Flavour Enhanced Food Recommendation

We propose a mechanism to use the features of flavour to enhance the quality of food recommendations. An empirical method to determine the flavour of food is incorporated into a recommendation engine based on major gustatory nerves. Such a system has advantages of suggesting food items that the user is more likely to enjoy based upon matching with their flavour profile through use of the taste biological domain knowledge. This preliminary intends to spark more robust mechanisms by which flavour of food is taken into consideration as a major feature set into food recommendation systems. Our long term vision is to integrate this with health factors to recommend healthy and tasty food to users to enhance quality of life.Comment: In Proceedings of 5th International Workshop on Multimedia Assisted Dietary Management, Nice, France, October 21, 2019, MADiMa 2019, 6 page

From Personal Memories to Sharable Memories

The exchange of personal experiences is a way of supporting decision making and interpersonal communication. In this article, we discuss how augmented personal memories could be exploited in order to support such a sharing. We start with a brief summary of a system implementing an augmented memory for a single user. Then, we exploit results from interviews to define an example scenario involving sharable memories. This scenario serves as background for a discussion of various questions related to sharing memories and potential approaches to their solution. We especially focus on the selection of relevant experiences and sharing partners, sharing methods, and the configuration of those sharing methods by means of reflection

Learning from a plan-based interface

The use of plan recognition in the user interface is presented as a basis for a learning environment within which students can assimilate the range of possible actions and objectives afforded by a target application. Support in the form of “present whereabouts” and “possible progressions” enable students to learn by doing. When combined with a facility for exploratory learning, this helps avoid the onerous air of a “teaching situation”

The Source of Magic

This paper is an attempt to show that a large part of Western society no longer operates on the rationalist principles that most of us thought it did, but that it instead runs by magic more akin to that in fantasy works. The term ‘magic’ is not meant metaphorically or in science fiction author Arthur C Clarke’s sense that ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ (Clarke 1962), but is meant literally in the sense that Frazer (1890, republished 2003) used the term. This means that instead of trying to understand the present and near future by looking at the works of science fiction creators who put forth a rationalist and technological view of the world, we would understand the future better by looking to the fantasy of authors such as Jack Vance, Matthew Hughes, Ursula Le Guin, Piers Anthony and Michael Moorcock. This magic is manifested through magical thinking and irrational behaviour, where the majority of us use literal spells and incantations in our daily interactions with each other in the networked world, and where we worship capricious gods; most importantly, those spells, incantations and worship actually work, and those gods have actually come to exist. This paper will also show just how the spread of the computer technology propounded by scientists, technologists and SF writers has inevitably led to the creation of this irrational and magical world. This is partly because of limitations built-in to the formal systems on which these systems are based, leading to an extreme example of the law of unintended consequences. Finally, the paper will explain the mechanism by which magic is literally becoming real by reference to Frazer’s two laws of magic: the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contagion