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Investigating Multi-Agent Reasoning about Disparate Phenomena in Science using belief systems. The models of agents are derived from historical documents (e.g. lab notes correspondence). The models are constructed through schematic functional programming (Clarity). Context is significant for any belief system that involves mutli-agent systems. We (David Gooding - University of Bath) are investigating not only the effects of inter-communication between agents but also the effects of the initial belief context of each agent.

I am a computer science graduate student at the University of Maine and am currently helping to integrate context mediated behavior into the Orca mission controller.

I work at Xerox of Brazil with workflow and Document Management systems but I am developing a project at University Católica in the AI (artificial inteligence) area which is based on context-sensitive reasoning. My project proposes a representation of dynamic attributes, but I haven't find a solution of how I'll represent these. I am looking for some material about c-schemas (contextual schemas). I found some papers of Prof. Roy Turner about the Orca project; we want to know more about how these attributes are represented in c-schemas in the AUV case. Another problem is that I am new in this area and I can't visualize (in the AUV case) how the c-schema is stored in the memory; which platform supports this implementation -- this project uses some kind of database?

My main area of research is databases but I'm interested in information processing in general and in applied logic and interactions between databases and AI in particular. Context has been absent from databases up until now (I'd appreciate being notified of exceptions) and this fact is coming back now with a vengeance. Issues like integration of heterogeneous information have made context an important research issue (viz. the COIN -COntext INterchange- project at MIT the work of Amit Sheth at U of Georgia and others). I'm interested in perspectives from outside Computer Science to learn and adapt -Situation Theory being my favourite one.

I work within AI on the reasoning required for the understanding of metaphorical utterances and utterances about mental states. I have developed a system called ATT-Meta that has capabilities in both directions (reported in CONTEXT'99 and CONTEXT'01). The directions look divergent but are in fact convergent because I have mainly worked on metaphor for mental states and processes and because of interactions noted below. The ATT-Meta system is based on contexts currently used for two distinct but related purposes. One purpose is to serve as belief spaces within which to simulate alleged reasoning of other agents. The other is to serve as environments within which to conduct what we call "source-domain pretences" whereby the the system draws inferences from the usually ridiculous literal source-domain meaning of metaphorical utterances. The two types of context are strongly related both conceptually and algorithmically. The contexts can be nested to any depth to allow for (a) nested belief situations (b) nested metaphorical situations arising from certain types of metaphor combination (c) simulation of metaphorical thought of other agents and (d) simulation of the alleged reasoning of entities that are only agents metaphorically speaking. However so far we have concentrated on (a) and (b) in our actual system development and experimentation.

I am a computing student at Imperial College London and a software developer for AB Games Ltd. My interest is in linking heterogenous data sources from across the Internet using FOL+Contexts as a representation language.

My work domain is Philosophy of Language and Linguistics. Starting out from Formal Semantics, I have worked and published on context-dependent interpretation of lexical items, metaphor and metonymy, and polysemy, the construction of properties under perspectives. Special attention has the creation of perspectives, selective mechanisms fromout [sic] contexts, which guide concept formation and understanding. Besides in articles on these topics, main results of this work can be found in my books: Norms of Language (London: Longman, 1987) Dynamic Conceptual Semantics. Investigations into Concept-Formation and Understanding (CSLI-FoLLI-Publications. Stanford 1998) and Consciousness Emerging: the Interaction of Perception Imagination Action Memory Thought and Language (Series: Advances in Consciousness Research No. 39. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publ.Comp. 2002.)

I am interested in the pragmatic side of context, i.e. the components, the functions, and the general role of context in cognitive and linguistic processes in relation both to the child's acquisition of language and to the various forms that human interaction can take. I have proposed an "integrated" view of context which should include both the given components of context and the activated ones (cf. Bazzanella 1998 and forth; see web page).

More specifically I am concerned with: i) the role of mutual knowledge/beliefs and the topic of implicit meaning in the processes of understanding/coming to understanding/misunderstanding both in face-to-face (cf. Bazzanella and Damiano 1999, Bazzanella forth.) and other forms of interaction such as CMC (cf. Bazzanella and Baracco forth.); ii) specific linguistic phenomena which are closely bound to context such as "Dialogic Repetition" (cf. e.g. Bazzanella 1996) and "Discourse Markers" (cf. Bazzanella 1990, Bazzanella and Morra forth.); iii) problems related to contextualization in spoken language corpora (cf. Bazzanella and Bosco forth. ). Varol Ackman and myself are currently editing a special issue of Journal of Pragmatics on the topic "Perspectives on Context".

