Providing Self-Aware Systems with Reflexivity

We propose a new type of self-aware systems inspired by ideas from higher-order theories of consciousness. First, we discussed the crucial distinction between introspection and reflexion. Then, we focus on computational reflexion as a mechanism by which a computer program can inspect its own code at every stage of the computation. Finally, we provide a formal definition and a proof-of-concept implementation of computational reflexion, viewed as an enriched form of program interpretation and a way to dynamically "augment" a computational process.Comment: 12 pages plus bibliography, appendices with code description, code of the proof-of-concept implementation, and examples of executio

On the Dimensions of Context Dependence: Partiality, Approximation, and Perspective

. In this paper we propose to re-read the past work on formalizing context as the search for a logic of the relationships between partial, approximate, and perspectival theories of the world. The idea is the following. We start from a very abstract analysis of a context dependent representation into three basic elements. We briey show that all the mechanisms of contextual reasoning that have been studied in the past fall into three abstract forms: expand/contract, push/pop, and shifting. Moreover we argue that each of the three forms of reasoning actually captures an operation on a dierent dimension of variation of a context dependent representation, partiality, approximation, and perspective. We show how these ideas are formalized in the framework of MultiContext Systems, and briey illustrate some applications.

Mapping visual to textual knowledge representation

Item does not contain fulltextIn this paper, graphical representations for knowledge structures in the design method DESIRE for component-based design of knowledge and multi-agent systems are presented, together with a graphical editor based on the Constraint Graph environment. Moreover, a translator is described which translates these graphical representations to textual representations in DESIRE. The strength of the combined environment is a powerful—yet easy-to-use—framework to support the development of knowledge-based and multi-agent systems. Finally, a mapping is presented from DESIRE to Conceptual Graphs. This provides a unifying perspective on the knowledge representation format of DESIRE and allows the use of conceptual graph tools to specify and maintain the knowledge representation part of a DESIRE specification