While different forms of social interaction have been extensively studied in several fields, the development of formal logics makes precise knowledge representation and mechanical reasoning about situations involving social interaction possible. In particular, such logics make it possible to formally specify and verify software implementing social mechanisms. In my talk I will give an overview ...

Giorgio Levi has two great fortunes: he has a noble smile and he survived a heart attack. These are the important facts about his personality, and they are so evident that there is no need for this modest portrait, which does little more than stating the obvious. I should perhaps start by sketching my relation with Giorgio, so that my point of view is clear: I owe my life to him. In 1991, he ga...

Data is everywhere, and manifests itself in various formats. Data can be publicly available and can be privately owned. Data can be persistent on a server or ephemeral in a data stream. Society depends on data and hence the security, privacy and reliability of the data are critical in diverse ways. In this talk I will touch on various security aspects of data in different contexts that arise in...

Online education is a popular paradigm for promoting continuing education for adult learners. However, only a handful of studies have addressed usability issues in the online education environment. Particularly, few studies have integrated the multifaceted usability evaluation into the lifecycle of developing such an environment. This paper will show the integration of usability evaluation into...

This pilot study investigated whether there is a correlation between English reading proficiency of Japanese EFL learners and their ability to read aloud properly. The former was measured through a reading comprehension test under the format of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), whereas the latter was evaluated in terms of (1) the use of correct breath/sense groups, (2) rate of ...

In ironic texts what is literally said is usually negated, and in absence of an explicit negation marker. This makes social computing quite challenging. Detecting irony is very much important for NLP tasks such as polarity classification, sentiment analysis, opinion mining, or reputation analysis. There is a growing interest from the research community in investigating the impact of irony on po...

Labelled Markov processes are continuous-state fully probabilistic labelled transition systems. They can be seen as co-algebras of a suitable monad on the category of measurable space. The theory as developed so far included a treatment of bisimulation, logical characterization of bisimulation, weak bisimulation, metrics, universal domains for LMPs and approximations. Much of the theory involve...

This study employed an eye-tracking technique to examine students’ visual attention when solving a multiple-choice science problem. Six university students participated in a problem-solving task to predict occurrences of landslide hazards from four images representing four combinations of four factors. Participants’ responses and visual attention were recorded by an eye tracker. Participants we...

The use of cartographic representations in 3D views accumulates the advantages of technological advances, but faces a lack of cartographic knowledge needed to build these representations. Consequences include misconceptions in map design that can inhibit or even impair the understanding of the features represented and their spatial relations. A common task in 3D map-use is virtual navigation su...

For a detailed review of this subject I refer to a recent paper [1]; in this talk I only very briefly comment on a few most important questions: (a) Very recent significant progress in viscous hydrodynamics calculations (b) Initial eccentricity/flow fluctuations, the effect of which has been clarified recently (c) Initial conditions, in particular the role of the gradients in the initial veloci...