I am interested in the logical formalization of context-dependent reasoning or as I prefer to call it pragmatic reasoning. Reasoning of this kind is particularly interesting and distinctive when the context is incompletely or incorrectly specified as it then involves inferring an appropriate context (or contexts if there is ambiguity) in which to interpret the given. Pragmatic reasoning is ubiquitous and its analysis and formalization has been undertaken in linguistics the philosophy of language the philosophy of science and in the formalization of common sense reasoning in artificial intelligence. My work in this area to-date is summarized under the following headings:

Conceptual foundations
Causation and counterfactuals
Practical reasoning and rationality
Implementation

For further details please see my web page:

http://www.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/~jb/

Software and information model Finding concepts in UML Models of products and models of tasks

I have a Master in Philosophy (University of Geneva) and a PhD in Philosophy of Language (CREA - Ecole Polytechnique Paris and Università del Piemonte orientale Vercelli). I am now research fellow at the University of Genoa. My main fields of interest are philosophy of language pragmatics and cognitive science. Recent publications include a book on contextual dependence.

My scientific activities deal with virtual personnalizable operas: it means operas using computers not only for the performance, but also to enable collaborative composition and performance, so that musical, textual, graphical elements may be updated in realtime

-context is very important for us : context of composition, context of playing : all the explicite and implicit factors that enable an opera work to run (and maybe to help us to understand what does not work in some cases of interaction).

I started to work on the problem of context during my master dissertation, when I proposed a context-based solution to a well-known problem in reasoning about action, the qualification problem. After that, I worked at a philosophical foundation of a theory of context during my PhD.

Currently, my work follows two main lines:

• FOUNDATIONS: together with Massimo Benerecetti and Chiara Ghidini, I'm working at a general theory of contextual reasoning. We aim at providing an abstract characterization of all forms of contextual reasoning, and a formalization in the logic of MultiContext Systems (http://dit.unitn.it/~context). Our current results appear in the paper "Contextual Reasoning Distilled" in the Journal of Theoretical and Experimental AI, 12(3), pp. 279-305, 2000.
• APPLICATIONS: I work on the application of the ideas above to areas like knowledge management, semantic web, and more in general distributed systems. The main idea is that context provides a very useful concept in designing applications in which there are many autonomous knowledge sources which must be coordinated to achieve some goals. My personal scientific challenge is to design systems for knowledge coordination which makes minimal assumptions on what is shared among these autonomous entities. This work is part of a project called EDAMOK, in which this approach is implemented in a peer-to-peer infrastructure.

Other areas of interest are: belief contexts; theory of agents and multi-agent systems; philosophical logic (in particular, I work on a new logic for indexical langages); context-aware applications.

I work in Artificial Intelligence and my research concerns the design and development of Context-based Intelligent Systems for the global objective, and more specifically on the relationships between cooperation, incremental knowledge acquisition, learning, explanation and context.I have participated in the organization of two workshops on context at IJCAI in 1993 (France) and 1995 (Canada), and the series of International and Interdisciplinary Conferences on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT-97, CONTEXT-99, CONTEXT-01, and next year CONTEXT-03). I consider context as the key factor for the improvement of cooperation, the explanation generation and the incremental knowledge acquisition.

The context that I consider is the context of the interaction between a human and a machine. My goal is to make context explicit to model it and improve the human-machine interaction and also human-human interaction through a machine.

Modeling context implies to address questions as: Is context knowledge or a mechanism to tackle knowledge? How to exploit context to improve the acquisition, representation, reasoning about,and the explanation of knowledge? In cooperative systems,how context can improve the cooperation between a human and a machine in problem solving?

In the framework of the SART application (http://www.lip6.fr/SART), a Ph.D. student has developed a context-based formalism called contextual graphs. Contextual graphs include in a natural way mechanisms for incremental knowledge acquisition, learning, and explanation generation at different levels of detail. The software is being developed now to be general for different applications.

My name is Anders Broberg i have a PH.D in computing science and working at the Department of Computing Science at Umeå University in Sweden. During the last years I have been engaged in a research project with the title Knowledge-Mirror . My licentiate dissertation and my PH.D thesis are two of the major results from this project. The licentiate dissertation with the title Cognitive Tools for Learning was presented at a seminar at my department on June 4 1997 and I defended the PH.D thesis with the title Tools for Learners as Knowledgeworkers on March 3 2000. My research is focused on the working and learning situation in the knowledge society that we are just entering and mainly on creation of computer supports for knowledge work. The dissertation work has resulted in are several prototypes of tools for knowledge workers. TEXT-COL tool supporting readers of computer mediated texts with active reading and the FOCI environment supporting work with foci. One example of my interest for context go back to the fact that the personal value of a document is depends to a high grade of the context one reads it.

