Oliviero Stock

• Fondazione Bruno Kessler

The optimal innovation hypothesis (OIH) offers a good aesthetic and cognitive reference for the kind of linguistic creativity where minimal variations can have a strong effect on the audience and realize an overall intended goal. The same approach can be the basis for creative systems. The question is how to concretely evaluate not only their quali...

In the spirit of the modern meaning of the word humanism, if technology aims at the flourishing of humans, it is of the greatest value to empower each human being with the capability of appreciating culture, in an inclusive, individual-adaptive manner. In particular, in this brief chapter, the case is made for the opportunity that intelligent user...

Does building a collaborative digital story lead to reduction of intergroup tension? Studies show that joint storytelling can help reach deeper levels of understanding through exposure to another group's narrative. We hypothesized that engagement in a collaborative digital storytelling task would lead to reductions of negative emotions and attitude...

This chapter is concerned with human–computer collaboration to achieve linguistic creativity. We claim that humans and computers may benefit from each other during the creativity process and we demonstrate concrete examples of systems that allow different degrees of interaction with the user. Then, we focus on computer-supported human creativity, w...

Joint narratives are often used in the context of reconciliation interventions for people in social conflict situations, which arise, for example, due to ethnic or religious differences. The interventions aim to encourage a change in attitudes of the participants towards each other. Typically, a human mediator is fundamental for achieving a success...

Joint narratives are often used in the context of reconciliation interventions for people in social conflict situations, which arise, for example, due to ethnic or religious differences. The interventions aim to encourage a change in attitudes of the participants towards each other. Typically, a human mediator is fundamental for achieving a success...

Altering the lyrics of famous songs is a common creative and communicative act, often used for purposes that go beyond simple amusement, such as the creation of companion music for advertisements. In this case, the altered song commonly refers to the advertised product or idea. Here we present a system that can automatically reproduce this process:...

Cultural heritage (CH) is an attractive domain for experimenting with novel technologies for various reasons. In general, the research focuses is on experimenting the potential of the novel technology, while having a high-quality content is necessary for experimentation in a realistic setting, but it is not the focus of the research. While generall...

The following discusses a demo for an application that serves as a museum guide, which after the visit gives advice on additional cultural heritage sites to visit. The demo simulates the implementation at the Tower of David in Jerusalem. The system uses behavior to determine both preferences and characteristics.

Systems often try to give advice to users. Personalization and the use of personality in the use of recommendation systems is a very topical. Examining the Cultural Heritage Domain, we propose a framework how we can monitor visitor behavior on the go, something that is mildly volatile, to determine personality traits, something that is more stable....

In this paper we present Heady-Lines, a creative system that produces news headlines based on well-known expressions. The algorithm is composed of several steps that identify keywords from a news article, select an appropriate well-known expression and modify it to produce a novel one, using state-of-the-art natural language processing and linguist...

A key acceptability criterion for artificial agents will be the possible moral implications of their actions. In particular, intelligent persuasive systems (systems designed to influence humans via communication) constitute a highly sensitive topic because of their intrinsically social nature. Still, ethical studies in this area are rare and tend t...

Drawing on concepts from theories on persuasion, social psychology and philosophy of language, we designed an ambient persuasive system that acts as an automatic facilitator by supporting a balanced flow of communication in group conversational activity. The system includes two main components: a) a context-awareness system that monitors group memb...

In this paper we present the evaluation of an application for the collaborative composition of comics using a pre-defined set of images and sentences. This study is an intermediate step to guide the design of a tablet application for supporting collaborative storytelling between two authors from different cultures and speaking different languages....

Technology-supported indoor navigation is not easy; there are many technological challenges as well as UI challenges that need to be addressed. A set of user interface guidelines for designing a navigation system in a CH setting has been developed based on our experience and current best practices. In this paper, we describe an implementation of ou...

