BACKGROUND Against a background of pandemic threat posed by SARS and avian H5N1 influenza, this study used deliberative forums to elucidate informed community perspectives on aspects of pandemic planning. METHODS Two deliberative forums were carried out with members of the South Australian community. The forums were supported by a qualitative study with adults and youths, systematic reviews o...

Agents in a multiagent system may need to share information and services. For this, they need to be able to interleave deliberative planning with execution of actions. The deliberative planning is needed to decide which actions to perform to achieve an objective, whereas execution of some of the actions is needed to make a more informed decision on the other actions and to access services provi...

Stakeholder involvement in design is desirable from both a practical and an ethical point of view. It is difficult to do well, however, and some problems recur again and again, both of a practical nature, e.g. stakeholders acting strategically rather than openly, and of an ethical nature, e.g. power imbalances unduly affecting the outcome of the process. Hidden Design has been proposed as a met...

There is an ongoing debate on the nature of the processes and knowledge involved in learning language. On one side of the debate, people argue that children learn words through deliberative processes that use propositional conceptual knowledge; on the opposing side, people argue that children learn words through automatic processes and knowledge based on learned associations among perceptual fe...

We are highly sympathetic to Dhar and Gorlin's goal of developing a dual system theory of choice. But we do feel that the proposal could be changed and clarified in a few ways. Specifically, we believe that the evidence suggests that the systems operate in parallel, not sequentially. In addition, the relation between intuitive/associative processing and affect remains unresolved, a vagueness th...

When making a decision it is often necessary to consider the available alternatives in order to choose the most appropriate option. This deliberative process, where the pros and cons of each option are considered, relies on memories of past actions and outcomes. The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex are required for memory encoding, memory retrieval and decision making, but it is unclear how th...

This paper presents analysis of citizen encounters with specialists in a deliberative process, called Deliberative Mapping, which explored options for addressing the shortage of organs for transplantation in the UK. There is a rich theoretical literature about the extent to which citizens are competent to question the knowledge claims of specialists in complex decision-making processes, suggest...

In this paper we present a hybrid reactive/deliberative approach to the multi-robot integrated exploration problem. In contrast to other works, the design of the reactive and deliberative processes is exclusively oriented to the exploration having both the same importance level. The approach is based on the concepts of expected safe zone and gateway cell. The reactive exploration of the expecte...

This paper aims to demonstrate the connection between argument structures, such as those that are created and manipulated by argument mapping tools, and argumentative dialogues, such as those that form a part of online deliberative processes. Our approach is to use recent advances in argument-based knowledge representation, and to tie these to tools we have developed that support argument mappi...

In several papers, Hubert Dreyfus has used chess as a paradigmatic example of how experts act intuitively, rarely using deliberation when selecting actions, while individuals that are only competent rely on analytic and deliberative thought. By contrast, Montero and Evans (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10:175–194, 2011) argue that intuitive aspects of chess are actually rational, in ...