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An Ockhamistic branching time model
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The project, HANDS (Helping Autism-diagnosed teenagers Navigate and Develop Socially), studies how teenagers with ASD and with IQ within the normal range (IQ > 70) can handle what they see as difficult situations using mobile technology. HANDS is a project sponsored by the European Commission as part of the 7th Framework Programme. It is the basic...
Citations
... tiple early warning indicators. @BULLET Visual suspect profiling: Some FCA-based methods such as Temporal Concept Analysis (Wolff 2005) were developed to visually represent and analyze data with a temporal dimension. Temporal Concept lattices were used in (Elzinga et al. 2010) to create visual profiles of potentially interesting terrorism subjects. Scharfe et al. (2009) used a model of branching time in which there are alternative plans for the future corresponding to any possible choice of a person and used it as the basis of an ICT toolset for supporting autism diagnosed teenagers. For creating the temporal profile of individual suspects, we use traditional FCA lattices and the timestamps of the poli ...
Since the fall of the Iron curtain starting in 1989 in Hungary, millions of Central and Eastern European girls and women have
been forced to work in the European sex industry (estimated 175,000 to 200,000 yearly. In this paper, we present our work
with the Amsterdam-Amstelland (Netherlands) police to find suspects and victims of human trafficking and forced prostitution.
266,157 suspicious activity reports were filed by police officers between 2005 and 2009 that contain their observations made
during a police patrol, motor vehicle inspection, etc. We used FCA to filter out interesting persons for further investigation
and used the temporal variant of FCA to create a visual profile of these persons, their evolution over time and their social
environment. We exposed multiple cases of forced prostitution where sufficient indications were available to obtain the permission
from the Public Prosecutor to use special investigation techniques. This resulted in a confirmation of their involvement in
human trafficking and forced prostitution resulting in actual arrestments being made.
... If we want to design a system which can convince the user to behave in a certain manner, then the communication of such a persuasive system must be based on an A-theoretical perspective. In the case of the HANDS system described in [14], the user is a teenager with an autism diagnosis who is facing a certain difficult situation. The system is supposed to persuade the user to handle the difficulty in a certain way. ...
... In the second place, a focus on the user experience offers a possibility of theorizing about the opportune moment for introducing new information. We refer to this as the principle of Kairos [14]: making good use of the balance between time, place, and circumstance. A good example of this is the algorithm employed by many web shops, displaying goods that are 'frequently bought with' the one you have already selected. ...
... Here, the suggestion of buying another item is presented precisely at the moment before initiating the check-out procedure. In the HANDS system [14], offering on time, on site support to mentally disadvantaged, it is imperative that the system has a fail-safe, e.g., a panic button displayed at appropriate times in every possible scenario that the user may end up in. This corresponds to saying that this solution must be present in all possible futures after initiating the sequence. ...
This paper deals with the history and the philosophy of some important conceptual structures of time and modality. In particular,
the focus is on the historical and philosophical background of the introduction of the notion of branching time as a useful
conceptual structure in philosophical logic. It is pointed out that the idea was first suggested by Saul Kripke in a letter
to A.N. Prior, dated Sept. 3, 1958. It is also shown in the paper that Prior received the idea positively and that he developed
it significantly in his later writings, although he at least in the beginning met the idea with some reservation and hesitation.
Prior’s development of branching time may be understood as a crucial part of his attempt at the formulation of a conceptual
framework integrating basic human notions of time, free choice and ethics. Finally, the paper presents some challenges regarding
the significance of branching time in philosophy and in the study of information architecture.
... The target group for the HANDS system consists of teenagers of normal intelligence, but with issues often related to diagnoses within the autism spectrum. This means that the students typically are high-functioning in many respects, but may also experience problems with handling situations outside a strict regime of routines [14]. In the early stages of the project, and leading all the way up to the software specifications, user scenarios have played an important role. ...
... The student should do one or the other – not both. The whole series of events can also be presented using branching time to illustrate the possible future courses of events [14]. This is however beyond the scope of this paper. ...
