Online communities like Flickr, del.icio.us and YouTube have established themselves as very popular and powerful services for publishing and searching contents, but also for identifying other users who share similar interests. In these communities, data are usually annotated with carefully selected and often semantically meaningful tags, collaboratively chosen by the user who uploaded an item a...

vi Chapter 1: Introduction 1 1.1 Toward Socially Assistive Robotics as an Intervention For Children with ASD . . . . . . . . . 2 1.2 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2.1 Designing an Interaction Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2.2 BIA Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....

Socially-relevant decisions are based on clearly recognizable but also not consciously accessible affective stimuli. We studied the role of the dorsolateral frontal cortex (DLFC) in decision-making on masked affect expressions using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Our paradigm permitted us to capture brain activity during a pre-decision phase when the subjects viewed emotional expression...

Results from agent-based or multi-agent simulation (AB/MAS) modelling can provide relevant information for policy makers, scientists and stakeholders about the boundary conditions of rural development and the uncertainties involved in land-use/cover change (LUCC). However, the process of model validation that can build trust in the outcomes for new parameter conditions and in future scenarios i...

Most autonomous agents are situated in a social context and need to interact with other agents (both human and artificial) to complete their problem solving objectives. Such agents are usually capable of performing a wide range of actions and engaging in a variety of social interactions. Faced with this variety of options, an agent must decide what to do. There are many potential decision makin...

Advances in agent and Web technologies are making it increasingly possible to incorporate guidebots, or animated pedagogical agents, in a wide range of Webbased learning materials. If designed properly these guidebots can promote deeper learning and improve the learner's subjective experience. Guidebots exploit a person's natural tendency to interact socially with computers, as documented by Re...

We review studies that investigate negative social cognitions of socially anxious youth in relation to two specific domains: interpretation of ambiguous social situations and self-evaluation of social performance, including social skills and nervous behaviors. In this review, we address the question whether socially anxious youth's negative perceptions are distortions of reality or reflect a ke...