741 research outputs found
Redesigning work organizations and technologies: experiences from European projects
Currently distributed business process (re) design (resulting in components of business networks) basically relies on technical criteria. And that are the main purposes of most research projects supported by EC. Through the process of building a European Research Area, this means a strong influence in the national research programmes. However it is generally accepted that it should also take into account social criteria and aspects such as the quality of working life, or participation in decision processes. Those were some of the objectives of projects in de 80s decade, and framed some of the main concepts and scientific approaches to work organisation. The democratic participation of network and organisations members in the design process is a critical success factor. This is not accepted by everyone, but is based in sufficient case studies. Nevertheless, in order to achieve an optimization that can satisfying the requirements of agility of a network of enterprises, more complex design methods must be developed. Thus, the support to the collaborative design of distributed work in a network of enterprises, through a concurrent approaching business processes, work organisation and task content is a key factor to achieve such purposes. Increasing needs in terms of amounts of information, agility, and support for collaboration without time and space constrains, imposes the use of a computer-based model.business process; networks; decision processes; collaborative design;
Mixed reality participants in smart meeting rooms and smart home enviroments
Human–computer interaction requires modeling of the user. A user profile typically contains preferences, interests, characteristics, and interaction behavior. However, in its multimodal interaction with a smart environment the user displays characteristics that show how the user, not necessarily consciously, verbally and nonverbally provides the smart environment with useful input and feedback. Especially in ambient intelligence environments we encounter situations where the environment supports interaction between the environment, smart objects (e.g., mobile robots, smart furniture) and human participants in the environment. Therefore it is useful for the profile to contain a physical representation of the user obtained by multi-modal capturing techniques. We discuss the modeling and simulation of interacting participants in a virtual meeting room, we discuss how remote meeting participants can take part in meeting activities and they have some observations on translating research results to smart home environments
On the Development of Adaptive and User-Centred Interactive Multimodal Interfaces
Multimodal systems have attained increased attention in recent years, which has made possible important
improvements in the technologies for recognition, processing, and generation of multimodal information.
However, there are still many issues related to multimodality which are not clear, for example, the
principles that make it possible to resemble human-human multimodal communication. This chapter
focuses on some of the most important challenges that researchers have recently envisioned for future
multimodal interfaces. It also describes current efforts to develop intelligent, adaptive, proactive, portable
and affective multimodal interfaces
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
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
Bringing together commercial and academic perspectives for the development of intelligent AmI interfaces
The users of Ambient Intelligence systems expect an intelligent behavior from their environment, receiving adapted and easily accessible services and functionality. This can only be possible if the communication between the user and the system is carried out through an interface that is simple (i.e. which does not have a steep learning curve), fluid (i.e. the communication takes place rapidly and effectively), and robust (i.e. the system understands the user correctly). Natural language interfaces such as dialog systems combine the previous three requisites, as they are based on a spoken conversation between the user and the system that resembles human communication. The current industrial development of commercial dialog systems deploys robust interfaces in strictly defined application domains. However, commercial systems have not yet adopted the new perspective proposed in the academic settings, which would allow straightforward adaptation of these interfaces to various application domains. This would be highly beneficial for their use in AmI settings as the same interface could be used in varying environments. In this paper, we propose a new approach to bridge the gap between the academic and industrial perspectives in order to develop dialog systems using an academic paradigm while employing the industrial standards, which makes it possible to obtain new generation interfaces without the need for changing the already existing commercial infrastructures. Our proposal has been evaluated with the successful development of a real dialog system that follows our proposed approach to manage dialog and generates code compliant with the industry-wide standard VoiceXML.Research funded by projects CICYT TIN2011-28620-C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485), and DPS2008- 07029-C02-02.Publicad
Intelligent techniques for context-aware systems
Nowadays, with advances in communication technologies, researches are focused in the fields
of designing new devices with increasing capabilities, implanting software frameworks or middleware
to make these devices interoperable. Building better human interfaces is a challenging
task and the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to the process help associating
semantic meaning to devices which makes possible the gesture recognition and voice
recognition.
This thesis is mainly concerned with the open problem in context-aware systems: the
evaluation of these systems in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments. With regard to this
issue, we argue that due to highly dynamic properties of the AmI environments, it should
exist a methodology for evaluating these systems taking into account the type of scenarios.
However in order to support with a solid ground for that discussion, some elements are to
be discussed as well. In particular, we:
• use a commercial platform that allows us to design and manage the contextual information
of context- aware systems by means of a context manager included in the
architecture;
• analyze the formal representation of this contextual information by means of a knowledge
based system (KBS);
• discuss the possible methodologies to be used for modelling knowledge in KBS and our
approach;
• give reasons why intelligent agents is a valid technique to be applied to systems in AmI
environments;
• propose a generic multi-agent system (MAS) architecture that can be applied to a
large class of envisaged AmI applications;
• propose a multimodal user interface and its integration with our MAS;
• propose an evaluation methodology for context-aware systems in AmI scenarios.