In this paper we present a methodology to provide visitors, in smart regions, additional cultural heritage attractions based on prior museum visits us- ing user models and Linked Open Data. Visitor preferences and behavior are tracked via a museum mobile guide and used to create a visitor model. Seman- tic models and Linked Open Data support the re...

Since 2007, the PATCH workshop series (https://patchworkshopseries.wordpress.com/) have been gathering successfully researchers and professionals from various countries and institutions to discuss the topics of digital access to cultural heritage and specifically the personalization aspects in this process. Due to this rich history, the reach of th...

The objective of this manifesto (as a result of the JITT workshop in June 2014) is to identify a list of pivotal research topics and issues in e-tourism. E-tourism can be seen as everything that happens electronically in the travel and tourism industry/experience; more formally it is defined as the design, implementation and application of IT and e...

In this paper, we examine a possible plan to associate museum visits with outdoor cultural heritage activities. The plan consists of looking at museum visit movement styles to predict personality and learning styles, and using holding power to determine user interests. We then describe how this information can be utilized to both suggest possible v...

In this paper we present a methodology to provide visitors, in smart regions, additional cultural heritage attractions based on their prior museum visits using: 1) user models and 2) Linked Open Data. Visitor preferences and behavior are tracked via a museum mobile guide and used to create a visitor model. Semantic models and Linked Open Data suppo...

In this paper we present an ambient persuasive system designed to promote balanced participation during group brainstorming. The system gets information from participants’ attention behavior during a brainstorming session and provides visual messages for facilitating balanced participation. In the present study, we investigated the effect that usin...

In this paper, we present the evaluation of a pen-and-paper mockup for the composition of comics using a pre-defined set of images and sentences. Our goal was to investigate the effectiveness and the satisfaction of use of such an approach in comparison to a less constrained one. This pilot study is meant as an initial step to inform the design of...

The need for creativity is ubiquitous, and mobile devices connected to Web services can help us. Linguistic creativity is widely used in advertisements to surprise us, to get our attention, and to stick concepts in our memory. However, creativity can also be used as a defense. When we walk in the street, we are overwhelmed by messages that try to g...

Accurate wording is essential in persuasive verbal communication. Through it speakers can provide an affective connotation to the text and reveal their disposition or induce a similar disposition on the recipient. All this is apparent in persuasion texts par excellence, such as political speech and advertisement. Automatic sentiment variations of e...

Given the fast rise of increasingly autonomous artificial agents and robots, a key acceptability criterion will be the possible moral implications of their actions. In particular, intelligent persuasive systems (systems designed to influence humans via communication) constitute a highly sensitive topic because of their intrinsically social nature....

Small groups can have a better museum visit when that visit is both a social and an educational occasion. The unmediated discussion that often ensues during a shared cultural experience, especially when it is with a small group whose members already know each other, has been shown by ethnographers to be important for a more enriching experience. We...

The Cultural Heritage experience at the museum begins before the actual on-site visit and continues with memories and reflections after the visit. In considering the potential of novel information and communication technology to enhance the entire visit experience, one scenario envisioned is extending the on-site visit boundaries, to help the visit...

Well-being in a small group can be tied to how much its members interact. Small group tours are social occasions, and the discussion that ensues has been shown by ethnographers to be important for a more enriching experience. Increasing conversation can thus be seen as a way to improve social and psychological well-being.We present DramaTric, a mob...

In this paper, we present a system that acts as an automatic facilitator by supporting the flow of communication in a group conversation activity. The system monitors the group members' non-verbal behavior and promotes balanced participation, giving targeted directives to the participants through peripheral displays. We describe an initial study to...

As advertisements on posters in the street get more and more aggressive, our basic cognitive defense -aimed at not perceiving those messages- is not enough. One advanced defensive technique is based on transforming the perceived message into something different from what was originally meant in the message. The demo is based on an application for s...

Most often visitors come to a museum with limited time available and want to get the right information for their interest. In such scenario, where there is an overload of information to be delivered in a relatively short time, technology may play a crucial role in supporting museum visitors and enhancing the overall visit experience. Content prepar...

