Showing all 9 Tech Reports linked to Stuart Watt
Using genre to support active participation in learning communities
Many communities exist that learn and share information either partly or wholly online. These (wholly or partially) on-line communities share messages, documents, and other artefacts that contain useful community knowledge. Members of the community learn through this sharing process, and the growing archive they create forms a valuable learning resource for existing and new members of the community. Two main kinds of approach exist to support community members in accessing resources. The first...read more
Oracles, Bards, and Village Gossips, or, Social Roles and Meta Knowledge Management
Knowledge management systems are used widely in many different organisations, yet there are few models and theories which can be used to help introduce and apply them successfully. In this paper, we analyse some of the more common problems for knowledge management systems. Using this background, we adapt models and theories from social and organisational psychology and computer supported collaborative work, and discuss a variety of different knowledge management systems in these contexts. We...read more
Seeing things as people: anthropomorphism and common-sense psychology
This thesis is about common-sense psychology and its role in cognitive science. Put simply, the argument is that common-sense psychology is important because it offers clues to some complex problems in cognitive science, and because common-sense psychology has significant effects on our intuitions, both in science and on an everyday level. The thesis develops a theory of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology. Anthropomorphism, the natural human tendency to ascribe human...read more
Artificial Societies and Psychological Agents
Agents have for a while been a key concept in artificial intelligence, but often all that the word refers to is a computational process or task with a capability for autonomous action, either alone or in an artificial society of similar agents. But the artificial nature of these societies restricts the flexibility of agents to a point where social interaction between people and agents is blocked by significant social and psychological factors not usually considered in artificial intelligence...read more
Teaching Through Electronic Mail
In November 1994 we (members of the former Human Cognition Research Laboratory) ran an experimental version of the Masters level course DM863, "Common Lisp for Artificial Intelligence," taught as far as possible entirely through the Internet. This report describes this course and outlines some of the experiences and ideas that evolved during this course.read more
The Naive Psychology Manifesto
This paper argues that artificial intelligence has failed to address the whole problem of common sense, and that this is the cause of a recent stagnation in the field. The big gap is in common sense---or naive---psychology, our natural human ability to see one another as minds rather than as bodies. This is especially important to artificial intelligence because AI must eventually enable us humans to see computers not as grey boxes, but as minds. The paper proposes that AI study exactly...read more
Multiple Agent Systems for Configuration Design
This paper investigates how the task of configuration design can be carried out using concepts of multiple agency. Configuration design is the task of selecting components from a predefined set to complete a system which meets a given functional specification and other design constraints. It is a class of task which is conventionally solved using a single agent reflecting an arbitrary balance of the design criteria chosen by the system designer. To study the efficacy of the multiple agent...read more
Froglet: A Source Level Stepper for Lisp
Froglet is a source-level stepper for Common Lisp. Unlike previous steppers, which used pretty-printed reconstructions of definitions to show the progress of execution, Froglet uses the text from which the definition was read. This means that forms can be shown under evaluation in the right context, complete with comments and related functions. It also provides views onto the stack and onto the lexical environment of the form currently being evaluated. This paper describes the background to...read more
The Emerging VITAL Workbench
VITAL is a research and development project which aims to provide methodological and software support for developing large, embedded KBS applications. VITAL is novel in that its ambition is to develop a methodology-based workbench covering the whole KBS life-cycle, from requirements specification to implementation, and to integrate and deploy a number of techniques drawn from artificial intelligence, as well as software engineering and human-computer interaction fields of research. In this...read more
