This paper addresses a sensitive issue, of presence experienced by people interactingwith a virtual environment (VE). Understanding‘presence’, both theoretically and empirically, is important for designers interested in building effective computer-mediated environments for learningand work activities. The concept of presence has been treated mostly as a state of mind, to be investigated through ‘objective ’ and ‘subjective ’ measurement devices. The authors propose to add a different approach, which can address presence as an action-based process. This approach considers presence as the ongoing result of the actions performed in an environment and the local and cultural resources deployed by actors. In this sense, ‘presence’ can be captured by monitoringthe sequence of participants ’ actions and the aspects of the environment that are involved in this process; discourse/interaction analysis represents a fittingmethod for this goal. Sequences of interaction with a virtual library are used to illustrate some core aspects of an ethnographic, action-based approach to presence, such as the action possibilities envisaged by participants, the configuration of the virtual objects, the norms that regulate the interaction, the resources that are imported in the VE. These aspects are a necessary step to understand users ’ presence in the VE and to plan consequent interventions to

Goldstone for useful chats about learning, abstraction and surrogate situations. What do linguistic symbols do for minds like ours, and how (if at all) can basic embodied, dynamical and situated approaches do justice to high-level human thought and reason? These two questions are best addressed together, since our answers to the first may inform the second. The key move in ‘scaling-up ’ simple embodied cognitive science is, I argue, to take very seriously the potent role of human-built structures in transforming the spaces of human learning and reason. In particular, in this paper I look at a range of cases involving what I dub ‘surrogate situations’. Here, we actively create restricted artificial environments that allow us to deploy basic perception-actionreason routines in the absence of their proper objects. Examples include the use of real-world models, diagrams and other concrete external symbols to support dense looping interactions with a variety of stable external structures that stand in for the absent states of affairs. 1 Language itself, I shall finally suggest, is the most potent and fundamental form of such surrogacy. Words are both cheap stand-ins for gross behavioral outcomes, and the concrete objects that structure new spaces for basic forms of learning and reason. A good hard look at surrogate situatedness thus turns the standard skeptical challenge on its head. But it raises important questions concerning what really matters about these new approaches, and it helps focus what I see as the major challenge for the future: how, in detail, to conceptualize the role of symbols (both internal and external) in dynamical cognitive processes.

A neural network model of language acquisition is introduced, based on and motivated by current research in psychology and linguistics. It includes both semanticfeature representations of words and localist linguistic representations of words. The network learns to associate the semantic features of words to their linguistic labels, as well as to predict the next word in the corpus. This is interpreted to model both the acquisition of a lexicon, and the beginnings of syntax or grammar (word order). The relationship of lexical learning to grammar learning is examined, and similarities to the human data found. The results may provide support for the `Grammar from the Lexicon', or `emergent grammar' position.

categories, every experience would be new, and one couldn’t make sense of one’s world. Furthermore, higher intelligence requires large numbers of categories, perhaps millions and beyond. Acquiring and robust detection of categories appears to be a complex task as categories inter-relate in complex ways and occur in diverse conditions. We may then ask: how can a system learn so many complex inter-related categories? We propose and explore an avenue that we call prediction games in infinitely rich worlds. In these games, the world is a source of an unlimited stream of information. The games are played by a prediction system that in effect repeatedly experiments with its world and learns from its experiments. The system converts its input stream from the world into a sequence of learning episodes for itself. Each learning episode consists of the system hiding parts of the input, guessing (predicting) them using the remainder of the input (the local context), and updating itself based on comparing its observations with its predictions. The goal of the system is to improve its

