Search Results (130)

Agentic AI systems, possessing capabilities for autonomous planning and action, show great potential across diverse domains. However, their practical deployment is hindered by challenges in aligning their behavior with varied human values, complex safety requirements, and specific compliance needs. Existing alignment methodologies often falter when faced with the complex task of providing personalized context without inducing confabulation or operational inefficiencies. This paper introduces a novel solution: a ‘superego’ agent, designed as a personalized oversight mechanism for agentic AI. This system dynamically steers AI planning by referencing user-selected ‘Creed Constitutions’—encapsulating diverse rule sets—with adjustable adherence levels to fit non-negotiable values. A real-time compliance enforcer validates plans against these constitutions and a universal ethical floor before execution. We present a functional system, including a demonstration interface with a prototypical constitution-sharing portal, and successful integration with third-party models via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Comprehensive benchmark evaluations (HarmBench, AgentHarm) demonstrate that our Superego agent dramatically reduces harmful outputs—achieving up to a 98.3% harm score reduction and near-perfect refusal rates (e.g., 100% with Claude Sonnet 4 on AgentHarm’s harmful set) for leading LLMs like Gemini 2.5 Flash and GPT-4o. This approach substantially simplifies personalized AI alignment, rendering agentic systems more reliably attuned to individual and cultural contexts, while also enabling substantial safety improvements. Full article

From the mid-Ming to early Qing dynasties, Mount Jizu 雞足山 in Yunnan achieved unexpected prominence within China’s Buddhist sacred landscape—an event of regional, national, and transnational significance. Employing an explicit comparative lens that juxtaposes Jizu with China’s core-region sacred sites like Mount Wutai and Emei, this study investigates the timing, regional dynamics, institutional mechanisms, and causal drivers behind the rapid ascent. Rejecting teleological narratives, it traces the mountain’s trajectory through four developmental phases to address critical historiographical questions: how did a peripheral Yunnan site achieve national prominence within a remarkably compressed timeframe? By what mechanisms could its sacred authority be constructed to inspire pilgrimages even across vast distances? Which historical agents and processes orchestrated these transformations, and how did the mountain’s symbolic meaning shift dynamically over time? Departing from earlier scholarship that privileges regional and secular frameworks, this work not only rebalances the emphasis on religious dimensions but also expands the analytical scope beyond regional confines to situate Mount Jizu within national and transnational frameworks. Eventually, by analyzing the structural, institutional, and agential dynamics—spanning local, imperial, and transnational dimensions—this study reveals how the mountain’s sacralization emerged from the convergence of local agency, acculturative pressures, state-building imperatives, late-Ming Buddhist revival, literati networks, and the strategic mobilization of symbolic capital. It also reveals that Mount Jizu was not a static sacred site but a dynamic arena of contestation and negotiation, where competing claims to spiritual authority and cultural identity were perpetually redefined. Full article

This article assesses the importance of two tax controversies in conditioning market access in fifteenth-century Bruges. It looks at diplomatic posturing on the management of this market and the conditions for partaking in its trade. The theory of ‘signalling’ is applied to highlight diplomatic stances and reveal the reasoning behind policy decisions including reprisals, taxes, and boycotts hitherto absent in the literature. Diplomatic, urban legal, and fiscal sources are consulted to reveal what the Castilians and Catalans, sizeable and organised merchant communities in Bruges, perceived as an existential threat to their trade—the ‘fiscalisation’ of market access. This article takes a comparative approach, employing the theory of signalling to determine the strategies of the various actors involved and their efficacy. The Duke of Burgundy and his administration emerge from this story as the prime agent in determining this equilibrium, with the Castilians and Catalans bringing their diplomatic and economic leverage to bear to prevent it. The city of Bruges, as lobbyist and interlocutor, was involved throughout attempting to find a balance between its many merchant communities. These cases offer historical insights into strategies of negotiation when the economic stakes are high. Full article

