The Excellence in Writing Award from the American Council for the Blind was given to Nicholas Giudice of the VEMI Lab in recognition of his Medium essay “COVID-19 and Blindness,” which describes the challenges blind people are facing during the pandemic.
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VEMI researchers have recently published a new paper providing guidelines and best practices for nonvisual access to graphical material using touchscreen-based haptic interfaces. The article, published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (IJHCI), synthesizes the results of a series of six studies with both blind and sighted participants evaluating the efficacy of the vibro-audio […]
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Abstract: In open multiagent systems in which some of the agents may be self-interested, it is vital that an agent be able to make trust decisions about its peers to determine which of them may be untrustworthy and how to behave in response. The agent’s context, including the environment, observed and inferred actions and motives […]
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Abstract: The core idea of evolution is that order in living systems emerges from a simple process of variation and selection. In biological systems we usually understand the source of variation as best described by the mechanisms of genetics. If human social systems are evolutionary systems, however, it would seem the variation that most explains […]
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Abstract: Context-aware agents operating in a cooperative multi agent system (MAS) can benefit from establishing a shared view of their context, since this increases coherence and consistency in the system’s behavior. To this end, agents must share contextual knowledge with each other. In our prior work on context-mediated behavior, agents used frame-based contextual schemas (c-schemas) […]
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Abstract: Many tasks requiring multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are simple, with static goals, of short duration, and require few AUVs, often of the same type. Simple coordination mechanisms that assign roles to AUVs before the mission are sufficient for these multi-AUV systems. However, for tasks that are complex and dynamic, of long duration (implying […]
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Abstract: Although much attention has been devoted to modeling and using context in intelligent agents, relatively little has been given to the problem for multiagent systems (MASs). Yet, just as with an individual agent, context affects how a MAS should behave. In this paper, we discuss an approach to distributed context management for multiagent systems. […]
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Abstract: Artificial agents that simulate aspects of human behavior are expected to behave much like a real human in a similar situation would. Human behavior however, is largely context-dependent. Ignoring the effect context can have on an agent’s behavior can hinder the quality and plausibility of agent’s behavior. In this paper, we present a context-driven […]
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Abstract All effective agents are context-sensitive. This is true for biological agents, and it must also be true for artificial agents if they are to succeed. Context-mediated behavior (CMB) is one approach to endowing artificial agents with context-sensitive, context- appropriate behavior. It relies on explicitly representing contexts—important classes of situations—as contextual schemas and associating with […]
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This paper explores an alternative vision for upper ontologies which is more effective at facilitating the sharability and reusability of ontologies. The notion of generic ontologies is characterized through the formalization of ontological commitments and choices. Ontology repositories are used to modularize ontologies so that any particular upper ontology is equivalent to the union of […]
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