URBANO: A Tour-Guide Robot Learning to Make Better Speeches

—Thanks to the numerous attempts that are being made to develop autonomous robots, increasingly intelligent and cognitive skills are allowed. This paper proposes an automatic presentation generator for a robot guide, which is considered one more cognitive skill. The presentations are made up of groups of paragraphs. The selection of the best paragraphs is based on a semantic understanding of the characteristics of the paragraphs, on the restrictions defined for the presentation and by the quality criteria appropriate for a public presentation. This work is part of the ROBONAUTA project of the Intelligent Control Research Group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid to create "awareness" in a robot guide. The software developed in the project has been verified on the tour-guide robot Urbano. The most important aspect of this proposal is that the design uses learning as the means to optimize the quality of the presentations. To achieve this goal, the system has to perform the optimized decision making, in different phases. The modeling of the quality index of the presentation is made using fuzzy logic and it represents the beliefs of the robot about what is good, bad, or indifferent about a presentation. This fuzzy system is used to select the most appropriate group of paragraphs for a presentation. The beliefs of the robot continue to evolving in order to coincide with the opinions of the public. It uses a genetic algorithm for the evolution of the rules. With this tool, the tour guide-robot shows the presentation, which satisfies the objectives and restrictions, and automatically it identifies the best paragraphs in order to find the most suitable set of contents for every public profil

Template-driven teacher modelling approach : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Information Science at Massey University, Palmerston North

This thesis describes the Template-driven Teacher Modeling Approach, the initial implementation of the template server and the formative evaluation on the prototype. The initiative of Template-driven teacher modeling is to integrate the template server and intelligent teacher models in Web-based education systems for course authoring. There are a number of key components in the proposed system: user interface, template server and content repository. The Template-Driven Teacher Modeling (TDTM) architecture supports the course authoring by providing higher degree of control over the generation of presentation. The collection of accumulated templates in the template repository for a teacher or a group of teachers are selected as the inputs for the inference mechanism in teacher's model to calculate the best representation of the teaching strategy, and then predict teacher intention when he or she interacts with the system. Moreover, the presentation templates are kept to support the re-use of the on-line content at the level of individual screens with the help of Template Server

Mobile Agents for Mobile Tourists: A User Evaluation of Gulliver's Genie

How mobile computing applications and services may be best designed, implemented and deployed remains the subject of much research. One alternative approach to developing software for mobile users that is receiving increasing attention from the research community is that of one based on intelligent agents. Recent advances in mobile computing technology have made such an approach feasible. We present an overview of the design and implementation of an archetypical mobile computing application, namely that of an electronic tourist guide. This guide is unique in that it comprises a suite of intelligent agents that conform to the strong intentional stance. However, the focus of this paper is primarily concerned with the results of detailed user evaluations conducted on this system. Within the literature, comprehensive evaluations of mobile context-sensitive systems are sparse and therefore, this paper seeks, in part, to address this deficiency

Presenting in Virtual Worlds: An Architecture for a 3D Anthropomorphic Presenter

Multiparty-interaction technology is changing entertainment, education, and training. Deployed examples of such technology include embodied agents and robots that act as a museum guide, a news presenter, a teacher, a receptionist, or someone trying to sell you insurance, homes, or tickets. In all these cases, the embodied agent needs to explain and describe. This article describes the design of a 3D virtual presenter that uses different output channels (including speech and animation of posture, pointing, and involuntary movements) to present and explain. The behavior is scripted and synchronized with a 2D display containing associated text and regions (slides, drawings, and paintings) at which the presenter can point. This article is part of a special issue on interactive entertainment

Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes

Irreducible incoherence and intelligent design : a look into the conceptual toolbox of a pseudoscience

The concept of Irreducible Complexity (IC) has played a pivotal role in the resurgence of the creationist movement over the past two decades. Evolutionary biologists and philosophers have unambiguously rejected the purported demonstration of “intelligent design” in nature, but there have been several, apparently contradictory, lines of criticism. We argue that this is in fact due to Michael Behe's own incoherent definition and use of IC. This paper offers an analysis of several equivocations inherent in the concept of Irreducible Complexity and discusses the way in which advocates of the Intelligent Design Creationism (IDC) have conveniently turned IC into a moving target. An analysis of these rhetorical strategies helps us to understand why IC has gained such prominence in the IDC movement, and why, despite its complete lack of scientific merits, it has even convinced some knowledgeable persons of the impending demise of evolutionary theory

A Personalized System for Conversational Recommendations

Searching for and making decisions about information is becoming increasingly difficult as the amount of information and number of choices increases. Recommendation systems help users find items of interest of a particular type, such as movies or restaurants, but are still somewhat awkward to use. Our solution is to take advantage of the complementary strengths of personalized recommendation systems and dialogue systems, creating personalized aides. We present a system -- the Adaptive Place Advisor -- that treats item selection as an interactive, conversational process, with the program inquiring about item attributes and the user responding. Individual, long-term user preferences are unobtrusively obtained in the course of normal recommendation dialogues and used to direct future conversations with the same user. We present a novel user model that influences both item search and the questions asked during a conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in significantly reducing the time and number of interactions required to find a satisfactory item, as compared to a control group of users interacting with a non-adaptive version of the system

Requirements for an Adaptive Multimedia Presentation System with Contextual Supplemental Support Media

Investigations into the requirements for a practical adaptive multimedia presentation system have led the writers to propose the use of a video segmentation process that provides contextual supplementary updates produced by users. Supplements consisting of tailored segments are dynamically inserted into previously stored material in response to questions from users. A proposal for the use of this technique is presented in the context of personalisation within a Virtual Learning Environment. During the investigation, a brief survey of advanced adaptive approaches revealed that adaptation may be enhanced by use of manually generated metadata, automated or semi-automated use of metadata by stored context dependent ontology hierarchies that describe the semantics of the learning domain. The use of neural networks or fuzzy logic filtering is a technique for future investigation. A prototype demonstrator is under construction

Generating indicative-informative summaries with SumUM

We present and evaluate SumUM, a text summarization system that takes a raw technical text as input and produces an indicative informative summary. The indicative part of the summary identifies the topics of the document, and the informative part elaborates on some of these topics according to the reader's interest. SumUM motivates the topics, describes entities, and defines concepts. It is a first step for exploring the issue of dynamic summarization. This is accomplished through a process of shallow syntactic and semantic analysis, concept identification, and text regeneration. Our method was developed through the study of a corpus of abstracts written by professional abstractors. Relying on human judgment, we have evaluated indicativeness, informativeness, and text acceptability of the automatic summaries. The results thus far indicate good performance when compared with other summarization technologies

Personalised trails and learner profiling within e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on personalisation and personalised trails. We begin by introducing and defining the concepts of personalisation and personalised trails. Personalisation requires that a user profile be stored, and so we assess currently available standard profile schemas and discuss the requirements for a profile to support personalised learning. We then review techniques for providing personalisation and some systems that implement these techniques, and discuss some of the issues around evaluating personalisation systems. We look especially at the use of learning and cognitive styles to support personalised learning, and also consider personalisation in the field of mobile learning, which has a slightly different take on the subject, and in commercially available systems, where personalisation support is found to currently be only at quite a low level. We conclude with a summary of the lessons to be learned from our review of personalisation and personalised trails