Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment. The Processing Issues: COST 2102 International Conference, Budapest, Hungary, September 7-10, 2010, Revised Selected Papers /

This volume brings together the advanced research results obtained by the European COST Action 2102 “Cross Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication,‿ primarily discussed at the PINK SSPnet-COST 2102 International Conference on “Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment: The Processing Issues‿ held in Budapest, Hungary, September 7–10, 2010 (http://berber.tmit.bme.hu/cost2102/). The main focus of the conference was on methods to combine and build up knowledge through verbal and nonverbal signals enacted in an environment and in a context. In previous meetings, COST 2102 focused on the importance of uncovering and exploiting the wealth of information conveyed by multimodal signals. The next steps have been to analyze actions performed in response to multimodal signals and to study how these actions are organized in a realistic and socially believable context. The focus was on processing issues, since the new approach is computationally complex and the amount of data to be treated may be considered algorithmically infeasible. Therefore, data processing for gainingenactive knowledge must account for natural and intuitive approaches, based more on heuristics and experiences rather than on symbols, as well as on the discovery of new processing possibilities that account for new approaches for data analysis, coordination of the data flow through synchronization and temporal organization and optimization of the extracted features

Metaverse. Old urban issues in new virtual cities

Recent years have seen the arise of some early attempts to build virtual cities, utopias or affective dystopias in an embodied Internet, which in some respects appear to be the ultimate expression of the neoliberal city paradigma (even if virtual). Although there is an extensive disciplinary literature on the relationship between planning and virtual or augmented reality linked mainly to the gaming industry, this often avoids design and value issues. The observation of some of these early experiences - Decentraland, Minecraft, Liberland Metaverse, to name a few - poses important questions and problems that are gradually becoming inescapable for designers and urban planners, and allows us to make some partial considerations on the risks and potentialities of these early virtual cities

Towards the Automatic Detection of Involvement in Conversation

Oertel C, de Looze C, Scherer S, Windmann A, Wagner P, Campbell N. Towards the Automatic Detection of Involvement in Conversation. In: Esposito A, Vinciarelli A, Vicsi K, Pelachaud C, Nijholt A, eds. Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment: The Processing Issues; COST 2102 International Conference, Budapest, Hungary, September 7-10, 2010, Revised Selected Papers. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol 6800. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer; 2011: 163-170.Although an increasing amount of research has been carried out into human-machine interaction in the last century, even today we are not able to fully understand the dynamic changes in human interaction. Only when we achieve this, will we be able to go beyond a one to one mapping between text and speech and be able to add social information to speech technologies. Social information is expressed to a high degree through prosodic cues and movement of the body and the face. The aim of this paper is to use those cues to make one aspect of social information more tangible; namely participants' degree of involvement in a conversation. Our results on the level and span of the voice as well as intensity, and our preliminary results on the movement of the body and face suggest that these cues are reliable cues for the detection of distinct levels of participants' involvement in conversation. This will allow for the development of a statistical model which is able to classify these stages of involvement. Our data indicate that involvement may be a scalar phenomenon

A COMPARISON BETWEEN MOTIVATIONS AND PERSONALITY TRAITS IN RELIGIOUS TOURISTS AND CRUISE SHIP TOURISTS

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the motivations and the personality traits that characterize tourists who choose religious travels versus cruises. Participating in the research were 683 Italian tourists (345 males and 338 females, age range 18–63 years); 483 who went to a pilgrimage travel and 200 who chose a cruise ship in the Mediterranean Sea. Both groups of tourists completed the Travel Motivation Scale and the Big Five Questionnaire. Results show that different motivations and personality traits characterize the different types of tourists and, further, that motivations for traveling are predicted by specific —some similar, other divergent— personality trait

Factors Influencing Customer Satisfaction towards E-shopping in Malaysia

Online shopping or e-shopping has changed the world of business and quite a few people have decided to work with these features. What their primary concerns precisely and the responses from the globalisation are the competency of incorporation while doing their businesses. E-shopping has also increased substantially in Malaysia in recent years. The rapid increase in the e-commerce industry in Malaysia has created the demand to emphasize on how to increase customer satisfaction while operating in the e-retailing environment. It is very important that customers are satisfied with the website, or else, they would not return. Therefore, a crucial fact to look into is that companies must ensure that their customers are satisfied with their purchases that are really essential from the ecommerce’s point of view. With is in mind, this study aimed at investigating customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia. A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed among students randomly selected from various public and private universities located within Klang valley area. Total 369 questionnaires were returned, out of which 341 questionnaires were found usable for further analysis. Finally, SEM was employed to test the hypotheses. This study found that customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia is to a great extent influenced by ease of use, trust, design of the website, online security and e-service quality. Finally, recommendations and future study direction is provided. Keywords: E-shopping, Customer satisfaction, Trust, Online security, E-service quality, Malaysia

Research on Teaching and Learning In Biology, Chemistry and Physics In ESERA 2013 Conference

This paper provides an overview of the topics in educational research that were published in the ESERA 2013 conference proceedings. The aim of the research was to identify what aspects of the teacher-student-content interaction were investigated frequently and what have been studied rarely. We used the categorization system developed by Kinnunen, Lampiselkä, Malmi and Meisalo (2016) and altogether 184 articles were analyzed. The analysis focused on secondary and tertiary level biology, chemistry, physics, and science education. The results showed that most of the studies focus on either the teacher’s pedagogical actions or on the student - content relationship. All other aspects were studied considerably less. For example, the teachers’ thoughts about the students’ perceptions and attitudes towards the goals and the content, and the teachers’ conceptions of the students’ actions towards achieving the goals were studied only rarely. Discussion about the scope and the coverage of the research in science education in Europe is needed.Peer reviewe