Nice post on InternetActu.net reporting an interview to Antony Townsend on the topic of LBS’ impacts of the way people will perceive cities. His ideas fits very well with the article we wrote with Nicolas about using IT solutions to support a shift of attitude of citizenry.

[interview]

Finally I published some word on the STAMPS project, that will cover my PhD research. STAMPS stands for System for TAgging Messages, Post-inferential Semantics.

[link]

Today everything was white, nice atmosphere …

Dillenbourg, P. and Traum, D. (1996). Grounding in computer-supported collaborative problem solving. Report of project 11-40711.94, TECFA, University of Genèva. Available from: http://tecfa.unige.ch/tecfa/research/cscps/bootnap.html.
———————-

This report contain the analysis of the ‘bootnap’ project. The authors used a MOO environment for enquirying multi-modalities forms of communication to observe grounding in computer-mediated communication. They asked some pairs to play a mistery solving game and they record their interaction on the textual chat, on the whiteboard and through virtual actions (i.e., move to go from a rome to the other).

Their observations indicated a relationship between grounding and problem solving. In particular they connected the acknoledgement rate to the problem solving variables (e.g., low acknowledgment rates are associated with long-term cross redundancy) than to other dialogue variables.

Controversely, they started looking at cross modalities acknowlegments even if they say that the system they used was not specifically designed to support such cross-modalities acknowledgments. However, they do notice the fact that action can generally be interpreted as acknowledging something if it is prodiced very briefly after. Unfortunately, they could not get too much in details in that because the number of the examples of such situations was too low for drawing any conclusions.

Nice meeting with Stefano Mastrogiacomo and Francesco Cara on our research activities. Some interesting ideas emerged from the interaction: trying to find the relevance of joint actions. In the activity theory, a joint action is a task that can exist only if 2 persons or more do it togheter (what we call collaboration). To be distinguished from participatory actions where people split and then they join the single parts (what we call cooperation).

Stefano argued that at activity level the processes acted by agents follows a problem solving strategy (according to activity theory). I am not sure that this is true in all cases but anyway I found this supporting our claims that we cannot looking into this level of abstraction with the markers used to describe the language level (action level in the activity theory).

The conclusion was that we need to look for different markers that can take into account of a more complex interaction, if it is possible …

What I need to enquiry further is that if there are some mechanisms pre defined for the problem solving activity and how these relate to the lower level interaction (speech, action).

[via Brain Off]
Nice article written after Natalie Jeremijenko’s Feral Robot project. The idea is very simple but dramatically powerful: to reconvert cheap and available technology to monitor levels of pollution. More, to give this tool to everybody to logs pollution in their living space and to aggregate these partial information into a big picture! This fits very well with my intent to collect simple ideas that can change the world. Superb.

A side note, sooner or later we will meet Natalie! …

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights is reserved by the respective author/s.

Dillenbourg, P. and Traum, D. (1996). Grounding in computer-supported collaborative problem solving. Report of project 11-40711.94, TECFA, University of Genèva. Available from: http://tecfa.unige.ch/tecfa/research/cscps/bootnap.html.
———————-

This report contain the analysis of the ‘bootnap’ project. The authors used a MOO environment for enquirying multi-modalities forms of communication to observe grounding in computer-mediated communication. They asked some pairs to play a mistery solving game and they record their interaction on the textual chat, on the whiteboard and through virtual actions (i.e., move to go from a rome to the other).

Their observations indicated a relationship between grounding and problem solving. In particular they connected the acknoledgement rate to the problem solving variables (e.g., low acknowledgment rates are associated with long-term cross redundancy) than to other dialogue variables.

Controversely, they started looking at cross modalities acknowlegments even if they say that the system they used was not specifically designed to support such cross-modalities acknowledgments. However, they do notice the fact that action can generally be interpreted as acknowledging something if it is prodiced very briefly after. Unfortunately, they could not get too much in details in that because the number of the examples of such situations was too low for drawing any conclusions.

Friday I took part of this presentation on the model UPON presented by Antonio de Nicola of the italian CNR. These are my running notes.
————

Ontology building methodologies are systems for constructing ontologies from scratch. UPON is constituted by the following phases:
1 – Requirements capture (semantic needs to be encoded in the ontology)
a) create storyboard
b) create Application Lexicon (i.e., using Ontolearn)
c) identify Competency Questions
d) Use-Case identification
2 – Analysis
a) considering reuse of the existing resources
b) modeling the application scenario
c) building the glossary (i.e., ebXML; RosettaNet)
3 – Building the Glossary (is the intersection between the application lexicon with the domain lexicon)
4 – Definition of CONCEPTS (terms plus definitions)
5 – Design
a) categorisation
b) refining the concepts
6 – Specifying Relations
a) functional unit
b) decomposition analysis
c) attributes
d) domain specific relations
7 – Implementations
a) formalisation in OWL
b) create components and packages
8 – Test
a) verify the coverage of the ontology
b) answering competency questions
c) using Performance Indicators

According to the presenter, is it possible to implicitly verify the goodness of the ontology by looking at the difference of performance indicators between the direct communication (A -> B) and the mediated communication (A -> O -> B).

References:

Grunninger & Fox (1995)
Methontology (University of Madrid)

I found this webcam pointing on the BioWall installed here at EPFL…

[link] hint> use firefox!

My ex-colleague David, has written a nice tutorial on how to use seamlessly signature and encryption in e-mails: Read on! The tutorial is both for Mac and Windows users.

If you’d like to get a very brief and top-level introduction into how this whole PGP encryption thing works, read on. If you want to know how to get started without a big hassle using the wide-spread S/MIME standard, read on!