Social Mental Shaping: Modelling the Impact of Sociality on Autonomous Agents' Mental States

This paper presents a framework that captures how the social nature of agents that are situated in a multi-agent environment impacts upon their individual mental states. Roles and relationships provide an abstraction upon which we develop the notion of social mental shaping. This allows us to extend the standard Belief-Desire-Intention model to account for how common social phenomena (e.g. cooperation, collaborative problem-solving and negotiation) can be integrated into a unified theoretical perspective that reflects a fully explicated model of the autonomous agent's mental state

Enabling Robots to Communicate their Objectives

The overarching goal of this work is to efficiently enable end-users to correctly anticipate a robot's behavior in novel situations. Since a robot's behavior is often a direct result of its underlying objective function, our insight is that end-users need to have an accurate mental model of this objective function in order to understand and predict what the robot will do. While people naturally develop such a mental model over time through observing the robot act, this familiarization process may be lengthy. Our approach reduces this time by having the robot model how people infer objectives from observed behavior, and then it selects those behaviors that are maximally informative. The problem of computing a posterior over objectives from observed behavior is known as Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL), and has been applied to robots learning human objectives. We consider the problem where the roles of human and robot are swapped. Our main contribution is to recognize that unlike robots, humans will not be exact in their IRL inference. We thus introduce two factors to define candidate approximate-inference models for human learning in this setting, and analyze them in a user study in the autonomous driving domain. We show that certain approximate-inference models lead to the robot generating example behaviors that better enable users to anticipate what it will do in novel situations. Our results also suggest, however, that additional research is needed in modeling how humans extrapolate from examples of robot behavior.Comment: RSS 201

Why Catastrophic Organizational Failures Happen

Excerpt from the introduction: The purpose of this chapter is to examine the major streams of research about catastrophic failures, describing what we have learned about why these failures occur as well as how they can be prevented. The chapter begins by describing the most prominent sociological school of thought with regard to catastrophic failures, namely normal accident theory. That body of thought examines the structure of organizational systems that are most susceptible to catastrophic failures. Then, we turn to several behavioral perspectives on catastrophic failures, assessing a stream of research that has attempted to understand the cognitive, group and organizational processes that develop and unfold over time, leading ultimately to a catastrophic failure. For an understanding of how to prevent such failures, we then assess the literature on high reliability organizations (HRO). These scholars have examined why some complex organizations operating in extremely hazardous conditions manage to remain nearly error free. The chapter closes by assessing how scholars are trying to extend the HRO literature to develop more extensive prescriptions for managers trying to avoid catastrophic failures

Learning the optimal buffer-stock consumption rule of Carroll

This article questions the rather pessimistic conclusions of Allen et Carroll (2001) about the ability of consumer to learn the optimal buffer-stock based consumption rule. To this aim, we develop an agent based model where alternative learning schemes can be compared in terms of the consumption behaviour that they yield. We show that neither purely adaptive learning, nor social learning based on imitation can ensure satisfactory consumption behaviours. By contrast, if the agents can form adaptive expectations, based on an evolving individual mental model, their behaviour becomes much more interesting in terms of its regularity, and its ability to improve performance (which is as a clear manifestation of learning). Our results indicate that assumptions on bounded rationality, and on adaptive expectations are perfectly compatible with sound and realistic economic behaviour, which, in some cases, can even converge to the optimal solution. This framework may therefore be used to develop macroeconomic models with adaptive dynamics.Consumption decisions; Learning; Expectations; Adaptive behaviour; Computational economics

Learning the optimal buffer-stock consumption rule of Carroll

This article questions the rather pessimistic conclusions of Allen et Carroll (2001) about the ability of consumer to learn the optimal buffer-stock based consumption rule. To this aim, we develop an agent based model where alternative learning schemes can be compared in terms of the consumption behaviour that they yield. We show that neither purely adaptive learning, nor social learning based on imitation can ensure satisfactory consumption behaviours. By contrast, if the agents can form adaptive expectations, based on an evolving individual mental model, their behaviour becomes much more interesting in terms of its regularity, and its ability to improve performance (which is as a clear manifestation of learning). Our results indicate that assumptions on bounded rationality, and on adaptive expectations are perfectly compatible with sound and realistic economic behaviour, which, in some cases, can even converge to the optimal solution. This framework may therefore be used to develop macroeconomic models with adaptive dynamics.Consumption decisions; Learning; Expectations; Adaptive behaviour, Computational economics

Conducting a Shared Mental Model of Student Evaluation: Implications for Nurse Educators

Subjective evaluation of student performance, by its definition, is open to bias, the possibility of being inequitable, and of being unfair. One faculty member may consider a student performance passing, while the next faculty member may not. Grading criteria may not have the same meaning to all evaluators, which compounds the issue. In search of narrowing the variables, faculty may develop a shared mental model, where faculty reach agreement on the terms and criteria used for subjective evaluation. The use of a shared mental model should decrease subjectivity, and result in student evaluations that are more fair and equitable. This is based on faculty use of more specific, objective criteria for subjective evaluations. The benefits to faculty are that a shared mental model of conducting evaluations promotes best practices in evaluation, and may provide defensible evaluations in high-stakes situations if students grieve the evaluation or decide to pursue legal action

