The Formalities of Affordance
Antony Galton
In Mehul Bhatt, Hans Guesgen and Shyamanta Hazarika (editors), Spatio-Temporal Dynamics,
Proceedings of
Workshop 21, 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, August 16-20, Lisbon, Portugal, pages 1-6. (Invited talk)
Abstract
It is an obvious truth that the possibilities for action and movement
are conditioned by the physical spatial environment. In the
terminology of J. J. Gibson, these possibilities are defined by the
``affordances" of environmental features, and the key to being a
successful agent in the physical world is being able to perceive and
exploit these affordances. To what extent can affordances be
characterised in terms of low-level environmental features using the
methods of traditional logic-based commonsense knowledge
representation? Following an introductory general discussion, this
paper concentrates on a particular case, the affordance
of containment, for which we give a sequence of successively more
detailed and lower-level analyses.
Read the paper
Slides from the workshop presentation
Antony Galton
Last modified: Fri Nov 18 16:47:44 GMT 2011