The impact of emotional voice assistants on consumers’ shopping attitude and behavior

While most recent voice assistants talk in a non-emotional tone, this is expected to change. Since emotions are often contagious in human-human-interactions, the question arises whether consumers also catch the expressed emotion of voice assistants while shopping. In this paper, we present an approach for synthesizing speech in different emotional tones and show that synthesized emotional speech impacts consumers’ emotions, shopping attitude and behavior

Privacy and Identity Issues in Financial Transactions:The proportionality of the European anti-money laundering legislation

Few legal instruments shape the European financial system as much as the Anti-money laundering Directives. Currently in its fifth version, the Directive sets out measures to define a European approach against money laundering and terrorist financing. It binds all members of the financial services industry, making it an essential pillar in the system of regulation of the financial sector. In essence, the Anti-money laundering Directive demands that obliged entities apply four measures. All customers of obliged entities must be identified, and all transactions must be monitored in order to filter out any transactions that seem unusual or suspicious. Information on suspicious transactions must thirdly be forwarded to the national Financial Intelligence Unit. Finally, obliged entities retain records for at least five years after the end of the business relationship with the customer. Clearly, processing personal data so extensively clashes with the fundamental right to privacy. As everyone uses financial services, the measures of the Directive infringe the privacy of the entire European population. There are no meaningful exceptions to the group of people who are covered or the types of transactions that are monitored. The measures of the Directive are therefore also applied to people, who have never been suspected of any crime, and to transactions, that are connected to the most intimate aspects of someone’s private life. In this way, the Anti-money laundering Directive is comparable to the Data retention Directive, which was annulled by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for very similar reasons as outlined above. This thesis therefore argues that the Anti-money laundering Directive would be annulled by the CJEU in the same way, if it was challenged

ANALYSE VON MEINUNGEN IN SOZIALEN NETZWERKEN DES WEB 2.0

Im Web 2.0 bilden sich vermehrt soziale Netzwerke, in denen Nutzer Meinungen zu Produkten austauschen. Für Unternehmen ist es wichtig zu wissen, wie sich die Meinungen zu ihren Produkten in der Kommunikation zwischen den Nutzern der sozialen Netzwerke entwickeln um frühzeitig Chancen und Risiken zu erkennen. Eine manuelle Meinungsanalyse ist jedoch sehr aufwändig und nur in geringem Umfang möglich. In dieser Arbeit wird ein System vorgestellt, das Meinungen und Kommunikationsbeziehungen in Foren mithilfe von Text Mining automatisch extrahiert und mittels der sozialen Netzwerkanalyse Meinungsführer und Meinungstrends identifiziert

Analyse der Meinungsentwicklung in Online Foren – Konzept und Fallstudie

Das Web 2.0 ist u.a. auch eine weltweite Plattform für Meinungsäußerungen. Immer mehr Kunden diskutieren online über Produkte und tauschen Erfahrungen aus. Die Analyse der Online Beiträge stellt daher ein wichtiges Marktforschungsinstrument dar. Es wird ein Ansatz zur automatischen Identifikation, Aggregation und Analyse von Meinungen mittels Text Mining vorgestellt und dessen Anwendung an einem Beispiel aus der Sportartikelindustrie aufgezeigt

Multimodal Image Captioning for Marketing Analysis

Automatically captioning images with natural language sentences is an important research topic. State of the art models are able to produce human-like sentences. These models typically describe the depicted scene as a whole and do not target specific objects of interest or emotional relationships between these objects in the image. However, marketing companies require to describe these important attributes of a given scene. In our case, objects of interest are consumer goods, which are usually identifiable by a product logo and are associated with certain brands. From a marketing point of view, it is desirable to also evaluate the emotional context of a trademarked product, i.e., whether it appears in a positive or a negative connotation. We address the problem of finding brands in images and deriving corresponding captions by introducing a modified image captioning network. We also add a third output modality, which simultaneously produces real-valued image ratings. Our network is trained using a classification-aware loss function in order to stimulate the generation of sentences with an emphasis on words identifying the brand of a product. We evaluate our model on a dataset of images depicting interactions between humans and branded products. The introduced network improves mean class accuracy by 24.5 percent. Thanks to adding the third output modality, it also considerably improves the quality of generated captions for images depicting branded products.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, accepted at MIPR201

Designing In-Store Navigation Systems in Physical Retail

Physical retail faces the challenge of remaining attractive to customers in the age of e-commerce. In-store navigation systems are one way to mitigate this issue. These software systems allow customers to be navigated through the retail store. We derive design requirements (DRs) for in-store navigation systems based on eight interviews with customers and employees of furniture stores. We illustrate the implementation of the DRs in a conceptual prototype designed with the platform “Hololink.” Initial evaluation results (n = 20) show that customers perceive such a solution for physical retail as mainly positive. We contribute to research and practice by showing how to design in-store navigation systems