The original formulation of SharedPlans [Grosz and Sidner, 1990] was developed to provide a model of collaborative planning in which it was not necessary for one agent to have intentions toward an act of a different agent. This formulation provided for two agents to coordinate their activities without introducing any notion of jointly held intentions (or, 'weintentions'). However, it only treated activities that directly decomposed into single agents actions. In this paper we provide a revised and expanded version of SharedPlans that accommodates actions involving groups of agents as well as complex actions that decompose into multi-agent actions. The new definitions also allow for contracting out certain actions, and provide a model with the features required in Bratman's account of shared cooperative activity [Bratman, 1992]. A reformulation of the model of individual plans that meshes with the definition of SharedPlans is also provided. 1

This paper re-assesses the role of real-time video as a technology to support interpersonal communications at distance. We review three distinct hypotheses about the role of video in the co-ordination of conversational content and process. For each hypothesis, we identify design implications and outstanding research questions derived from current findings. We first evaluate the non-verbal communication hypothesis, namely the prevailing assumption that the role of video is to supplement speech, and embodied in applications such as videoconferencing and videophone. We conclude that previous work has overestimated the importance of video at the expense of audio. This finding has strong implications for the implementation of such systems, and we make recommendations about both synchronisation and bandwidth allocation. Furthermore our own recent studies of workplace interactions point to other communicative functions of video. Current systems have neglected another potentially vital role of...

this paper is inspired by philosophical work, it is squarely motivated by the concerns of building intelligent systems that are capable of collaborative behavior, either with a user, or with other such systems. Still, we hope that the paper sheds light on philosophical issues, and treats the subject of joint action at a sufficiently precise level to be illuminating of problems that any philosophical account needs to confront. An important consequence of focusing on joint actions, rather than solely on individual actions, is the opportunity to rethink related theories. In particular, we claim that speech act theory will need to be recast in light of joint action theory since many of the basic illocutionary acts (e.g., requests, promises) are intimately involved in eatablishing, monitoring, and discharging joint activities. However, despite this tight relationship, no existing speech act theory provides guidance on this connection. This paper takes a first step in the direction of linking speech act theory and joint action theory by showing how various speech acts can be used to form and disband teams. It is by now commonplace to observe that joint action is different from a collection of individual actions, even if they are coordinated. Agents can be acting in a coordinated fashion, as in ordinary automobile traffic, but not be acting together. Conversely, agents can be acting together, but not be coordinated except at the start and end of their joint action (e.g, see [36]) The key property distinguishing joint or collaborative action from mere coordinated action is the joint mental state of the participants. The best way to explore what this mental state must be is to imagine a joint action going astray. Our favorite example is driving in a convoy, versus ordinary traff...

Searle's celebrated Chinese Room Argument has shaken the foundations of Artificial Intelligence. Many refutations have been attempted, but none seem convincing. This paper is an attempt to sort out explicitly the assumptions and the logical, methodological and empirical points of disagreement. Searle is shown to have underestimated some features of computer modeling, but the heart of the issue turns out to be an empirical question about the scope and limits of the purely symbolic (computational) model of the mind. Nonsymbolic modeling turns out to be immune to the Chinese Room Argument. The issues discussed include the Total Turing Test, modularity, neural modeling, robotics, causality and the symbol-grounding problem. 1.

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Consciousness and intentionality are perhaps the two central phenomena in the philosophy of mind. Human beings are conscious beings: there is something it is like to be us. Human beings are intentional beings: we represent what is going on in the world. Correspondingly, our specific mental states, such as perceptions and thoughts, very often have

entities ............................................................................................................. 13 2.3 Basic functions and relations ..................................................... 13 Parthood and Temporary Parthood ...................................................................................... 14 Dependence and Spatial Dependence ................................................................................... 14 Constitution .................................................................................................................. 15 Participation .................................................................................................................. 15 Quality inherence and quality value .................................................................................... 16 2.4 Further distinctions ................................................................ 16 Physical and non-physical endurants ................................................................................... 16 Amounts of matter ...................................................................................................... 16 Objects ..................................................................................................................... 16 Features .................................................................................................................... 16 Non-physical endurants and the agentive/non-agentive distinction ............................................ 17 Kinds of perdurants ......................................................................................................... 17 Kinds of quality .......................................................................................................

Traditionally, perceptual experiences—for example, the experience of seeing a cat—were thought to have two quite distinct components. When one sees a cat, one’s experience is “about ” the cat: this is the representational or intentional component of the experience. One’s experience also has phenomenal character: this is the sensational component of the experience. Although the intentional and sensational components at least typically go together, in principle they might come apart: the intentional component could be present without the sensational component or vice versa. Recently a number of philosophers have argued that this picture of perception is incorrect. According to them, the sensational component of a perceptual experience cannot vary independently of its intentional component: the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience is entirely determined by the experience’s propositional content—that is, by what it represents. Usually this is supposed to hold also of “bodily sensations”: experiences of pain, twinges, tickles, and the like. The phenomenal character of such experiences, it is claimed, is likewise entirely determined by their propositional contents. This view comes in a number of variants, and also goes under a number of names:

More than a decade ago, philosopher John Searle started a long-running controversy with his paper “Minds, Brains, and Programs ” (Searle, 1980a), an attack on the ambitious claims of artificial intelligence (AI). With his now famous Chinese Room argument, Searle claimed to show that despite the best efforts of AI researchers, a computer could never recreate such vital

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