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The purpose of this article is to give a non‐technical overview of some of the technical progress made recently on tackling three fundamental problems in the area of formal knowledge representation/artificial intelligence. These are the Frame Problem, the Ramification Problem, and the Qualification Problem. The article aims to describe the development of two logic‐based languages, the Event Calculus and Modular‐E, to address various aspects of these issues. The article also aims to set this work in the wider context of contemporary developments in applied logic, non‐monotonic reasoning and formal theories of common sense.

The study applies symbolic logic to model aspects of human knowledge and reasoning.

The article finds that there are fundamental interdependencies between the three problems mentioned above. The conceptual framework shared by the Event Calculus and Modular‐E is appropriate for providing principled solutions to them.

This article provides an overview of an important approach to dealing with three fundamental issues in artificial intelligence.

This paper aims to address some security issues in open systems such as service‐oriented applications and grid computing. It proposes a security framework for these systems taking a trust viewpoint. The objective is to equip the entities in these systems with mechanisms allowing them to decide about trusting or not each other before starting transactions.

In this paper, the entities of open systems (web services, virtual organizations, etc.) are designed as software autonomous agents equipped with advanced communication and reasoning capabilities. Agents interact with one another by communicating using public dialogue game‐based protocols and strategies on how to use these protocols. These strategies are private to individual agents, and are defined in terms of dialogue games with conditions. Agents use their reasoning capabilities to evaluate these conditions and deploy their strategies. Agents compute the trust they have in other agents, represented as a subjective quantitative value, using direct and indirect interaction histories with these other agents and the notion of social networks.

The paper finds that trust is subject to many parameters such as the number of interactions between agents, the size of the social network, and the timely relevance of information. Combining these parameters provides a comprehensive trust model. The proposed framework is proved to be computationally efficient and simulations show that it can be used to detect malicious entities.

The paper proposes different protocols and strategies for trust computation and different parameters to consider when computing this trust. It proposes an efficient algorithm for this computation and a prototype simulating it.

This paper aims to study the automotive 4.0 context to understand the consumers’ propensity towards high-tech automated cars. The paper analyses the antecedents that lead to the use of innovative vehicles. Theory of planned behaviour (TPB) is adopted and extended by including further constructs, such as environmental aspects and inhibitors.

The advent of smart technologies and the internet of things has given rise to several contributions that look at consumers’ intention towards innovation adoption in the automotive industry. Furthermore, this study rises from the growing interest that sustainable mobility achieved. Based on the previous technology acceptance models and particularly TPB, this paper develops a structured questionnaire. After a pilot survey, the final questionnaire was administered online through email and social media in the Italian context. Structural equation modelling technique has been used for analysing data and testing the conceptual model.

The number of questionnaires filled out was 310, with a sample composed of young adults, characterised by different addiction levels towards technology. The results explain the drivers that lead to accept and adopt high-tech automated vehicles. This topic is still under investigation and offers potential research opportunities, considering the evolution of the market and the consumers’ habits and needs. Future research studies in this area should focus on generalising the present findings in other countries. Moreover, once this technology starts to be adopted, other constructs could be discovered, investigated and included in the model.

Mobility has raised a growing interest with the fast increasing demand for sustainability and growth of innovative solutions embedded in mobility. This research explores the TPB model’s application and the relation between its constructs, environmental aspects, inhibitors and intention to adopt automated vehicles. On this strength, it is possible to identify each construct’s relevance for obtaining social consensus on the market.

The purpose of this paper is to explore why innovative service ecosystems scale up, using a service-dominant logic lens. The focus is on identifying the key drivers of the scaling-up process as the basis for a new conceptual framework on the scaling up of service innovations.

An inductive research design is used to zoom in on two innovative service ecosystems, Eataly and KidZania, to identify the key drivers that can explain why innovations scale up. For both companies, the triangulation of semi-structured interviews, archival sources and in-store observations is used as complementary data sets. Multiple investigators and multiple coders have been involved in the data collection, coding process and analysis.

An extended conceptualization of service innovation is obtained, grounded in a framework of four drivers of scaling up: effectuation as the basis for creating the value proposition; sensing and adapting to local contexts; the reconfiguration and alignment of resources and forms for collaboration between actors; and values’ resonance.

This study represents one of the first empirical investigations of the key drivers of the scaling up process of service innovations. The paper contributes with a conceptualization of service innovation and why scaling-up processes emerge, emphasizing the existence of multiple constellations of four drivers.

Bike sharing (BS) is a phenomenon of growing interest in the sustainable mobility field. In recent years, many governments have implemented concrete actions to diffuse the services in cities, trying to encourage citizens' sustainable behavior. Several mobile applications (apps) related to the mobility sector have embedded gamification mechanics applied in non-gaming contexts, able to create and increase user engagement and to manage users' behavior (Deterding et al., 2011). The main purpose of this study is to understand whether app perception influences gamification, and how gamification improves service quality and user loyalty in BS systems.

To examine the impact of gamification on service quality and loyalty, the study performed secondary data collection and qualitative analysis with in-depth interviews. Thereafter, a quantitative analysis was conducted, and the theoretical model was analyzed through structural equation modeling (SEM).

findings showed that the use of gamification mechanics in BS services improves users' loyalty and directly influences service quality. The gamification tool improves users' engagement, transferring rules, facilitating the achievement of goals and quality standards and enhancing the BS usage.

This study uniquely contributes an understanding of the effect of gamification on service quality and loyalty in BS usage. It also provides some insight for companies and policymakers into implementing gamification mechanics in order to address new challenges for quality management.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate possible improvements in the pursuit of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) by multinational enterprises (MNEs) through an analysis of the literature.

A critical framework based on Gleicher’s formula for change is provided after conducting a systematic literature review.

The best way to pursue the SDGs is through an integrated approach that recognises the importance of MNEs in terms of possibilities and power of action. Working towards the SDGs appears to be largely limited by three aspects of the problem: its complexity and wickedness, the genuine interest in reaching some SDGs, at the expense of profit and low foresight.

A fundamental limitation of the study concerns, as in most of the literature on the matter, the impossibility of providing an optimal solution to the problem of meeting the SDGs, given their nature. However, formulating the best definition of the problem and its characteristics can contribute to making its management better.

This study has social implications due to the extreme importance that many SDGs have with regard to democracy and social equity, beyond their environmental and economic aspects.

The claimed contribution is the value brought by the synthesis of several points of view, through the interdisciplinary analysis of the research question. The novelty consists in organising the literature according to the formula for change.

Social cognitive theory suggests that children may have more favorable attitudes toward food products promoted by media characters who are similar to them, in terms of factors such as age, gender and race-ethnicity. This paper aims to profile the characters in food and beverage websites and apps for children and examine whether the healthfulness of promoted products varies as a function of character background.

This study includes two parallel content analyses focused on websites and apps that were produced by America’s top selling food and beverage companies.

There were very few child-targeted websites and apps, but those that existed were replete with media characters. These websites/apps tended to feature media characters with diverse gender, age and racial–ethnic backgrounds. However, marketing featuring adult and male characters promoted particularly unhealthy foods.

American food companies, many of whom signed voluntary self-regulatory pledges through the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, should make a more concerted effort to refrain from featuring appealing media characters in child-directed new media marketing. Whether conscious or not, it seems as if food marketers may be leveraging characters to appeal to a wide audience of children of varied demographic backgrounds.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this manuscript is the only research to focus specifically on the demographic profiles (i.e. gender, age and race-ethnicity) of characters in food websites and the nutritional quality of the products they promote. It is also the first to systematically examine media characters in food apps in any capacity.