335 research outputs found
Statistical Pattern Recognition Meets Formal Ontologies
No full textIn this paper we propose a series of novel lines of research emerging from the encounter of computer vision and formal ontologies. The main underlying idea is that a genuine visual knowledge can only emerge by the integration of the algorithmic and the semantic layer, which are typical of the two disciplines. We also present some early attempts at applying the proposed hybrid approach to tackle some important and still unsolved issues
Atti del Convegno “Lo Scienziato Ambientale dal mondo del lavoro a quello della scienza”
No full text
Open ontology-driven sociotechnical systems: Transparency as a key for business resiliency
No full textMost business and social organisations can be seen nowadays as complex sociotechnical systems (STSs), including three components: technical artifacts, social artifacts, and humans. Within social artifacts, a special role have norms, which largely influence the overall system's behavior. However, norms need to be understood, interpreted, negotiated, and actuated by humans, who may of course deviate from them, or even decide to change them. STSs are therefore essentially prone to failure: critical situations are part of STS's life, and may sometimes lead to tragic outcomes. That's why resilience to failure must be built into such systems, and is a crucial parameter to determine their quality. We argue in this paper that, to achieve a high level of resilience, transparency is the key: actors within the system need to take a reflective stance toward the system itself. In other words, an STS must be open to its actors, which by observing and understanding its dynamics can take the appropriate initiatives in presence of unforeseen problems, possibly modifying the system at run time. Ontological models can play a crucial role in this context. However, we need to make a radical change in our modelling approach, shifting the focus of analysis from ontology-driven information systems to ontology-driven sociotechnical systems
Rationality, Autonomy and Coordination: the Sunk Costs Perspective
No full textOur thesis is that an agent1 is autonomous only if he is capable, within a non predictable environment, to balance two forms of rationality: one that, given goals and preferences, enables him to select the best course of action (means-ends), the other, given current achievements and capabilities, enables him to adapt preferences and future goals. We will propose the basic elements of an economic model that should explain how and why this balance is achieved: in particular we underline that an agent’s capabilities can often be considered as partially sunk investments. This leads an agent, while choosing, to consider not just the value generated by the achievement of a goal, but also the lost value generated by the non use of existing capabilities.We will propose that, under particular conditions, an agent, in order to be rational, could be led to perform a rationalization process of justification that changes preferences and goals according to his current state and available capabilities. Moreover, we propose that such a behaviour could offer a new perspective on the notion of autonomy and on the social process of coordination
Multi-scale f-formation discovery for group detection
No full textWe present an unsupervised approach for the automatic detection of static interactive groups. The approach builds upon a novel multi-scale Hough voting policy, which incorporates in a flexible way the sociological notion of group as F-formation; the goal is to model at the same time small arrangements of close friends and aggregations of many individuals spread over a large area. Our technique is based on a competition of different voting sessions, each one specialized for a particular group cardinality; all the votes are then evaluated using information theoretic criteria, producing the final set of groups. The proposed technique has been applied on public benchmark sequences and a novel cocktail party dataset, evaluating new group detection metrics and obtaining state-of-the-art performances
Il commissario Catullo : il Carme 56 in Eccetera di Emilio Tadini
No full textThis paper deals with Enrico Tadini’s last novel, Eccetera, and its relationship with Catullus
LVI. Tadini was a well-known painter and writer of the second half of XXth century, author of
novels, poems, dramas, critical essays. In a scene of Eccetera the narrator reports the story of a
curious experience by one of the characters. Working as carrier, he delivers a book to a couple:
the book is an old edition of Catullus’ poems and the male of the couple propose to him to an
erotic performance that reproduces the situation of Catullus’ LVI. A close reading of the re-use of
the Latin poem shows that Tadini built the scene – and all his novel – on an elaborate system of
dichotomies and oppositions: old and new, colors and white, otherness and familiarity, classical
culture and contemporary absence of culture, past and present. Such a complexity simply tries to
reflect the complexity of the real life, as the analysis of Tadini’s style confirms. The author
establishes a dialogue with the reader, that is also a way of reflecting – through the powerful lens
of humorism – on the status of the contemporary novel and on our relationships with the past
Towards an ontology-based framework to store and recover memories for creative architectural projects
No full textFormal methods and empirical practices. Conversations with Patrick Suppes
No full textThe philosopher Patrick Suppes has developed a unique and influential approach to studying the foundations of science—he combines an understanding of the main principles of scientific theories in axiomatic terms and formal models with a hands-on approach. While moving the study of the philosophy of science out of the parlor and into the lab, he often comes up with original results from the psychology of learning to the theory of measurement and quantum mechanics. This book searches for a common thread in Suppes's multifaceted work through a series of conversations with the man himself and illuminates many of the more challenging aspects of his philosophy.
Roberta Feffario is a researcher in the Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian Research Council. She works at the Laboratory for Applied Ontology in Trento, Italy.
Viola Schiaffonati is assistant professor in the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione of the Politecnico di Milano
Towards a Conceptualization of Sociomaterial Entanglement
No full textIn knowledge representation, socio-technical systems can be modeled
as multiagent systems in which the local knowledge of each individual agent can
be seen as a context. In this paper we propose formal ontologies as a means to
describe the assumptions driving the construction of contexts as local theories and
to enable interoperability among them. In particular, we present two alternative
conceptualizations of the notion of sociomateriality (and entanglement), which
is central in the recent debates on socio-technical systems in the social sciences,
namely critical and agential realism.
We thus start by providing a model of entanglement according to the critical realist
view, representing it as a property of objects that are essentially dependent on
different modules of an already given ontology. We refine then our treatment by
proposing a taxonomy of sociomaterial entanglements that distinguishes between
ontological and epistemological entanglement. In the final section, we discuss the
second perspective, which is more challenging form the point of view of knowledge
representation, and we show that the very distinction of information into
modules can be at least in principle built out of the assumption of an entangled
reality
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