Exploring the role of graphic design in enhancing the brand identity and menu designs of restaurants: a case study approach

This Thesis examines the important role of graphic design in improving restaurant branding and menu design using a case study approach. The aim is to explore how effective graphic design strategies can help create a strong brand presence and compelling menu design in the restaurant industry. It includes two design projects: the development of the visual identity for an ice cream restaurant and a salad restaurant. The effectiveness of these graphic design interventions in increasing awareness, attracting customers, and conveying brand personality is analyzed and discussed. The findings provide valuable insight into the world of restaurant branding and the impact of well-executed graphic design on creating a successful business identity

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Providing Service-based Personalization in an Adaptive Hypermedia System

Adaptive hypermedia is one of the most popular approaches of personalized information access. When the field started to emerge, the expectation was that soon nearly all published hypermedia content could be adapted to the needs, preferences, and abilities of its users. However, after a decade and a half, the gap between the amount of total hypermedia content available and the amount of content available in a personalized way is still quite large.In this work we are proposing a novel way of speeding the development of new adaptive hypermedia systems. The gist of the approach is to extract the adaptation functionality out of the adaptive hypermedia system, encapsulate it into a standalone system, and offer adaptation as a service to the client applications. Such a standalone adaptation provider reduces the development of adaptation functionality to configuration and compliance and as a result creates new adaptive systems faster and helps serve larger user populations with adaptively accessible content.To empirically prove the viability of our approach, we developed PERSEUS - server of adaptation functionalities. First, we confirmed that the conceptual design of PERSEUS supports realization of a several of the widely used adaptive hypermedia techniques. Second, to demonstrate that the extracted adaptation does not create a significant computational bottleneck, we conducted a series of performance tests. The results show that PERSEUS is capable of providing a basis for implementing computationally challenging adaptation procedures and compares well with alternative, not-encapsulated adaptation solutions. As a result, even on modest hardware, large user populations can be served content adapted by PERSEUS

Business model innovation reshaping the grocery retail

Analisi dell'evoluzione portata nell'ambito del business modelope

Un système de collecte sécurisé et de gestion des données pour les réseaux de capteurs sans fils

Le développement des réseaux de capteurs sans fil fait que chaque utilisateur ou organisation est déjà connecté à un nombre important de nœuds. Ces nœuds génèrent une quantité importante de données, rendant la gestion de ces données non évident. De plus, ces données peuvent contenir des informations concernant la vie privée. Les travaux de la thèse attaquent ces problématiques. Premièrement, nous avons conçu un middleware qui communique avec les capteurs physiques pour collecter, stocker, traduire, indexer, analyser et générer des alertes sur les données des capteurs. Ce middleware est basé sur la notion de composants et de composites. Chaque nœud physique communique avec un composite du middleware via une interface RESTFul. Ce middleware a été testé et utilisé dans le cadre du projet Européen Mobesens dans le but de gérer les données d'un réseau de capteurs pour la surveillance de la qualité de l'eau. Deuxièmement, nous avons conçu un protocole hybride d'authentification et d'établissement de clés de paires et de groupes. Considérant qu'il existe une différence de performance entre les noeuds capteur, la passerelle et le middleware, nous avons utilisé l'authentification basé sur la cryptographie basée sur les identités entre la passerelle et le serveur de stockage et une cryptographie symétrique entre les capteurs et les deux autres parties. Ensuite, le middleware a été généralisé dans la troisième partie de la thèse pour que chaque organisation ou individu puisse avoir son propre espace pour gérer les données de ses capteurs en utilisant le cloud computing. Ensuite, nous avons portail social sécurisé pour le partage des données des réseaux de capteursNowadays, each user or organization is already connected to a large number of sensor nodes which generate a substantial amount of data, making their management not an obvious issue. In addition, these data can be confidential. For these reasons, developing a secure system managing the data from heterogeneous sensor nodes is a real need. In the first part, we developed a composite-based middleware for wireless sensor networks to communicate with the physical sensors for storing, processing, indexing, analyzing and generating alerts on those sensors data. Each composite is connected to a physical node or used to aggregate data from different composites. Each physical node communicating with the middleware is setup as a composite. The middleware has been used in the context of the European project Mobesens in order to manage data from a sensor network for monitoring water quality. In the second part of the thesis, we proposed a new hybrid authentication and key establishment scheme between senor nodes (SN), gateways (MN) and the middleware (SS). It is based on two protocols. The first protocol intent is the mutual authentication between SS and MN, on providing an asymmetric pair of keys for MN, and on establishing a pairwise key between them. The second protocol aims at authenticating them, and establishing a group key and pairwise keys between SN and the two others. The middleware has been generalized in the third part in order to provide a private space for multi-organization or -user to manage his sensors data using cloud computing. Next, we expanded the composite with gadgets to share securely sensor data in order to provide a secure social sensor networkEVRY-INT (912282302) / SudocSudocFranceF

