Tour recommendation for groups

Consider a group of people who are visiting a major touristic city, such as NY, Paris, or Rome. It is reasonable to assume that each member of the group has his or her own interests or preferences about places to visit, which in general may differ from those of other members. Still, people almost always want to hang out together and so the following question naturally arises: What is the best tour that the group could perform together in the city? This problem underpins several challenges, ranging from understanding people’s expected attitudes towards potential points of interest, to modeling and providing good and viable solutions. Formulating this problem is challenging because of multiple competing objectives. For example, making the entire group as happy as possible in general conflicts with the objective that no member becomes disappointed. In this paper, we address the algorithmic implications of the above problem, by providing various formulations that take into account the overall group as well as the individual satisfaction and the length of the tour. We then study the computational complexity of these formulations, we provide effective and efficient practical algorithms, and, finally, we evaluate them on datasets constructed from real city data

Learning English with travel blogs: A genre-based process-writing teaching proposal

Current communication is increasingly computer-mediated, dynamic, dialogic, and global, so students should master new information, communication technologies, and digital genres, as well as acknowledge the global role of the English language. Thus, this paper aims to offer a teaching proposal, to be ideally implemented in the secondary education English as a foreign language classroom, on how to develop students’ communicative and digital competences based on a digital genre like the travel blog. First, a corpus of travel blogs was compiled, and the blogs’ communicative purposes and prominent linguistic and discursive features were identified. Next, different lesson plans were designed on the principles of communicative language teaching and task-based learning, together with the corpus-based results. Overall, students are expected to follow a process-writing approach that enables them to interact digitally in travel blogs. La comunicación actual es cada vez más informática, dinámica, dialógica e internacional, por lo que los estudiantes deberían dominar nuevas tecnologías de información y comunicación y géneros digitales, así como reconocer el papel global del inglés. Este artículo pretende ofrecer una propuesta didáctica, idealmente para la clase de inglés como lengua extranjera en educación secundaria, sobre cómo desarrollar la competencia comunicativa y digital de los estudiantes basándose en un género digital como el blog de viajes. Para ello, se ha compilado un corpus de blogs de viajes, se han identificado sus propósitos comunicativos y sus características lingüísticas y discursivas más relevantes, y después se ha planificado una secuencia didáctica tomando los principios del enfoque comunicativo y el aprendizaje por tareas y los resultados obtenidos del análisis del corpus. Se espera que los estudiantes sigan un enfoque de la escritura como proceso que les permita interactuar digitalmente en los blogs de viajes

Rulemaking 2.0

In response to President Obama\u27s Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, federal agencies are on the verge of a new generation in online rulemaking. However, unless we recognize the several barriers to making rulemaking a more broadly participatory process, and purposefully adapt Web 2.0 technologies and methods to lower those barriers, Rulemaking 2.0 is likely to disappoint agencies and open-government advocates alike. This article describes the design, operation, and initial results of Regulation Room, a pilot public rulemaking participation platform created by a cross-disciplinary group of Cornell researchers in collaboration with the Department of Transportation. Regulation Room uses selected live rulemakings to experiment with human and computer support for public comment. The ultimate project goal is to provide guidance on design, technological, and human intervention strategies, grounded in theory and tested in practice, for effective Rulemaking 2.0 systems. Early results give some cause for optimism about the open-government potential of Web 2.0-supported rulemaking. But significant challenges remain. Broader, better public participation is hampered by 1) ignorance of the rulemaking process; 2) unawareness that rulemakings of interest are going on; and 3) information overload from the length and complexity of rulemaking materials. No existing, commonly used Web services or applications are good analogies for what a Rulemaking 2.0 system must do to lower these barriers. To be effective, the system must not only provide the right mix of technology, content, and human assistance to support users in the unfamiliar environment of complex government policymaking; it must also spur them to revise their expectations about how they engage information on the Web and also, perhaps, about what is required for civic participation

Recommending a productivity model for Singapore hotels: A critical review of productivity models adopted by researchers and hotel operators

