AAAI 2008 Fall Symposia Reports

The goal of the Adaptive Agents in Cultural Contexts symposium was to investigate agents and environments for behavior in social and cultural contexts and for realistic adaptation of such agents to changing situations. Computational human behavior models, in extending a conventional information-processing approach, face two complex problems: adaptation and evolution of behavior, and the cultural specificity of cognition. These fields are vast, variegated, informed by disparate theoretical and technical disciplines, and interrelated. This symposium was intended to examine the intersection of findings from the field, theory, and applications in such areas as autonomous agent models and simulations for research, international commercial enterprise, nongovernmental organizations, and military, as well as commercial, games. The symposium began with an invited talk given by psychologist Helen Klein of Wright State University, who addressed the dimensions of culturally specific cognition and surveyed behavioral phenomena across cultures. This theoretical basis spoke directly to one of the two major modeling approaches among the symposium’s papers, focusing on behavioral aspects of the individual agent. In these approaches, cultural characteristics of behavior in individual agents was identified and implemented in the context of conventional cognitive architectures. The other major modeling approach tackled the issue of cultural change, simulating the transmission of culture through societies of agents. These approaches drew from theoretical underpinnings in genetics and memetics, studying phenomena such as coalition formation in an artificial life environment. Applications for adaptive and culturally sensitive models included simulation-based training, decision aids, and environments for communication and collaboration between agents both automated and human controlled. Part of the symposium involved the demonstration and analysis of virtual environments for agents, along with automated agents in these environments, such as the inhabitants of an Iraqi town demonstrating culturally accurate verbal, gestural, and