In the context of the HANDS project [13], we argue that cognitive support systems designed for mobile devices may benefit from classical AI techniques as well as from Persuasive Technology. We investigate a system of stepwise instruction, called a Simple Safe Success Instructor, first in terms of scripts, and later in terms of Hierarchical Task Networks. The system under development is crafted for the benefit of young people with an autism-diagnosis, and the purpose is to support these in desired changes in attitude and behavior in dynamically changing environments.
Heart Failure (HF) is among the most deadly diseases globally with reduced quality of life (QoL), repeatable hospitalizations, and early mortality. For effectively managing HF patients should systematically monitor their symptoms and follow the experts’ guidelines. While the precise mechanism behind HF disease has not been fully delineated, risk factors for HF have been identified. Though the risk factors are known, these is a compelling need for efficient and effective management and monitoring the progress of HF. Mobile health (mHealth) intervention has the potential to offer personalized services for predictive, participatory and preventative care and contribute to more accessible, faster and reliable disease monitoring. In this work we present an extended review of the evolution of mHealth interventions in cardiology and HF and the emerging potential these resources provide.
The HANDS (Helping Autism-diagnosed teenagers Navigate and Develop Socially) research project involves the creation of an e-learning toolset that can be used to develop individualized tools to support the social development of teenagers with an autism diagnosis. The e-learning toolset is based on ideas from persuasive technology. This paper addresses the system design of the HANDS toolset as seen from the user's perspective. The results of the evaluation of prototype 1 of the toolset and the needs for further development are discussed. In addition, questions regarding credibility and reflections on ethical issues related to the project are considered.
Social exclusion of young people is a major socio-economic challenge all over Europe. This paper discusses the development and use of ICT applications to tackle the problem. The paper begins with a review to existing research on the possibilities of the ICT in social inclusion of young people. Secondly, as a way forward, a multidisciplinary approach is suggested, which would combine perspectives from social sciences, information systems, human-computer interaction, information technology and electronic commerce. The suggested approach combines technological and economic parameters of ICT development with social factors related to well-being, quality of life, gender, cultural and social conditions, and community values of young people. Particular emphasis is put into involvement of young people themselves in the development and innovation of ICT applications suggesting that a user-driven approach and participatory methodology are crucial in the successful development of ICT based applications for young people.
We propose an iterative and human-centred knowledge discovery methodology based on formal concept analysis. The proposed approach recognizes the important role of the domain expert in mining real-world enterprise applications and makes use of specific domain knowledge, including human intelligence and domain-specific constraints. Our approach was empirically validated at the Amsterdam-Amstelland police to identify suspects and victims of human trafficking in 266,157 suspicious activity reports. Based on guidelines of the Attorney Generals of the Netherlands, we first defined multiple early warning indicators that were used to index the police reports. Using concept lattices, we revealed numerous unknown human trafficking and loverboy suspects. In-depth investigation by the police resulted in a confirmation of their involvement in illegal activities resulting in actual arrestments been made. Our human-centred approach was embedded into operational policing practice and is now successfully used on a daily basis to cope with the vastly growing amount of unstructured information.
Many essential components of language charted by rhetoric, the ancient study of persuasion, remain understudied and underrepresented in current Natural Language systems. Our goal is to combine linguistic and rhetorical theories with discourse analy- sis and machine learning to develop formal models of computational rhetoric that may be usefully applied in real-world Computational Linguistics systems. As part of this initiative, we are building an on- tology of rhetorical figures and formalizing their expression.
The HANDS project suggests the use of Mobile Persuasion in order to support teenagers with an autism diagnosis and normal or high IQ. The paper offers a description of the HANDS toolset and its potential. The HANDS toolset has been evaluated at four schools for teenagers with autism over a period of 7 months. The paper presents the main conclusions from this evaluation and some perspectives of the use of systems like HANDS are discussed.
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2010, held in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia, in July 2010. The 12 full papers and 6 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 36 submissions. The volume also contains 5 invited talks. Originally centered around research on knowledge representation and reasoning with conceptual graphs, over the years ICCS has broadened its scopt to include innovations from a wider range of theories and related practices, among them other forms of graph-based formalisms like RDF or existential graphs, formal concept analysis, semantic Web technologies, ontologies, concept mapping and more.