The common view of component centered development is one where applications are constructed by assembling interacting but non-overlapping software components. We are interested in the case where components do overlap, but that may still be developed independently, and deployed and executed in a distributed fashion. In our approach, applications are constructed by independently modeling and prog...

In this paper we investigate various aspects of “developing agent architectures”, i.e., architectures that change over time according to their specification, in the framework architecture APOC. After a brief overview of APOC, we examine and discuss several ways of specifying developing architectures, and present examples of definitions of such architectures in APOC (e.g., Grossberg’s ART networ...

In this paper we discuss strategies concerning the implementation of an agent-based simulation of complex phenomena. The model we consider accounts for population decomposition and interaction in industrial districts. The approach we follow is twofold: on one hand, we implement progressively more complex models using different approaches (vertical multiple implementations); on the other hand, w...

In this paper, we present a synchronous text-based communication tool, referred to as Adaptive Communication Tool (ACT), which provides capabilities for adaptation and personalization. ACT supports both the free and the structured form of dialogue. The structured dialogue is implemented by two types of Scaffolding Sentence Templates (SST); i.e. sentence openers or communicative acts. The capabi...

The necessity and importance of teaching pragmatics has come to light by many researchers (e.g. Rose & Kasper, 2001). Due to the consensus over the need to teach pragmatic competence, the main issue now centers on the question of how we should teach this competence in the most effective way. Consistent with this line of research, the present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of deduc...