This paper describes the challenges and processes of developing a sociable interface and presents the implementation of one sociable interface, Dinner Party, in which a participant interacts with virtual creatures while dining alone. This paper explains how mundane objects can be sociable interfaces that interact with humans on a psychological level.

Many scientists now manage the bulk of their bibliographic information electronically, thereby organizing their publications and citation material from digital libraries. However, a library has been described as "thought in cold storage," and unfortunately many digital libraries can be cold, impersonal, isolated, and inaccessible places. In this Review, we discuss the current chilly state of di...

808 Genes are no longer what they used to be. Once the powerful determinants of our biological and evolutionary fate, their central importance is now gradually being chipped away. At first glance, this may just sound like an interesting puzzle for scientists: How can the gene be placed correctly in the larger context of biology? But it also creates an important challenge when it comes to commun...

Let x = (x0, . . . , xn−1) be an n-chain, i.e., an n-tuple of non-negative integers < n. Consider the operator s : x 7→ x′ = (x0, . . . , x ′ n−1), where x ′ j represents the number of j’s appearing among the components of x. An n-chain x is said to be perfect if s(x) = x. For example, (2,1,2,0,0) is a perfect 5-chain. Analogously to the theory of perfect, amicable, and sociable numbers, one ca...

People with concealable stigmatized identities often conceal to avoid facing prejudice and discrimination. Yet, this strategy carries risk; concealment may engender social costs. Across five studies in which participants (total n = 1992) were recruited from an online pool (Prolific) institutional undergraduate pool, we found that people who conceal, relative disclose, viewed as less moral socia...

Interface formalisms are able to model both the input requirements and the output behavior of system components; they support both bottom-up component-based design, and top-down design refinement. In this paper, we propose “sociable” interface formalisms, endowed with a rich compositional semantics that facilitates their use in design and modeling. Specifically, we introduce interface models th...