Search results for "artificial intelligence"

Children’s beliefs concerning school transition

2016

This study examines preschoolers’ beliefs concerning their transfer into primary education. Data from 1386 Finnish preschoolers were obtained using interviews with parents at the end of the children’s preschool year. The qualitative content analysis revealed categories, which encompassed peer relationships, relationship with teacher, learning, formal schoolwork, informal activities, comfortable school entry and no concerns. The results indicated that children’s beliefs concerning their prospective school entry centred on maintaining and making friendships, and that children possessed both negative and positive expectations about their relationship with their future teacher. Both girls and b…

Does Navigation Always Predict Performance? Effects of Navigation on Digital Reading are Moderated by Comprehension Skills

2016

<p align="left">This study investigated interactive effects of navigation and offline comprehension skill on digital reading performance. As indicators of navigation relevant page selection and irrelevant page selection were considered. In 533 Spanish high school students aged 11-17 positive effects of offline comprehension skill and relevant page selection on digital reading performance were found, while irrelevant page selection had a negative effect. In addition, an interaction between relevant page selection and offline comprehension skill was found. While the effect of relevant page selection was strong in good offline comprehenders, it was significantly reduced in weak offline c…

Election Manipulation on Social Networks: Seeding, Edge Removal, Edge Addition

2021

We focus on the election manipulation problem through social influence, where a manipulator exploits a social network to make her most preferred candidate win an election. Influence is due to information in favor of and/or against one or multiple candidates, sent by seeds and spreading through the network according to the independent cascade model. We provide a comprehensive study of the election control problem, investigating two forms of manipulations: seeding to buy influencers given a social network, and removing or adding edges in the social network given the seeds and the information sent. In particular, we study a wide range of cases distinguishing for the number of candidates or the…

Representing social intelligence: An agent-based modeling application

2017

Abstract Intelligent systems are composed of autonomous components that interact each others, with and through the environment, in order to give intelligent support for reaching specific objectives. In such kind of systems the environment is an active part of the system itself and provides input for runtime changing and adaptation. Modeling and representing systems like this is a hard task. In this paper we propose a biologically inspired approach that combined with the use of Agent-Based Modeling allows to create a means for analyzing emergent needs of the system at runtime and converting them into useful intelligent services to be provided. The experiment proposed for validating and illus…

Fuzziness and social life: Informal notions, formal definitions

2012

A clear bidirectional path exists between everyday social and cultural life and the formal notions of uncertainty. If in recent times there has been a resurgence of the contribution of the formal notions of fuzziness and vagueness to disciplines such as aesthetics, medicine and more generally humanities, it is also true that concepts and phenomena from everyday reality are continually and usefully reused in order to build formal definitions that are more akin to the essence of things. In this paper, some notions connected with the handling of uncertainty, and particularly with FST, are outlined with the aim of benefitting the spontaneous emergence of new paths toward an unified theory of un…

Towards a fuzzy-linguistic based social network sentiment-expression system

2015

Liking allows users of Social Networks, blogs and online magazines to express their support of posts and artifacts by a simple click. Such function is very popular but lacks semantic power, and some platforms have augmented it by allowing to choose a pictographic depiction corresponding to a feeling. What is gained in depth is lost in simplicity, and the wide acceptance liking has enjoyed did not carried to the sentiment version. We outline a sentiment-expression hybrid system based on textual analysis and linguistic fuzzy Markov chains overcoming the intrinsic limitations of liking without burdening the user with complex choices.

Expanding the Family Frame: Social Specialists, Mediated Experiences, and Gendered Images of Mobility in Transnational Wedding Videos

2021

This contribution explores the role of wedding videos in shaping transnational social relationships. Examining the production and aesthetic means of these ‘mobile images of mobility’, I show how videographers serve as ritual and social specialists to bring to the fore a fictionalized, imagined place of transnational social relationships. As evidence of ‘memory objects’ for life events, these videos form the basis for mediated experiences in transnational settings, relating those depicted to those engaging in and those watching the videos. They all become part of the social relationships that are inscribed in the video. Yet this imaginary filmic space creates gendered, contested spaces of mo…

2019

Trust is a critical issue in human–robot interactions: as robotic systems gain complexity, it becomes crucial for them to be able to blend into our society by maximizing their acceptability and reliability. Various studies have examined how trust is attributed by people to robots, but fewer have investigated the opposite scenario, where a robot is the trustor and a human is the trustee. The ability for an agent to evaluate the trustworthiness of its sources of information is particularly useful in joint task situations where people and robots must collaborate to reach shared goals. We propose an artificial cognitive architecture based on the developmental robotics paradigm that can estimate…

A Robot Architecture Based on Higher Order Perception Loop

2009

The paper discusses the self-consciousness of a robot as based on higher order perceptions of the robot itself. In this sense, the first order perceptions of the robot are the immediate perceptions of the outer world of the robot, while higher order perceptions are the robot perceptions of its own inner world. The resulting architecture based on higher order perceptions has been implemented and tested in a project regarding a robotic touristic guide acting in the Botanical Garden of the University of Palermo.

Attention-Based Landmark Selection in Autonomous Robotics

2007

This paper describes a robotic architecture that uses visual attention mechanisms for autonomous navigation in unknown indoor environments. A foveation mechanism based on a bottom-up attention system allows the robot to autonomously select landmarks, defined as salient points in the camera images. Landmarks are memorized in a behavioral fashion by coupling sensing and acting to achieve a representation that is view and scale independent. Selected landmarks are stored in a topological map. During the navigation a top-down mechanism controls the attention system to achieve robot localization. Experiments and results show that our system is robust to noise and odometric errors, being at the sa…