I study Cognitive Psycholgy at Paris 8 University, and working more "precisely" on influence of context on reasoning. Actually, I'll participate (at a modest level) in SART project, within a training at Lip6, working with Patrick Brézillon.

I am working in the overlapping areas of natural language interpretation knowledge representation and multimodal dialogue. More specifically I am investigating the problems of automatic natural language interpretation in the wider setting of multimodal human-computer dialogue. In this setting I find it natural to interpret linguistic contributions in terms of "dialogue acts", i.e. actions intended to achieve certain changes in the context. In my experience the semantic (and pragmatic) analysis of dialogue contributions is a fruitful way to define a notion of "context" that is both sufficiently rich to be useful and sufficiently limited to be manageable. I have devised a formalism called "modular partial models" for the effective representation of dialogue context. At my website you can find some publications and descriptions of projects dealing with these issues.

common sense reasoning

formalizing context

• learn some news concepts, and build stereotypes
• compare concepts (i.d. evaluate similarities)
• reason with concepts, by a kind of propagative/cumulative logic

But of course this approach can only works in very little "worlds", for computers have limited resources. So I wonder whether it is possible to define the meaning of a concept with just a "fuzzy" knowledge of the context. I think so, but I don't know how. More precisely, I don't have a good method for knowledge acquisition, that is to say, what is to be taken into account "around" a concept, and with which precision, in order to have a (more or less) good knowledge of this concept ? And also I wonder when a context has to be re-examined (regularly ?, after some events ?)

I am interested in context analysis of metaphor sequences for story theory and musical semiotics.

Main areas of work: (a) Natural Language (NL) especially Discourse and Syntax; (b) Semiotics and General Systems Theory with particular reference to Multimedia; (c) Computer-Mediated Communication.

Context is indispensable to the understanding of all these forms of communication since they all involve an interaction between message and context.

Specific issues include: (a) How can context be adequately modelled and represented in such a way as to foster a fuller understanding of NL discourse and of computer-mediated multimedia communication? (b) How do appropriate models of context for NL differ from those for Programming Languages?

How context impacts my work: study of contextual information in human-machine task-oriented spoken dialogue systems, with the goal of performing natural human-machine dialogue, even if spoken language recognition and understanding technology still have imperfect performance.

I am currently researching what Searle calls 'Background' and what Finch calls 'Foundation Facts' in Wittgenstein. The question concerning me at present is whether there are contexts necessary for natural language and which are in principle impossible to represent. Another area of interest is Buddhist views on language.

I am a French researcher in mathematical education (didactic of mathematics); my main interest is about logic and reasoning in mathematics. As you know, also in mathematics, reasoning is very context- dependant, and this is opposite with the idea that logic in contente's free. My thesis is that propositional calculus is not relevant for mathematics ; to analyze mathematical proof and reasoning, we need predicate logic, which is much more expressive, and specially elementary, model theory ; I show in some various scholar situations (from primary to university) that elementary model theory from Tarski provides us tools for analysing pupils and students reasoning, as well as mathematical proofs, and I explore which logic is relevant for mathematic teachers preparation, knowing that as for now in France ther is nearly no logic in their curriculum.

I was in ESSLI school in Trento last Summer, where I found many echoes of my own work, specially semantics fields;

Proof theory, programming language semantics, type theory, non-classical logic, computational linguistics.

Pretty much all aspects of Context including: philosophical aspects (its role in knowledge and representation), how context is used by humans, how it could be utilised in useful algorithms, the combination of learning and inference in context, how one uses and documents context in social simulation, better ways to model context (than naive logical formalisms which often cause more problems than they solve), finding what is common to conceptions of context (and of course what is not), bottom-up approaches to investigating context formation and use.

Am currently editing a special issue of "Foundations of Science" on the topic "Context in Context" with Varol Ackman.

AI Planning

We are interested in building context into critical systems such as fighter aircraft

I do not have specific questions right now. I think I resolved mine during my Ph.D. research. But I would prefer to stay in contact with others currently working on the same area (either to learn more and to share my experience)

I work in the area of knowledge representation and reasonings. I am particularly interested in classification and categorization reasonings. I study the influence of the context in which a learner encounters observations in the categorization and the classification processes.

I'm a organizational researcher. My interest is how the activity (activity theory, Alexis Leontief) shape the learning of the organizations from the learning of the individuals inside it and vice versa. If learning is a social construct the context is fundamental for its occurrence as preconize the autopoiesis (and the cybernetics of second order) theory.

But how precisely does the individual learning cross to the organizational learning? What is the role of the context in this crossing?

