In this work, we provide a treatment of the relationship between two models that have been widely used in the implementation of autonomous agents: the Belief DesireIntention (BDI) model and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We start with an informal description of the relationship, identifying the common features of the two approaches and the differences between them. Then we hone our understanding of these differences through an empirical analysis of the performance of both models on the TileWorld testbed. This allows us to show that even though the MDP model displays consistently better...

This SpringerBrief reviews the knowledge engineering problem of engineering objectivity in top-k query answering; essentially, answers must be computed taking into account the user's preferences and a collection of (subjective) reports provided by other users. Most assume each report can be seen as a set of scores for a list of features, its author's preferences among the features, as well as other information is discussed in this brief. These pieces of information for every report are then combined, along with the querying user's preferences and their trust in each report, to rank the...