Form Follows Function: Designing For Tensions Of Conversational Agents In Service Encounters

The proliferation of conversational agents (CAs) promises efficiency and quality improvements while enabling a more seamless integration of technology into service encounters. However, it remains unclear how CAs should be designed to provide the optimal experience for the key users: clients and frontline employees. Based on qualitative research with those key users, this study delivers a vision of an adaptable CA. It proposes a differentiated approach toward the design of CA: there is no one-size-fits-all design regarding the level of social presence, autonomy, or agency. The analysis reveals three tensions in user expectations leading to inconsistent design requirements for CAs. To resolve those tensions, CAs should be adapted to the changing context of a service encounter considering the appropriate level of autonomy, task complexity, interpersonal intimacy, and social role of the CA. The study contributes three design principles emphasizing the importance of the context for which a CA is designed

Solving For Pattern: A Practice-Based Approach to Social and Ecological Justice Learning and Action

This research contributes to the ongoing discussion of how to address social and ecological justice as interconnected objectives in the promotion of learning and action. The design and development of the research project has been guided by two assertions: one, that an integrated approach to social and ecological justice is needed to respond to crises facing our world; and two, the development of learning and action must be grounded in experiential knowledge gained through working towards solutions to social and ecological problems as a daily practice. Through a qualitative research process, semi-structured interviews were conducted with thirteen individuals working in community-based organizations that focus on child and youth safety, nutrition, and education; environmental and outdoor education; settlement experiences and the needs of new Canadians; inclusion of individuals with special needs; healthcare and safety of those living with poverty and addictions; and challenging racism, homo/transphobia, and colonialism. The research study was guided by the following question: In what ways can experience-based knowledge of working towards social and ecological justice inform theorizing on integrated social and ecological justice learning and action? A critical approach to constructivist grounded theory was used in the gathering, analysis, and discussion of research data. The research process involved open-ended interviews; verbatim transcription; memoing; primary, secondary, and tertiary coding with NVivo software; and, testing for thematic saturation. Key questions discussed in the semi-structured interviews included: What role does learning and action toward social and/or ecological justice play in your work within the community? What do you see as the problem (or problems) giving rise to the conditions you are working to improve in your daily practice? What kinds of strategies do you use to achieve your goals of learning and action? And, what obstacles do you face as you seek to address problems you observe in the community? The analysis and discussion of research data considered links between foundational ideas from multiple disciplines and insights shared by participants about their daily practice. The analysis chapter presents a detailed account of participants' stories that invites readers to draw their own connections between the reviewed theory and participants' insights. The discussion chapter centres on three themes that highlight the intersections between participants’ insights and key ideas drawn from the theory. The three themes—the normalization of dominance, resistance masquerading as neutrality, and witnessing as a foundation for learning and action—are presented as learning foundations that can support learners in critically examining multiple linked forms of oppression and ecological degradation. These foundational learnings are proposed as a basis for guiding learners in the process of meaningfully engaging a diverse range of social and ecological justice issues. The research considers how learning might contribute to the development of a capacity to embrace varied learning objectives that are associated with social and ecological justice. The underlying goal of this work is to promote approaches to social and ecological justice that address both the individual factors relevant to a particular issue and the broader patterns that impact the issue. The vision for such an approach is to support unity among those individuals and organizations working toward social and ecological justice objectives, and to imagine solutions that in Wendell Berry's (2005) words “solve for pattern” (p. 33)

Why do you ask all those questions? Supporting client profiling in financial service encounters

Client data is key to provide personalized services and products. Therefore, banks go through great efforts to profile their clients during financial advisory service encounters. Since traditional pen-and-paper profiling does not satisfy the banks’ needs, they strive to digitalize this activity. This paper offers joint profiling as a solution: The advisor and the client jointly create a client’s profile using a shared display. However, test clients provided a mixed response to a first joint profiling prototype. They wondered, why the bank needs all this information. In a second iteration, joint profiling was augmented by task awareness, i.e., linking all profiled information to the client\u27s goal. This task aware joint profiling was far better accepted by the clients. This paper offers research insights on the role of profiling in face-to-face advisory service encounters, on its acceptance by the clients, and on design principles for digital profiling in financial service encounters

When a computer speaks institutional talk: Exploring challenges and potentials of virtual assistants in face-to-face advisory services

Advisory services are a highly sensitive form of collaboration: they rely on a clear distribution of roles between human participants who act according to an implicit set of practices and scripts. As such, they do not offer a specific role to a virtual assistant. At the same time, the technological improvements make the promise that institutional settings may be soon complemented with technology that allows for asking questions using natural speech, understands the context, and provides answers based on online processing of data. This article explores challenges and potentials of virtual assistants in advisory services while analyzing data from interviews and a workshop with clients and advisors from financial advisory services. It links the insights from the field with the institutional talk perspective. The findings unveil, that the concerns and hopes of potential users relate to their position and an implicit understanding of what an advisory service is about. This calls for careful and attentive design approach towards virtual assistants in advisory services

For Better or Worse : Imagining Innovation in Smart City Municipal Design

The smart city concept recently (ca. 2010) emerged as a corporate-led system-as-a-service (SaaS) tool to meet city needs of accessibility and efficiency. I looked at three Western cities—Reykjavík, San José, and Toronto—to discover what it meant for city managers to meet municipal needs by embracing smart initiatives. Senior-level city managers, consultants, and technologists invoked vocabularies of smartness and innovation, adopting Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) as tools to facilitate human resource and service efficiency needs. I found persistent ambiguity in how city managers described and measured outcomes for city smartness. I also found stakeholders used smartness to participate in global knowledge sharing coalitions with public and private entities, amplifying negotiation potential, and producing values of prestige around novel technological innovation. In so doing, public and private stakeholders formed individual and organizational identities around technological innovation, creating invisible tensions between human resource and technology investments, characterized by celebration of innovation work to the detriment of maintenance labors. My findings inform ongoing scholarship by explaining how smart city technologists sold a discourse of innovation that was not entirely compatible with how cities bureaucratically functioned. Such distinction is important to communicate to scholarly audiences unfamiliar with techno-fetishisms, but familiar with urban management critiques. Moreover, my study opens paths to understanding how private interests influence municipal management through more obscured means

Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion

382 p.Libro ElectrónicoEach of us has been in the computing field for more than 40 years. The book is the product of a lifetime of observing and participating in the changes it has brought. Each of us has been both a teacher and a learner in the field. This book emerged from a general education course we have taught at Harvard, but it is not a textbook. We wrote this book to share what wisdom we have with as many people as we can reach. We try to paint a big picture, with dozens of illuminating anecdotes as the brushstrokes. We aim to entertain you at the same time as we provoke your thinking.Preface Chapter 1 Digital Explosion Why Is It Happening, and What Is at Stake? The Explosion of Bits, and Everything Else The Koans of Bits Good and Ill, Promise and Peril Chapter 2 Naked in the Sunlight Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned 1984 Is Here, and We Like It Footprints and Fingerprints Why We Lost Our Privacy, or Gave It Away Little Brother Is Watching Big Brother, Abroad and in the U.S. Technology Change and Lifestyle Change Beyond Privacy Chapter 3 Ghosts in the Machine Secrets and Surprises of Electronic Documents What You See Is Not What the Computer Knows Representation, Reality, and Illusion Hiding Information in Images The Scary Secrets of Old Disks Chapter 4 Needles in the Haystack Google and Other Brokers in the Bits Bazaar Found After Seventy Years The Library and the Bazaar The Fall of Hierarchy It Matters How It Works Who Pays, and for What? Search Is Power You Searched for WHAT? Tracking Searches Regulating or Replacing the Brokers Chapter 5 Secret Bits How Codes Became Unbreakable Encryption in the Hands of Terrorists, and Everyone Else Historical Cryptography Lessons for the Internet Age Secrecy Changes Forever Cryptography for Everyone Cryptography Unsettled Chapter 6 Balance Toppled Who Owns the Bits? Automated Crimes—Automated Justice NET Act Makes Sharing a Crime The Peer-to-Peer Upheaval Sharing Goes Decentralized Authorized Use Only Forbidden Technology Copyright Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance The Limits of Property Chapter 7 You Can’t Say That on the Internet Guarding the Frontiers of Digital Expression Do You Know Where Your Child Is on the Web Tonight? Metaphors for Something Unlike Anything Else Publisher or Distributor? Neither Liberty nor Security The Nastiest Place on Earth The Most Participatory Form of Mass Speech Protecting Good Samaritans—and a Few Bad Ones Laws of Unintended Consequences Can the Internet Be Like a Magazine Store? Let Your Fingers Do the Stalking Like an Annoying Telephone Call? Digital Protection, Digital Censorship—and Self-Censorship Chapter 8 Bits in the Air Old Metaphors, New Technologies, and Free Speech Censoring the President How Broadcasting Became Regulated The Path to Spectrum Deregulation What Does the Future Hold for Radio? Conclusion After the Explosion Bits Lighting Up the World A Few Bits in Conclusion Appendix The Internet as System and Spirit The Internet as a Communication System The Internet Spirit Endnotes Inde

Future directions for scientific advice in Europe

Across Europe, scientific evidence and advice is in great demand, to inform policies and decision making on issues such as climate change, new technologies and environmental regulation. But the diversity of political cultures and attitudes to expertise in different European countries can make the task of designing EU-wide advisory institutions and processes both sensitive and complex. In January 2015, President Juncker asked Commissioner Moedas to report on options for improving scientific advice within the European Commission. At a time when these issues are higher than usual on the political agenda, it is important that the case for scientific advice and evidence-informed policy is articulated and analysed afresh. To support these efforts, this collection brings together agenda-setting essays by policymakers, practitioners, scientists and scholars from across Europe. Authors include Anne Glover, Ulrike Felt, Robert Madelin, Andy Stirling, Vladimír Šucha and Jos van der Meer. Their contributions outline various challenges but also constructive ways forward for scientific advice in Europe

‘Channel Shift’:technologically-mediated policing and procedural justice

In recent years, police forces in the United Kingdom have introduced various technologies that alter the methods by which they interact with the public. In a parallel development, many forces have also begun to embrace the concept of procedural justice as a method through which to secure legitimacy and (in turn) public compliance and cooperation. What has not received sufficient attention, within policing or academia, is the extent to which these two trends are compatible, with the procedural justice literature still predicated on an assumption that police–public ‘contacts’ or ‘encounters’ are in-person. The effect of technologically mediating police–public contacts on ‘policing by consent’, is therefore unknown. In this article, we focus specifically on the possible implications of the Single Online Home (SOH) (a portal through which the public can report crime, get updates on cases, give feedback and pay fines, among other things, which is currently being rolled out across forces), considering ‘interactions’ between police and public where there is no physical co-presence. Noting the unique context that is policing, we draw on the limited existing research on procedural justice encounters in technologically mediated contexts to explore whether procedural justice theory is ‘future-proof’ for a policing context increasingly reliant on such encounters. We conclude that, through empirical research, we must update our conceptual understanding of what ‘contact’ can mean, and accept that current developments may in fact be transforming relationships rather than simply facilitating existing ones