I am a cognitive scientist who is iterested in how context affects the sequence of thoughts and emotions a mind 'collapses upon' during a stream of experience. For more information including a list of publications please see: http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/liane/

My main research interests concern the formalization of contextual reasoning and its applicability for capturing theoretical aspect of Multi-Agent Systems and Distributed Information Systems. My research has been (so far) mainly focused on three themes:

1. The formalization of a new semantics called ``Local Models Semantics'' (LMS) proposed as foundation of contextual reasoning. 2. The definition of a logic for the representation and reasoning in distributed knowledge called ``Distributed First Order Logic'' (DFOL). DFOL semantics is based on the same intuitions of LMS about the use of context in reasoning. DFOL has been successfully applied to model federations of heterogeneous databases and theoretical aspects of information integration. A sound and complete axiomatization of DFOL has been provided using a formal system called Multi-Context system.

3. The use of LMS for modeling propositional attitudes. In particular I've applied LMS for providing an elegant and uniform treatment of bounded and unbounded beliefs. I'm also interested in using LMS to solve more "philosophical" problems related to propositional attitudes for instance for modeling the opaque and transparent reading of belief reports (which is a challenging communication problem between intelligent agents).

I am a PhD Student in linguistics (semantics) at the Laboratoire de Recherche sur le Langage (LRL - Université Blaise Pascal) in Clermont-Ferrand (FRANCE). I am working within the ElaDyS Project (ELAboration DYnamique de la Signification) which tries to model conceptual representations associated to lexical items (mainly nouns verbs and adjectives) and their combination in a cognitive agent. I am interested in context (both extra-linguistic situation and co-text) for I try to determine what kind of information (and how) it can

• activate in the representations associated to nouns in the cognitive agent during discourse reception.
• * create in the representations built by a child acquiring language.

Some of the questions I am interested in answering are: How much of reasoning and common sense reasoning can be modeled as contextual reasoning? Which proof theory (bridge rules) are needed for this task? Which are the appropriate semantics for describing context-based reasoning? What are the impacts of context on semantics and on a theory of meaning?

Our work has some similarities and differences from what I understand as current discussion about context in the AI community. Similarities: tuples in a database are statements or facts which are embedded in its "context" of use and is "true" relative to a set of assumptions. The primary difference lies with simplifying assumptions that we make concerning what "context assumptions" matters. Thus we assume the presence of a domain model (aka "ontology") so that we don't end up writing n-squared set of lifting axioms. Also we introduce generic "conversion methods" that can be instantiated to "lifting axioms" which translate things from one context to another.

Currently we are developing a formalism for representing and reasoning about semantic knowledge in large-scale data systems which embody concepts from (1) deductive and object-oriented languages (e.g. F-logic) (2) notion of semantic values (see [Sciore Siegel and Rosenthal ACM TODS 94]) and (3) some ideas from McCarthy's Context. Reasoning within this framework is accomplished via "abduction" (aka Kowalski) which generates a query plan to databases which correctly account for conflicts arising from the contexts of different sources.

There are obviously a lot of overlap between what we do and what the AI-context community does. I'll be interested in hearing more about progress made by this community and also getting some feedback on our work.

Contextual representation and reasoning has been one of my main research interests both previously with Rutgers University and now at Watson Research Center of IBM. My focus has been on explicit context representation and manipulation/reasoning and its applications in perception and general intelligent problem solving. I am also interested in perception, image processing, and visual reasoning.

I am very interested in user behavior/context on the WWW. More specifically in quantifying user behaviors on the WWW (moves quickly through the site and then stops, always/never/sometimes follows the recommended links goes back and forward the same pages) to identify user contexts (in a hurry just looking etc).

I am currently a freelance information systems consultant, living in Liverpool, England, and very interested in applications of context and Web tools that take into account the cognitive aspects of context to improve usability - or to create systems that could only function with a proper sense of context.

Included in these are web community systems for discussion and introduction that make great advances over the current paradigms, partly through a deeper understanding of what is relevant to the actual tasks involved in being part of an electronic community. (It could be applied to this forum, if you wanted an amusingly appropriate real boost!)

In my research we are inferring the larger purpose (Clark, 1996) from utterances construed during conversations via telephone calls of (prospective) customers with an organisation. We suggest a relationship between these larger purposes and the long term needs and values of customers. As a consequence, the larger purposes "tell" the story the customer wants to communicate to the organisation to enable them to fulfil the ir needs and wishes optimally.

We are trying to pinpoint to the relevant parts of the context that discourse participants use to steer their behaviour. We have developed a computational model that hihglights the signals that point to these relevant parts.

I wrote a thesis in 1991 called "Context : a formalization and some applications.

Together with John McCarthy I worked on a bunch of context related topics.

