In this important work, Professor Walter M. Elsasser attempts to evaluate the status of one of the most puzzling scientific and philosophic problems of our time: How the basic ideas or categories of biology relate to the fundamental concepts of physics. In particular: "Is biology reducible to physics?" In turn: "Are social and mental phenomena reducible to biology?," as some of the new school of sociobiologists contend.

When people engage in conversation, they tailor their utterances to their conversational partners, whether these partners are other humans or computational systems. This tailoring, or adaptation to the partner takes place in all facets of human language use, and is based on a mental model or a user model of the conversational partner. Such adaptation has been shown to improve listeners' comprehension, their satisfaction with an interactive system, the efficiency with which they execute conversational tasks, and the likelihood of achieving (...) higher level goals such as changing the listener's beliefs and attitudes. We focus on one aspect of adaptation, namely the tailoring of the content of dialogue system utterances for the higher level processes of persuasion, argumentation and advice-giving. Our hypothesis is that algorithms that adapt content for these processes, according to a user model, will improve the usability, efficiency, and effectiveness of dialogue systems. We describe a multimodal dialogue system and algorithms for adaptive content selection based on multi-attribute decision theory. We demonstrate experimentally the improved efficacy of system responses through the use of user models to both tailor the content of system utterances and to manipulate their conciseness. (shrink)

Two major functions of the visual system are discussed and contrasted. One function of vision is the creation of an internal model or percept of the external world. Most research in object perception has concentrated on this aspect of vision. Vision also guides the control of object-directed action. In the latter case, vision directs our actions with respect to the world by transforming visual inputs into appropriate motor outputs. We argue that separate, but interactive, visual systems have evolved for the (...) perception of objects on the one hand and the control of actions directed at those objects on the other. This 'duplex' approach to high-level vision suggests that Marrian or 'reconstructive' approaches and Gibsonian or 'purposive-animate-behaviorist' approaches need not be seen as mutually exclusive, but rather as complementary in their emphases on different aspects of visual function. (shrink)

This paper describes the perspectives of stakeholders within the North American dairy industry on key issues affecting the welfare of dairy cattle. Five heterogeneous focus groups were held during a dairy cattle welfare meeting in Guelph, Canada in October 2012. Each group contained between 7 and 10 participants and consisted of a mix of dairy producers, veterinarians, academics, students, and dairy industry specialists. The 1-h facilitated discussions were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Content analysis of the resulting transcripts showed that participants (...) across all stakeholder categories identified lameness as the most important welfare issue facing dairy cattle. Other prominent issues of concern included cow comfort, disease, on-farm mortality, stockmanship, painful procedures, injuries, cull cow management, calf management, and restriction of behavioural freedoms. Participants typically gave several reasons for why they considered issues problematic. Underlying reasons were grouped according to animal-centered concerns [at both the individual and at the herd level ] and industry-centered concerns . This analysis identified areas of shared concern among diverse stakeholder groups, which should aid in the development of standards and policies that satisfy stakeholders within and external to the dairy industry. (shrink)

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Spatial Information Theory, COSIT 2005, held in Elliottville, NY, USA in September 2005. The 30 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 82 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on vagueness, uncertainty, and gradation; paths and routes; ontologies and semantics; ontologies and spatial relations; spatial reasoning: cognitive maps and spatial reasoning; time, change, and dynamics; landmarks and navigation; geographic information, and spatial behaviour.