Seeing Through the Invisible Pink Unicorn

This paper explores the quasi-religious aspects of the Invisible Pink Unicorn (IPU), an internet based spoof of religion. IPU message boards situate a moral orientation in an ongoing interactional process that sacralizes parody and an idealized form of “free thinking.” We employ content analysis and grounded theory to argue that IPU writers’ parody of religion serves as a ritual act and conclude our discussion by considering the implications of the findings for the literature on ritual

Intelligent pressure-based typing biometrics system

The design and development of a real-time enhanced password security system, based on the analysis of habitual typing rhythms of individuals, is discussed in this paper. The paper examines the use of force exerted on the keyboard and time latency between keystrokes to create typing patterns for individual users. Pressure signals which are taken from the sensors underneath the keypad are extracted accordingly. These are then used to recognize authentic users and reject imposters. An experimental setup has been developed to capture the pressure signal information of the users’ typing rhythm. Neuro-fuzzy system is employed as the classifier to measure the user’s typing pattern using the Adaptive Neural Fuzzy Inference System toolbox (ANFIS) in MATLAB

Integration of human behavioral aspects in a dynamic model for a manufacturing system

International audienceThe computational simulation of human intelligent behavior has been one of the main research topics in (AI) artificial intelligence domain. Therefore, a great number of behavioral models were proposed considering emotional, cognitive and psychological factors to simulate the human behavior in different domain such as military or manufacturing systems. In addition to psychological factors, the social state of a group of workers plays a critical role in rational decision-making, perception, human interaction and human intelligence. Thus, it is judicious to analyze the workers' behavior at work and to integrate their needs and requirements in manufacturing systems models in order to improve the simulation accuracy. In this context, this paper suggests a graphical and a mathematical representation model of workers' behaviors as well as the ties that can exist among them. The model is also extended to consider inter-worker social relations that can influence the individual performance

Using emotions in intelligent virtual environments: the EJaCalIVE framework

Nowadays, there is a need to provide new applications which allow the definition and implementation of safe environments that attends to the user needs and increases their wellbeing. In this sense, this paper introduces the EJaCalIVE framework which allows the creation of emotional virtual environments that incorporate agents, eHealth related devices, human actors, and emotions projecting them virtually and managing the interaction between all the elements. In this way, the proposed framework allows the design and programming of intelligent virtual environments, as well as the simulation and detection of human emotions which can be used for the improvement of the decision-making processes of the developed entities. The paper also shows a case study that enforces the need of this framework in common environments like nursing homes or assisted living facilities. Concretely, the case study proposes the simulation of a residence for the elderly. The main goal is to have an emotion-based simulation to train an assistance robot avoiding the complexity involved in working with the real elders. The main advantage of the proposed framework is to provide a safe environment, that is, an environment where users are able to interact safely with the system.This work is partially supported by the MINECO/FEDER TIN2015-65515-C4-1-R and the FPI Grant AP2013-01276 awarded to Jaime-Andres Rincon. This work is also supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT) within the projects UID/CEC/00319/2013 and Post-Doc scholarship SFRH/BPD/102696/2014 (A. Costa).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Editorial

Human capital is the single most important capability asset within knowledge value chain driven corporations. In the organizations’ pursuit to become knowledge driven, it is essential to address human capital challenges with prime focus on attracting, retaining and sustaining knowledge workers.  Some of the major challenges are in the domain of talent acquisition, engagement and retention. Current trends show increasing rates of job hopping, attitudinal changes, job dissatisfaction, expectancy with regard to increased payments, greater autonomy in workplace and instantaneous career growth.  Organizations face dilemma choosing between investing on training potential candidates or on acquiring talent. As talent moves rapidly to countries with better economies, the focus should be on geographical retention. Unequal distribution of knowledge and expertise is highly rampant.  Traditional monetary driven “performance causal value chains” is no longer effective in motivating the knowledge worker. Thus, the true challenge for any knowledge driven organization functioning in a dynamic environment is human capital management.  This issue focuses on the research output in the area of Human Capital Challenges in knowledge driven organisations

Impact of decision-making system in social navigation

[EN] Facing human activity-aware navigation with a cognitive architecture raises several difficulties integrating the components and orchestrating behaviors and skills to perform social tasks. In a real-world scenario, the navigation system should not only consider individuals like obstacles. It is necessary to offer particular and dynamic people representation to enhance the HRI experience. The robot’s behaviors must be modified by humans, directly or indirectly. In this paper, we integrate our human representation framework in a cognitive architecture to allow that people who interact with the robot could modify its behavior, not only with the interaction but also with their culture or the social context. The human representation framework represents and distributes the proxemic zones’ information in a standard way, through a cost map. We have evaluated the influence of the decision-making system in human-aware navigation and how a local planner may be decisive in this navigation. The material developed during this research can be found in a public repository (https://github.com/IntelligentRoboticsLabs/social_navigation2_WAF) and instructions to facilitate the reproducibility of the results.S

Service Quality and Customer Loyalty in a Post-Crisis Context. Prediction-Oriented Modeling to Enhance the Particular Importance of a Social and Sustainable Approach

Research into the influence of service quality on customer loyalty has typically focused on confirming isolated direct causal influences regarding particular dimensions of quality, usually undertaken in the context of positive, firm-customer relations. The present study extends analysis of these factors through a new lens. First, the study was undertaken in a market context following a crisis that has had far-reaching consequences for customers’ relational behaviors. We explore the case of the Spanish banking industry, a sector that accurately reflects these new relational conditions, including a rising demand for more socially responsible banking. Second, we propose a holistic model that combines the effects of four key factors associated with service quality (outcome, personnel, servicescape and social qualities). We also apply an innovative predictive methodological technique using partial least squares (PLS) and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) that enables us not only to determine the direct causal effects among variables, but also to consider different scenarios in which to predict customer loyalty. The results highlight the role of outcome and social qualities. The novelty of the social qualities factor helps to underscore the importance of social, ethical and sustainable practices to customer loyalty, although personnel and servicescape qualities must also be present to improve the predictive capability of service quality on loyalty

Glossarium BITri 2016 : Interdisciplinary Elucidation of Concepts, Metaphors, Theories and Problems Concerning Information

222 p.Terms included in this glossary recap some of the main concepts, theories, problems and metaphors concerning INFORMATION in all spheres of knowledge. This is the first edition of an ambitious enterprise covering at its completion all relevant notions relating to INFORMATION in any scientific context. As such, this glossariumBITri is part of the broader project BITrum, which is committed to the mutual understanding of all disciplines devoted to information across fields of knowledge and practic