Finally Grass was ported to the Macintosh environment by OpenOSX.
GRASS is one of the most powerful geographical information system that is currently maintained at the Istituto Trentino di Cultura, in Italy. It may be one of the technology to look for to analyze spatial information and to correlate data aggregated in the form of a cartographic representation. There is also an interesting way to look at the data extracted by Grass with the power of the R environment.

GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) is a Geographical Information System (GIS) with raster, topological vector, image processing, and graphics production functionality that operates on various platforms through a graphical user interface and/or command line. A state-of-the-art NVIZ 3-D visualization program is also included. Grass is The open source alternative to ArcView bundled with their spatial analysis module. A similar configuration can easily cost more than US $20,000. GRASS is a complete geographical operating system; with more then 350 powerful, geo-spatial modules.

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[Cahn and Brennan1999] Cahn, J. E. and Brennan, S. E. (1999). A psychological model of grounding and repair in dialog. In Proceedings, AAAI Fall Symposium on Psychological Models of Communication in Collaborative Systems, pages 25–33, North Falmouth, MA. American Association for Artificial Intelligence, AAAI.
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The authors formalise and extend the contribution model of Clark and Schafer 1989 \ref{Clark89}. Particularly, the adaptation they propose is not just a computational reformulation of Clark’s model. The authors propose here some adaptations and addition. The first addition is to emphatise that all contribution graphs are private models, and can represent the perspective of only one agent. The second addition is the detail of the heuristic with which a simple computational agent applies its grounding criterion to the evidence in a turn. Also, they claim thath a contribution should be embedded only when the evidence it provides fails to meet the grounding criterion of the model holder. Finally they introduced a new structure to the formalism: the exchange, that is a pair of contributions linked by their complementary roles: the first proposes and the second executes a jointly achieved task.

Using this newly defined concept they tried to map contributions into tasks using the exchange as the minimal jointly determined dialog unit.

At the end the authors raise some questions like exactly what people represent and remember about a dialog, which is important in terms of understanding the impact of the personal view on the current status of the communication and secondly how to remap the grounding criterion to the current status of the communication.

[Dillenbourg et al.1996] Dillenbourg, P., Traum, D., and Schneider, D. (1996). Grounding in multi-modal task-oriented collaboration. In Proceedings of the European Conference on AI in Education, pages 415–425, Lisbon, Portugal.
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This study concentrate on the study the social grounding process, i.e., the mechanisms by which common ground is updated and maintained between two collaborating human agents. They refer to the definition of Rochelle of collaborative learning where the agents attempt to maintain a shared conception of the problem. They oppose this definition with the fact that in their findings a pair seems to build different shared spaces instead of one. They describe different results they had using an experimental setting called “bootnap” where two players had to coordinate and collaborate to solve a problem usign an MOO environment. They describe two main observations: a) the pair seems to build different shared spaces, through different grounding mechanisms; b) grounding is performed across different modalities.

In concluding they observe the fact that grounding seems to migrate through different modalities. A possible comment may be at the definition level if we really can compare two words like conception (which has a virtual connotation) with space (whch has a more concrete connotation).

Today I was reading Pierre’s paper about grounding in Multi-modal Task-Oriented Collaboration and I was thinking about the usage of the word beliefs that is often used to refer to common ground. The noun “belief” has 2 senses in WordNet.

1. belief — (any cognitive content held as true)
2. impression, feeling, belief, notion, opinion — (a vague idea in which some confidence is placed; “his impression of her was favorable”; “what are your feelings about the crisis?”; “it strengthened my belief in his sincerity”; “I had a feeling that she was lying”)

Therefore my consideration is that a belief is evanescent, because it is retained in the person cognitive schemas and expressed only in connection with impressions or feelings that do not account for a more concrete validity [I still have to find a proper reference for this]. My opinion is then to look for something more concrete of belief to define grounding or the grounding criterion, like acceptance or commitment. These two last concepts hold a more concrete effect on the persons actions and therefore are more observable than belief. This consideration I am raising here seems to be supported by two studies of B. diEugenio [2000] and M. Backer [1994].

