An interactive, generative Punch and Judy show using institutions, ASP and emotional agents

Using Punch and Judy as a story domain, we describe an interactive puppet show, where the flow and content of the story can be influenced by the actions of the audience. As the puppet show is acted out, the audience reacts to events by cheering or booing the characters. This affects the agents’ emotional state, potentially causing them to change their actions, altering the course of the narrative. An institutional normative model is used to constrain the narrative so that it remains consistent with the Punch and Judy canon. Through this vignette of a socio-technical system (STS), comprising human and software actors, an institutional model – derived from narrative theory – and (simplistic) technological interaction artifacts, we begin to be able to explore some of the issues that can arise in STS through the prism of the World-Institution-Technology (WIT) model

Using semantic annotation in building databases to improve information and energy modelling: a use-case of UK domestic time-series data

There is a increasing interest in modelling stock-level (i.e. local authority, re- gional or national) energy flows in buildings (both domestic and non-domestic) primarily as a means for technological and economic assessment of carbon abate- ment options. Modelling stock level building energy flows is a complex endeav- our that requires the bringing together of a range of different data-sets (cli- mate data, physical building data, occupant profiles, system profiles etc.) each with its own particular data-structure. Typically, this process can be time- consuming, repetitive and difficult to update. As new data is continually being produced, models can quickly become out-dated. We propose a semantically annotated database via an over-arching ontology that radically simplifies this process providing powerful new techniques to combine data-sets and query them. We demonstrate this technique through building up a full time-series of English Housing Survey (EHS) data (from 1970 onwards) which are not directly com- patible due to changes in survey methodologies over time. We then use the combined data-set to build up a picture of changing SAP levels for new build- ings over this period and plot them against mandated changes to the building regulations. The key demonstration here is the speed and the efficiency of the process rather than the data itself

LOG-IDEAH:ASP for architectonic asset preservation

To preserve our cultural heritage, it is important to preserve our architectonic assets, comprising buildings, their decorations and the spaces they encompass. In some geographical areas, occasional natural disasters, specifically earthquakes, damage these cultural assets. Perpetuate is a European Union funded project aimed at establishing a methodology for the classification of the damage to these buildings, expressed as "collapse mechanisms". Structural engineering research has identified 17 different collapse mechanisms for masonry buildings damaged by earthquakes. Following established structural engineering practice, paper-based decisions trees have been specified to encode the recognition process for each of the various collapse mechanisms. In this paper, we report on how answer set programming has been applied to the construction of a machineprocessable representation of these collapse mechanisms as an alternative for these decision-trees and their subsequent verification and application to building records from L'Aquila, Algiers and Rhodes. As a result, we advocate that structural engineers do not require the time-consuming and error-prone method of decisions trees, but can instead specify the properties of collapse mechanisms directly as an answer set program. © Viviana Novelli, Marina De Vos, Julian Padget, and Dina D'Ayala