Many museums offer their visitors the use of a mobile guide to enhance their visit experience. Novel mobile guides have the potential to provide personalized, context-aware, rich content to museum visitors. However, they might also affect the way visitors behave and interact. While many studies have examined novel features that these guides can pro...

We propose a new area to focus upon as a research challenge: How to use personalized technology to connect our cultural heritage experiences to our "daily" lives. In particular we want to connect the visitor's museum experiences with outside relevant mobile cultural heritage experiences. We begin to examine what processes and technologies will be n...

Museums are both appealing and challenging as an environment for research with novel mobile technology. Over the years, quite a few research projects explored the potential of novel technologies to support information delivery to museum visitors. Having an accurate visitor position and orientation is a key factor in the success for offering an inte...

A multi-user tabletop interface was designed to support reconciliation of a conflict aimed at shifting hostile attitudes and achieving a greater understanding of another viewpoint. The interface provided a setting for face-to-face shared narration and support for the management of disagreements. The interface allows for escalation and de-escalation...

This work in progress compares group use of mobile projector technology with an existing mobile solution in a simulated environment. Early Results indicate that while having potential, pico projectors still have areas that need to be improved such as focus and shakiness. In addition, personal control was found to be an important factor in user sati...

In recent years there has been a growing interest in crowdsourcing methodologies to be used in experimental research for NLP tasks. In particular, evaluation of systems and theories about persuasion is difficult to accommodate within existing frameworks. In this paper we present a new cheap and fast methodology that allows fast experiment building...

People tend to treat computers as social actors, even if these are usually designed as mere tools. This forces computers to play a social role without having the social skills to be successful (Reeves and Nass, 1996).

Cultural heritage is an area that has recently drawn research attention, especially for exploring ways to harness novel mobile technologies for supporting visitors. The main benefit of these novel technologies is their ability to provide personalized, context-aware information services to their users. However, the use of context-awareness is connec...

In this paper we describe the in-progress work of the Pathlight navigation system for groups and individuals. Pathlight provides indoor navigation support in the museum using a handheld projector. We describe some of the advantages the system provides, look at some background, briefly describe some system features, and posit some open questions for...

One of the goals of the workshop upon which this book is based was to explore the gap between Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) by examining a central problem facing AI workers who are trying to build practical systems - the problem of communication. Examining communication from a Cognitive Science/AI perspective offers the prospec...

Technology can play a crucial role in supporting museum visitors and enhancing their overall museum visit experiences. Visitors coming to a museum do not want to be overloaded with information, but to receive the relevant information, learn, and have an overall interesting experience. To serve this goal, a user-friendly and flexible system is neede...

In this paper we propose a new type of system explicitly aimed at influencing immediate behavior in an informal, non goal-oriented co-located small group. The state of the group dynamics is automatically assessed in order for the system to continuously plan and deploy minimalist strategies using evocative means to influence behavior, rather than ex...

Museums are both appealing and challenging as an environment for indoor positioning research. By nature, they are dense and rich in objects and information, and as a result they contain more information than a visitor can absorb in a time-limited visit. Many research projects have explored the potential of novel technologies to support information...

Museum visits can be more enjoyable to small groups if they can be both social and educational experiences. One very rewarding aspect of a visit, especially those involving small groups such as families, is the unmediated group discussion that can ensue during a shared cultural experience. We present a situated, mobile museum system that delivers a...

In this paper we present a tool for valence shifting of natural language texts, named Valentino (VALENced Text INOculator). Valentino can modify existing textual expressions towards more positively or negatively valenced versions. To this end we built specific resources, gathering valenced terms that are semantically or contextually connected to th...

Museum visits can be more enjoyable to small groups if they can be both social and educational experiences. One very rewarding aspect of a visit, especially those involving small groups such as families, is the unmediated group discussion that can ensue during a shared cultural experience. We present a museum mobile system that perceives and analyz...

