A social psychological perspective on World War II collaboration in the 21st century: A Belgian case

The present study addresses antecedents and consequences of attitudes towards collaboration in the context of World War II (WWII) in Belgium. A survey conducted on 922 Belgian French- and Dutch-speaking participants shows that, on overall, Dutch-speakers perceive collaboration as more moral and support amnesty of the former collaborators at a higher level than their Francophone counterparts. In addition, we show that these attitudes are predicted by the generational belonging, linguistic and national identification of the participants. Finally, we find that attitudes towards WWII collaboration are linked to specific political prospects for the future of the country only among Dutch-speakers. These findings suggest that, 75 years after its end, the issue of collaboration during WWII still divides the Belgian society. Furthermore, they underline the added value of a multilevel approach in the understanding of social psychological phenomena.     

Time-informed task planning in multi-agent collaboration

Human-robot collaboration requires the two sides to coordinate their actions in order to better accomplish common goals. In such setups, the timing of actions may significantly affect collaborative performance. The present work proposes a new framework for planning multi-agent interaction that is based on the representation of tasks sharing a common starting and ending point, as petals in a composite daisy graph. Coordination is accomplished through temporal constraints linking the execution of tasks. The planner distributes tasks to the involved parties sequentially. In particular, by considering the properties of the available options at the given moment, the planner accomplishes locally optimal task assignments to agents. Optimality is supported by a fuzzy theoretic representation of time intervals which enables fusing temporal information with other quantitative HRI aspects, therefore accomplishing a ranking of the available options. The current work aims at a systematic experimental assessment of the proposed framework is pursued, verifying that it can successfully cope with a wide range of HRI scenarios.