I implemented contexts (aka microtheories) in Cyc.

We are developing software that centers the learning expernience on the learners context. It is critical that we remain aware of the latest thinking on context - particularly as it relates to learning.

1. functional linguistics 2. categorization interpretation formalization

Interested in (i) modelling of space-time context for system level description languages (ii) space-time context reasoning (iii) mathematical modelling of context.

1. How the Internet is changing our experience from hyper-text to hyper-context? 2. Hyper-context is the virtual reality of the post-PC age. 3. While hyper-text is "the traveling" between texts and hyper-media is "the traveling" between multimedia objects (video sound etc.), hyper-context is "the traveling" between portals, chats, etc. 4. Hyper-context breaks the wall between reality and media between objectivism and subjectivism. Thus hypercontext is post-Cartesian and post-modern concept. 5. In hypercontextual realities we can talk with 'bots. 6. The applications of hypercontext: E-commerce 'bots, e-learning 'bots, post-interactive video (communicative video), where the user can talk with the characters. 7. the basic technology behind the hypercontextual web is "the semantic web" (Tim Berners-Lee) and the XML language. 8. ?!?!

I believe that context will play a central role in computing in general and in accessing information in particular. Context is the best filter to provide relevant information.

Context can be assigned to a user but it can also be assigned to data items and all data and information can be organized using context of events and entitities. This organization will be more powerful than the standard relational or portal like organizations.

I have spent some time browsing the literature to determine what is known about context rather than its application. This has been gathered into a draft paper available from my web site.

I was involved in the initial organisation of the knowledge in context workshop at IJCAI.

I am currently working on a PhD with the topic: User-adaptive tour planning and proposal in a tourist information system. For that purpose, a context-model which incorporates user modeling-aspects is needed.

Use of context: context-based similarity assessment theory that is flexible yet efficient and can be used in a decision support system by retrieving relevant past experiences. More information (articles) at http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~juris

Information Interpretation and Semantics. Exploitation of semantics for the specification of Query Languages and Information Retrieval Techniques. Representation of and inferences based on context-based modelling domain knowledge. Exploitation of context/semantics in order to draw meaningful results as well as to design and implement semantically enhanced user/system interaction techniques. Theory of interpretation.

Currently finished my Ph.D. and involved in R&D projects for extraction/presentation/dissemination of medical knowledge.

We are working on a project that applies tries to turn text into knowledge in some limited sense. Our project involves linguistics, information extraction and we are entering into the knowledge realm. As we try to process text from and for multiple domains we are hitting the problem of describing the contexts appropriately. The project web pages are in www.tuta.hut.fi/briefs.

• the information just created by the person
• the access to information created in previous similar situations by the person or someone else within the organization

I have (thus) the same set of questions as Roy Turner, with the following one on the top of his: How can we acquire and formalize the contextual knowledge that experts seem to be so familiar with? My group and I try to spot this information within taxonomies of concept generality. We are developing two systems helping the expert to make precise his/her relations among concepts, from texts s/he considers as relevant. One of them, ASIUM, proposes new concepts that must be validated by the field expert. The second one, ROWAN, helps the expert to refine the definition of already existing concepts.

I have proposed a context-sensitive cognitive architecture - DUAL (Kokinov 1994a,b) as well as a context-sensitive model of human analogical reasoning (Kokinov 1994c). In addition to the simulation experiments I am running psychological experiments which have revealed some priming and context effects on problem solving (Kokinov 1990; Kokinov & Yoveva 1996). I am also working on a more general theory of context (Kokinov 1995).

• Kokinov B. & Yoveva M. (1996) - Context Effects on Problem Solving. In: Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Erlbaum Hillsdale NJ 1996.
• Kokinov B. (1995) - A Dynamic Approach to Context Modelling. In: Brezillon P. & Abu-Hakima S. (eds.) Proceedings of IJCAI¹95 Workshop on Modelling Context in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. 1995
• Kokinov B. (1994a) - The Context-Sensitive Cognitive Architecture DUAL. In: Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Erlbaum Hillsdale NJ 1994.
• Kokinov B. (1994b) - The DUAL Cognitive Architecture: A Hybrid Multi-Agent Approach. In: A. Cohn (ed.) Proceedings of ECAI'94. John Wiley & Sons Ltd. London 1994.
• Kokinov B. (1994c) - A Hybrid Model of Reasoning by Analogy. Chapter 5. in: K. Holyoak & J. Barnden (eds.) Analogical Connections Advances in Connectionist and Neural Computation Theory, vol.2 Ablex Publ. Corp. 1994
• Kokinov B. (1990) - Associative Memory-Based Reasoning: Some Experimental Results. In: Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. MIT July 1990 Erlbaum Hillsdale NJ 1990.