Ubiquitous computing plays an increasing role in our lives. Typically, applications in ubiquitous computing environments are context aware, namely, they react to the situations of their users at a given moment in time. One example for such environment is visitor's guides in cultural heritage sites, supporting visits of individuals or small groups,...

Many museums today use mobile guides to aid in enhancing the museum visit experience. One of the uses for mobile guides is for navigation. While navigation for individuals visiting a museum has been studied extensively, the study of individuals and groups navigating in museums with mobile guides is in its nascent stages. We propose a study using a...

In political speeches, the audience tends to react or resonate to signals of persuasive communication, including an expected theme, a name or an expression. Automatically predicting the impact of such discourses is a challenging task. In fact nowadays, with the huge amount of textual material that flows on the Web (news, discourses, blogs, etc.), i...

Evaluating systems and theories about persuasion represents a bottleneck for both theoretical and applied fields: experiments are usually expensive and time consuming. Still, measuring the persuasive impact of a message is of paramount importance. In this paper we present a new "cheap and fast" methodology for measuring the persuasiveness of commun...

Persuasion has been studied for more than two millennia. Basically it can be viewed as the collection of methodologies aiming at changing, by means of communication, the mental state of the receiver, in view of a certain action (or set of actions) to be performed by the receiver. Inspired by this tradition, and by the practical realizations in the...

A café table is a traditional setting for conversation. Tabletop displays may have an active role in this connection. In particular for a museum scenario, conversation after the visit is important for a joint elaboration of a small group visit experience. We propose the museum café as the location to introduce a tabletop display meant to foster and...

The development of intelligent guides for a museum is an important theme of research entailing a variety of challenging aspects. Intelligent guides are based on the idea that information presentation should take into account the context of the individual, in the first place the position of the visitor, but also other information that the system can...

Museum visits can be more useful to small groups if they can be the centerpiece of a social experience as well as an educational one. One of the most rewarding aspects of a visit, especially those involving families, is the unmediated group discussion that can ensue during a shared cultural experience. However, if current methods were to be applied...

While automatic generation of funny texts delivers incrementally better results, for the time being semiautomatic generation can already provide something useful. In particular, we present an interactive system for producing humorous puns obtained through variation (i.e., word substitution) performed on familiar expressions. The replacement word is...

This editorial provides an introduction to current AI research on computationally created artifacts as well as to the papers and topics covered by this special issue on computational creativity. Copyright © 2009, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a 3-week intervention in which a co-located cooperation enforcing interface, called StoryTable, was used to facilitate collaboration and positive social interaction for six children, aged 8-10 years, with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). The intervention focused on exposing pairs of children to an enforced...

This Special Issue of AI and Society contains a selection of papers presented at the 6th Social Intelligence Design Workshop held at ITC-irst, Povo (Trento, Italy) in July 2007. Being the 6th in a series means that there now is a well-established and also a growing research area. The interest in this research area is growing because, among other th...

This paper is about the development of a face-to-face collaborative technology to support shifting attitudes of participants in conflict via a narration task. The work is based on two cultural elements: conflict resolution theory and the design of a collaboration enforcing interface designed specifically for the task. The general claim is that part...

In this paper, we introduce a novel type of persuasive system aimed at orienting a group conversation in a casual setting. The system is based on a tabletop display complemented by a limited speech recognition system (a word spotter). It affects group behavior indirectly by presenting on the shared interface contextually appropriate visual material...

Among forms of creative language, verbal humor has received some attention in the computational milieu. Some aspects of irony and wordplay could be experimented in automated systems. For instance, we developed a system that makes fun of existing acronyms, based mainly on lexical reasoning. The dimension of emotion in words is also starting to be un...

In political speech, even if the audience is sympathetic to the speaker and does not need to be persuaded, it tends to react or respond to signals of persuasive communication (including an expected theme, a name, an expression, and the tone of the voice). In this article, we describe the creation of a corpus of political speeches tagged with audien...

