Our multi-disciplinary team is developing mobile computing software that uses "just-in-time" presentation of information to motivate behavior change. Using a participatory design process, preliminary interviews have helped us to establish 10 design goals. We have employed some to create a prototype of a tool that encourages better dietary decision making through incremental, just-in-time motiva...

Although active listening is an influential behavior, which can affect the social responses of others, the neural correlates underlying its perception have remained unclear. Sensing active listening in social interactions is accompanied by an improvement in the recollected impressions of relevant experiences and is thought to arouse positive feelings. We therefore hypothesized that the recognit...

We provide a rigorous definition of the visual cause of a behavior that is broadly applicable to the visually driven behavior in humans, animals, neurons, robots and other perceiving systems. Our framework generalizes standard accounts of causal learning to settings in which the causal variables need to be constructed from micro-variables. We prove the Causal Coarsening Theorem, which allows us...

Token Ring network managers are faced with the difficult decision of staying with Token Ring or migrating to Ethernet. Making matters worse is that analysts, consultants, and vendors do not always agree on the answer. Some recommend abandonment of Token Ring as soon as possible and move to Ethernet. Others suggest that Token Ring is strategic and one should stay with it forever. Ultimately, one...

Optical technology gains extensive attention and ever increasing improvement because of the huge amount of network traffic caused by the growing number of internet users and their rising demands. However, with wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), it is easier to take the advantage of optical networks and optical burst switching (OBS) and to construct WDM networks with low delay rates and bet...

Experience has shown that as little as 4% of any business produces over half of the waste, rework and delay. Finding and fixing these pockets of dysfunction can dramatically reduce costs and boost profits. According to Authors Stalk and Hout in Competing Against Time, a 25% reduction in delay will double productivity and increase profits by 20%. It doesn’t matter if you’re a manufacturer produc...

This special issue is on multiagent learning, that is, on learning that relies on or even requires the interaction among several intelligent agents. An agent is commonly understood as a computational or natural entity that can be viewed as perceiving in and acting upon its environment, as being autonomous in that its behavior is at least partially determined by its own experience, and as pursui...