Rome, historically regarded as a monumental center of Catholic Christendom, now stands as a multi-layered environment shaped by diverse religious communities whose overlapping architectures, rites, and narratives expand the city’s cultural memory. This article employs Warburg’s Mnemosyne methodology to investigate how symbolic motifs, architectural forms, and intangible practices—from Eastern Orthodox iconography to the Great Mosque of Rome’s transnational design—migrate, adapt, and reconfigure within Rome’s urban fabric. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from cultural memory studies, religious studies, and urban geography, it reveals how minority communities—Jewish, Muslim, Orthodox Christian, Protestant, Methodist, and Scientology—act as “memory agents”, negotiating visibility and introducing new heritage layers that challenge monolithic perceptions of Rome’s identity. The analysis underscores that intangible heritage, such as chanting, prayer, and interfaith festivals, is equally central to understanding how collective memory is produced and transmitted. Tensions arise when key stakeholders do not validate these emerging cultural forms or question their “authenticity”, reflecting the contested nature of heritage-making. Ultimately, Rome’s religious plurality, shaped by migration and historical transformations, emerges as a dynamic memoryscape. By recognizing the vital role of minority faiths in heritage-making, this study contributes to broader debates on cultural pluralism, super-diversity, and the evolving definitions of religious and cultural heritage in contemporary global cities. Full article

In the electricity market, the issue of contract negotiation prices between generators/traders and buyers is of particular relevance, as an accurate contract modeling leads to increased financial returns and business sustainability for the various participating agents, encouraging investments in specialized sectors for price forecasting and risk analysis. This paper presents a methodology applied in experiments on energy forward curve scenarios using a set of techniques, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Seasonal AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average with eXogenous regressors (SARIMAX), and Feature Engineering to generate a 10-year projection of the Conventional Long-Term Price. The model validation proved to be effective, with errors of only 4.5% by Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and slightly less than 2% by Mean Absolute Error (MAE), for a time series spanning from 7 January 2012 to 31 August 2024, in the Brazilian energy market. Full article

The importance of dialogical space and its various forms, useful in philosophical counseling, has been emphasized in recent discourse. The discourse primarily focuses on various aspects of the exchange between the counselee and the counselor in the form of external dialogue. This paper, drawing insights from Hubert Hermans, broadens the discourse into the domain of Agentive Reason, which includes the internal dialogue of the counselee, comprising various I-positions. By engaging with the associated network of the counselee’s “I-positions,” the counselor expands the counselee’s internal domain, thereby facilitating the counseling process. This paper aims to show that this process is best served when the counselor is able to cultivate his/her dialogical relationship with the counselee towards forming a metaposition from where the organization of existing and new I-positions can be seen, questioned, restructured, and most importantly, acted upon. This paper seeks to demonstrate this prospect through a symbolic exploration of Bhagavad Gītā in the form of a dialogical space. It examines how Arjuna’s agentive crisis, echoed in his internal dialogical tension of many maladaptive I-positions, is addressed by extending his dialogical self to Kṛṣṇa’s positions and counter-positions, leading the interaction to a dialogical metaposition in Arjuna’s external domain. The goal is not to establish Kṛṣṇa as a philosophical counselor or to present his discourse with Arjuna as a treatise on philosophical counseling. Rather, the intent is to encourage exploration of the symbolic representation underlying the Gītā, which helps us decipher various dialogical metapositions in the external domain that may correspond with the positions, needs, and emotions in the counselee’s internal domain. This has a threefold purpose: first, to recognize the open boundaries of the dialogical self; second, to examine the instrumental role of the counselor in negotiating these boundaries when they are closed in self-defense; and third, to introduce the concepts of Informed Ignorance and Agentive Reason. Full article

This study examines how cognitive mechanisms shaped the understanding and ritualization of wonhan (寃恨, resentment) in Joseon Korea, particularly in the context of disasters. Drawing on cognitive science and historical analysis, it demonstrates that while wonhan functioned as a shared conceptual framework across social boundaries, debates over wonhon (寃魂, resentful spirits) exposed ideological tensions in state orthodoxy. Through an analysis of key historical cases, particularly the 1451 Sinmi Year Rituals, the study shows how the tension between intention-based and system-based reasoning was negotiated within ritual practices and political discourse. The research reveals that state rituals, especially yeoje, served as sites where these competing reasoning modes interacted. Even as state officials maintained system-based interpretations of resentment as disruptive energy, the inherently anthropomorphic nature of ritual prayer necessitated treating the deceased as intentional agents. This created a practical synthesis of divergent reasoning modes within ritual contexts. By examining the cognitive foundations of wonhan and wonhon, this study highlights the multilayered nature of contentious religious issues. It demonstrates how shared conceptual ground can emerge even within seemingly opposed perspectives and how conflicting reasoning modes can coexist in ritual contexts. The findings suggest that religious disputes are not solely doctrinal conflicts but also reflect deeper cognitive tendencies that shape divergent interpretations. Full article

