Chatbots for learning: A review of educational chatbots for the Facebook Messenger

With the exponential growth in the mobile device market over the last decade, chatbots are becoming an increasingly popular option to interact with users, and their popularity and adoption are rapidly spreading. These mobile devices change the way we communicate and allow ever-present learning in various environments. This study examined educational chatbots for Facebook Messenger to support learning. The independent web directory was screened to assess chatbots for this study resulting in the identification of 89 unique chatbots. Each chatbot was classified by language, subject matter and developer's platform. Finally, we evaluated 47 educational chatbots using the Facebook Messenger platform based on the analytic hierarchy process against the quality attributes of teaching, humanity, affect, and accessibility. We found that educational chatbots on the Facebook Messenger platform vary from the basic level of sending personalized messages to recommending learning content. Results show that chatbots which are part of the instant messaging application are still in its early stages to become artificial intelligence teaching assistants. The findings provide tips for teachers to integrate chatbots into classroom practice and advice what types of chatbots they can try out.Web of Science151art. no. 10386

User-Friendly MES Interfaces:Recommendations for an AI-Based Chatbot Assistance in Industry 4.0 Shop Floors

The purpose of this paper is to study an Industry 4.0 scenario of ‘technical assistance’ and use manufacturing execution systems (MES) to address the need for easy information extraction on the shop floor. We identify specific requirements for a user-friendly MES interface to develop (and test) an approach for technical assistance and introduce a chatbot with a prediction system as an interface layer for MES. The chatbot is aimed at production coordination by assisting the shop floor workforce and learn from their inputs, thus acting as an intelligent assistant. We programmed a prototype chatbot as a proof of concept, where the new interface layer provided live updates related to production in natural language and added predictive power to MES. The results indicate that the chatbot interface for MES is beneficial to the shop floor workforce and provides easy information extraction, compared to the traditional search techniques. The paper contributes to the manufacturing information systems field and demonstrates a human-AI collaboration system in a factory. In particular, this paper recommends the manner in which MES based technical assistance systems can be developed for the purpose of easy information retrieval

Data Science and Knowledge Discovery

Data Science (DS) is gaining significant importance in the decision process due to a mix of various areas, including Computer Science, Machine Learning, Math and Statistics, domain/business knowledge, software development, and traditional research. In the business field, DS's application allows using scientific methods, processes, algorithms, and systems to extract knowledge and insights from structured and unstructured data to support the decision process. After collecting the data, it is crucial to discover the knowledge. In this step, Knowledge Discovery (KD) tasks are used to create knowledge from structured and unstructured sources (e.g., text, data, and images). The output needs to be in a readable and interpretable format. It must represent knowledge in a manner that facilitates inferencing. KD is applied in several areas, such as education, health, accounting, energy, and public administration. This book includes fourteen excellent articles which discuss this trending topic and present innovative solutions to show the importance of Data Science and Knowledge Discovery to researchers, managers, industry, society, and other communities. The chapters address several topics like Data mining, Deep Learning, Data Visualization and Analytics, Semantic data, Geospatial and Spatio-Temporal Data, Data Augmentation and Text Mining

Protectbot: A Chatbot to Protect Children on Gaming Platforms

Online gaming no longer has limited access, as it has become available to a high percentage of children in recent years. Consequently, children are exposed to multifaceted threats, such as cyberbullying, grooming, and sexting. The online gaming industry is taking concerted measures to create a safe environment for children to play and interact with, such efforts remain inadequate and fragmented. Different approaches utilizing machine learning (ML) techniques to detect child predatory behavior have been designed to provide potential detection and protection in this context. After analyzing the available AI tools and solutions it was observed that the available solutions are limited to the identification of predatory behavior in chat logs which is not enough to avert the multifaceted threats. In this thesis, we developed a chatbot Protectbot to interact with the suspect on the gaming platform. Protectbot leveraged the dialogue generative pre-trained transformer (DialoGPT) model which is based on Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2). To analyze the suspect\u27s behavior, we developed a text classifier based on natural language processing that can classify the chats as predatory and non-predatory. The developed classifier is trained and tested on Pan 12 dataset. To convert the text into numerical vectors we utilized fastText. The best results are obtained by using non-linear SVM on sentence vectors obtained from fastText. We got a recall of 0.99 and an F_0.5-score of 0.99 which is better than the state-of-the-art methods. We also built a new dataset containing 71 predatory full chats retrieved from Perverted Justice. Using sentence vectors generated by fastText and KNN classifier, 66 chats out of 71 were correctly classified as predatory chats

An interactive interface for nursing robots.

Physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) is inevitable for a human user while working with assistive robots. There are various aspects of pHRI, such as choosing the interface, type of control schemes implemented and the modes of interaction. The research work presented in this thesis concentrates on a health-care assistive robot called Adaptive Robot Nursing Assistant (ARNA). An assistive robot in a health-care environment has to be able to perform routine tasks and be aware of the surrounding environment at the same time. In order to operate the robot, a teleoperation based interaction would be tedious for some patients as it would require a high level of concentration and can cause cognitive fatigue. It would also require a learning curve for the user in order to teleoperate the robot efficiently. The research work involves the development of a proposed Human-Machine Interface (HMI) framework which integrates the decision-making module, interaction module, and a tablet interface module. The HMI framework integrates a traded control based interaction which allows the robot to take decisions on planning and executing a task while the user only has to specify the task through a tablet interface. According to the preliminary experiments conducted as a part of this thesis, the traded control based approach allows a novice user to operate the robot with the same efficiency as an expert user. Past researchers have shown that during a conversation with a speech interface, a user would feel disengaged if the answers received from the interface are not in the context of the conversation. The research work in this thesis explores the different possibilities of implementing a speech interface that would be able to reply to any conversational queries from the user. A speech interface was developed by creating a semantic space out of Wikipedia database using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). This allowed the speech interface to have a wide knowledge-base and be able to maintain a conversation in the same context as intended by the user. This interface was developed as a web-service and was deployed on two different robots to exhibit its portability and the ease of implementation with any other robot. In the work presented, a tablet application was developed which integrates speech interface and an onscreen button interface to execute tasks through ARNA robot. This tablet interface application can access video feed and sensor data from robots, assist the user with decision making during pick and place operations, monitor the user health over time, and provide conversational dialogue during sitting sessions. In this thesis, we present the software and hardware framework that enable a patient sitter HMI, and together with experimental results with a small number of users that demonstrate that the concept is sound and scalable

Text stylometry for chat bot identification and intelligence estimation.

Authorship identification is a technique used to identify the author of an unclaimed document, by attempting to find traits that will match those of the original author. Authorship identification has a great potential for applications in forensics. It can also be used in identifying chat bots, a form of intelligent software created to mimic the human conversations, by their unique style. The online criminal community is utilizing chat bots as a new way to steal private information and commit fraud and identity theft. The need for identifying chat bots by their style is becoming essential to overcome the danger of online criminal activities. Researchers realized the need to advance the understanding of chat bots and design programs to prevent criminal activities, whether it was an identity theft or even a terrorist threat. The more research work to advance chat bots’ ability to perceive humans, the more duties needed to be followed to confront those threats by the research community. This research went further by trying to study whether chat bots have behavioral drift. Studying text for Stylometry has been the goal for many researchers who have experimented many features and combinations of features in their experiments. A novel feature has been proposed that represented Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) and implemented that on a Byte level N-Gram. Term Frequency-Inverse Token Frequency (TF-ITF) used these terms and created the feature. The initial experiments utilizing collected data demonstrated the feasibility of this approach. Additional versions of the feature were created and tested for authorship identification. Results demonstrated that the feature was successfully used to identify authors of text, and additional experiments showed that the feature is language independent. The feature successfully identified authors of a German text. Furthermore, the feature was used in text similarities on a book level and a paragraph level. Finally, a selective combination of features was used to classify text that ranges from kindergarten level to scientific researches and novels. The feature combination measured the Quality of Writing (QoW) and the complexity of text, which were the first step to correlate that with the author’s IQ as a future goal

Personality Identification from Social Media Using Deep Learning: A Review

Social media helps in sharing of ideas and information among people scattered around the world and thus helps in creating communities, groups, and virtual networks. Identification of personality is significant in many types of applications such as in detecting the mental state or character of a person, predicting job satisfaction, professional and personal relationship success, in recommendation systems. Personality is also an important factor to determine individual variation in thoughts, feelings, and conduct systems. According to the survey of Global social media research in 2018, approximately 3.196 billion social media users are in worldwide. The numbers are estimated to grow rapidly further with the use of mobile smart devices and advancement in technology. Support vector machine (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), Multilayer perceptron neural network, and convolutional neural network (CNN) are some of the machine learning techniques used for personality identification in the literature review. This paper presents various studies conducted in identifying the personality of social media users with the help of machine learning approaches and the recent studies that targeted to predict the personality of online social media (OSM) users are reviewed

pHealth 2021. Proc. of the 18th Internat. Conf. on Wearable Micro and Nano Technologies for Personalised Health, 8-10 November 2021, Genoa, Italy

Smart mobile systems – microsystems, smart textiles, smart implants, sensor-controlled medical devices – together with related body, local and wide-area networks up to cloud services, have become important enablers for telemedicine and the next generation of healthcare services. The multilateral benefits of pHealth technologies offer enormous potential for all stakeholder communities, not only in terms of improvements in medical quality and industrial competitiveness, but also for the management of healthcare costs and, last but not least, the improvement of patient experience. This book presents the proceedings of pHealth 2021, the 18th in a series of conferences on wearable micro and nano technologies for personalized health with personal health management systems, hosted by the University of Genoa, Italy, and held as an online event from 8 – 10 November 2021. The conference focused on digital health ecosystems in the transformation of healthcare towards personalized, participative, preventive, predictive precision medicine (5P medicine). The book contains 46 peer-reviewed papers (1 keynote, 5 invited papers, 33 full papers, and 7 poster papers). Subjects covered include the deployment of mobile technologies, micro-nano-bio smart systems, bio-data management and analytics, autonomous and intelligent systems, the Health Internet of Things (HIoT), as well as potential risks for security and privacy, and the motivation and empowerment of patients in care processes. Providing an overview of current advances in personalized health and health management, the book will be of interest to all those working in the field of healthcare today