Best Selling Books by Peter Ford

There has been a building on the bluff in the middle of Hay on Wye for 900 years. This is the story of the people associated with it - owners, residents and visitors. In the early days it was a fortified castle attacked by King John and Llewellyn the Great, and occupied briefly by Simon de Montfort. After the union of England and Wales in 1542 domestic buildings replaced the military structures. First the Boyle Mansion built by the sheriff of Hereford and then the imposing Jacobean mansion built by the Gwynne family. This formed the main structure for a procession of occupiers, amongst whom were the successful mercers the Wellingtons, Archdeacon Bevan who used it as a vicarage for 56 years, the Dower House of Lady Glanusk and finally the home of the King of Hay Richard Booth. This is their story.

The stated objective of the current research is to develop a generalized approach for humanmachine interaction via spoken language that exploits recent developments in cognitive science particularly notions of grammatical constructions as form-meaning mappings in language, and notions of shared intentions as distributed plans for interaction and collaboration. In order to do this, we tested human-robot interaction initially with the Event Perceiver system and later on with the Sony AIBOs under soccer related behaviors. We have presented the system architecture for the Eagle Knights Four-Legged team as a testbed for this work. With respect to social cognition, shared intentions represent distributed plans in which two or more collaborators have a common representation of an action plan in which each plays specific roles with specific responsibilities with the aim of achieving some common goal. In the current study, the common goals were well defined in advance (e.g. teaching the robots new relations or new behaviors), and so the shared intentions could be built into the dialog management system. We plan to continue this work by experimenting with more evolved behaviors in testing full coaching capabilities in the soccer scenario. Videos for several human-robot dialogs, including the previous one, can be found in Dominey & Weitzenfeld (2006).