To facilitate interactive design, the solutions to configuration problems can be compiled into a decision diagram. We develop three heuristics for reducing the time and space required to do this. These heuristics are based on the distinctive clustered and hierarchical structure of the constraint graphs of configuration problems. The first heuristic attempts to limit the growth in the size of th...

This study tests the hypothesis of linguistic relativity along two lines of research: a) how L2 learners of Chinese and English, respectively, syntactically package semantic components for caused motion (cause, manner, path) in an experimental situation in which they are asked to describe video clips showing caused motion events to an imagery addressee, and b) how monolingual native speakers of...

Purpose: This paper seeks to answer two research questions which are " What are key factors which influence Chinese to adopt mobile technology? " and " Do these key factors differ from factors which are identified from Western context? " Design/methodology: The findings from a pilot study with 45 in-depth interviews are used to develop questionnaires and test across 800 residents from the three...

This paper exposes the results of our participation in INEX’06. Two runs were submitted to the Ad Hoc Thorough track obtained with Garnata, our Information Retrieval system for structured documents. We have implemented two different models based on Influence Diagrams, the SID and CID models. The result of this first participation has been very poor. In the paper, we describe the models, the sys...

Influence diagrams serve as a powerful tool for modelling symmetric decision problems. When solving an influence diagram we de­ termine a set of strategies for the decisions involved. A strategy for a decision variable is in principle a function over its past. How­ ever, some of the past may be irrelevant for the decision, and for computational reasons it is important not to deal with redundant...

Bayes belief networks and influence diagrams are tools for constructing coherent probabilistic representations of uncertain expert opinion. The construction of such a network with about 30 nodes is used to illustrate a variety of techniques which can facilitate the process of structuring and quantifying uncertain relationships. These include some generalizations of the "noisy OR gate" concept. ...

Learning from demonstration utilizes human expertise to program a robot. We believe this approach to robot programming will facilitate the development and deployment of general purpose personal robots that can adapt to specific user preferences. Demonstrations can potentially take place across a wide variety of environmental conditions. In this paper we study the impact that the users visual ac...

This paper discusses the use of uncertain knowledge in eipert systems. The discussion is focused on the use of these systems to support decision making in complei, uncertain environments. Within this conteit, our research indicates that strictly probabilistic representations, which enable the use or decision-theoretic reasoning, are highly preferable to recently proposed alternatives. Furthermo...

This paper presents a cross-cultural comparison of U.S., Canadian-Anglophone, Canadian-Francophone, and Mexican managers’ attitudes toward upward influence strategies. Generally, it was found that all four groups have similar perspectives in terms of the relative acceptability of various influence strategies. However, examination of absolute ratings of influence behaviors suggests that Canadian...

Modeling the perceived behaviors of other agents improves the performance of an agent in multiagent interactions. We utilize the language of interactive influence diagrams to model repeated interactions between the agents, and ascribe procedural models to other agents. Procedural models offer the benefit of understanding how others arrive at their behaviors. As model spaces are often bounded, t...