Pro-active Meeting Assistants: Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all. This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

Detecting Low Rapport During Natural Interactions in Small Groups from Non-Verbal Behaviour

Rapport, the close and harmonious relationship in which interaction partners are "in sync" with each other, was shown to result in smoother social interactions, improved collaboration, and improved interpersonal outcomes. In this work, we are first to investigate automatic prediction of low rapport during natural interactions within small groups. This task is challenging given that rapport only manifests in subtle non-verbal signals that are, in addition, subject to influences of group dynamics as well as inter-personal idiosyncrasies. We record videos of unscripted discussions of three to four people using a multi-view camera system and microphones. We analyse a rich set of non-verbal signals for rapport detection, namely facial expressions, hand motion, gaze, speaker turns, and speech prosody. Using facial features, we can detect low rapport with an average precision of 0.7 (chance level at 0.25), while incorporating prior knowledge of participants' personalities can even achieve early prediction without a drop in performance. We further provide a detailed analysis of different feature sets and the amount of information contained in different temporal segments of the interactions.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Bhagavad Gitā & the Art of Leadership: Old Text, New Context!

Author and scholar Satinder Dhiman focuses upon the pervasive and necessary role of spirituality in values-based leadership. He notes that while the leadership literature is plentiful, the Bhagavad Gītā represents one of the very few writings which explores the core psychological, philosophical, ethical, and spiritual underpinnings of leadership roles. In this article, the author applies hermeneutics to the Gītā to highlight important leadership lessons and to apply such lessons to contemporary organizational leadership. Through selfless work, a true leader eschews an egoistic pursuit of self-aggrandizement to achieve the freedom of serving others. Thus, Dhiman concludes, the Gītā teaches its readers how “to discover the sacred in life while remaining fully engaged in the secular activities.

Pro-active Meeting Assistants : Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

Inferring the rules of social interaction in migrating caribou

Social interactions are a significant factor that influence the decision-making of species ranging from humans to bacteria. In the context of animal migration, social interactions may lead to improved decision-making, greater ability to respond to environmental cues, and the cultural transmission of optimal routes. Despite their significance, the precise nature of social interactions in migrating species remains largely unknown. Here we deploy unmanned aerial systems to collect aerial footage of caribou as they undertake their migration from Victoria Island to mainland Canada. Through a Bayesian analysis of trajectories we reveal the fine-scale interaction rules of migrating caribou and show they are attracted to one another and copy directional choices of neighbours, but do not interact through clearly defined metric or topological interaction ranges. By explicitly considering the role of social information on movement decisions we construct a map of near neighbour influence that quantifies the nature of information flow in these herds. These results will inform more realistic, mechanism-based models of migration in caribou and other social ungulates, leading to better predictions of spatial use patterns and responses to changing environmental conditions. Moreover, we anticipate that the protocol we developed here will be broadly applicable to study social behaviour in a wide range of migratory and non-migratory taxa. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Collective movement ecology’

CAN GENDER QUOTAS BREAK DOWN NEGATIVE STEREOTYPES? EVIDENCE FROM CHANGES IN ELECTORAL RULES

In this paper we analyse the effect of gender quotas on women involvement in political activity using a rich data set providing information on all Italian local administrators elected from 1985 to 2007. Gender quotas were introduced in Italy by law in 1993 and were in force until 1995. Because of the short period covered by the reform, some municipalities never voted under the gender quota regime. This allows us to individuate a treatment and a control group and to estimate the effects of gender quotas using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy. Our estimates show that women representation in politics after the reform has increased significantly more in municipalities that were interested by the reform compared to municipalities that were not affected. This result holds true also if we exclude from our analysis elections taking place during the period in which the reform was in force. Moreover, the higher women representation in “Gender Quota Municipalities” is not related to the advantages that women elected during the reform have obtained from incumbency and does not seem to be driven by different temporal trends among Southern and Northern regions. These findings suggest that affirmative actions are useful to break down stereotypes against women.Affirmative Actions, Gender Quotas, Discrimination, Stereotypes, Politicians, Natural Experiment

Values and Norms Matter – On the Basic Determinants of Long-Run Economic Development

Over the last couple of decades, it has become a commonplace to claim that “institutions matter” for economic development. Yet, institutions are not exogenous but the result of hu-man action. It is argued here that the values and norms held by substantial parts of society’s members are an important determinant of its institutions. It is further argued that values and norms have both a direct and an indirect effect on economic development: the direct effect materializes because the values and norms also contain the work ethic which, if transformed into behavior, should have direct consequences on economic development. The indirect effect is conjectured to work via the relevant institutions: if institutions are important for economic development and institutions are influenced by the values and norms, then this is a more indi-rect channel through which values and norms can display their impact.Institutions, Values and Norms, Democracy, Rule of Law, Culture, Social Capi-tal, Civil Society, Economic Development, Total Factor Productivity

Relating Employee Satisfaction and Voluntary Turnover

Voluntary turnover has been an enduring topic in organizational management theory and a subject of numerous empirical studies due to its great influence on organizations’ efficiency. Currently the goal was to investigate which employee satisfaction issues relate to turnover intentions and do they relate to actual voluntary turnover. The empirical study was conducted in Estonian government office: questionnaire describing employee satisfaction and turnover intentions was carried out twice and the qualitative input was received from the interviews with all resigning employees.. It appeared that employees less satisfied with items having more direct influence on their daily job and communication, were more eager to leave the organization. Employees less satisfied with distant matters concerning their job, were less willing to leave. Subsequently the results indicated that whether the employees think about leaving and their approximate estimation on further length of service, can be associated with actual turnover. The examination of the departure interviews showed that the relations detected by the analyses of the survey results, were quite accurately put into practice.employee satisfaction; job satisfaction; voluntary turnover; turnover intentions.