The goal of our research is to develop a conceptual framework for context-based security systems. Context-based security aims at adapting the security policy depending on a set of relevant information collected from the dynamic environment.

We are essentially interested in access control of protected resources or authorizations in the case of distributed systems where a set of independent computers and devices communicate via a network in order to share data and services.

We believe that more secure systems can be achieved by adding to these systems the ability to automatically adapt their security policy depending on new constraints. The security policy must then adapt itself to the new context. Our approach will thus combine the two fields of context-aware computing and security in pervasive computing in order to provide the foundations for “context-aware security”.

1. Domain and Activities

I work in "Reasoning about Function", "Model Based Reasoning" and "Fault Diagnosis". My interest lies in applying function to improve the diagnostic abilities of model based troubleshooting systems. I have applied function for candidate discrimination, a stage traditionally done using fault probabilities, and have proposed an efficient component ontological representation for function in my research.

2. How context intervenes in my problem.

Function is inherently context-dependent. However, treating it as such leads to representational inefficiencies: function model has to be built at run time. I have proposed that component ontological representation be used for function, which makes it context-insensitive. My interest lies in how context interacts with function.

3. Questions I wish to ask

Can a representation of function accounting for all possible contexts be reasonably used? Can reasoning be assumed to be correct when using the function of one context in other contexts?

The current focus of my work is the integration of gestural and linguistic information in construction dialogues. Other than with the usual "narrative" settings used to investigate gesture + speech, the use of pointing gestures is predominant in my research area. The most common environment for pointing gestures to appear are so-called (complex) demonstratives, consisting of simple demonstratives ('that' etc.) and, e.g., common nouns, in short something like 'that cube'. The impact of context on the use and resolution of complex demonstratives is evident: Only relative to a physical context can pointing gestures be resolved, and similarly can complex constructions be understood wrt to some context.

The context I'm trying to formalize and utilize is for building a knowledge base of a text-based requirements document written in natural language. Also this challenge is intertwined with finding the right method to resolve the ambiguity in the text using computational linguistics techniques.

I'm an ontologist working on the CYC project.

I'm working in small a R&D company MODEL Technologies Inc.. We have developed a Context Engine and use it for building a class of applications labeled ContextPortal. Our first application is ContextPortal for Outlook and Exchange.

A general description of ContextPortal:

ContextPortal "technology" is a new generation of context management knowledge-based tools programming libraries and applications that arranges information according to context (concepts and associations rather than keywords or preset categories) to provide searching and navigation capabilities that reflect better the way people think.

My websites deal with the source of meaning from a neurological perspective and what that says about the structure of the disciplines we use to represent reality. This includes the setting of contexts of interpretation and the structure of contexts.

Main scientific areas of research: distributed artificial intelligence; interaction between artificial autonomous agents; cognitive maps to represent artificial agents beliefs; cognitive mapping to represent and manipulate agent's internal mental states; coginitive maps to represent the cognitive context of distributed decision making.

Other scientific areas of interest: decision support systems; software tools to improve distributed decision process and strategic decision making in organisations.

My research interests are semantics, pragmatics, and natural language understanding as an information process. In recent years I have been trying to develop a pragmatic information model based on the Gricean pragmatic theory. In my attempt to reformulate Grice's cooperative principle I have come to understand the importance of context in language understanding and communication. Given that 'relevance' 'quality' 'quantity' and 'form' are universal properties of both linguistic and non-linguistic information the relevancy truthfulness informativeness and well-formedness of a given unit of information have to be ultimately determined with reference to the context in which either the unmarked information or the marked information (extra information, e.g. implicature) is conveyed. With such understanding in mind I take context as the key to the study of language understanding and a good theory of linguistic pragmatics and communication.

I am professor of information science and head of the department of information and archival studies at the University of Amsterdam. In both fields context is being identified as a fundamental issue.

I am a Post Grad student doing a PhD on "Ontologies for Knowledge Management and e-business". Prior to this stage in my career I founded a company whose purpose was the development of a highly context dependent financial planning and modelling system which I designed. Due to the usual problems of undercapitalisation and planning the company did not succeed, but its death was very much prolonged by the interest the system generated in the market place - lots of interest, little commitment. My belief in such ontology-based systems has never waivered as I was trying to develop such systems with no formal exposure to ontologies. My undying commitment to the subject was reinforced when I met with Mary-Anne Williams at Newcastle University and she exposed me to the field of ontologies. Mary-Anne is now my supervisor and from day one I have emphasised the importance of context dependence.

I am very interested in the implication of context, as I believe almost all if not all knowledge must be context based.

