Localized Technological Change in the Network of Networks: the Interaction between Regulation and the Evolution of Technology in Telecommunications

This paper attempts to integrate advances in the economics oftechnological change into the economic analysis of the evolutionof the telecommunications industrial organization and to showthat technological change should be considered as an endogenous,path-dependent and clay factor of change fed by the specificcharacters of the technology, the institutional set-up and theindustrial organization of this sector.     

Issues of trust and control on agent autonomy

The relationship between trust and control is quite relevant both for the very notion of trust and for modelling and implementing trust-control relations with autonomous systems. We claim that control is antagonistic of the strict form of trust: 'trust in y '; but also that it completes and complements it for arriving to a global trust. In other words, putting control and guaranties is trust-building; it produces a sufficient trust, when trust in y 's autonomous willingness and competence would not be enough. We also argue that control requires new forms of trust: trust in the control itself or in the controller, trust in y as for being monitored and controlled, trust in possible authorities, etc. Finally, we show that paradoxically control could not be antagonistic of strict trust in y , but it can even create, increase it by making y more willing or more effective. In conclusion, depending on the circumstances, control makes y more reliable or less reliable; control can either decrease or increase trust. A good theory of trust cannot be complete without a theory of control.     

Propositional and terminological knowledge representations

Abstract

Formalisms based on a propositional representation demonstrate a high representational competence because of their flexibility, properties, and their great expression power, even if they often fail to represent the meaning of the nodes that make up the propositional networks. The presence of a network of definitions would make the representation richer, and would augment the expressiveness and the inferential capabilities of the whole system: the twofold architecture of the hybrid systems seems to be suitable to satisfy these prerequisites. Nevertheless, the hybrid systems fail to clearly define the intensional and extensional levels of knowledge. This paper proposes a different distribution of tasks between the two parts of a hybrid system on the ground of a precise distinction among intensional, mental extensional, and extensional aspects of knowledge. Moreover, it suggests employing a propositional approach also for arranging the abstract definitions of the terminological box. These principles have been tested in KRAM (Knowledge Representation for Agency Modelling), a hybrid system used as a component both of a cooperative interface and of a system able to model actions and minds of cognitive agents.