Curated routes: the project of developing experiential tracks in sub-urban landscape

The Curated Routes project reflects on the visiting routes’ ability to make apparent the internal characteristics of urban environments. The project’s name allude to the intellectual function of curation and the materiality of routes. Curate deals with the practice of arranging material –tangible or intangible- in a way that a new understanding of an area is revealed. The word routes refers to the linear associations that link places and guide movement. The Curated Routes aim to reinforce the development of bonding ties between people and urban environments by re-constructing the way we visit and explore a place. The overall goal of the project is to outline the conceptual guidelines of a visitors’ guide that could later be used for the development of the informatics model. The project follows the methodology that the context-aware routes apply, though particular attention is paid to the second phase of the process where an innovative approach is applied. The introduction of the “chronotope” filters enables us to “knit” the terrestrial route to a range of informative storylines, and hence to develop different interpretations of an urban environment

User-centred design of flexible hypermedia for a mobile guide: Reflections on the hyperaudio experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system’s behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time

AN AGENT-BASED DECISION SUPPORT MODEL FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF E-SERVICES IN THE TOURIST SECTOR

This paper regards cultural heritage as a strategic development tool for urban tourist policy. It highlights the use of e-services as a central instrument in a competitive tourist sector. The appropriate choice of e-services – and packages thereof – depends on the various strategic considerations of urban stakeholders (agents) and may differ for each individual city. The paper offers a systematic analysis framework for supporting these choices and deploys multi-criteria analysis as a systematic evaluation methodology, in particular the Regime method. The evaluation framework is exemplified through an application to three field cases in Europe, viz. the cities of Amsterdam, Genoa and Leipzig. Our analysis concludes that tailor-made packages of e-services that serve the needs of the stakeholders can be made with the help of our evaluation tools.

Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed

Learning Points and Routes to Recommend Trajectories

The problem of recommending tours to travellers is an important and broadly studied area. Suggested solutions include various approaches of points-of-interest (POI) recommendation and route planning. We consider the task of recommending a sequence of POIs, that simultaneously uses information about POIs and routes. Our approach unifies the treatment of various sources of information by representing them as features in machine learning algorithms, enabling us to learn from past behaviour. Information about POIs are used to learn a POI ranking model that accounts for the start and end points of tours. Data about previous trajectories are used for learning transition patterns between POIs that enable us to recommend probable routes. In addition, a probabilistic model is proposed to combine the results of POI ranking and the POI to POI transitions. We propose a new F$_1$ score on pairs of POIs that capture the order of visits. Empirical results show that our approach improves on recent methods, and demonstrate that combining points and routes enables better trajectory recommendations

MiKhuy Tours "Descubre Quito en un bocado" Estudio de factibilidad para tour cultural y gastronómico por el centro histórico de la ciudad de Quito

Mikhuy Tours is a company that merges the History of the city with the traditional food to give a different experience for the costumer. The concept is to bring a new alternative for tourists who want an exclusive and personalized journey filled with authenticity and experiences from Quito. The tour will be trough the different buildings and monuments of the “Centro Histórico” of Quito accompanied with all kinds of traditional snacks, for the tourist to have a true experience in the city.Mikhuy Tours es una empresa turística que mezcla la historia y tradición del centro histórico de la ciudad con los manjares típicos de la zona. Un nuevo concepto en Quito para los turistas que buscan una experiencia lo más cercana posible de la realidad de un quiteño. La propuesta es brindar un servicio especializado, exclusivo e único para los turistas tanto nacionales como internacionales, y de esta manera puedan disfrutar de una alternativa diferente para conocer la ciudad

Optimisation using Natural Language Processing: Personalized Tour Recommendation for Museums

This paper proposes a new method to provide personalized tour recommendation for museum visits. It combines an optimization of preference criteria of visitors with an automatic extraction of artwork importance from museum information based on Natural Language Processing using textual energy. This project includes researchers from computer and social sciences. Some results are obtained with numerical experiments. They show that our model clearly improves the satisfaction of the visitor who follows the proposed tour. This work foreshadows some interesting outcomes and applications about on-demand personalized visit of museums in a very near future.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; Proceedings of the 2014 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems pp. 439-44

“Rafiki Kahawa Shamba”: Developing “coffee tourism” in organic coffee farm to support local economic development in Tanzania

Final paper submitted to: AD650 Economic Development via Tourism in Developing World: Tanzania, Spring, 2017, Professor Samuel Mendlinger. Assignment #3: New Tourism Service for Tanzania

An Agent-Based Decision Support Model for the Development of E-Services in the Tourist Sector

This paper regards cultural heritage as a strategic development tool for urban tourist policy. It highlights the use of e-services as a central instrument in a competitive tourist sector. The appropriate choice of e-services - and packages thereof - depends on the various strategic considerations of urban stakeholders (agents) and may differ for each individual city. The paper offers a systematic analysis framework for supporting these choices and deploys multi-criteria analysis as a systematic evaluation methodology, in particular the Regime method. The evaluation framework is exemplified through an application to three field cases in Europe, viz. the cities of Amsterdam, Genoa and Leipzig. Our analysis concludes that tailor-made packages of e-services that serve the needs of the stakeholders can be made with the help of our evaluation tools.cultural heritage, e-services, city marketing, agent-based decision support model

QuASeR -- Quantum Accelerated De Novo DNA Sequence Reconstruction

In this article, we present QuASeR, a reference-free DNA sequence reconstruction implementation via de novo assembly on both gate-based and quantum annealing platforms. Each one of the four steps of the implementation (TSP, QUBO, Hamiltonians and QAOA) is explained with simple proof-of-concept examples to target both the genomics research community and quantum application developers in a self-contained manner. The details of the implementation are discussed for the various layers of the quantum full-stack accelerator design. We also highlight the limitations of current classical simulation and available quantum hardware systems. The implementation is open-source and can be found on https://github.com/prince-ph0en1x/QuASeR.Comment: 24 page