This paper elucidates the cognitive and cultural underpinnings that facilitate the coexistence of multiple—occasionally contradictory—interpretive frameworks of magico-religious beliefs and practices within a single sociocultural context. Religious beliefs and practices frequently transcend the boundaries established by a tradition’s official doctrines and normative frameworks. From the perspective of religious authorities and theological elites, such transgressions may constitute sites of tension and doctrinal concern. However, individuals, as the primary agents of lived religion, rarely conceptualize these situations as crises of faith or legitimacy. Instead, they develop improvisational strategies to negotiate these apparent contradictions within their sociocultural milieus. At the cultural level, religious beliefs and practices are not rigidly constrained by dominant official doctrines and normative prescriptions; rather, they accommodate a diverse range of interpretive possibilities. Focusing on a specific rainmaking ritual known as “Tiger Head Sinking” from the Joseon Dynasty—a period marked by the hegemony of Neo-Confucian doctrinal and normative structures—this study investigates how the dynamic interplay between cognitive constraints and cultural schemas facilitates the coexistence of seemingly incompatible interpretations and folk theories of the ritual. Full article

Agent-based automated negotiation aims to enhance decision-making processes by predefining negotiation rules, strategies, and objectives to achieve mutually acceptable agreements. However, most existing research primarily focuses on modeling the formal negotiation phase, while neglecting the critical role of opponent analysis during the pre-negotiation stage. Additionally, the impact of opponent selection and classification on strategy formulation is often overlooked. To address these gaps, we propose a novel automated negotiation framework that enables the agent to use reinforcement learning, enhanced by opponent modeling, for strategy optimization during the negotiation stage. Firstly, we analyze the node and network topology characteristics within an agent-based relational network to uncover the potential strength and types of relationships between negotiating parties. Then, these analysis results are used to inform strategy adjustments through reinforcement learning, where different negotiation strategies are selected based on the opponent’s profile. Specifically, agents’ expectations are adjusted according to relationship strength, ensuring that the expectations of negotiating parties are accurately represented across varying levels of relationship strength. Meanwhile, the relationship classification results are used to adjust the discount factor within a Q-learning negotiation algorithm. Finally, we conducted a series of experiments, and comparative analysis demonstrates that our proposed model outperforms existing negotiation frameworks in terms of negotiation efficiency, utility, and fairness. Full article

This study explores market value depreciation among soccer players across the top five European leagues, addressing a critical gap in the sports finance literature by focusing on post-prime valuation dynamics. Leveraging a dataset from the 2023/2024 season, player market values and attributes sourced from Transfermarkt and Sportmonks were analyzed using league-specific multilinear regression models. The findings reveal a consistent decline in market values beginning at age 27, with notable variation across leagues. The German Bundesliga demonstrates the steepest depreciation rates, suggesting shorter career peaks or distinct market dynamics. In contrast, the Italian Serie A and Spanish La Liga exhibit the slowest depreciation rates, preserving player value for older athletes longer than other leagues. The English Premier League and French Ligue 1 show moderate depreciation, with the Premier League’s decline closely aligning with Ligue 1 and diverging less from other leagues than traditionally assumed. These results challenge preconceived narratives about league-specific player valuations and offer empirical insights into the transfer market. By providing a nuanced understanding of depreciation trends, this study can inform strategic decisions for agents, managers, and clubs, particularly in optimizing contract negotiations, transfer strategies, and long-term asset management in professional football. Full article

In spring 2023, controversy arose over Spring Fever, an annual campaign to promote sexual and relationship education in primary schools in The Netherlands. This led to parliamentary questions and even death threats against employees of Rutgers, The Netherlands Center on Sexuality, which developed the program. This article examines how child sexuality was framed both in the Spring Fever project and in the resulting controversy. The analysis is based on newspaper articles from March to June 2023. One premise of Spring Fever is that children are seen as sexual agents able to develop their sexuality safely through age-appropriate education, which aims for children’s healthy development, including negotiating consent and experiencing pleasure. During the 2023 controversy, discourses of childhood innocence emerged in response to this, alongside accusations of focusing too much on “woke” themes, such as gender diversity. This paper concludes that, due to global anti-gender movements and local right-wing politics, the Dutch model of sex education—pragmatic, comprehensive, and evidence-based, as seen in Spring Fever—no longer maintains its depoliticizing effect. Additionally, the Spring Fever controversy signals a shift in the politics of sexual nationalism in The Netherlands. Full article

