Towards a multimedia knowledge-based agent with social competence and human interaction capabilities

We present work in progress on an intelligent embodied conversation agent in the basic care and healthcare domain. In contrast to most of the existing agents, the presented agent is aimed to have linguistic cultural, social and emotional competence needed to interact with elderly and migrants. It is composed of an ontology-based and reasoning-driven dialogue manager, multimodal communication analysis and generation modules and a search engine for the retrieval of multimedia background content from the web needed for conducting a conversation on a given topic.The presented work is funded by the European Commission under the contract number H2020-645012-RIA

Cloud4SOA: A Semantic-Interoperability PaaS Solution for Multi-cloud Platform Management and Portability

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a novel, rapidly growing segment in the Cloud computing market. However, the diversity and heterogeneity of today's existing PaaS offerings raises several interoperability challenges. This introduces adoption barriers due to the lock-in issues that prevent the portability of data and applications from one PaaS to another, "locking" software developers to the first provider they use. This paper introduces the Cloud4SOA solution, a scalable approach to semantically interconnect heterogeneous PaaS offerings across different Cloud providers that share the same technology. The design of the Cloud4SOA solution, extensively presented in this work, comprises of a set of interlinked collaborating software components and models to provide developers and platform providers with a number of core capabilities: matchmaking, management, monitoring and migration of applications. The paper concludes with the presentation of a proof-of-concept implem entation of the Cloud4SOA system based on real-life business scenarios