Interagency training to support the liaison and diversion agenda

Background In England and Wales there are an unacceptably large number of people in prison or in contact with the criminal justice system who have mental health issues. Integrated and effective interagency collaboration is required between the criminal justice system and mental health services to ensure early diagnosis, treatment, appropriate sentencing or diversion of these individuals from the criminal justice systems into mental health services. Liaison and diversion schemes are proposed as a means to integrated service provision through positioning mental health professionals within the criminal justice system. These schemes were recommended by the Bradley Report (2009) to be rolled out for all police custody suites and courts by 2014 in a National Diversion Programme. Working within these schemes, at the interface of the criminal justice system and mental health services, has its challenges (Hean et al., 2009) and the workforce from both systems must be prepared to address these. This was recognised by Bradley when he recommended that: “where appropriate, training should be undertaken jointly with other services to encourage shared understanding and partnership working. Development of training should take place in conjunction with local liaison and diversion services (p111; Bradley, 2009). The form this joint training should take is as yet unexplored. We have proposed elsewhere that joint training should equip different agencies and professionals with the skills and knowledge required to collaborate effectively, and not only focus on mental health awareness courses for those in police, prison and courts services (Hean et al. 2011). The criminal justice system and mental health services need to come together to learn about, from, and with each other in interagency training. Aim We present in this report our vision of what this joint interagency training between the criminal justice and mental health services should contain, how it may be delivered and its potential benefits. We explore the receptiveness of professionals from the criminal justice and mental health services to interagency training and explore their perceptions of the challenges to interagency working between the two systems. We focus particularly on one particular dimension: an interagency crossing boundary workshop and its theoretical underpinnings. We explore professionals’ expectations of this type of intervention as well as their perceptions of the knowledge and skills required to deliver the emerging liaison and diversion agenda in general and the content and delivery of interagency training in the future. These findings are synthesized into a series of recommendations and a model of interagency training that will prepare professionals in both agencies to respond to the liaison and diversion agenda more effectively and work collaboratively in the interest of the mentally ill offender. Method A crossing boundary workshop (Engeström, 2001) was delivered in December 2011 to a sample of 52 professionals from a range of non-health professionals associated with criminal justice system (probation, police and courts) and professionals from the mental health system or health domain (learning disability, substance misuse and mental health services). The receptiveness of criminal justice system and mental health service professionals to interagency training was assessed through the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (Reid et al., 2005) administered to respondents before the workshop. Perceptions of the challenges facing interagency working and the expectations of the workshop were explored through interactive exercises. Professionals from both agencies participated in a series of 6 parallel focus groups to discuss how to prepare the workforce to respond effectively to the liaison/diversion agenda and the constraints they worked under in terms of commissioning, delivering and attending this training. Findings Professionals from both the mental health and criminal justice systems need to build empathic relationships with staff from other agencies. They stressed the importance of actual face-to-face contact between professionals from different agencies to achieve this and saw interagency relationships as being built through increased knowledge of other agencies and the orchestrating of formal facilitated contact between them. They were strongly in favour of interagency training and its contribution to enhanced collaborative competence across the workforce and, in the long term, improved offender mental health. They believed interagency training would develop in the workforce a greater knowledge of other agencies and help them understand other professionals’ roles and responsibilities. They believed interagency training should occur pre-qualification, through into continued professional development and contain a variety of interagency training experiences. Professionals from both systems shared a high level of person centredness in their approach to their practice and stressed the importance of training being grounded and delivered in a real world environment. Participants acknowledged that training opportunities are under threat due to financial and time limitations and that joint commissioning, shared resources and economies of scale must be considered. Recommendations • A training package should be developed to prepare professionals both from the mental health and criminal justice system for the liaison and diversion agenda and integrated service provision. This training must offer a strong interagency component aimed at developing interagency collaboration skills and interagency knowledge. A four-stage training model is proposed in this report. This incorporates pre-registration or undergraduate training for trainee professionals in the mental health services and criminal justice system, general awareness training, interagency training for continuing professional development and the development of interagency reflective practice opportunities. This model may be supplemented by a variety of on-line resources, some of which are described. • These interagency training models should be developed in partnership between universities and local facilitators from within the criminal justice system and mental health services to provide both the theoretical and evidence based rigour associated with developing collaborative practice curricula alongside the real world contextual knowledge required of these programmes. • In the long term, interagency training should be delivered in practice by practitioners to ensure the continued validity and sustainability of these programmes. Training should be sensitive to changes in the workforce due to turnover and the pressures of organisational change. • In times of economic constraint, training should be well targeted at staff and organisations essential to the liaison and diversion agenda. • An interagency commissioning approach will be required to deliver the training package outlined to support the liaison and diversion agenda, and especially if there is to be joint training and sharing of resources

The Strength of the Mind: Essays on Consciousness and Introspection

I defend the view that mental states have degrees of strength. Our pains are more or less intense, our mental imagery is more or less vivid, our visual perceptions are more or less striking, and our desires and thoughts are more or less gripping. Mental strength is a phenomenal magnitude shared by all conscious experiences that determines their degree of felt intensity. Mental strength, however, has been largely ignored over other aspects of mental states such as their representational contents, phenomenology, or type. Considering mental strength is crucial for illuminating philosophical discussions related to representationalism, the transparency of experiences, cognitive phenomenology, attention, and the structure and function of consciousness. I use mental strength to develop in detail a neuropsychologically plausible theory of introspection and its limits that is inspired by a signal detection theoretic model of perception. In the second half of the dissertation, I look into methodological issues concerning the neural correlates of consciousness such as controlling for performance capacity and stimulus strength, and what these methodological concerns reveal about our theories of consciousness and its function

Why it is important to build robots capable of doing science

Science, like any other cognitive activity, is grounded in the sensorimotor interaction of our bodies with the environment. Human embodiment thus constrains the class of scientific concepts and theories which are accessible to us. The paper explores the possibility of doing science with artificial cognitive agents, in the framework of an interactivist-constructivist cognitive model of science. Intelligent robots, by virtue of having different sensorimotor capabilities, may overcome the fundamental limitations of human science and provide important technological innovations. Mathematics and nanophysics are prime candidates for being studied by artificial scientists