MANAGING QUERY AND UPDATE TRANSACTIONS UNDER QUALITY CONTRACTS IN WEB-DATABASES

In modern Web-database systems, users typically perform read-only queries, whereas all write-only data updates are performed in the background, concurrently with queries.For most of these services to be successful and their users to be kept satisfied, two criteria need to be met: user requests must be answered in a timely fashion and must return fresh data. This is relatively easy when the system is lightly loaded and, as such, both queries and updates can be executed quickly. However, this goal becomes practically hard to achieve in real systems due to the high volumes of queries and updates, especially in periods of flash crowds. In this work, we argue it is beneficial to allow users to specify their preferences and let the system optimize towards satisfying user preferences, instead of simply improving the average case. We believe that this user-centric approach will empower the system to gracefully deal with a broader spectrum of workloads.Towards user-centric web-databases, we propose a Quality Contracts framework to help users express their preferences over multiple quality specifications. Moreover, we propose a suite of algorithms to effectively perform load balancing and scheduling for both queries and updates according to user preferences. We evaluate the proposed framework and algorithms through a simulation with real traces from disk accesses and from a stock information website. Finally, to increase the applicability of Quality Contracts enhanced Web-database systems, we propose an algorithm to help users adapt to the Web-database system behavior and maximize their query success ratio

FATREC Workshop on Responsible Recommendation Proceedings

We sought with this workshop, to foster a discussion of various topics that fall under the general umbrella of responsible recommendation: ethical considerations in recommendation, bias and discrimination in recommender systems, transparency and accountability, social impact of recommenders, user privacy, and other related concerns. Our goal was to encourage the community to think about how we build and study recommender systems in a socially-responsible manner. Recommendation systems are increasingly impacting people\u27s decisions in different walks of life including commerce, employment, dating, health, education and governance. As the impact and scope of recommendations increase, developing systems that tackle issues of fairness, transparency and accountability becomes important. This workshop was held in the spirit of FATML (Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning), DAT (Data and Algorithmic Transparency), and similar workshops in related communities. With Responsible Recommendation , we brought that conversation to RecSys

Emerging digital banking service quality dimensions and their impact on elderly customer satisfaction and engagement: a study in Sri Lankan context

This research is based on the impact of emerging digital banking service quality dimensions on elderly customer satisfaction and engagement in Sri Lankan context. Security and privacy, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived personalization and web aesthetics have been identified as the emerging service qualities in this new age of digital banking. Research on emerging service quality dimensions has become very crucial to both academics and practitioners; however, very little scholarly research has directed service marketers as to how they can influence on elderly customer satisfaction and engagement. In recognition of these current gaps of knowledge, this thesis investigates three research gaps that are addressed through three research questions. First, the research explores how security and privacy, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived personalization and web aesthetics influence the elderly customer satisfaction (RQ1). Second, the research investigates the influence of perceived personalization on elderly customer engagement (RQ2). Third, it investigates the impact of in-person engagement and digital engagement on elderly customer satisfaction (RQ3). To address the three research questions, research in this thesis employed a theory building study, followed by a theory-testing study, using a mixed-method approach. Study one used convergent interview method to collect data from 30 elderly customers who are engaged with a digital banking service provider for more than 6 months. The study qualitatively explored the interviewees’ perceptions of the security and privacy, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived personalization, web aesthetics, in-person engagement and digital engagement. Study two collected data from digital banking customers (above the age of 60) of two leading retail banks in Sri Lanka, resulting in a sample of n=275. The data was collected using a web-based survey that contained 28 items. The factors contained in the conceptual model were drawn from both the literature and the theory-building study. The measurement items were drawn from prior research and thematic findings. Five-point Likert scale was used to measure the items. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was then used to analyse the hypothesized relationships in the model. Four out of nine hypothesized relationships were supported by the results of this theory-testing studyThe results of the study confirm that, all the five service quality dimensions identified (security and privacy, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, web aesthetics and perceived personalisation) are distinct constructs. The results also indicate that all five service quality dimensions have appropriate reliability and each dimension has a significant correlation with other dimensions and make a significant influence on digital banking habits of elderly customers on digital platform. Findings suggest that the perceived usefulness is the key driver of elderly customer satisfaction on digital banking, followed by in-person engagement, perceived personalization, security and privacy, perceived ease of use and web aesthetics respectively. It means that elderly customers are more satisfied and engaged if the digital banking service provider augment the value proposition of digital banking with a clear understanding of the special needs they have. In other words, elderly customers are willing to engage and learn more on digital banking and have a much better and fully fledged customer experience on digital platform. Key words: Service quality dimensions, digital banking, perceived - personalization, engagement and usefulness, customer satisfaction, in-person and digital engagement

