Exploring personality-targeted UI design in online social participation systems

We present a theoretical foundation and empirical findings demonstrating the effectiveness of personality-targeted design. Much like a medical treatment applied to a person based on his specific genetic profile, we argue that theory-driven, personality-targeted UI design can be more effective than design applied to the entire population. The empirical exploration focused on two settings, two populations and two personality traits: Study 1 shows that users' extroversion level moderates the relationship between the UI cue of audience size and users' contribution. Study 2 demonstrates that the effectiveness of social anchors in encouraging online contributions depends on users' level of emotional stability. Taken together, the findings demonstrate the potential and robustness of the interactionist approach to UI design. The findings contribute to the HCI community, and in particular to designers of social systems, by providing guidelines to targeted design that can increase online participation. Copyright © 2013 ACM

Sex in the city: the rise of soft-erotic film culture in Cinema Leopold, Ghent, 1945-1954

Since the 1990s, film studies saw a disciplinary shift from approaches favoring a textual and ideological analysis of films to a broader understanding of the socio-cultural history of cinema under the banner of new cinema history. This turn not only allowed for ‘niche’ research domains to flourish such as film economics or cinema memory research, or for new empirical and critical methodologies to be applied to film and cinema history. This change in researching and writing film/cinema history also shed light on previously marginalized, neglected or uncharted film cultures and histories, burgeoning scholarship in for instance (s)exploitation cinema. This contribution examines a peculiar part of post-war local film culture in the Belgian city of Ghent, more precisely the one around the city-center soft-erotic cinema Cinema Leopold (1945-54). The research is based on a programming and box-office database compiled from archival sources and contextualized by other data (internal and external correspondence, posters,…) coming from the business archive of Octave Bonnevalle, Cinema Leopold’s founding pater familias (material kept in the State Archives of Belgium; RAB/B70/1928-1977). The database now contains information on 625 film titles shown between 1945 and 1954, out of which 233 were unidentified (due to lack of information). Although the database is at times crippled by source inconsistencies, it is extremely rich in documenting the everyday practices of a cinema that gradually turned into a soft-erotic movie theater. The database allows for some remarkable findings concerning shifts in the origin of films, their production years, genres, censorship and popularity. The key finding is that Cinema Leopold started out after the Second World War with a child-friendly, mainstream Hollywood-oriented film program, as did most cinemas in Ghent, but its profile slowly tilted towards more mature audiences and provocative film genres. These included French ‘risqué’ feature films containing some forms of nudity like Perfectionist/Un Grand Patron (Ciampi, 1951) and documentaries on venereal diseases like the successful Austrian Creeping Poison/Schleichendes Gift (Wallbrück, 1946), but also auteur movies such as Bergman’s Port of Call/Hamnstad (1948) were shown. It is interesting how Leopold walked a fine line between innovative, bold European art-house cinema, soft-erotic ‘didactic’ movies and flat-out commercial soft-porn. By 1954, Leopold had gathered a loyal crowd, which kept the cinema alive until 1981 despite the several law suits and trials. This micro-history offers a remarkable example of the post-war flourishing of alternative, yet profit-driven cinema circuits, riddled with media controversies and censorship

The Passion of Gibson: evaluating a recent interpretation of Christ\u27s suffering and death in light of the New Testament

Passion of the Christ Publisher: [S.l.] : Icon Film Distribution, 2004

An evaluation of the 'Skipper' designated driver program: Preliminary results

The general aim of designated driver programs is to reduce the level of drink driving by encouraging potential drivers to travel with a driver who has abstained from (or at least limited) consuming alcohol. Designated driver programs appear to be quite widespread around the world, however a limited number have been effectively evaluated. This paper reports the preliminary results from the outcome component of an evaluation of a designated driver program called 'Skipper', which was trialled in a provincial city in Queensland. In order to asses changes over time in self-reported designated driver awareness and behaviour, as well as drinking and drink driving behaviour, surveys were conducted three weeks prior to (baseline) and four months following (follow-up) the commencement of the trial. The sample comprised 413 individuals from representative drinking venues in the 'intervention area' (202 baseline; 211 follow-up) and 401 individuals from a 'comparison area' (203 baseline; 199 follow-up). The preliminary results indicate that awareness of the program in the intervention area was quite high four months following its introduction. The results also suggest that the 'Skipper' program and the related publicity had positive impacts on behaviour with there being an increase in the proportion of people participating in designated driver as a passenger and a tendency for those who act as designated drivers to do so more often. In addition, there was no evidence of an increase in alcohol consumption among the passengers of designated drivers compared to what otherwise may have been the case. It is less clear at this stage whether the 'Skipper' program has impacted on other behaviours of interest. Suggestions for further research and program improvement are discussed as well as limitations of the research

