Stefano Borgo will present the School of IT seminar with a talk entitled, "Towards Culture-aware Artificial Agents".  

Artificial agents might not understand human interests and actions if these agents cannot anticipate how a person understands a situation and the implications of a behavior. Indeed, in many cases understanding, behaviors and expectations are constrained, if not driven, by culture.  In the talk we discuss the (elusive) notion of culture and propose to model it via the notion of trait. We discuss in which sense culture(s) can be the subject of formal representation and describe the formal organization of (a notion of) culture that can help artificial agents to behave in agreement with human culture. In particular, we distinguish some trait types (knowledge, rule, behavior, interpretation) and show how they can be organized. 

Speaker bio: I studied math at the University of Padua (Bachelor), logic at Indiana University (Master) and knowledge representation at the Free University of Bolzano-Bozen (PhD).

My research develops in the areas of information and social systems where logic, artificial intelligence and cognitive science overlap. I like to start with an ontological approach to clarify the domain and to identify the problem. You can see this, for example, in my work on engineering function and product modeling and, in a different way, on space representation. In general, I like to work with people with different backgrounds because I'm attracted to interdisciplinary topics.

I've given tens of invited talks at conferences and universities. Typically, people ask me to talk about applied ontology and how it can be used in some domain or context. I've been active in about 30 national and international projects. As most people, I didn't like all of them but they often spark some interesting problem to think about. Today I'm in the Editorial Board of the journal Applied Ontology. member of the Advisory Board of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) and in the Steering committee of several conference/workshop series.