Shame, when reasoning and emotions are linked

Short paperInternational audienceSome emotions, described as "basic" in the literature, are almost reflexes. Other emotions are triggered via pattern matching mechanisms operating on specific mental states (most often epistemic and motivational) to determine the (in)congruence of these states. Yet other emotions come from more or less complex cognitive mechanisms (and we thus call them complex emotions) such as counterfactual reasoning (e.g. guilt or regret), normative judgement (e.g. shame or pride), probabilistic evaluations of the world (e.g. surprise), etc.. In the following, we study and formalise the complex emotion of shame that is of particular importance in social behaviour, and illustrate it on some scenarios

Agent-based Analysis of the Spread of Awareness in the Population in the Prodromal Phase of Bushfires

Efficient communication is essential in disasters in order to coordinate a response and assure effective evacuation. This paper focuses on the case study of the Melbourne bushfires in 2009. We first analysed some interviews of the population to know who the population communicates with (neighbours, family, authorities, etc), and using what channel (radio, phone, internet, etc). We then developed and implemented communicative actions in a Belief-Desire-Intention model of the population\u27s behaviour. Finally, we ran experiments in order to compare the speed at which the population becomes aware of the fires in different scenarios with different types of communication (more or less organised). Our first results show that more organised modes of communication would provide significant benefits in terms of propagation of awareness in the population

Games ready to use: A serious game for teaching natural risk management

International audienceRisk management has become an essential skill for civil engineers. Teaching risk management to engineering students is therefore crucial, but is also challenging: it looks too abstract to students, and practical works are complex and expensive to organise. It also involves interconnected mechanisms coupling human and technical aspects, that are difficult to explain. In order to support risk management teaching, we propose SPRITE, an agent-based serious game using a concrete case study which is exemplary in terms of risk management: the coastal floods on the Oleron Island (France). SPRITE places the player (student) in the role of a local councillor of the Oleron Island, who must ensure the safety and well-being of the island residents, while maximising performance w.r.t. economic and environmental issues, in a context of coastal flood risk. SPRITE is the central piece of a pedagogical sequence which is actually used in risk management courses at Bordeaux University. This paper describes the SPRITE serious game and the underlying agent-based model, and reports on some lessons learnt from its use in a risk management course

The role of cognitive biases in reactions to bushfires

International audienceHuman behaviour is influenced by many psychological factors such as emotions, whose role is already widely recog-nised. Another important factor, and all the more so during disasters where time pressure and stress constrain reasoning, are cognitive biases. In this paper, we present a short overview of the literature on cognitive biases and show how some of these biases are relevant in a particular disaster, the 2009 bushfires in the SouthEast of Australia. We provide a preliminary formalisation of these cognitive biases in BDI (beliefs, desires, intentions) agents, with the goal of integrating such agents into agent-based models to get more realistic behaviour. We argue that taking such "irrational" behaviours into account in simulation is crucial in order to produce valid results that can be used by emergency managers to better understand the behaviour of the population in future bushfires

Effect of Systemic Diseases on Periodontal Microbiome. A Literature Review. Part III

Periodontitis is defined as a chronic inflammatory disease and is mainly caused by a dysbiosis of the periodontal microbiome. Many systemic diseases have been linked to periodontal disease, and the alteration of the microbiome plays a major role in the pathogenesis. Diabetes has been highly associated with the increased risk of periodontal disease, as it provides a hyperglycemic microenvironment that heavily influences the periodontal microbiome by reducing its diversity and favoring disease associated bacteria. Rheumatoid arthritis has also been associated with periodontitis, with many studies indicating microbial shifts in affected individuals without reaching a consensus on the precise nature of dysbiosis. Contradictory and limited number of studies focusing on the effect of other diseases (systemic lupus erythematosus, human immunodeficiency virus, leucocyte adhesion deficiency, liver diseases) on the periodontal microbiome have been also conducted, and many of them have shown distinct microbial shifts in affected individuals

Comparing Agent Architectures in Social Simulation: BDI Agents versus Finite-state Machines

Each summer in Australia, bushfires burn many hectares of forest, causing deaths, injuries, and destroying property. Agent-based simulation is a powerful tool for decision-makers to explore different strategies for managing such crisis, testing them on a simulated population; but valid results require realistic underlying models. It is therefore essential to be able to compare models using different architectures to represent the human behaviour, on objective and subjective criteria. In this paper we describe two simulations of the Australian population\u27s behaviour in bushfires: one with a finite-state machine architecture; one with a BDI architecture. We then compare these two models with respect to a number of criteria