Conventional approaches to the modeling of autonomous agents and agent communication rely heavily on the ascription of mental properties like beliefs and intentions to the individual agents. These “mentalistic” approaches are, when applicable, very powerful, but become problematic in open environments like the Semantic Web, Peer2Peer systems and open multiagent systems populated by truly autono...

The importance of shared reality emerges early in human development. Infants and young children notice when others share their beliefs, and information about shared beliefs influences their social judgments. This article reviews recent research on the importance of shared beliefs in three domains that have been widely investigated over the past several years-opinions, moral views, and religious...

In this paper, we use signed bipartite graphs to model opinions expressed by one type of entities (e.g., individuals, organizations) about another (e.g., political issues, religious beliefs), and based on the strength of that opinion, partition both types of entities into two clusters. The clustering is done in such a way that support for the second type of entity by the first within a cluster ...

BACKGROUND Capturing public opinion toward public health topics is important to ensure that services, policy, and research are aligned with the beliefs and priorities of the general public. A number of approaches can be used to capture public opinion. METHODS We are conducting a program of work on the effectiveness and acceptability of health promoting financial incentive interventions. We ha...

This study assesses the relationship between political partisanship and attitudes and behavior with respect to the H1N1 virus (swine flu) crisis of 2009 in general, and the U.S. mass vaccination program in particular. I argue that even seemingly nonpartisan political issues like public health are increasingly characterized by partisan polarization in public attitudes and that such polarization ...