severely alter the average separation between two proteins. This has important implications for how conformational changes organize membrane proteins into functional groups within membranes.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 63 references, submitted to PLoS Computational Biolog

Between acceptance and dislike: the intricacy of cross-cultural contacts while travelling

Today travelling is a global phenomenon. Many journeys involve cross-cultural contacts, often between cultures which are very remote from each other. Some questions arise: does the contemporary traveller expect cross-cultural contacts and how does he/she imagine such interactions? These seemingly simple questions enable us to reflect on the intentionality and complexity of cross-cultural interactions, the main issue discussed in the article. The author draws the reader's attention to the social roles assumed by the modern traveller, as well as the theoretical scenarios of cross-cultural contact, analyzing its symmetric and asymmetric forms

Semiclassical Evolution of Dissipative Markovian Systems

A semiclassical approximation for an evolving density operator, driven by a "closed" hamiltonian operator and "open" markovian Lindblad operators, is obtained. The theory is based on the chord function, i.e. the Fourier transform of the Wigner function. It reduces to an exact solution of the Lindblad master equation if the hamiltonian operator is a quadratic function and the Lindblad operators are linear functions of positions and momenta. Initially, the semiclassical formulae for the case of hermitian Lindblad operators are reinterpreted in terms of a (real) double phase space, generated by an appropriate classical double Hamiltonian. An extra "open" term is added to the double Hamiltonian by the non-hermitian part of the Lindblad operators in the general case of dissipative markovian evolution. The particular case of generic hamiltonian operators, but linear dissipative Lindblad operators, is studied in more detail. A Liouville-type equivariance still holds for the corresponding classical evolution in double phase, but the centre subspace, which supports the Wigner function, is compressed, along with expansion of its conjugate subspace, which supports the chord function. Decoherence narrows the relevant region of double phase space to the neighborhood of a caustic for both the Wigner function and the chord function. This difficulty is avoided by a propagator in a mixed representation, so that a further "small-chord" approximation leads to a simple generalization of the quadratic theory for evolving Wigner functions.Comment: 33 pages - accepted to J. Phys.

New Connections Fund Grantseeker Feedback Study

Analysizes and reports on survey results from grantseekers in the James Irvine Foundation's pilot of the New Connections Fund, designed to be an open, competitive process for "unsolicited" grants. Includes feedback from three rounds of funding, including levels of grantee perceptions and satisfaction with the process, as well as suggestions for improvment