Powerful Interactions


Book Description

Make your everyday interactions with children intentional and purposeful with these steps: Be Present, Connect, and Extend Learning.




Interactive Task Learning


Book Description

Experts from a range of disciplines explore how humans and artificial agents can quickly learn completely new tasks through natural interactions with each other. Humans are not limited to a fixed set of innate or preprogrammed tasks. We learn quickly through language and other forms of natural interaction, and we improve our performance and teach others what we have learned. Understanding the mechanisms that underlie the acquisition of new tasks through natural interaction is an ongoing challenge. Advances in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and robotics are leading us to future systems with human-like capabilities. A huge gap exists, however, between the highly specialized niche capabilities of current machine learning systems and the generality, flexibility, and in situ robustness of human instruction and learning. Drawing on expertise from multiple disciplines, this Strüngmann Forum Report explores how humans and artificial agents can quickly learn completely new tasks through natural interactions with each other. The contributors consider functional knowledge requirements, the ontology of interactive task learning, and the representation of task knowledge at multiple levels of abstraction. They explore natural forms of interactions among humans as well as the use of interaction to teach robots and software agents new tasks in complex, dynamic environments. They discuss research challenges and opportunities, including ethical considerations, and make proposals to further understanding of interactive task learning and create new capabilities in assistive robotics, healthcare, education, training, and gaming. Contributors Tony Belpaeme, Katrien Beuls, Maya Cakmak, Joyce Y. Chai, Franklin Chang, Ropafadzo Denga, Marc Destefano, Mark d'Inverno, Kenneth D. Forbus, Simon Garrod, Kevin A. Gluck, Wayne D. Gray, James Kirk, Kenneth R. Koedinger, Parisa Kordjamshidi, John E. Laird, Christian Lebiere, Stephen C. Levinson, Elena Lieven, John K. Lindstedt, Aaron Mininger, Tom Mitchell, Shiwali Mohan, Ana Paiva, Katerina Pastra, Peter Pirolli, Roussell Rahman, Charles Rich, Katharina J. Rohlfing, Paul S. Rosenbloom, Nele Russwinkel, Dario D. Salvucci, Matthew-Donald D. Sangster, Matthias Scheutz, Julie A. Shah, Candace L. Sidner, Catherine Sibert, Michael Spranger, Luc Steels, Suzanne Stevenson, Terrence C. Stewart, Arthur Still, Andrea Stocco, Niels Taatgen, Andrea L. Thomaz, J. Gregory Trafton, Han L. J. van der Maas, Paul Van Eecke, Kurt VanLehn, Anna-Lisa Vollmer, Janet Wiles, Robert E. Wray III, Matthew Yee-King




Fascist Interactions


Book Description

Although studies of fascism have constituted one of the most fertile areas of historical inquiry in recent decades, more and more scholars have called for a new agenda with more research beyond Italy and Germany, less preoccupation with definition and classification, and more sustained focus on the relationships among different fascist formations before 1945. Starting from a critical assessment of these imperatives, this rigorous volume charts a historiographical path that transcends rigid distinctions while still developing meaningful criteria of differentiation. Even as we take fascism seriously as a political phenomenon, such an approach allows us to better understand its distinctive contradictions and historical variations.




The New Foreign Policy


Book Description

Integrating theory and case studies, this cogent text explores the processes and factors that shape foreign policy. In her thoroughly revised and updated edition, Laura Neack considers both old and new lessons, drawing on a rich array of real foreign policy choices and outcomes. In new cases, Neack explores decision making in the Eurozone crisis, increasing nationalism in Germany and Japan and what seems to be growing bellicosity among Canadians, Obama’s grand strategy and the responses of rising powers Brazil and India, and the Egyptian youth revolution. Following a levels-of-analysis organization, the author considers all elements that influence foreign policy, including the role of leaders, bargaining, national image, political culture, public opinion, the media, and nonstate actors.




New Interactions


Book Description

This series uses an enquiry based approach to geography through the inclusion of enquiry sections at the end of each book. It includes updated text and statistics ensuring students the most topical, contemporary information. It aims to help students aquire full understanding of each topic through the intergration of a key question and summary answer on each double page spread. The texts are suitable for students of differing abilities and working at different levels.




Multiple Systems


Book Description

This book presents the proceedings of the Eighth National Conference of the Italian Systems Society. The contributions underline the need for Systemics and Systems Science in order to address multiple, changing systems involving several coherent versions. The conference focused on identifying, discussing, and understanding possible interrelationships between fundamental theoretical advances in different disciplines. Given their scope, these proceedings represent a valuable asset for all researchers whose work involves multiple systems.




The Co-Creation Edge


Book Description

Rapid changes in business along with better informed customers threaten the traditional sales and procurement process. Thousands of sales and procurement people are threatened with extinction, yet all is not destined to be doom and gloom. A new way of partnering between these two roles can, in fact, create significant value for both organizations. Sales and procurement professionals have a bright future ahead of them if they can respond to six trends that the authors have identified in the business-to-business world. Each trend offers an opportunity to develop a new skill for sales and procurement professionals and adopt a new practice. Because these practices are not yet widely adopted as “best practices”, the authors coin them “next practices.” These trends include: working together to solve complex problems; organizing problem-solving networks across company boundaries; creating processes for live cross-company engagement; facilitating data driven, cross-company interactions fed by digital platforms; providing new personal experiences for individuals and lastly (and most importantly) creating new sources of value for firms. If these trends are adopted by organizations, the ability to co-create means providing significant value to both the sales management team at the supplier and the purchasing management team at the customer. With the alternative being that these job functions will be replaced by web-based or channel-based alternatives that will do most of what they do today at a fraction of the cost. Increasingly, there is no middle ground anymore. SAMs and senior buyers will either evolve into high value-added sales and procurement professionals, or disappear.




Interaction and Coevolution


Book Description

“It is not only the species that change evolutionarily through interactions . . . the interactions themselves also change.” Thus states John N. Thompson in the foreword to Interaction and Coevolution, the first title in his series of books exploring the relentless nature of evolution and the processes that shape the web of life. Originally published in 1982 more as an idea piece—an early attempt to synthesize then academically distinct but logically linked strands of ecological thought and to suggest avenues for further research—than as a data-driven monograph, Interaction and Coevolution would go on to be considered a landmark study that pointed to the beginning of a new discipline. Through chapters on antagonism, mutualism, and the effects of these interactions on populations, speciation, and community structure, Thompson seeks to explain not only how interactions differ in the selection pressures they exert on species, but also when interactions are most likely to lead to coevolution. In this era of climate change and swiftly transforming environments, the ideas Thompson puts forward in Interaction and Coevolution are more relevant than ever before.




The Early Universe


Book Description

The Early Universe has become the standard reference on forefront topics in cosmology, particularly to the early history of the Universe. Subjects covered include primordial nubleosynthesis, baryogenesis, phases transitions, inflation, dark matter, and galaxy formation, relics such as axions, neutrinos and monopoles, and speculations about the Universe at the Planck time. The book includes more than ninety figures as well as a five-page update discussing recent developments such as the COBE results.




LHC Physics


Book Description

Exploring the phenomenology of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, LHC Physics focuses on the first years of data collected at the LHC as well as the experimental and theoretical tools involved. It discusses a broad spectrum of experimental and theoretical activity in particle physics, from the searches for the Higgs boson and physics beyond t