The not-for profit sport sector is heavily reliant on volunteers for its functioning and ultimately its survival. Recent social and legal/policy changes are having a profound impact on volunteers’ attitudes and behaviour. One vehicle for understanding the role of attitudes and behaviour in volunteer settings is the examination of organisational commitment. Committed individuals are believed to ...

action subsuming make spaghetti and make fettucini (make pesto and make marinara). Edge labels like h=; 1; 2i represent between two actions a and b represent the fact that the rst argument of a is identical to the second argument of b. Computing the join of G1 and G2 then consists of nding action nodes sharing a common abstraction and identifying temporal and strcutural relations common to both...

Some groups endure longer, are more stable, and are better able than other groups to incorporate new members or ideas without losing their distinctiveness. I present a simple model of individual behavior based on the thesis that interaction leads to shared knowledge and that relative shared knowlege leads to interaction. Using this model I examine the structural and cultural bases of group stab...

Even before the advent of Arti cial Intelligence, science ction writer Isaac Asimov recognized that an agent must place the protection of humans from harm at a higher priority than obeying human orders. Inspired by Asimov, we pose the following fundamental questions: (1) How should one formalize the rich, but informal, notion of \harm"? (2) How can an agent avoid performing harmful actions, and...

In this paper, we present a state-based regression function for planning domains where an agent does not have complete information and may have sensing actions. We consider binary domains , and employ the 0-approximation (Son & Baral 2001) to define the regression function. In binary domains, the use of 0-approximation means using 3-valued states. Although planning using this approach is incomp...

Even before the advent of Arti cial Intelligence, science ction writer Isaac Asimov recognized that an agent must place the protection of humans from harm at a higher priority than obeying human orders. Inspired by Asimov, we pose the following fundamental questions: (1) How should one formalize the rich, but informal, notion of \harm"? (2) How can an agent avoid performing harmful actions, and...

Machine learning algorithms have been widely used in document categorization, including both classification and clustering. Two major problems of machine learning in practice are how to generate or extract features from data and how to acquire enough labels for machines to learn. There have been many studies about feature engineering and labeling work reduction in the past decades. Document fea...

This chapter reports the results of a project attempting to assess the performance of a few major search engines from various perspectives. The search engines involved in the study include the Microsoft Search Engine (MSE) when it was in its beta test stage, AllTheWeb, and Yahoo. In a few comparisons, other search engines such as Google, Vivisimo are also included. The study collects statistics...

We present a set of extensions to the knowledge-level PKS (Planning with Knowledge and Sensing) planner, aimed at improving its ability to generate plans in realworld robotics domains. These extensions include a facility for integrating externally-defined reasoning processes in PKS (e.g., invoking a motion planner), an interval-based fluent representation for capturing the effects of noisy sens...

Introduction The advancement of the Internet technology has increased the need for distributed, concurrent, heterogeneous and dynamic application systems. Agent technology is a new paradigm suitable for developing such systems that situates and operates in a dynamic and heterogeneous environment. What exactly is an agent? To date, there is no widely accepted definition of what an agent is. In t...