Robert Trappl

Sabine Payr

This volume began with a workshop of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence held in 2001. Concerned with embodied agents as cultural objects and subjects, the book is divided into three parts. It begins by drawing attention to the cultural embeddedness of technology in general and agent design in particular, as a reminder that there cannot be an agent without culture. The section concludes that agent systems not only can be used to establish a shared understanding, but can also promote the diversity of understanding and identity. Part II consists of chapters dealing with design concepts and reflections on cross-cultural believability. It suggests how an agent's behavior may be adapted to the cultural context of application while maintaining consistency and describes an approach based on the OCC model--which is widely known and used in the embodied agents research community. Next, the section suggests that Affect Control Theory--an empirically-based, mathematically-elaborated perspective on microsociology--can be incorporated into agents in order to give them a capacity for normative role behaviors and emotional displays. Subsequent chapters pass on from more general considerations to the design and implementation of cross-cultural characters and present virtual character design from the perspective of the artist and the practitioner in stressing that corporate culture and audience culture(s) both guide the design choices, but the resulting culturally adapted agent is "handcrafted." It ends with a chapter that reports cross-cultural user studies made in the UK, Austria, and Croatia. Part III discusses the potential of agents as mediators in intercultural communication. It includes an overview of the ways in which embodied agents are and could be used to coach the acquisition of intercultural communication skills, followed by a chapter that suggests agents could be used to intentionally mold intercultural communication. The last chapter addresses the need for a shared sense of community in large-scale collaboration systems for multi-national organizations that transcends any one cultural orientation and that is truly multicultural.

Human-agent interaction in A Multicultural World

Agent Culture

Peter Baumgartner

Few developments in the intellectual life of the past quarter-century have provoked more controversy than the attempt to engineer human-like intelligence by artificial means. Born of computer science, this effort has sparked a continuing debate among the psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers,and linguists who have pioneered--and criticized--artificial intelligence. Are there general principles, as some computer scientists had originally hoped, that would fully describe the activity of both animal and machine minds, just as aerodynamics accounts for the flight of birds and airplanes? In the twenty substantial interviews published here, leading researchers address this and other vexing questions in the field of cognitive science. The interviewees include Patricia Smith Churchland (Take It Apart and See How It Runs), Paul M. Churchland (Neural Networks and Commonsense), Aaron V. Cicourel (Cognition and Cultural Belief), Daniel C. Dennett (In Defense of AI), Hubert L. Dreyfus (Cognitivism Abandoned), Jerry A. Fodor (The Folly of Simulation), John Haugeland (Farewell to GOFAI?), George Lakoff (Embodied Minds and Meanings), James L. McClelland (Toward a Pragmatic Connectionism), Allen Newell (The Serial Imperative), Stephen E. Palmer (Gestalt Psychology Redux), Hilary Putnam (Against the New Associationism), David E. Rumelhart (From Searching to Seeing), John R. Searle (Ontology Is the Question), Terrence J. Sejnowski (The Hardware Really Matters), Herbert A. Simon (Technology Is Not the Problem), Joseph Weizenbaum (The Myth of the Last Metaphor), Robert Wilensky (Why Play the Philosophy Game?), Terry A.Winograd (Computers and Social Values), and Lotfi A. Zadeh (The Albatross of Classical Logic). Speaking Minds can complement more traditional textbooks but can also stand alone as an introduction to the field. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Sabine Payr

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