This book offers valuable new insights into the design of culturally-aware systems. In its
first part it is devoted to presenting selected Culturally-Aware Intelligent Systems devised
in the field of Artificial Intelligence and its second part consists of two sub-parts that
offer a source of inspiration for building modelizations of Culture and of its influence on the
human mind and behavior to be used in new Culturally-Aware Intelligent Systems. Those
sub-parts present the results of experiments conducted in two fields that study Culture and its
influence on the human mind's functions: Cultural Neuroscience and Cross-Cultural Psychology.In
this era of globalization people from different countries and cultures have the opportunity to
interact directly or indirectly in a wide variety of contexts. Despite differences in their
ways of thinking and reasoning their behaviors their values lifestyles customs and habits
languages religions - in a word their cultures - they must be able to collaborate on projects
to understand each other's views to communicate in such a way that they don't offend each
other to anticipate the effects of their actions on others and so on. As such it is of
primary importance to understand how culture affects people's mental activities such as
perception interpretation reasoning emotion and behavior in order to anticipate possible
misunderstandings due to differences in handling the same situation and to try and resolve
them.Artificial Intelligence and more specifically the field of Intelligent Systems design
aims at building systems that mimic the behavior of human beings in order to complete tasks
more efficiently than humans could by themselves. Consequently in the last decade experts and
scholars in the field of Intelligent Systems have been increasingly tackling the notion of
cultural awareness. A Culturally-Aware Intelligent System can be defined as a systemwhere
Culture-related or more generally socio-cultural information is modeled and used to design
the human-machine interface or to provide support with the task carried out by the system be
it reasoning simulation or any other task involving cultural knowledge.