A possible outline for my contribution may be>
Title_ From Belief to Acceptance/Commitment in Computational Models of Grounding
1. Introduction: Importance of Computational Models. Some of the most recent models. Pros and Cons of these. Need for empirical evidence.
2. Comparison of different Models
3. Limitations and convergences
4. Empirical approaches
5. Conclusions

After brainstorming a bit we came out with this idea:
“STAMPS” project: System for TAgging Messages, Post-Inferential Semantics
Besides the acronym, we like it because refers to:
1- the act of tagging a physical place with a virtual sign;
2- the automatic tagging system done on each message for the Smart Layering purpose.

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[Clark and Brennan1991] Clark, H. and Brennan, S. (1991). In L. Resnick, J. Levine and S. Teasley, editors, Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, chapter Grounding in Communication, pages 127–149. American Psychological Association, Washington.
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Seminal paper about grounding theory. The author defines grounding as the activity to maintain a shared representation of the meaning of the communications by a group of persons. Subsequently the author introduce the grounding criterion, as the sufficient level of understanding for the current purpose.

Then, the author offer a series of evidences of how grounding is accomplished in communication, like the negative evidence, the acknowledgments, the positive evidence, the try maker, the anticipative repair, etc.

Another foundamental concept here introduced is the “Least Collaborative Effort” principle: the attempt to make the contribution as informative as is required for the current purpose of the exchange, but not more than is required. Also, avoid unnecessary proxility.

The following argument is the description of the grounding reference mechanism offering alternative descriptions or indicative gestures or referential installments or trial references.

The author also think that grounding changes with the medium, and he define a kind of topology to describe the different kinds. Subsequently, he focus on the costs of gounding that he describe as strongly connected with the Least Collaborative Effort described above.

The conclusion is that communication is a collective activity which requires the coordinated actions of the participants. In this context, grounding is crucial for keeping that coordination on track.

Via Pasta and Vinegar, an interesting link on the qualitative description of place localization in natural language. He propose a very empirical approach to support spatial exploration in natural language: building a database of the existing places with additional information for retrieving places with no ambiguity of natural language.

Usage de la cognition spatiale pour localiser les lieux d’activité lors d’une enquête Origine – Destination:

Ce mémoire cerne la problématique de la description qualitative de la localisation d’un lieu décrit en langage naturel. C’est par une approche cognitive qu’est abordé successivement l’apprentissage de l’espace, le stockage de l’information et la restitution de l’information en langage naturel, par l’entremise des concepts de méronymie, de catégories hiérarchiques et de référents spatiaux. De ce cadre théorique, on propose de restructurer une base de données de lieux existants en y ajoutant des paramètres qui permettent de retrouver, d’une description en langage naturel précise ou floue, un lieu sans ambigüité dans une base de données grâce à une interface usager offrant divers modes de repérage spatial.

Found an interesting quote on M. Baker’s paper: “A model for Negotiation in Teaching-Learning Dialogues”. It is about a contructivist view on learning that he stated as opposed to the more conservative view of knowledge transmission. Well, I cannot agree more on this because of my studies on Paper’s constructionism and Piaget’s constructivism:

…induction into the culture through education, if it is to prepare the young for life as lived, should also partake of the spirit of a forum, of negotiation, of the recreating of meaning. But this conclusion runs counter to traditions of pedagogy that derive from another time, another interpretation of culture, another conception of authority -one that looked at the process of education as a transmission of knowledge and values. (Bruner, 1986, p. 123)

It is astonishing how much time is required to do simple stuff like installing a wiki on a server. After trying with no luck to run phpWiki I started looking at easier solutions like vpwiki which comes with VodooPad.

What I would like to do is to build my own glossary of the terms I use in my work. I would like it to be a wiki and to be interoperable with WordPress so to be able to link the terminology to the blog posts.

I was just looking for something simple, but vtwiki maybe is too simple. It is lacking of all the basic features of a wiki, the access control, a structured versioning system, some syntax for the graphic presentation and similar things.

Besides the last version still does not support attachments. I am too tired now to think. I’ll see tomorrow with Zeno. Good night.

I found a nice quote that I am willing to share with the audience:

“Le temps seul peut rendre les peuples capables de se gouverner eux-mêmes. Leur Education se fait par leurs révolutions.”

That can be translated circa as:

“Only time can enable people to be capable of self-governing themselves. Their education is done with their revolutions.”

Alphonse de Lamartine, poet and politician, beginning of 19th century.