Sophocles\u27 Antigone: The Tragedy of the Separation of Greece\u27s Competing Social Institutions

Critical Essay Research in progress for HUMA 1301: Introduction to Humanities I Faculty Mentors: Carolyn Perry, Ph.D. and Rich DeRouen The following essay by Austin Tate began in response to an assignment in the Introduction to Humanities course taught by Prof. DeRouen. The assignment asked students to analyze the influence of contending value systems—those of the oikos and those of the polis—as they reveal themselves in selected scenes from the Sophoclean play Antigone. A secondary objective of the task was to interrogate the attempts of Antigone and Creon—the central characters of the play—to navigate the mix of personal and social obligations they faced in the cultural context of their respective positions in the Theban city-state. Austin’s work showed a command of the material and a nuanced grasp of the complex issues of the play that seemed deserving of the kind of showcase provided by Quest. In preparing the essay for publication, it seemed appropriate to deepen the exploration of the central characters’ relationships to the broader community of Thebes and the implications those relationships hold for the conflict between Antigone and Creon. Prof. Perry took on the task of guiding Austin through this evolution of the essay. In pursuing the revision, Austin took an idea found in the conclusion of his original draft—that Antigone might have found someone with more authority to argue on her behalf—and moved that idea into his thesis. This change led him to consider the possible actions Teiresias, the seer, and Eurydice, the queen, might have taken to resolve the dilemma at the heart of the play. Austin’s insightful final version of the essay shows how this seemingly small shift in perspective can lead to a conclusion about ancient Greece that has implications for twenty-first century culture and politics

Cognitively Engineering a Virtual Collaboration Environment for Crisis Response

Crisis response situations require collaboration across many different organizations with different backgrounds, training, procedures, and goals. The Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 and the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts in 2005 emphasized the importance of effective communication and collaboration. In the former, the Multinational Planning Augmentation Team (MPAT) supported brokering of requests for assistance with offers of help from rapidly deployed military and humanitarian assistance facilities. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the National Guard Soldiers and active component Army Soldiers assisted other state, federal, and non-government organizations with varying degrees of efficiency and expediency. Compounding the challenges associated with collaboration during crisis situations is the distributed nature of the supporting organizations and the lack of a designated leader across these military, government, nongovernment organizations. The Army Research Laboratory is collaborating with the University of Edinburgh, University o

Working Notes from the 1992 AAAI Spring Symposium on Practical Approaches to Scheduling and Planning

The symposium presented issues involved in the development of scheduling systems that can deal with resource and time limitations. To qualify, a system must be implemented and tested to some degree on non-trivial problems (ideally, on real-world problems). However, a system need not be fully deployed to qualify. Systems that schedule actions in terms of metric time constraints typically represent and reason about an external numeric clock or calendar and can be contrasted with those systems that represent time purely symbolically. The following topics are discussed: integrating planning and scheduling; integrating symbolic goals and numerical utilities; managing uncertainty; incremental rescheduling; managing limited computation time; anytime scheduling and planning algorithms, systems; dependency analysis and schedule reuse; management of schedule and plan execution; and incorporation of discrete event techniques

EmergencyGrid:Planning in Convergence Environments

Government agencies are often responsible for event handling, planning, coordination, and status reporting during emergency response in natural disaster events such as floods, tsunamis and earthquakes. Across such a range of emergency response scenarios, there is a common set of requirements that distributed intelligent computer systems generally address. To support the implementation of these requirements, some researchers are proposing the creation of grids, where final interface and processing nodes perform joint work supported by a network infrastructure. The aim of this project is to extend the concepts of emergency response grids, using a convergence scenario between web and other computational platforms. Our initial work focuses on the Interactive Digital TV platform, where we intend to transform individual TV devices into active final nodes, using a hierarchical planning structure. We describe the architecture of this approach and an initial prototype specification that is being developed to validate some concepts and illustrate the advantages of this convergence planning environment

CoAKTinG: Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid

Grid infrastructures coupled with semantic web linkage and reasoning open up intriguing new possibilities for scientific collaboration. In this short paper, we outline the research agenda and collaboration technologies under development within the CoAKTinG project: Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid. CoAKTinG will provide tools to assist scientific collaboration by integrating intelligent meeting spaces, ontologically annotated media streams from online meetings, decision rationale and group memory capture, meeting facilitation, issue handling, planning and coordination support, constraint satisfaction, and instant messaging/presence. Their integration is illustrated through an extended use scenario