CoachAI: A Conversational Agent Assisted Health Coaching Platform

Poor lifestyle represents a health risk factor and is the leading cause of morbidity and chronic conditions. The impact of poor lifestyle can be significantly altered by individual behavior change. Although the current shift in healthcare towards a long lasting modifiable behavior, however, with increasing caregiver workload and individuals' continuous needs of care, there is a need to ease caregiver's work while ensuring continuous interaction with users. This paper describes the design and validation of CoachAI, a conversational agent assisted health coaching system to support health intervention delivery to individuals and groups. CoachAI instantiates a text based healthcare chatbot system that bridges the remote human coach and the users. This research provides three main contributions to the preventive healthcare and healthy lifestyle promotion: (1) it presents the conversational agent to aid the caregiver; (2) it aims to decrease caregiver's workload and enhance care given to users, by handling (automating) repetitive caregiver tasks; and (3) it presents a domain independent mobile health conversational agent for health intervention delivery. We will discuss our approach and analyze the results of a one month validation study on physical activity, healthy diet and stress management

Agricultural information dissemination using ICTs: a review and analysis of information dissemination models in China

Open Access funded by China Agricultural UniversityOver the last three decades, China’s agriculture sector has been transformed from the traditional to modern practice through the effective deployment of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Information processing and dissemination have played a critical role in this transformation process. Many studies in relation to agriculture information services have been conducted in China, but few of them have attempted to provide a comprehensive review and analysis of different information dissemination models and their applications. This paper aims to review and identify the ICT based information dissemination models in China and to share the knowledge and experience in applying emerging ICTs in disseminating agriculture information to farmers and farm communities to improve productivity and economic, social and environmental sustainability. The paper reviews and analyzes the development stages of China’s agricultural information dissemination systems and different mechanisms for agricultural information service development and operations. Seven ICT-based information dissemination models are identified and discussed. Success cases are presented. The findings provide a useful direction for researchers and practitioners in developing future ICT based information dissemination systems. It is hoped that this paper will also help other developing countries to learn from China’s experience and best practice in their endeavor of applying emerging ICTs in agriculture information dissemination and knowledge transfer

Communication-oriented Project Management Solution

Hajusa tarkvaraarenduse populaarsuse kiire kasv muudab tarkvaraloomeprotsessi kohanemisvõimelisemaks ja paindlikumaks inimressursside osas. Selleks, et hajusat loomeprotsessi toetada, tekib kliendi, meeskonna liikmete ja projektijuhi vahel lisakoorem kommunikatsiooni näol. Kaasaegse tarkvaraarenduse praktikas eksisteerib hulk nutikaid ja mugavaid tööriistu, mis aitavad muuta kommunikatsiooni mugavamaks ja ladusamaks. Kahjuks need riistad ei tegele mitme kommunikatsioonivahendi integratsiooniga ühtseks töötavaks süsteemiks. Töö eesmärgiks on pakkuda kirjeldatud probleemile lahendus. Töös kirjeldatakse loodud koostöötamise tarkvara, mis on mõeldud toetama hajusat tarkvaraarendust ning mille eesmärgid on erinevate kommunikatsioonivahendite andmete integratsioon ja tarkvaraarenduse projektiga seotud analüütilise informatsiooni pakkumine.Growth of popularity of distributed software development makes development process more adaptive and flexible in terms of human resources. But in order to sustain the process there is an additional burden put on the communication between customer, team members and project managers. In the contemporary software development practice there exists a number of smart and handy tools, which help making the communication more fluent and convenient. However none of those tools tackle a problem of integrating multiple communicational sources into a single tool. This paper intends to present a solution to this problem by introducing a collaboration tool for distributed software development. The collaboration tool will be oriented on integra- tion of multiple communication sources and provide analytical information on software development project

On the Automated Synthesis of Enterprise Integration Patterns to Adapt Choreography-based Distributed Systems

The Future Internet is becoming a reality, providing a large-scale computing environments where a virtually infinite number of available services can be composed so to fit users' needs. Modern service-oriented applications will be more and more often built by reusing and assembling distributed services. A key enabler for this vision is then the ability to automatically compose and dynamically coordinate software services. Service choreographies are an emergent Service Engineering (SE) approach to compose together and coordinate services in a distributed way. When mismatching third-party services are to be composed, obtaining the distributed coordination and adaptation logic required to suitably realize a choreography is a non-trivial and error prone task. Automatic support is then needed. In this direction, this paper leverages previous work on the automatic synthesis of choreography-based systems, and describes our preliminary steps towards exploiting Enterprise Integration Patterns to deal with a form of choreography adaptation.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2015, arXiv:1512.0694