This study aims to investigate the extent to which social presence (as an element of Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework exists in virtual learning environments of the present study. The population of the study consisted of 107 virtual students at B.S. level at the Iran University of Science and Technology and Khajeh Nasir Toosi University of Technology. A questionnaire was developed by the re...

While agents and environments are two intimately connected concepts, most approaches for multi-agent development focus on the agent-specific part of the system, whereas the handling of concerns related to the environment is often neglected or delegated to implementation level constructs. In this paper we demonstrate that building on an environment specification with expressive semantics is inst...

Are cooperative decisions typically made more quickly or slowly than non-cooperative decisions? While this question has attracted considerable attention in recent years, most research has focused on one-shot interactions. Yet it is repeated interactions that characterize most important real-world social interactions. In repeated interactions, the cooperativeness of one's interaction partners (t...

SocialSense is a system designed to provide additional social information about nearby people. SocialSense detects Bluetooth devices and uses them to infer the presence of particular people, pulling their profiles and status from online social networking sites. SocialSense differs from existing mobile social awareness systems by integrating live feeds from multiple sources. Information is shown...

A familial vulnerability to schizophrenia is agreed even though the exact genes involved seem elusive. But despite epidemiological evidence showing different rates of schizophrenia in sociocultural groups that would be considered genetically similar, the causal role of the environment is still hotly contested. Many service users, social scientists and clinicians are convinced that social factor...

This paper discusses the interactive vision approach, which advocates using knowledge from the human sciences on the structure and dynamics of human-human interaction in the development of machine vision systems and interactive robots. While this approach is discussed generally, the particular case of the system being developed for the Aurora project (which aims to produce a robot to be used as...

These advances in the physical and biological sciences provided much needed explanations for how the body functioned in health and disease. Leading scientists such as Claude Bernard developed the concept of internal physiological balance, later named homeostasis by Walter Cannon [2, 3] . Edward Jenner introduced the method of vaccination, and Joseph Lister demonstrated the value of antisepsis [...

Social roles structure daily life because people adjust their behavior according to the role that they have in a specific situation. Online social roles are not necessarily the same as those in daily life and, because they are not so strictly assigned, the question arises whether they can be manipulated. We conducted a structured experiment to investigate whether the manipulation of online soci...

Student working environment influences student learning and achievement level. In this respect social aspects of students’ formal and non-formal learning play special role in learning environment. The main research problem of this paper is to find out if students' academic performance influences their position in different students' social networks. Further, there is a need to identify other pr...