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This paper makes the case for integrated ecosystem-based management, which combines value creation and the safeguarding of ecosystem health. Drawing lessons from previous successes and failures, the paper identifies existing impediments in policy and practice and lays out a set of steps and guiding principles towards successfully integrated ocean management. It assesses current opportunities to accelerate progress and the impact of these opportunities on jobs and equity. It assesses current opportunities to accelerate progress and the impact of these opportunities on jobs and equity.

Increasingly, embodied agents take over tasks which are traditionally performed by humans. But how do users perceive these embodied agents? In this paper, we describe an experiment in which we compared a real person and a virtual character giving route instructions. The voice, the outfit and the gestures were kept (close to) identical for both cases. The participants judged them, among other things, on trustworthiness, personality and presentation style. In contrast to the outcome of earlier investigations, in most categories the agent scored better or comparable to the human guide. This suggests that embodied agents are suitable to take the place of humans in information-giving applications, provided that natural sounding speech and natural looking nonverbal behaviors can be achieved.

Today computers can be programmed to compose music automatically, using techniques ranging from rule-based to evolutionary computation (e.g., genetic algorithms and cellular automata). However, we lack good techniques for programming the computer to play or interpret music with expression. Expression in music is largely associated with emotions. Therefore we are looking into the possibility of programming computer music systems with emotions. We are addressing this problem from an A-Life perspective combined with recent discoveries in the neurosciences with respect to emotion.Antonio Damasio refers to the importance of emotions to assist an individual to maintain survival, as they seem to be an important mechanism for adaptation and decision-making. Specifically, environmental events of value should be susceptible to preferential perceptual processing, regarding their pleasant or unpleasant. This approach assumes the existence of neural pathways that facilitate survival. Stable emotional systems should then emerge from self-regulatory homeostatic processes.We implemented a system consisting of an agent that inhabits an environment containing with a number of different objects. These objects cause different physiological reactions to the agent. The internal body state of the agent is defined by a set of internal drives and a set of physiological variables that vary as the agent interacts with the objects it encounters in the environment. The agent is controlled by a feed-forward neural network that integrates visual input with information about its internal states. The network learns through a reinforcement-learning algorithm, derivate from different body states, due to pleasant or unpleasant stimuli.The playback of musical recordings in MIDI format is steered by the physiological variables of the agent in different phases of the adaptation process.The behaviour of the system is coherent with Damasio's theory of background emotional system. It demonstrates that specific phenomena, such as body/world categorization and existence of a body map, can evolve from a simple rule: self-survival in the environment. Currently, we are in the process of defining a system of higher-level emotional states (or foreground system) that will operate in social contexts; i.e., with several agents in the environment reacting to objects and interacting with each other.