Personalized Dialogue Generation with Diversified Traits

Endowing a dialogue system with particular personality traits is essential to deliver more human-like conversations. However, due to the challenge of embodying personality via language expression and the lack of large-scale persona-labeled dialogue data, this research problem is still far from well-studied. In this paper, we investigate the problem of incorporating explicit personality traits in dialogue generation to deliver personalized dialogues. To this end, firstly, we construct PersonalDialog, a large-scale multi-turn dialogue dataset containing various traits from a large number of speakers. The dataset consists of 20.83M sessions and 56.25M utterances from 8.47M speakers. Each utterance is associated with a speaker who is marked with traits like Age, Gender, Location, Interest Tags, etc. Several anonymization schemes are designed to protect the privacy of each speaker. This large-scale dataset will facilitate not only the study of personalized dialogue generation, but also other researches on sociolinguistics or social science. Secondly, to study how personality traits can be captured and addressed in dialogue generation, we propose persona-aware dialogue generation models within the sequence to sequence learning framework. Explicit personality traits (structured by key-value pairs) are embedded using a trait fusion module. During the decoding process, two techniques, namely persona-aware attention and persona-aware bias, are devised to capture and address trait-related information. Experiments demonstrate that our model is able to address proper traits in different contexts. Case studies also show interesting results for this challenging research problem.Comment: Please contact [zhengyinhe1 at 163 dot com] for the PersonalDialog datase

Recognizing Induced Emotions of Movie Audiences: Are Induced and Perceived Emotions the Same?

Predicting the emotional response of movie audi- ences to affective movie content is a challenging task in affective computing. Previous work has focused on using audiovisual movie content to predict movie induced emotions. However, the relationship between the audience’s perceptions of the affective movie content (perceived emotions) and the emotions evoked in the audience (induced emotions) remains unexplored. In this work, we address the relationship between perceived and in- duced emotions in movies, and identify features and modelling approaches effective for predicting movie induced emotions. First, we extend the LIRIS-ACCEDE database by annotating perceived emotions in a crowd-sourced manner, and find that perceived and induced emotions are not always consistent. Second, we show that dialogue events and aesthetic highlights are effective predictors of movie induced emotions. In addition to movie based features, we also study physiological and be- havioural measurements of audiences. Our experiments show that induced emotion recognition can benefit from including temporal context and from including multimodal information. Our study bridges the gap between affective content analysis and induced emotion prediction

The Performance of German Motion Pictures, Profits, and

This paper discusses different mechanisms of subsidy allocation invoked by operation of law. We compare the allocation of subsidies via committees to the allocation of subsidies through the reference principle, which binds public support to performance at the box offce. The analysis is embedded in a broadly disposed regression analysis of the determinants of the performance of German movies in the theatrical market. It aims to identify market characteristics and contrasts the German case with studies that address foreign markets. Finally, the profitability of the industry is considered as the presumed economic non-viability of the industry constantly recurs in the public debate as an argument for subsidies.German movies, subsidies, motion picture industry

Chameleons in imagined conversations: A new approach to understanding coordination of linguistic style in dialogs

Conversational participants tend to immediately and unconsciously adapt to each other's language styles: a speaker will even adjust the number of articles and other function words in their next utterance in response to the number in their partner's immediately preceding utterance. This striking level of coordination is thought to have arisen as a way to achieve social goals, such as gaining approval or emphasizing difference in status. But has the adaptation mechanism become so deeply embedded in the language-generation process as to become a reflex? We argue that fictional dialogs offer a way to study this question, since authors create the conversations but don't receive the social benefits (rather, the imagined characters do). Indeed, we find significant coordination across many families of function words in our large movie-script corpus. We also report suggestive preliminary findings on the effects of gender and other features; e.g., surprisingly, for articles, on average, characters adapt more to females than to males.Comment: data available at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~cristian/movie