Historical accounts of the social sciences have too often accepted local or national institutions as a self-evident framework of analysis, instead of considering them as being embedded in transnational relations of various kinds. Evolving patterns of transnational mobility and exchange cut through the neat distinction between the local, the national, and the inter-national, and thus represent an essential component in the dynamics of the social sciences, as well as a fruitful perspective for rethinking their historical development. In this programmatic outline, it is argued that a transnational history of the social sciences may be fruitfully understood on the basis of three general mechanisms, which have structured the transnational flows of people and ideas in decisive ways: (a) the functioning of international scholarly institutions, (b) the transnational mobility of scholars, and (c) the politics of trans-national exchange of nonacademic institutions. The article subsequently examines and illustrates each of these mechanisms.

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We present a new framework for controlling a robot collaborating with a human to accomplish a common mission. Knowing that we are interested in collaboration domains where there is no shared plan between the human and the robot, the constraints on the decision process are more challenging. We study the decision process of a robot agent for a specific shared mission with a human considering the effect of the human presence, the planning flexibility according to human comfortability and achieving mission. We choose to formalize this problem with Partially Observable Markov Decision Process, then we describe a new domain example that represent human-robot collaboration with no shared plan and we show some preliminary results of solving the POMDP model with standard optimal algorithms as a base work to compare with state-of-the-art and future-work approximate algorithms.

Résumé Les comptes rendus historiques du développement des sciences sociales ont trop souvent considéré les institutions locales ou nationales comme le cadre d'analyse pertinent, au lieu de prendre en compte leur insertion dans divers types de relations transnationales. L'évolution des structures de mobilité et d'échanges transnationaux met à mal les distinctions nettes entre le local, le national et l'international, et représente une composante essentielle de la dynamique des sciences sociales, ainsi qu'une perspective prometteuse pour repenser leur développement historique. Dans l'esquisse programmatique qui suit, nous suggérons qu'il est possible de concevoir une histoire transnationale des sciences sociales à partir de trois mécanismes généraux qui ont structuré de façon décisive les flux transnationaux d'individus et d'idées : a) le fonctionnement des institutions scientifiques internationales, b) la mobilité transnationale des universitaires, et c) les politiques d'échanges transnationaux poursuivies par des institutions non-universitaires.

This paper addresses the problem of exploring an unknown area with a team of autonomous robots using decentralized decision making techniques. The localization aspect is not considered and it is assumed the robots share their positions and have access to a map updated with all explored areas. A key problem is then the coordination of decentralized decision processes: each individual robot must choose appropriate exploration goals so that the team simultaneously explores different locations of the environment. We formalize this problem as a Decentralized Markov Decision Process (Dec-MDP) solved as a set of individual MDPs, where interactions between MDPs are considered in a distributed value function. Thus each robot computes locally a strategy that minimizes the interactions between the robots and maximizes the space coverage of the team. Our technique has been implemented and evaluated in real-world and simulated experiments.