Evaluating Competing Agent Strategies for a Voice Email Agent

This paper reports experimental results comparing a mixed-initiative to a system-initiative dialog strategy in the context of a personal voice email agent. To independently test the effects of dialog strategy and user expertise, users interact with either the system-initiative or the mixed-initiative agent to perform three successive tasks which are identical for both agents. We report performance comparisons across agent strategies as well as over tasks. This evaluation utilizes and tests the PARADISE evaluation framework, and discusses the performance function derivable from the experimental data.Comment: 6 pages latex, uses icassp91.sty, psfi

Evaluation of anthropomorphic feedback for an online auction and affordances

This paper describes an experiment investigating the effectiveness and user satisfaction of using anthropomorphic feedback at the user interface. The context chosen was online bidding due to this kind of activity being very much used in current times by general users. The main results of the experiment were that there was a statistically significant effect observed for the time taken to place a bid in the anthropomorphic text condition. However there were no other significant effects for effectiveness issues and user satisfaction indicators. The results were also analysed in terms of the affordances and the main findings were that each of the four conditions tested in the experiment were probably equivalent in terms of their facilitating the affordances. Overall it may be more important to facilitate the affordances rather than a type of feedback being anthropomorphic in nature or not

Promising Practices in Combatting Juvenile Sex Trafficking Surrounding Large Events and Beyond

Proactive, inter-agency, multidisciplinary collaboration has proven helpful in effectively addressing human trafficking surrounding large events, such as the Super Bowl, as multiple municipal entities, neighboring law enforcement agencies, various service providers, local and visiting volunteers, and heightened media focus are generally involved

Research note: Complying with frustration, the experience of equality and diversity practitioners

The Equality and Diversity (E&D) role in Higher Education (HE) in the UK ensures that universities are compliant with equalities legislation and that they fulfil their duty to promote equality as these relate to employees and the institution as a whole. Hunter and Swan (2007) call for more research to explore how equality and diversity practitioners handle these complex and contradictory (E&D) duties (Healy et al, 2010). We also argue that, as the UK university context itself faces severe financial challenges, understanding the experiences of HE E&D practitioners/managers becomes more urgent. The purpose of the research is to explain the experience of equality practitioners in the HE context, an under-explored area of equality practice. Meyerson and Scully’s concept (1995) of the ‘tempered radical’ has been used to give us greater insight into how the challenges of this role are played out in the HE context

Sacred, secular, or sacrilegious? prehistoric sites, pagans and the Sacred Sites project in Britain

This paper explores issues and tensions developing within today's Britain around prehistoric 'sacred sites' and their appropriation by a wide range of interested or concerned groups. In examining and theorising competing constructions of 'sacredness' and its inscription today, we will draw on examples from well-known and less well-know British prehistoric places, to illustrate how claims and appropriations emerge from spiritual and political processes, and to question how places are themselves agents in the demarcation of their own sacredness. We focus on contemporary pagans as ‘new-indigenes’ and their engagements with the past and performances of spirituality on the stage of the heritage of Britain, as examined in our ‘Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights Project’ (www.sacredsites.or.uk), now in its fifth year. From the deposition of votive offerings at West Kennet long barrow and long-running disputes over access to Stonehenge as a ‘sacred site’, to the display of ritual paraphernalia derived from archaeological contexts (a Thor’s hammer pendant, for instance), pagans perform their worldviews and engage with heritage in diverse ways. Pagan re-enchantment of the past not only re-places heritage, myth, artefacts, ‘cultures’ in/out of time, highlighting (im)permanence as a linking theme in our analysis, but also disrupts the fixed and unchanging ‘past’ imposed onto heritage by much heritage discourse – challenging the permanent to yield, bend and accommodate.</p

The development of complex verb constructions in British Sign Language

This study focuses on the mapping of events onto verb-argument structures in British Sign Language (BSL). The development of complex sentences in BSL is described in a group of 30 children, aged 3;2–12;0, using data from comprehension measures and elicited sentence production. The findings support two interpretations: firstly, in the mapping of concepts onto language, children acquiring BSL overgeneralize the use of argument structure related to perspective shifting;secondly, these overgeneralizations are predicted by the typological characteristics of the language and modality. Children under age 6;0, in attempting to produce sentences encoded through a perspective shift, begin by breaking down double-verb constructions (AB verbs) into components, producing only the part of the verb phrase which describes the perspective of the patient. There is also a prolonged period of development of non-manual features, with the full structure not seen in its adult form until after 9;0. The errors in the use of AB verbs and the subsequent protracted development of correct usage are explained in terms of the conceptual–linguistic interface

Online kiosks: the alternative to mobile technologies for mobile users

Online kiosks have the potential to be a significant alternative to mobile technologies in retailing, information provision and service delivery. This article describes the development and use of different types of online kiosk in contexts where users are on the move and away from fixed technologies. A case study of a major UK airport terminal is used to illustrate different types of kiosk applications. Comparisons are made with mobile phone technologies. Online kiosks have a niche in allowing access to information, services and e-commerce technologies for all potential consumers. However, they also have a much wider role in self-managed, self-service delivery of information, services, goods and relationships to consumers on the move.</p

Cutting Class Action Agency Costs: Lessons from the Public Company

The agency relationship between class counsel and class members in Rule 23(b)(3) class actions is similar to that between executives and shareholders in U.S. public companies. This similarity has often been noted in class action literature, but until this Article no attempt has been made to systematically compare the approaches taken in these two settings to reduce agency costs. Class action scholars have downplayed the importance of the public company analogy because public companies are subject to market discipline and class actions are not. But this is precisely why the analogy is useful: because public companies are subject to market discipline, the tools they utilize to reduce agency costs are more likely to be efficient. This Article looks to those tools as inspiration for class action reform, proposing several novel ways to improve current practice

Is Courtesy Enough?Solidarity in Call Center Interactions

Polite self-presentation is expected of call center agents even through they must convey complex and unfavorable information speedily via the telephone. This study identified and evaluated the use of response strategies that are strongly associated with courtesy. Data were drawn from 587 stressful calls in a corpus of 3000 calls recorded at a large Singaporean insurance company call center. We adopted a grounded theory methodology together with a rich triangulation of qualitative (linguistic and rhetorical) and quantitative (scalar and correlational) methods. Tools for coding response strategies (independent variables)and courtesy (dependent variables) were developed via analyses of calls, interviews with call center agents and management, and a series of evaluations involving blind coding and subsequent consensus. We identified four categories of response strategies that are tightly related to each other and to courtesy: shows solidarity, anticipates needs, shows attentiveness, and asks for direction. Correlations and analysis of their enactment in stressful calls led us to propose solidarity expressionresponses that engage the caller in search of meaning to work on the task as a team. We argue that solidarity expression challenges traditional views of politeness and is less about the presentation of self and more about enabling collaboration with the other.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58608/1/1103r_may08_rogers.pd