A Personalized System for Conversational Recommendations

Searching for and making decisions about information is becoming increasingly difficult as the amount of information and number of choices increases. Recommendation systems help users find items of interest of a particular type, such as movies or restaurants, but are still somewhat awkward to use. Our solution is to take advantage of the complementary strengths of personalized recommendation systems and dialogue systems, creating personalized aides. We present a system -- the Adaptive Place Advisor -- that treats item selection as an interactive, conversational process, with the program inquiring about item attributes and the user responding. Individual, long-term user preferences are unobtrusively obtained in the course of normal recommendation dialogues and used to direct future conversations with the same user. We present a novel user model that influences both item search and the questions asked during a conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in significantly reducing the time and number of interactions required to find a satisfactory item, as compared to a control group of users interacting with a non-adaptive version of the system

A coordination protocol for user-customisable cloud policy monitoring

Cloud computing will see a increasing demand for end-user customisation and personalisation of multi-tenant cloud service offerings. Combined with an identified need to address QoS and governance aspects in cloud computing, a need to provide user-customised QoS and governance policy management and monitoring as part of an SLA management infrastructure for clouds arises. We propose a user-customisable policy definition solution that can be enforced in multi-tenant cloud offerings through an automated instrumentation and monitoring technique. We in particular allow service processes that are run by cloud and SaaS providers to be made policy-aware in a transparent way

Timed Runtime Monitoring for Multiparty Conversations

We propose a dynamic verification framework for protocols in real-time distributed systems. The framework is based on Scribble, a tool-chain for design and verification of choreographies based on multiparty session types, developed with our industrial partners. Drawing from recent work on multiparty session types for real-time interactions, we extend Scribble with clocks, resets, and clock predicates constraining the times in which interactions should occur. We present a timed API for Python to program distributed implementations of Scribble specifications. A dynamic verification framework ensures the safe execution of applications written with our timed API: we have implemented dedicated runtime monitors that check that each interaction occurs at a correct timing with respect to the corresponding Scribble specification. The performance of our implementation and its practicability are analysed via benchmarking

Investigating Fine Temporal Dynamics of Prosodic and Lexical Accommodation

Conversational interaction is a dynamic activity in which participants engage in the construction of meaning and in establishing and maintaining social relationships. Lexical and prosodic accommodation have been observed in many studies as contributing importantly to these dimensions of social interaction. However, while previous works have considered accommodation mechanisms at global levels (for whole conversations, halves and thirds of conversations), this work investigates their evolution through repeated analysis at time intervals of increasing granularity to analyze the dynamics of alignment in a spoken language corpus. Results show that the levels of both prosodic and lexical accommodation fluctuate several times over the course of a conversation

Representing Conversations for Scalable Overhearing

Open distributed multi-agent systems are gaining interest in the academic community and in industry. In such open settings, agents are often coordinated using standardized agent conversation protocols. The representation of such protocols (for analysis, validation, monitoring, etc) is an important aspect of multi-agent applications. Recently, Petri nets have been shown to be an interesting approach to such representation, and radically different approaches using Petri nets have been proposed. However, their relative strengths and weaknesses have not been examined. Moreover, their scalability and suitability for different tasks have not been addressed. This paper addresses both these challenges. First, we analyze existing Petri net representations in terms of their scalability and appropriateness for overhearing, an important task in monitoring open multi-agent systems. Then, building on the insights gained, we introduce a novel representation using Colored Petri nets that explicitly represent legal joint conversation states and messages. This representation approach offers significant improvements in scalability and is particularly suitable for overhearing. Furthermore, we show that this new representation offers a comprehensive coverage of all conversation features of FIPA conversation standards. We also present a procedure for transforming AUML conversation protocol diagrams (a standard human-readable representation), to our Colored Petri net representation

Using the Variationist Comparative Method to Examine the Role of Language Contact in Synthetic and Periphrastic Verbs in Spanish

Language contact and linguistic change are thought to go hand in hand (e.g. Silva-Corvalán 1994), however there are methodological obstacles, such as collecting data at different points in time or the availability of monolingual data for comparison, that make claims about language change tenuous. The present study draws on two different corpora of spoken Spanish — bilingual New Mexican Spanish and monolingual Ecuadorian Spanish — in order to quantitatively assess the convergence hypothesis in which contact with English has produced a change to the Spanish verbal system, as reflected in an extension of the Present and Past Progressive forms at the expense of the synthetic Simple Present and Imperfect forms. The data do not show that the Spanish spoken by the bilinguals is changing to more closely resemble the analogous English progressive constructions, but instead suggest potential weakening of linguistic constraints on the conditioning of the variation between periphrastic and synthetic forms

Web services synchronization health care application

With the advance of Web Services technologies and the emergence of Web Services into the information space, tremendous opportunities for empowering users and organizations appear in various application domains including electronic commerce, travel, intelligence information gathering and analysis, health care, digital government, etc. In fact, Web services appear to be s solution for integrating distributed, autonomous and heterogeneous information sources. However, as Web services evolve in a dynamic environment which is the Internet many changes can occur and affect them. A Web service is affected when one or more of its associated information sources is affected by schema changes. Changes can alter the information sources contents but also their schemas which may render Web services partially or totally undefined. In this paper, we propose a solution for integrating information sources into Web services. Then we tackle the Web service synchronization problem by substituting the affected information sources. Our work is illustrated with a healthcare case study.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figure

Study on QoS support in 802.11e-based multi-hop vehicular wireless ad hoc networks

Multimedia communications over vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) will play an important role in the future intelligent transport system (ITS). QoS support for VANET therefore becomes an essential problem. In this paper, we first study the QoS performance in multi-hop VANET by using the standard IEEE 802.11e EDCA MAC and our proposed triple-constraint QoS routing protocol, Delay-Reliability-Hop (DeReHQ). In particular, we evaluate the DeReHQ protocol together with EDCA in highway and urban areas. Simulation results show that end-to-end delay performance can sometimes be achieved when both 802.11e EDCA and DeReHQ extended AODV are used. However, further studies on cross-layer optimization for QoS support in multi-hop environment are required