To whom to explain and what? : Systematic literature review on empirical studies on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Expectations towards artificial intelligence (AI) have risen continuously because of machine learning models’ evolution. However, the models’ decisions are often not intuitively understandable. For this reason, the field of Explainable AI (XAI) has emerged, which tries to create different techniques to help users understand AI better. As AI’s use spreads more broadly in society, it becomes like a co-worker that people need to understand. For this reason, AI-human interaction in research is of broad and current interest. This thesis outlines the current empirical XAI research literature themes from the human-computer interaction (HCI) perspective. This study's method is an explorative, systematic literature review carried out following the PRISMA (Preferred Research Items for Systematic Reviews) method. In total, 29 articles that concluded an empirical study into XAI from the HCI perspective were included in the review. The material was collected based on database searches and snowball sampling. The articles were analyzed based on their descriptive statistics, stakeholder groups, research questions, and theoretical approaches. This study aims to determine what factors made users consider XAI transparent, explainable, or trustworthy and to whom the XAI research was intended. Based on the analysis, three stakeholder groups to whom the current XAI literature was aimed for emerged: end-users, domain experts, and developers. This study’s findings show that domain experts’ needs towards XAI vary greatly between domains, whereas developers need better tools to create XAI systems. The end-users, on their part, considered case-based explanations unfair and wanted to have explanations that “speak their language”. Also, the results indicate that the effect of current XAI solutions on users’ trust towards AI systems is relatively small or even non-existing. The studies’ direct theoretical contributions and the number of theoretical lenses used were both found out to be relatively low. This thesis’s most immense contribution is to provide a synthesis of the extant empirical XAI literature from the HCI perspective, which previous studies have rarely brought together. Continuing this thesis, researchers can further investigate research avenues such as explanation quality methodologies, algorithm auditing methods, users’ mental models, and prior conceptions about AI.Odotukset tekoälyä kohtaan ovat kohonneet jatkuvasti koneoppimismallien kehittymisen vuoksi. Mallien tekemät päätökset eivät usein ole ihmiskäyttäjälle vaistonvaraisesti ymmärrettävissä. Tätä ongelmaa ratkomaan on syntynyt selittävän tekoälyn tutkimuskenttä, joka luo erilaisia tekniikoita käyttäjien ymmärryksen tueksi. Kun tekoälyn käyttö yhteiskunnassa yleistyy laajemmin, tulee siitä ikään kuin työkaveri, jota ihmisten tulee ymmärtää. Tästä syystä tekoälyn ja ihmisen välisen vuorovaikutuksen tutkiminen on nyt laajan mielenkiinnon kohteena. Tässä pro gradu -tutkielmassa hahmotellaan selittävän tekoälyn tutkimuskentän ajankohtaisia teemoja, ihmisen ja tietokoneen välisen vuorovaikutuksen näkökulmasta. Tutkielman metodi on tutkiva, systemaattinen kirjallisuuskatsaus, ja se suoritettiin seuraten PRISMA-ohjeistusta. Katsaukseen valikoitui yhteensä 29 ihmisen ja tietokoneen vuorovaikutuksen näkökulmasta selittävää tekoälyä empiirisesti tutkinutta artikkelia. Aineisto kerättiin tietokantahakujen ja lumipallo-otannan avulla. Tutkimuksia eriteltiin artikkeleja kuvailevien tietojen, niiden kohdeyleisön, tutkimuskysymysten sekä teoreettisten lähestymistapojen kautta. Tutkielman tarkoituksena on selvittää, millaiset tekijät saivat käyttäjät pitämään tekoälyä läpinäkyvänä, selitettävissä olevana tai luotettavana, sekä kenelle aihepiirin tutkimus oli suunnattu. Analyysin perusteella löytyi kolme ryhmää, joille nykyistä kirjallisuutta on suunnattu: loppukäyttäjät, toimialojen asiantuntijat sekä tekoälyn kehittäjät. Tutkielman tulokset osoittavat, että asiantuntijoiden tarpeet selittävää tekoälyä kohtaan vaihtelevat laajasti toimialojen välillä, kun taas sen kehittäjät kaipaisivat parempia työkaluja tuekseen. Loppukäyttäjien havaittiin pitävän tekoälyn antamia tapauskohtaisia esimerkkejä epäreiluina, ja haluavan juuri heitä puhuttelevia selityksiä. Tulokset ilmaisevat, että nykyisten selittävien tekoälytekniikoiden vaikutukset käyttäjien luottamukseen tekoälyä kohtaan ovat vähäisiä. Tutkimusten tieteellisen panosten ja niiden käyttämien teoreettisten näkökulmien määrän havaittiin olevan suhteellisen pieniä. Tämän tutkielman suurin tieteellinen panos on luoda yhteenveto empiiriseen, selittävän tekoälyn tutkimuskirjallisuuteen, ihmisen ja tietokoneen välisen vuorovaikutuksen näkökulmasta. Tätä näkökulmaa aiempi kirjallisuus on vain harvoin saattanut kokoon. Tutkielma avaa useita näkymiä jatkotutkimukselle, esimerkiksi selitysten laatumetodien, algoritmien auditointimenetelmien, käyttäjien ajatusmallien sekä aiempien käsitysten vaikutusten näkökulmista