The real challenge of creating believable and enjoyable board game arti cial opponents lies no longer in analysing millions of moves per minute. Instead, it lies in creating opponents that are socially aware of their surroundings and that can interact socially with other players. In traditional board games, where face-to-face interactions, social actions and strategic reasoning are important co...

This paper applies a measure of linguistic distance to differences in pronunciation which have been observed as a consequence of modern speakers orienting themselves to standard languages and larger regions rather than local towns and villages, resulting in what we shall call REGIONAL SPEECH. We examine regional speech, other local “varieties” in the Dutch of the Netherlands and Flanders, and a...

We consider a setting in which a single divisible good (“cake”) needs to be divided between n players, each with a possibly different valuation function over pieces of the cake. For this setting, we address the problem of finding divisions that maximize the utilitarian social welfare, focusing on divisions where each player needs to get one contiguous piece of the cake. We provide a constant fa...

We consider the following questions: What kind of logic has a natural semantics in multi-player (rather than 2-player) games? How can we express branching quantifiers, and other partial-information constructs, with a properly compositional syntax and semantics? We develop a logic in answer to these questions, with a formal semantics based on multiple concurrent strategies, formalized as closure...

In the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory (IRL) at Vanderbilt University we seek to develop service robots with a high level of social intelligence and interactivity. In order to achieve this goal, we have identified two main issues for research. The first issue is how to achieve a high level of interaction between the human and the robot. This has lead to the formulation of our philosophy of Huma...

We are exploring teaming in complex and dynamic environments that requires reasoning about roles and social influences. Towards that end we describe our implemented testbed and experiments that empirically show effects of such reasoning in a team setting.

The purpose of this study was to determine if children with warm social contact with their parents (noncaretaking functions) are more responsive to social reinforcement than are children who are deprived of such contact.Data was gathered from interviews with mothers, who described the amount and quality of both parents' contact with the child. The sample of middle class children, 13 girls and 1...