The business challenges and intensely competitive environment in today’s economy make productivity a key factor for organizational survival. This paper examines what productivity means to the services industry, in particular, to the hotel industry. This is underpinned by an investigation of the fundamental differences between goods and services and the implications on productivity measurement and control in the manufacturing and services industries. The purpose of this paper is to critically review productivity measurement and control methods used by researchers and hotel operators in order to find a model suitable for the hotel industry in Singapore, taking into consideration the local cultural expectation and legal context

Rulemaking 2.0

In response to President Obama\u27s Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, federal agencies are on the verge of a new generation in online rulemaking. However, unless we recognize the several barriers to making rulemaking a more broadly participatory process, and purposefully adapt Web 2.0 technologies and methods to lower those barriers, Rulemaking 2.0 is likely to disappoint agencies and open-government advocates alike. This article describes the design, operation, and initial results of Regulation Room, a pilot public rulemaking participation platform created by a cross-disciplinary group of Cornell researchers in collaboration with the Department of Transportation. Regulation Room uses selected live rulemakings to experiment with human and computer support for public comment. The ultimate project goal is to provide guidance on design, technological, and human intervention strategies, grounded in theory and tested in practice, for effective Rulemaking 2.0 systems. Early results give some cause for optimism about the open-government potential of Web 2.0-supported rulemaking. But significant challenges remain. Broader, better public participation is hampered by 1) ignorance of the rulemaking process; 2) unawareness that rulemakings of interest are going on; and 3) information overload from the length and complexity of rulemaking materials. No existing, commonly used Web services or applications are good analogies for what a Rulemaking 2.0 system must do to lower these barriers. To be effective, the system must not only provide the right mix of technology, content, and human assistance to support users in the unfamiliar environment of complex government policymaking; it must also spur them to revise their expectations about how they engage information on the Web and also, perhaps, about what is required for civic participation

Text-based document geolocation and its application to the digital humanities

This dissertation investigates automatic geolocation of documents (i.e. identification of their location, expressed as latitude/longitude coordinates), based on the text of those documents rather than metadata. I assert that such geolocation can be performed using text alone, at a sufficient accuracy for use in real-world applications. Although in some corpora metadata is found in abundance (e.g. home location, time zone, friends, followers, etc. in Twitter), it is lacking in others, such as many corpora of primary-source documents in the digital humanities, an area to which document geolocation has hardly been applied. To this end, I first develop methods for accurate text-based geolocation and then apply them to newly-annotated corpora in the digital humanities. The geolocation methods I develop use both uniform and adaptive (k-d tree) grids over the Earth’s surface, culminating in a hierarchical logistic-regression-based technique that achieves state of the art results on well-known corpora (Twitter user feeds, Wikipedia articles and Flickr image tags). In the second part of the dissertation I develop a new NLP task, text-based geolocation of historical corpora. Because there are no existing corpora to test on, I create and annotate two new corpora of significantly different natures (a 19th-century travel log and a large set of Civil War archives). I show how my methods produce good geolocation accuracy even given the relatively small amount of annotated data available, which can be further improved using domain adaptation. I then use the predictions on the much larger unannotated portion of the Civil War archives to generate and analyze geographic topic models, showing how they can be mined to produce interesting revelations concerning various Civil War-related subjects. Finally, I develop a new geolocation technique for text-only corpora involving co-training between document-geolocation and toponym- resolution models, using a gazetteer to inject additional information into the training process. To evaluate this technique I develop a new metric, the closest toponym error distance, on which I show improvements compared with a baseline geolocator.Linguistic

OLYMPIC HERITAGE OR OLYMPIC BURDEN ? A BRIEF ANALYSIS ON THE RELATION BETWEEN OLYMPICS AND SUSTAINABILITY

openThe UN Agenda2030 has marked the beginning of a new era characterized by the idea of “sustainability”. In this context, the organization of Mega Sport Events such as the Olympic Games has become one of the many fields where it’s required to respect some sustainability standards. The scope of this research is to underline how the relation between Olympics and sustainability works by analyzing the official documents released by the IOC. Through a comparative analysis on the different Olympics, the research will show the difference on what has been proclamated de jure in the official documents and what has been done de facto