According to recent studies, a museum visit by a small group (e. g. a family or a few friends) can be considered successful if conversation about the experience develops among its members. Often people stop at the museum café to have a break during the visit or before leaving. The museum café is the location that we foresee as ideal to introduce a...

So called intractable conflicts may benefit from more modest and socially oriented approaches than those based on classical conflict resolution techniques. This paper is inspired by theories on small group intervention in a conflict. The general claim is that participants may achieve a greater understanding of and appreciation for the other's viewp...

This paper presents resources and lexical strategies for persuasive natural language processing. After the introduction of a specifically tagged corpus of political speeches, some forms of affective language processing in persuasive communication and prospects for application scenarios are provided. In particular Valentino, a prototype for valence...

This paper presents resources and strategies for persuasive natural language processing. After the introduction of a specifically tagged corpus, some techniques for affective language processing and for persuasive lexicon extraction are provided together with prospective scenarios of application. 1.

In this paper a first implementation of a tool for valence shifting of natural language texts, named Valentino (VALENced Text INOculator), is presented. Valentino can modify existing textual expressions towards more positively or negatively valenced versions. To this end we built specific resources gathering various valenced terms that are semantic...

In this paper, a technique for the generation of advertis- ing headlines based on affect is described. The system takes as input the target concept to evoke and possibly a sentiment to communicate. A fundamental dimen- sion of advertising relies on the affective connotation of words. We have used it as an important component of our algorithms for t...

Nowadays, technology enables museums to become "active". Shortly, museum visitors will be equipped with smart personal devices and the museum environment will be able to interact proactively with them, offering them various services. Visitors often tend to visit museums in groups, mainly with family or friends, yet most of today mobile museum guide...

In this paper we describe a pilot study for an intervention aimed at enhancing social skills in high functioning children with autism. We found initial evidences that the use of a social interaction and may lessen the repetitive behaviors typical of autism. These positive effects also appear to be transferred to other tasks following the interventi...

Among forms of creative language, verbal humor has received some attention in the computational milieu. Some aspects of irony and wordplay could be experimented in automated systems. For instance we developed a system that makes fun of existing acronyms, based mainly on lexical reasoning. The dimension of emotion in words is also starting to be und...

The largest part of the advertising market is already electronic. This means there is an opportunity for automatizing some of the production processes, such as producing and rendering catchy language expressions. A system is described that produces creative, affective variations of familiar textual expressions and animates them according to the aff...

An advertising message induces in the recipient a positive (or negative) attitude toward the subject to advertise, for example through the evocation of a appropriate emotion. This paper is about the use of text processing techniques for proposing solutions to advertising professionals, opening up the way to a full automatization of the whole proces...

This volume of the CTIT proceedings series contains the proceedings of the sixth international workshop on Social Intelligence Design (SID 2007). In the SID workshop we consider Social Intelligence as the necessary ability for people to relate to, understand and interact effectively with others. Our particular concern is how Social Intelligence is...

The study of intelligent user interfaces and user modeling and adaptation is well suited for augmenting educational visits to museums. We have defined a novel integrated framework for museum visits and claim that such a framework is essential in such a vast domain that inherently implies complex interactivity. We found that it requires a significan...

Future intelligent systems will have contextual goals to pursue. As opposed to more traditional scenarios of human computer interaction, intelligent persuasive systems may also aim to induce the user or, in general, the audience, to perform some actions in the real world. Some scenarios of application are dynamic advertisement, preventive medicine,...

Visitors often tend to visit museums in groups, mainly with family or friends, yet most of the today mobile museum guides focus on supporting the individual visitor. The technology described in this paper allows supporting groups of visitors in addition to individuals by providing context- aware services aimed at supporting the whole group. These i...

Animated text is an appealing field of creative graphical design. Manually designed text animation is largely em- ployed in advertising, movie titles and web pages. In this paper we propose to link, through state of the art NLP tech- niques, the affective content detection of a piece of text to the animation of the words in the text itself. This me...