Neo-shamanism is a largely unexplored spiritual practice among Western peoples that, by virtue of its queerness, has pressing implications for archaeologists. In their practices, Druidic neo-shamans increasingly make pilgrimages to ancient sites and express strong views on the socio-politics of their presentation and management. Rather than avoid the ‘fringe’ and dismiss these engagements with ...

My PhD focusses on argumentation-based communication between agents. I take, as a starting point, the argumentation system proposed by Garcı́a and Simari [22], which allows a single agent to reason about its beliefs. I define a novel dialogue system that allows two agents to use Garcı́a and Simari’s system to carry out inter-agent argumentation. I define two specific protocols for two different t...

In today’s networked environment, online forums emerge as a popular form of social structures that provides greater opportunities for learning from external resources without pre-established knowledge network. However, our inquiries in online forums do not always generate knowledge desideratum satisfactorily. A few recent studies noticed that communication practices become a means to characteri...

This paper summarizes the state of art in agent autonomy. It dispels myths and builds a foundation for study of autonomy. We point to a renewed interest in good old-fashioned AI that has emerged from consideration of agents and autonomy. This paper also serves as a reader’s guide to the paper in this book. We end with sobering thoughts about the future of the human relationship with machines.

42 AI MAGAZINE ■ The 1993–95 period presented various “identity challenges” to the field of AI and to AAAI as a leading scientific society for the field. The euphoric days of the mid-1980s AI boom were over, various expectations of those times had not been met, and there was continuing concern about an AI “winter.” The major challenge of these years was to chart a path for AI, designed and endo...

Grinblat (2002) asks the following question in the context of algebras of sets: What is the smallest number v = v(n) such that, if A1, . . . , An are n equivalence relations on a common finite ground set X, such that for each i there are at least v elements of X that belong to Ai-equivalence classes of size larger than 1, then X has a rainbow matching—a set of 2n distinct elements a1, b1, . . ....

Although becoming a more racially-integrated society, the legacy of Apartheid still affects learners’ social engagements in and outside their classrooms. Adopting Nussbaum’s (2010) capabilities framework for a socially just democracy, this paper examines 27 pre-service teacher education students’ perceptions of a digital storytelling project and its potential for recognising and honouring capab...

Ladyman, Lipton, and Teller on The Empirical Stance Bas C. van Fraassen I. What is a stance? 1. The argument 2 What is a stance, in general? A. "Stance" and non-philosophical stances B. Role and unity of a stance 3. What is a philosophical stance? 4. What is an empiricist stance? II. Metaphysics III. Voluntarism A. Ladyman's challenge: counterinductive strategies B. The challenge concerning tol...