I am at the early stages of my Doctorate.

I work on logical AI. Since 1987 this has included the formalization of context formalizing contexts as first class objects. Here's part of the abstract of my 1993 paper given at the 1993 IJCAI and available as www.formal.stanford.edu/jmc/context.html.

The basic relation is ist(c p). It asserts that the proposition p is true in the context c. The most important formulas relate the propositions true in different contexts. Introducing contexts as formal objects will permit axiomatizations in limited contexts to be expanded to transcend the original limitations. This seems necessary to provide AI programs using logic with certain capabilities that human fact representation and human reasoning possess. Fully implementing transcendence seems to require further extensions to mathematical logic i.e. beyond the nonmonotonic inference methods first invented in AI and now studied as a new domain of logic.

My research into multimodal dialog and pervasive computing systems has led me to consider context in a variety of forms including but not limited to capturing context by using physical objects as permanent referents.

I rely on context to help me understand communication breakdowns. Speaker intention and recipient interpretation are often different and this can have severe consequences especially in the realm of health care.

I hope to design cases that will help students develop their diagnostic reasoning skills without being falsely constrained/influenced by the particulars of the cases they are trained with. I guess I want to help them "get-meta" if you will.

I've been interested in Linguistic Pragmatics of natural language. Main concern is about the conceptual mechanism of the so called Indirect Speech Act expressions. The apparent discrepancy between 'form' and 'meaning' might be given some elucidation in order to explain the 'well-meaningful' communicative function they play among the interactants in the real discourse.

Formal treatments based on propositional logic or linguistic philosophy have been successful to some extent I admit but they are still far from satisfactory.

Some cognitive linguists have tried the 'speech act metonymy' approach attributing the distance between 'form' and 'meaning' to the distance among the 'part'/'whole' relation within the hypothetical speech act 'scenario'.

On the other hand for the systemic functional linguists Indirect Speech Acts are metaphorical rewordings (or disguise?) of the original 'congruent' speech acts i.e. the 'metaphor of mood'.

Isn't it possible to address their mechanism to a more holistically organized dynamism of their 'CONTEXTS'???

Very briefly I could say that I am interested in and working on the role of context in Relevance Theory and its effects on translations

I am a computer scientist, so my interest in context comes from that context. The big question to me is something like: what knowledge of idea's context is needed in measuring and evaluating idea's quality and utility (automatically). I see the evaluation of ideas as the crucial point in the evolution of knowledge and context as the crucial point in communication which makes this evolution possible. Firstly the 'quest for the context' is philosophical and secondly I see context as a possibility to make computer-mediated computer systems more effective.

I am currently working in agent-mediated negotiation i.e. interaction conventions ("electronic institutions") that: (i) May allow (selfish) software agents to negotiate against other software agents or people or (ii) Where software agents perform some mediator tasks as an independent third party.

As seen in my web page most of my work has been done in collaboration either at Barcelona's IIIA or Xalapa's LANIA. We first looked into highly structured negotiation conventions such as auctions where the relevant context is part of the ontology shared by all participants but is made explicit and qualified as relevant by the auction house. This led to a general notion of "electronic institution" which permits to address less structured interactions and more general notions of context through enforceable and explicit norms. Currently we are addressing the problem of argumentative negotiation on one hand and the design of a "trading engine" that allows private negotiations where participants trade products whose features are progressively made explicit as they become pertinent.

I am a PhD student in the Computer Science department at the University of Melbourne. My research is in the area of software agents with human-like performance characteristics - how to improve existing agent systems to better support modelling human operators in simulated environments.

Context is an important issue when considering human performance - all reasoning and action takes place in context. I am interested in ways of modelling context in agents systems.

My research focuses on providing technologies and methodologies to support the rapid development of global information spaces that offer access to shared information from various forms of client devices and employing different modes of interaction. In particular my group is exploiting object-oriented XML and web technologies to achieve general and flexible solutions that can adapt to a constantly evolving world of new technologies and environements.

We have developed the OMS suite of tools and technologies designed to support all stages of development of database systems from conceptual modelling through to implementation. OMS includes its own object model inclusive of a full operational model designed to be both semantically expressive and suite to efficient data management. The conceptual modelling and design phases are supported by a special rapid prototyping system OMS Pro.

We are now interested in developing a general model of context using the OMS object model. In the future we want to work with others investigating context within particular application domains such as product data management and ubiquitous computing.

I am student and researcher of the University of Science and Technology in Ghana. I am active in researching in areas like information systems and management, knowledge management, and other computer software programmes. As an agricultural economist, more information will help in my research work. My other areas of research are on all aspects of user modeling and industrial experience in deploying adaptive systems in real world applications.

