ABS4GD: a multi-agent system that simulates group decision processes considering emotional and argumentative aspects

Emotion although being an important factor in our every day life it is many times forgotten in the development of systems to be used by persons. In this work we present an architecture for a ubiquitous group decision support system able to support persons in group decision processes. The system considers the emotional factors of the intervenient participants, as well as the argumentation between them. Particular attention will be taken to one of components of this system: the multi-agent simulator, modeling the human participants, considering emotional characteristics, and allowing the exchanges of hypothetic arguments among the participants.

LAID - a smart decision room with ambient intelligence for group decision making and argumentation support considering emotional aspects

Decision Making is one of the most important activities of the human being. Nowadays decisions imply to consider many different points of view, so decisions are commonly taken by formal or informal groups of persons. Groups exchange ideas or engage in a process of argumentation and counter-argumentation, negotiate, cooperate, collaborate or even discuss techniques and/or methodologies for problem solving. Group Decision Making is a social activity in which the discussion and results consider a combination of rational and emotional aspects. In this paper we will present a Smart Decision Room, LAID (Laboratory of Ambient Intelligence for Decision Making). In LAID environment it is provided the support to meeting room participants in the argumentation and decision making processes, combining rational and emotional aspects.

An emotional and context-aware model for adapting RSS news to users and groups

The exhibition of information does not always attend to the preferences and characteristics of the users, nor the context that involves the user. With the aim of overcoming this gap, we propose an emotional context-aware model for adapting information contents to users and groups. The proposed model is based on OCC and Big Five models to handle emotion and personality respectively. The idea is to adapt the representation of the information in order to maximize the positive emotional valences and minimize the negatives. To evaluate the proposed model it was developed a prototype for adapting RSS news to users and group of users.

Effects of emotional valence and three-dimensionality of visual stimuli on brain activation: an fMRI study

BACKGROUND: Examining changes in brain activation linked with emotion-inducing stimuli is essential to the study of emotions. Due to the ecological potential of techniques such as virtual reality (VR), inspection of whether brain activation in response to emotional stimuli can be modulated by the three-dimensional (3D) properties of the images is important. OBJECTIVE: The current study sought to test whether the activation of brain areas involved in the emotional processing of scenarios of different valences can be modulated by 3D. Therefore, the focus was made on the interaction effect between emotion-inducing stimuli of different emotional valences (pleasant, unpleasant and neutral valences) and visualization types (2D, 3D). However, main effects were also analyzed.METHODS: The effect of emotional valence and visualization types and their interaction were analyzed through a 3x2 repeated measures ANOVA. Post-hoc t-tests were performed under a ROI-analysis approach. RESULTS: The results show increased brain activation for the 3D affective-inducing stimuli in comparison with the same stimuli in 2D scenarios, mostly in cortical and subcortical regions that are related to emotional processing, in addition to visual processing regions. CONCLUSIONS: This study has the potential of clarify brain mechanisms involved in the processing of emotional stimuli (scenarios’ valence) and their interaction with three-dimensionality.

Hausdorff dimension bounds for smoothness of holonomies for codimension 1 hyperbolic dynamics

We prove that the stable holonomies of a proper codimension 1 attractor Λ, for a Cr diffeomorphism f of a surface, are not C1+θ for θ greater than the Hausdorff dimension of the stable leaves of f intersected with Λ. To prove this result we show that there are no diffeomorphisms of surfaces, with a proper codimension 1 attractor, that are affine on a neighbourhood of the attractor and have affine stable holonomies on the attractor.

Hausdorff dimension versus smoothness

There is a one-to-one correspondence between C1+H Cantor exchange systems that are C1+H fixed points of renormalization and C1+H diffeomorphisms f on surfaces with a codimension 1 hyperbolic attractor Λ that admit an invariant measure absolutely continuous with respect to the Hausdorff measure on Λ. However, there is no such C1+α Cantor exchange system with bounded geometry that is a C1+α fixed point of renormalization with regularity α greater than the Hausdorff dimension of its invariant Cantor set. The proof of the last result uses that the stable holonomies of a codimension 1 hyperbolic attractor Λ are not C1+θ for θ greater than the Hausdorff dimension of the stable leaves of f intersected with Λ.