No abstract

Publishing studies using standardized, machine-readable formats will enable machines to perform meta-analyses on demand. To build a semantically enhanced technology that embodies these functions, we developed the Cooperation Databank (CoDa)—a databank that contains 2,636 studies on human cooperation (1958–2017) conducted in 78 societies involving 356,283 participants. Experts annotated these studies along 312 variables, including the quantitative results (13,959 effects). We designed an ontology that defines and relates concepts in cooperation research and that can represent the relationships between results of correlational and experimental studies. We have created a research platform that, given the data set, enables users to retrieve studies that test the relation of variables with cooperation, visualize these study results, and perform (a) meta-analyses, (b) metaregressions, (c) estimates of publication bias, and (d) statistical power analyses for future studies. We leveraged the data set with visualization tools that allow users to explore the ontology of concepts in cooperation research and to plot a citation network of the history of studies. CoDa offers a vision of how publishing studies in a machine-readable format can establish institutions and tools that improve scientific practices and knowledge.

The goal of this work is to describe how robots interact with complex city environments, and to identify the main characteristics of an emerging field that we call Robot-City Interaction (RCI). Given the central role recently gained by modern cities as use cases for the deployment of advanced technologies, and the advancements achieved in the robotics field in recent years, we assume that there is an increasing interest both in integrating robots in urban ecosystems, and in studying how they can interact and benefit from each others. Therefore, our challenge becomes to verify the emergence of such area, to assess its current state and to identify the main characteristics, core themes and research challenges associated with it. This is achieved by reviewing a preliminary body of work contributing to this area, which we classify and analyze according to an analytical framework including a set of key dimensions for the area of RCI. Such review not only serves as a preliminary state-of-the-art in the area, but also allows us to identify the main characteristics of RCI and its research landscape.

Abstract. We present Dedalo, a framework which is able to exploit Linked Data to generate explanations for clusters. In general, any result of a Knowledge Discovery process, including clusters, is interpreted by human experts who use their background knowledge to explain them. However, for someone without such expert knowledge, those results may be difficult to understand. Obtaining a complete and satisfactory explanation becomes a laborious and time-consuming process, involving expertise in possibly different domains. Having said so, not only does the Web of Data contain vast amounts of such background knowledge, but it also natively connects those domains. While the efforts put in the interpretation process can be reduced with the support of Linked Data, how to automatically access the right piece of knowledge in such a big space remains an issue. Dedalo is a framework that dynamically traverses Linked Data to find commonalities that form explanations for items of a cluster. We have developed different strategies (or heuristics) to guide this traversal, reducing the time to get the best explanation.In our experiments, we compare those strategies and demonstrate that Dedalo finds relevant and sophisticated Linked Data explanations from different areas.