My field of work is philosophy of language. I have begun working on generalizations of Frege's context principle (the meaning of a word depends on the context of a sentence).This basic idea has been developed further and further in philosophy AI and linguistics. I have given an assessment of this basic holistic principle in the history of AI. Starting from that I have developed some specific interest in contextual reasoning and limited rationality.

My interest is in the relationship between contexts and translation. I'd like to analyse the types of contexts and their influence on the understanding and reproduction in translating and that on the acception and life of a translated text.

My work is part of a project which aims at modelling the collective process of software specification. This project both deals with the understanding of the process itself and the designing assisting tools. The aim of my work is to study how to take into account fragments of specification produced during a requirement process. We define the requirement process as an organized confrontation of viewpoints. To this end viewpoints have to be managed. We call the mechanism which links viewpoints a correlator.

It is obvious that one of the main characteristics of a requirement process is to link these different viewpoints so as to make them converge towards a common understanding of the system to be designed.

In my work I plead for the coexistence of several viewpoints because it allows a better definition of requirements for instance by enabling investigation of alternatives.

My aim is to apply contextual reasoning defined by J. McCarthy to explicit the links between viewpoints. Here we associate each viewpoint to a context and we consider the fragments of specifications as formulae. Because contexts can be transcended we define correlators also as contexts which apply to "viewpoint-contexts". With that frame we can describe rules which link viewpoints.

My company works in the area of corporate intelligence in biotechnology. We are currently looking at a variety of technologies that can help automate some of the tasks in information retrieval search and representation that we currently do manually. We see context understanding and manipulation as a central technology that will help our customers make more effective searches of the information we currently provide online. We are interested in context research and how this can help in "mapping of ontologies", which is another related issue we are interested in. We have participated in research on NLP of business news items and again here we want to see how context can impact the efficiency of template extraction.

I work at the Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Brighton UK. My areas of interest are formal and computational models of dialogue and discourse semantics/pragmatics. I have been working mainly within the frameworks of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) and Constructive Type Theory (CTT; also known as Pure Type Systems or Typed Lambda Calculus). Both DRT and CTT formalize certain aspects of context which are central to natural language processing in particular anaphora resolution.

Project leader of a pervasive computing project. Interested in knowing the meaning of context fron different schools of thinking

I am working on "contextual vocabulary acquisition" with Michael Kibby (Dept. of Learning & Instruction, SUNY Buffalo): figuring out a meaning for an unknown word from context. We are developing a computational theory and applying it to an educational curriculum to teach the algorithms to students to help improve their reading comprehension.

Rapaport William J. & Kibby Michael W. (2002b) "Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition: A Computational Theory and Educational Curriculum" in Nagib Callaos Ana Breda and Ma. Yolanda Fernandez J. (eds.) Proceedings of the 6th World Multiconference on Systemics Cybernetics and Informatics (SCI 2002; Orlando FL) (Orlando: International Institute of Informatics and Systemics) Vol. II: Concepts and Applications of Systemics Cybernetics and Informatics I pp. 261-266. Paper is available here.

Visit our research group's webpage

I am working presently at supporting Function-Means mapping using design context information

If you do a Lycos search on "Thematics" you get a lot of links. The work I do treats context as a thematic postcoordination problem.

Context "impacts" this problem as its philosophical basis, most especially in relation to SIGs and "SIG pidgin" languages. The matter of "fuzzy thinking" and its representation in retrieval situations is also a big part of the problem. I am most interested in workable and profitable models of conceptual access. I regard conceptual and contextual profile matching as the marketing method of the future (after people discover what postcoordination is.)

I am interested to find out whether any others are similarly interested.

I'm a M.Sc. student of Chord Group. The group started in 1994 and is located at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Our mission is to advance on the state-of-the-art of CSCW issues and Groupware Technology.

In particular I am interested in the improvement of the work group supported for groupware tools. I consider the knowledge of the context that involves an interaction as a key factor for the improvement of the cooperation of the group.

Philosophy, esp. philosophy of language. I am interested in differences between linguistic context (providing antecedents for anaphoric expressions) and non-linguistic context (providing information for the interpretation of e.g. demonstratives).

Usability engineering in different application domains; currently adaptive systems for nomadic users and context aware saystems.

I work in linguistics and philosophy of language. The central theme of my work is the delimitation of the line between semantics and pragmatics between conventional meaning and meaning which can be attributed to general conversational principles. As a result I am concerned with characterizing pragmatic principles and demonstrating the role such principles play in interpreting utterances in context. More specifically I have recently begun work on presupposition and am concerned in particular with determining what notion of context is relevant to understanding this phenomenon.