An information assistant system for the prevention of tunnel vision in crisis management

In the crisis management environment, tunnel vision is a set of bias in decision makers’ cognitive process which often leads to incorrect understanding of the real crisis situation, biased perception of information, and improper decisions. The tunnel vision phenomenon is a consequence of both the challenges in the task and the natural limitation in a human being’s cognitive process. An information assistant system is proposed with the purpose of preventing tunnel vision. The system serves as a platform for monitoring the on-going crisis event. All information goes through the system before arrives at the user. The system enhances the data quality, reduces the data quantity and presents the crisis information in a manner that prevents or repairs the user’s cognitive overload. While working with such a system, the users (crisis managers) are expected to be more likely to stay aware of the actual situation, stay open minded to possibilities, and make proper decisions

On the Possibility of Hallucinations

Many take the possibility of hallucinations to imply that a relationalist account, according to which perceptual experiences are constituted by direct relations to ordinary mind-independent objects, is false. The common reaction among relationalists is to adopt a disjunctivist view that denies that hallucinations have the same nature as perceptual experiences. This paper proposes a non-disjunctivist response to the argument from hallucination by arguing that the alleged empirical and a priori evidence in support of the possibility of hallucinations is inconclusive. A corollary upshot of the article is that whether hallucinations are possible or not is still an open empirical question

A debate dashboard to enhance on-line knowledge sharing

Purpose – Web 2.0 technologies have radically modified the way in which knowledge is created, managed and shared, improving productivity and accelerating innovation processes for the enterprises. These technologies have allowed enterprises to produce knowledge, leverage collective intelligence and build social capital on a scale that was unimaginable a few years ago. In this paper we focus on a particular kind of web-based collaborative platforms known as argument mapping tools and we discuss the main barriers to the adoption of them. Literature has proved that these argument mapping tools provide large and small and medium enterprise with several advantages, but nevertheless, they have low level adoption. In this paper we explore new technological solutions to support the adoption of argument mapping tools. In particular, we propose the design of a Debate Dashboard to provide visual feedback to support online deliberation. These visual feedback aims at compensating the loss of information due to the mediation of the technology. The Debate Dashboard is composed of a set of suitable visualization tools that have been selected on the basis of a literature review of the visualization tools. Design/methodology/approach - We propose a literature review of existing visualization tools. Building on the literature review we selected thirty visualization tools, which have been classified on the basis of the kind of feedback they are able to provide. We identify three classes of feedback: Community feedback (identikit of users), Interaction feedback (about how users interact) and Absorption feedback (about generated content and its organization). We distilled the Debate Dashboard features by building on results of a literature review on Web 2.0 tools for data visualization. As output of literature review we selected six visualization tools. We consider these selected tools as a sort of starting point. Indeed, our aim is the improvement of them through the addition of further features and functions in order to make them more effective in providing feedback. Originality/value – Our paper enriches the debate about computer mediated conversation and visualization tools. We propose a Dashboard prototype to augment collaborative knowledge mapping tools by providing visual feedback on conversations. The Dashboard will provide at the same time three different kinds of feedback about: details of the participants to the conversation, interaction processes and generated content. This will allow the improvement of the benefits and reduce the costs deriving from the use of mapping tools. Moreover, another important novelty is that visualization tools will be integrated to mapping tools, as until now they have been used only to visualize data contained in forums (as Usenet or Slash.dot), chat or email archives Practical implications – The Dashboard provides feedback about participants, interaction processes and generated contents, thus supporting the adoption of mapping tools as technologies able to foster knowledge sharing among remote workers or/and customers and supplier. The integration of Debate Dashboard with common online argument mapping tools aims at enabling the following advantages: 1. Reduction of misunderstanding; 2. Reduction of cognitive effort required to use argument mapping tools; 3. Improvement of the exploration and the analysis of the maps - the Debate Dashboard feedback improves the usability of the object (the map), thus allowing users to pitch into the conversation in the right place

The Emerging Importance of Social Visibility in Defining a Particular Social Group and Its Potential Impact on Asylum Claims Related to Sexual Orientation and Gender

An emerging issue in U.S. asylum claims based on membership in a particular social group is the relevance of social visibility in determining whether such a group exists. Of the five protected grounds for asylum, membership in a particular social group has always generated the most debate. In 2002, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) issued guidelines that present the protected characteristic and social perception approaches as alternative ways of establishing a particular social group, instructing States Parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention (the Convention ) to determine first if there is a protected characteristic and, only if no such characteristic exists, to determine whether the group is recognized by society. The author argues that adjudicators should reject the social visibility approach because it destroys Acosta\u27s principled framework, represents an abdication of U.S. obligations under the 1967 Protocol, cannot be applied in a consistent way, and ignores the complex relationship between visibility and power

'Visibility brings with it responsibility': Using a pragmatic performance approach to explore a political philosophy of technology

With the emergence, suspicion and social acceptance of ubiquitous communications technology thoroughly plumbed and the digital age already wondering what it is going to rename itself in light of ever more fluid and complex technologies, this paper asks: what can theatre and performance provide to the production of a political philosophy of technology? Using the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault and an analysis of a recent inter-cultural adaptation of Jean Genet's The Maids, this study examines the politics of visible theatre technologies in performance and offers a pragmatic, or instrumentalist, approach to developing a political philosophy of technology

Towards engineering ontologies for cognitive profiling of agents on the semantic web

Research shows that most agent-based collaborations suffer from lack of flexibility. This is due to the fact that most agent-based applications assume pre-defined knowledge of agents’ capabilities and/or neglect basic cognitive and interactional requirements in multi-agent collaboration. The highlight of this paper is that it brings cognitive models (inspired from cognitive sciences and HCI) proposing architectural and knowledge-based requirements for agents to structure ontological models for cognitive profiling in order to increase cognitive awareness between themselves, which in turn promotes flexibility, reusability and predictability of agent behavior; thus contributing towards minimizing cognitive overload incurred on humans. The semantic web is used as an action mediating space, where shared knowledge base in the form of ontological models provides affordances for improving cognitive awareness

Understanding the effects of one’s actions upon hidden objects and the development of search behaviour in 7-month-old infants

Infants' understanding of how their actions affect the visibility of hidden objects may be a crucial aspect of the development of search behaviour. To investigate this possibility, 7-month-old infants took part in a two-day training study. At the start of the first session, and at the end of the second, all infants performed a search task with a hiding-well. On both days, infants had an additional training experience. The ‘Agency group’ learnt to spin a turntable to reveal a hidden toy, whilst the ‘Means-End’ group learnt the same means-end motor action, but the toy was always visible. The Agency group showed greater improvement on the hiding-well search task following their training experience. We suggest that the Agency group's turntable experience was effective because it provided the experience of bringing objects back into visibility by one's actions. Further, the performance of the Agency group demonstrates generalized transfer of learning across situations with both different motor actions and stimuli in infants as young as 7 months