Digitalisation Practices in South-African State-Owned Enterprises: A Framework for Rapid Adoption of Digital Solutions

The dawn of the 4IR (4th Industrial Revolution) brought about numerous opportunities for digitisation of South African State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). Yet, it is uncertain to what extent these SOEs are positioned to embrace 4IR opportunities and address the challenges. In this paper we investigate the value of SOEs in South Africa (SA) as a developing economy as well as important components of the 4IR and SA government initiatives to embrace the 4IR. Amongst others, Blockchain, Advanced Analytics, AI, and the IoT have been identified as important 4IR components. On the strength of a literature review, a number of propositions is defined and these together with existing technology adoption frameworks, notably the Technology-Organisation-Environment (TOE) framework are used to define a digitalisation framework for 4IR adoption by SA SOEs. Key to the framework is collaboration among individuals in the 4IR. The framework is subsequently validated conceptually by linking it to the stated propositions

Building a Persuasive Virtual Dietitian

This paper describes the Multimedia Application for Diet Management (MADiMan), a system that supports users in managing their diets while admitting diet transgressions. MADiMan consists of a numerical reasoner that takes into account users’ dietary constraints and automatically adapts the users’ diet, and of a natural language generation (NLG) system that automatically creates textual messages for explaining the results provided by the reasoner with the aim of persuading users to stick to a healthy diet. In the first part of the paper, we introduce the MADiMan system and, in particular, the basic mechanisms related to reasoning, data interpretation and content selection for a numeric data-to-text NLG system. We also discuss a number of factors influencing the design of the textual messages produced. In particular, we describe in detail the design of the sentence-aggregation procedure, which determines the compactness of the final message by applying two aggregation strategies. In the second part of the paper, we present the app that we developed, CheckYourMeal!, and the results of two human-based quantitative evaluations of the NLG module conducted using CheckYourMeal! in a simulation. The first evaluation, conducted with twenty users, ascertained both the perceived usefulness of graphics/text and the appeal, easiness and persuasiveness of the textual messages. The second evaluation, conducted with thirty-nine users, ascertained their persuasive power. The evaluations were based on the analysis of questionnaires and of logged data of users’ behaviour. Both evaluations showed significant results

Reasoning and querying bounds on differences with layered preferences

Artificial intelligence largely relies on bounds on differences (BoDs) to model binary constraints regarding different dimensions, such as time, space, costs, and calories. Recently, some approaches have extended the BoDs framework in a fuzzy, \u201cnoncrisp\u201d direction, considering probabilities or preferences. While previous approaches have mainly aimed at providing an optimal solution to the set of constraints, we propose an innovative class of approaches in which constraint propagation algorithms aim at identifying the \u201cspace of solutions\u201d (i.e., the minimal network) with their preferences, and query answering mechanisms are provided to explore the space of solutions as required, for example, in decision support tasks. Aiming at generality, we propose a class of approaches parametrized over user\u2010defined scales of qualitative preferences (e.g., Low, Medium, High, and Very High), utilizing the resume and extension operations to combine preferences, and considering different formalisms to associate preferences with BoDs. We consider both \u201cgeneral\u201d preferences and a form of layered preferences that we call \u201cpyramid\u201d preferences. The properties of the class of approaches are also analyzed. In particular, we show that, when the resume and extension operations are defined such that they constitute a closed semiring, a more efficient constraint propagation algorithm can be used. Finally, we provide a preliminary implementation of the constraint propagation algorithms