In this paper we propose a theory of the cultural evolution of the firm. We apply cultural and evolutionary thinking to the questions posed by theories of the firm: What are firms and why do they exist? We argue that firms are best thought of as cultures, as social distributions of modes of thought and forms of externalization. Using the term meme to refer collectively to cultural modes of thought—ideas, beliefs, assumptions, values, interpretive schema, and know-how—we describe culture as a social phenomena, patterns of symbolic communication and behavior that are produced as members of the group enact the memes they have acquired as part of the culture. Memes spread from mind to mind as they are enacted and the resulting cultural patterns are observed and interpreted by others. The uncertainties of interpretation and the possibilities of reinterpretation and recontextualization create variation in the memes as they spread. Over time, firms evolve as a process of the selection, variation, and retention of memes. Our claim is that understanding firms in this way provides a new perspective— what we call the meme’s-eye view—on the question of why we have the firms we have and, by allowing us to shed the functionalist assumptions shared by both economics and knowledge-based theories of the firm, makes possible a genuinely descriptive, as opposed to normative, theory of why we have the firms that we have.

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Shepard has supposed that the mind is stocked with innate knowledge of the world and that this knowledge figures prominently in the way we see the world. According to him, this internal knowledge is the legacy of a process of internalization; a process of natural selection over the evolutionary history of the species. Shepard has developed his proposal most fully in his analysis of the relation between kinematic geometry and the shape of the motion path in apparent motion displays. We argue that Shepard has made a case for applying the principles of kinematic geometry to the perception of motion, but that he has not made the case for injecting these principles into the mind of the percipient. We offer a more modest interpretation of his important findings: that kinematic geometry may be a model of apparent motion. Inasmuch as our recommended interpretation does not lodge geometry in the mind of the percipient the motivation for positing internalization, a process that moves kinematic geometry into the mind, is obviated. In our conclusion we suggest that cognitive psychologists, in their embrace of internal mental universals and internalization may have been seduced by the siren call of metaphor. Theorists of perception face two fundamental questions:

A number of disparate approaches to language, ranging from cognitive linguistics to stochastic implementations of optimality theory, have challenged the classical distinction between knowledge of language and use of language. Supporters of such approaches point to the functional motivation of grammatical structure, language users ’ sensitivity to the frequency of occurrence of grammatical elements, and the great disparity between sentences that grammars generate and speakers ’ actual utterances. In this article I defend the classical position, and provide evidence from a number of sources that speakers mentally represent full grammatical structure, however fragmentary their utterances might be. The article also questions the relevance of most corpus-based frequency and probability studies to models of individual grammatical competence. I propose a scenario for the origins and evolution of language that helps to explain why grammar and usage are as distinct as they are.* 1. INTRODUCTION. My

Diverse uses of information technology (IT) i n organizations affect privacy. Developers of electronic commerce, database management, security mechanisms, telecommunication and collaborative systems should be aware of these effects and acknowledge the need for early privacy planning during the requirements definition activity. Public concerns about the collection of personal information by consumer-based Web sites have led most organizations running such sites to establish and publish privacy policies. However, these policies often fail to align with prevalent societal values on one hand and the operational functioning of web-based applications on the other. Assuming that such misalignments stem from imperfect appreciation of consequences and not an intent t o deceive, we discuss concepts, tools and techniques to help requirements engineers and IT policy makers bring policies and system requirements into better alignment. Our objective is to encourage RE researchers and practitioners to adopt a more holistic view of application and system specification, in which a system or application is seen as an engine of policy enforcement and values attainment.

With the growing research in autonomous systems, the issue of embodiment has become a fundamental issue in artificial intelligence. However, the necessity of embodiment is a perspective that has been a focus in artificial intelligence only in the recent years. It remains an undeveloped concept and a term that has been thrown around in conflicting contexts. This paper discusses embodiment, its interpretations, misinterpretations and the role it has played in artificial intelligence to date and specifically in the realisation of the "intelligent autonomous robot". While some believe that simply placing a controller in a physical environment constitutes a sufficient degree of embodiment, we wish to emphasise that agent-world interaction must develop away from this "ON-World" approach and seek to concentrate on "IN-World" interaction, participation, and adaptation.