Recommender systems aim to predict the preferences of users and suggest items of interest to them in various domains. While traditional recommendation techniques consider users as individuals, some approaches aim to satisfy the needs of a group of people. Multi-agent systems can be used to develop such recommendations, where multiple intelligent agents interact with each other to achieve a common goal, i.e., deciding which item to recommend. Particularly, negotiation techniques can be used to find a decision that aims at maximizing the satisfaction of all group members. The proposed approach introduces a multi-agent recommender system for a group of users by considering their personality traits, relationships and social interactions during the negotiation process that leads to the generation of recommendations. While traditional recommendation techniques do not take into account the effects of personality traits and relationships between individuals, our approach demonstrates that personality traits, especially personality types in the context of conflict management, and social relationships can significantly impact on the group recommendation. The results indicate that the opinion of an individual can be influenced when she is part of a group that cooperates towards a shared goal. Overall, the proposed approach shows that recommender systems can benefit from considering that factors. This work contributes to understanding the impact of personality traits and social relationships on group recommendations and suggests potential directions for future research. Full article

This article theorizes the role of local and indigenous culture in its intersection with development initiatives. It argues that Communication for Development and Social Change (CDSC), through a cultural studies framework, strengthens the potentiality of democratization and participation within community-based development and social change settings. We advocate that applied cultural studies can facilitate agency (through voice and self-representation) in social interventions. This is a cultural studies approach that has been recontextualised from the Birmingham origin as read through Marxist development studies, first adapted and mobilized during the anti-apartheid struggle in developing cultural strategy, and more recently with efforts to indigenise research practices with research participants in the southern Kalahari. We draw on an example of the community-owned, state-funded, and privately operated !Xaus Lodge cultural tourism asset. We illustrate how CDSC strategies, influenced by applied cultural studies, can work with an agentic imperative to effect development and mutual understanding in a defined geographical area, where multiple stakeholder agendas, cultural backgrounds, and ontologies are to be negotiated. Full article

Cooperative and self-enforceable water allocation is a key instrument to manage geopolitical conflict induced by water scarcity, which necessitates the cooperative willingness of the agents and considers their heterogeneity in geography, climate, hydrology, environment and social economy. Based on a multi-indicator system that contains asymmetric information on water volume contribution, current water consumption, water economic efficiency and efforts for eco-environmental protection, this study proposed a water allocation framework by combining the asymmetric power index approach with bankruptcy theory for solving the transboundary water allocation problem under scarcity. The proposed method was applied to the Yellow River Basin in northern China, which is mainly shared by nine provincial districts and frequently suffers from severe water shortages, and its results were compared with six alternative methods. The results highlight the necessity of quantifying agents’ willingness to cooperate under the condition of asymmetric negotiation power when making decisions on transboundary water allocations. The proposed method allows for transboundary water allocations through simultaneous consideration of the agent’s willingness to cooperate and asymmetric negotiation power, as well as disagreement allocation points, which ensure the stability, fairness and self-enforceability of allocation results. Therefore, it can offer practical and valuable decision-making insights for transboundary water management under water scarcity. Full article

How did early 19th Century Māori assess the authenticity of the gospel narrative based on their own traditional worldview? This essay explores the thoughts of Whangataua, an ancestor of the author from the Ngāi Tahu and Rangitāne tribes of the upper Manawatū River region in the North Island of New Zealand. How might Whangataua and his contemporaries have negotiated the authenticity of the gospel narrative shared by the missionary William Colenso between 1846 and 1852? This paper explores the cultural and intellectual negotiation that took place when Māori first heard the gospel message by comparing the story of the virgin birth of Jesus from the book of Luke with the traditional narrative of Tamatea-ure-haea and his wife Iwipupu. The intersection between the virgin conception narrative and Māori tribal beliefs held by 19th Century rangatira (principal chiefs) reveals an overlapping of realities where Māori worldview could become an agent of divine accommodation and authenticity for the gospel narratives. Full article