The formulation of the above mentioned elements became necessary as this thesis was
developed. The lack of an evaluation methodology for context-aware systems in AmI environments,
where so many issues to be covered, took us to the main objective of this thesis.
In this regard:
• we provide an updated and exhaustive state-of-the-art of this matter;
• examine the properties and characteristics of AmI scenarios;
• put forward an evaluation methodology and experimentally test our methodology in
AmI scenarios. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------La Inteligencia Ambiental y los entornos inteligentes hacen hincapié en una mayor facilidad
de uso, soporte de servicios más eficientes, el apoderamiento de los usuarios, y el apoyo
a las interacciones humanas. En esta visión, las personas estarán rodeadas de interfaces
inteligentes e intuitivas incrustados en objetos cotidianos que nos rodean y los sistemas
desarrollados para este ambiente deberán reconocer y responder a la presencia de individuos
de una manera invisible y transparente a ellos. Esta tesis se centra principalmente en el
problema abierto en los sistemas sensibles al contexto: la evaluación de estos sistemas en los
entornos de Inteligencia Ambiental. Con respecto a este tema, se argumenta que debido a las
propiedades altamente dinámica de los entornos de inteligencia ambiental, debería existir una
metodología para la evaluación de estos sistemas, teniendo en cuenta el tipo de escenarios.
Sin embargo, con el fin de apoyar con una base sólida para la discusión, algunos elementos
deben ser discutidos también. En particular, nosotros:
• Usamos una plataforma comercial que nos permite diseñar y gestionar la información
contextual de los sistemas sensibles al contexto a través de un gestor de contexto
incluido en la arquitectura;
• Analizamos la representación formal de esta información contextual a través de un
sistema basado en el conocimiento (SBC);
• Discutimos las posibles metodologías que se utilizarán para el modelado del conocimiento
en SBC y nuestra aproximación y propuesta;
• Discutimos las razones del por qué los agentes inteligentes son una técnica válida para
ser aplicada a los sistemas en entornos inteligencia ambiental;
• Proponemos un sistema multi-agente (SMA), con una arquitectura genérica que se
puede aplicar a una gran clase de aplicaciones de inteligencia ambiental;
• Proponemos una interfaz de usuario multimodales y su integración con nuestro SMA; • Proponemos una metodología de evaluación de los sistemas sensibles al contexto en los escenarios de inteligencia ambiental.
La formulación de los elementos antes mencionados se hizo necesaria en la medida que
esta tesis se ha desarrollado. La falta de una metodología de evaluación de los sistemas
sensibles al contexto en entornos de inteligencia ambiental, donde existen tantos temas a
tratar, nos llevó al objetivo principal de esta tesis. En este sentido, en esta tesis:
• Proporcionamos un estado del arte actualizado y exhaustivo de este asunto;
• Examinamos las propiedades y características de los escenarios de inteligencia ambiental;
• Proponemos una metodología de evaluación para este tipo de sistemas y experimentalmente
probamos nuestra metodología en diversos escenarios de inteligencia ambiental
The non-Verbal Structure of Patient Case Discussions in Multidisciplinary Medical Team Meetings
Meeting analysis has a long theoretical tradition in social psychology, with established practical rami?cations in computer science, especially in computer supported cooperative work. More recently, a good deal of research has focused on the issues of indexing and browsing multimedia records of meetings. Most research in this area, however, is still based on data collected in laboratories, under somewhat arti?cial conditions. This paper presents an analysis of the discourse structure and spontaneous interactions at real-life multidisciplinary medical team meetings held as part of the work routine in a major hospital. It is hypothesised that the conversational structure of these meetings, as indicated by sequencing and duration of vocalisations, enables segmentation into individual patient case discussions. The task of segmenting audio-visual records of multidisciplinary medical team meetings is described as a topic segmentation task, and a method for automatic segmentation is proposed. An empirical evaluation based on hand labelled data is presented which determines the optimal length of vocalisation sequences for segmentation, and establishes the competitiveness of the method with approaches based on more complex knowledge sources. The effectiveness of Bayesian classi?cation as a segmentation method, and its applicability to meeting segmentation in other domains are discusse
Four Mode Based Dialogue Management with Modified POMDP Model
This thesis proposes a method to manage the interaction between the user and the system dynamically, through speech or text input which updates the user goals, select system actions and calculate rewards for each system response at each time-stamp. The main focus is made on the dialog manager, which decides how to continue the dialogue. We have used POMDP technique, as it maintains a belief distribution on the dialogue states based on the observations over the dialogue even in a noisy environment. Four contextual control modes are introduced in dialogue management for decision-making mechanism, and to keep track of machine behaviour for each dialogue state. The result obtained proves that our proposed framework has overcome the limitations of prior POMDP methods, and exactly understands the actual intention of the users within the available time, providing very interactive conversation between the user and the computer
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