Designing intercultural communication and cooperation systems involves at least two central issues, i.e., concepts for modeling communication and the legitimacy of communication norms and conventions established through modeling and designing. This paper discusses the concept of genre in regard to modeling communication and reflects on how discourse-ethical principles may inform the design of i...

Our goal is to extend agent communication languages for persuasion dialogues. We distinguish action commitments from propositional commitments, because both limit future moves, but an action commitment is fulfilled when the hearer believes that the action is performed, whereas a propositional commitment is fulfilled only when the hearer concedes to the proposition – where concessions are the ab...

In this paper, we formulate agent’s decision process under the framework of Markov decision processes, and in particular, the multi-agent extension to Markov decision process that includes agent communication decisions. We model communication as the way for each agent to obtain local state information in other agents, by paying a certain communication cost. Thus, agents have to decide not only ...

Luhmann (1984) defined society as a communication system which is structurally coupled to, but not an aggregate of, human action systems. The communication system is then considered as self-organizing ("autopoietic"), as are human actors. Communication systems can be studied by using Shannon's (1948) mathematical theory of communication. The update of a network by action at one of the local nod...

An alternative in vitro approach to drug screening has been the use of human cell cultures for antiviral agents and microbial cell cultures for the assessment of the carcinogenic potential of selected compounds. A number of protozoan species have been also used as drug screens for anti-protozoal agents. The ciliated protozoan Tetrahymena pyriformis species has been widely utilised as a dru...

based on a meta-theoretical analysis of voting, the present paper is an attempt to present a theoretical model encompassing all the possible aspects of voting in an election action system, proposing four sub-systems of voting as follows: economic voting, political voting, cultural voting and moral voting. having distinguished among these sub-systems, the writer describes the constitutive elemen...

This study aimed to examine key factors affecting rural female facilitators’ role in participatory rural development in Tehran Province. Since the researchers intended to have a better insight into the facilitators’ role and employ inquiry as a learning forum for bringing about changes for all participants, they preferred to use a case study based upon an appreciative inquiry method. The study ...

Adults often modify their speech, gesture, sign language, and action when interacting with infants relative to adults. Some of these forms of infant-directed communication have been tied to infant preferences and learning, but infant-directed action has yet to be investigated. The purpose of the present study was to test whether infant-directed action impacts infants’ preferences and learning. ...