31,920 research outputs found
Multimodal agent interfaces and system architectures for health and fitness companions
Multimodal conversational spoken dialogues using physical and virtual agents provide a potential interface to motivate and support users in the domain of health and fitness. In this paper we present how such multimodal conversational Companions can be implemented to support their owners in various pervasive and mobile settings. In particular, we focus on different forms of multimodality and system architectures for such interfaces
Database Marketing In Travel And Tourism
An increasing number of organisations are developing customer databases in a bid to get closer to their customers and gain competitive advantage. This report investigates the practice of database marketing among different travel and tourism sectors, including airlines, hotels, museums and tour operators, and draws on UK and international examples. It compares direct marketing and database marketing and examines the different levels of sophistication at which database marketing can be practiced, the role of customer loyalty schemes, the ways in which a database can be segmented, the role of consumer data profiling companies and current developments in database marketing. The use of database marketing for customer retention and business acquisition is also investigated. In order to ensure true customer relationship building it is vital for the industry to leverage the information on their databases and provide customer recognition through the delivery of personalised service. Business acquisition through customer retention is likely to be a key strategy in future through the use of data-mining and cross-selling techniques. The report concludes that organisations must create a new marketing environment by moving away from transaction marketing towards the principles of customer relationship management
Affect and Metaphor Sensing in Virtual Drama
We report our developments on metaphor and affect sensing for several metaphorical language phenomena including affects as external entities metaphor, food metaphor, animal metaphor, size metaphor, and anger metaphor. The metaphor and affect sensing component has been embedded in a conversational intelligent agent interacting with human users under loose scenarios. Evaluation for the detection of several metaphorical language phenomena and affect is provided. Our paper contributes to the journal themes on believable virtual characters in real-time narrative environment, narrative in digital games and storytelling and educational gaming with social software
Affordable Generative Agents
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced the
simulation of believable interactive agents. However, the substantial cost on
maintaining the prolonged agent interactions poses challenge over the
deployment of believable LLM-based agents. Therefore, in this paper, we develop
Affordable Generative Agents (AGA), a framework for enabling the generation of
believable and low-cost interactions on both agent-environment and inter-agents
levels. Specifically, for agent-environment interactions, we substitute
repetitive LLM inferences with learned policies; while for inter-agent
interactions, we model the social relationships between agents and compress
auxiliary dialogue information. Extensive experiments on multiple environments
show the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed framework. Also, we delve
into the mechanisms of emergent believable behaviors lying in LLM agents,
demonstrating that agents can only generate finite behaviors in fixed
environments, based upon which, we understand ways to facilitate emergent
interaction behaviors. Our code is publicly available at:
\url{https://github.com/AffordableGenerativeAgents/Affordable-Generative-Agents}
Gender Mainstreaming and Sustainable Post Disaster Reconstruction,
Gender inequalities are barriers to achieve sustainable post disaster reconstruction.
Mainstreaming gender equality within post disaster reconstruction process can
enhance sustainability of reconstruction. Based on a detailed literature review on
post disaster reconstruction, this paper identifies pre-requisite conditions for
mainstreaming gender within sustainable post disaster reconstruction as ; awareness
of gender needs and concerns, a strong gender policy framework, women
participation and leadership as an agent of change, gendered institutional capability,
flexible and decentralised structure of gendered policy planning
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