Academic literature on the topic 'Smart personal assistant'

Natural user interfaces are becoming popular. One of the most common natural user interfaces nowadays are voice activated interfaces, particularly smart personal assistants such as Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortana, and Siri. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of these four smart personal assistants in two dimensions: the correctness of their answers and how natural the responses feel to users. Ninety-two participants conducted the evaluation. Results show that Alexa and Google Assistant are significantly better than Siri and Cortana. However, there is no statistically significant difference between Alexa and Google Assistant.

Smart Assistants have rapidly emerged in smartphones, vehicles, and many smart home devices. Establishing comfortable personal spaces in smart cities requires that these smart assistants are transparent in design and implementation—a fundamental trait required for their validation and accountability. In this article, we take the case of Google Assistant (GA), a state-of-the-art smart assistant, and perform its diagnostic analysis from the transparency and accountability perspectives. We compare our discoveries from the analysis of GA with those of four leading smart assistants. We use two online user studies (N = 100 and N = 210) conducted with students from four universities in three countries (China, Italy, and Pakistan) to learn whether risk communication in GA is transparent to its potential users and how it affects them. Our research discovered that GA has unusual permission requirements and sensitive Application Programming Interface (API) usage, and its privacy requirements are not transparent to smartphone users. The findings suggest that this lack of transparency makes the risk assessment and accountability of GA difficult posing risks to establishing private and secure personal spaces in a smart city. Following the separation of concerns principle, we suggest that autonomous bodies should develop standards for the design and development of smart city products and services.

In recent years, Virtual Personal Assistants(VPA) have worked with utmost efficacy sorting out queries and specific tasks posted by the individual users on the website by AI and Natural Language Processing . VPA developers develop functions to either scrape the query result from the Internet. The result data include copious formats from a simple definition in Wikipedia to complex calculations or recommendations. However, VPA’s designed for desktops do not work as extensively as the VPA’s featuring in the smart phones . They do not provide a complete automation of desktop websites due to continuous and frequent development. The current desktop personal assistant’s can show you the top results of the query ‘Biryani’, but cannot order on behalf of you. In this study, we propose a Virtual Personal Assistant ARCHER for desktop automation using Selenium by using the specifications of the behavior data of websites.

The ubiquity of smartphones and the growing popularity of smart speakers have given rise to cloud-based, intelligent personal assistants (IPAs), such as Siri and Google Assistant. However, little is known about the use of IPAs for Autonomous Second Language Learning (ASLL). Thus, the aims of this study were twofold: to assess Japanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students’ perceptions towards IPAs, also known as virtual assistants, for ASLL, and to better understand learner behavior of these technologies. A total of 14 Japanese university students were given smart speakers and interacted with a companion IPA, Amazon Alexa, over a two-month period in their homes. Moreover, the participants completed a survey consisting of Likert-scale items and open-ended questions to obtain their views of the IPA for ASLL. While the results indicated that the students had mostly favorable views of Alexa for L2 learning, many of them did not actively engage with the virtual assistant during the data collection period. Furthermore, students tended to give up when faced with communication difficulties with the IPA. These findings highlight the potential of IPAs for ASLL and underscore the gap between what students say, and what they actually do, with language learning technology.

The voice assistant technology is considered in scientific literature as a promising direction for organizing user work with a system of modern devices. Personal voice assistants create for the user the possibility of comfortable interaction with digital devices, bringing him closer to communication with the interlocutor. The relevance of studying the problem of using a voice assistant in fifth-generation communication networks made it the subject of research in this work. The article provides a retrospective analysis of real achievements in the field of practical application of voice assistant technology and identifies some of the most relevant directions for the development of the use of voice assistants. The main trends in the study of implementation and use, development of new generations of personal smart voice assistants are indicated. Conclusions are drawn about possible promising directions for further research. The proposed analysis of the scope of application of voice assistants and a brief description of the history of their creation and development has practical significance and makes it possible to use this publication as a lecture material.

Background Intelligent personal assistants such as Amazon Echo and Google Home have become increasingly integrated into the home setting and, therefore, may facilitate behavior change via novel interactions or as an adjunct to conventional interventions. However, little is currently known about their potential role in this context. Objective This feasibility study aims to develop the Intelligent Personal Assistant Project (IPAP) and assess the acceptability and feasibility of this technology for promoting and maintaining physical activity and other health-related behaviors in both parents and children. Methods This pilot feasibility study was conducted in 2 phases. For phase 1, families who were attending a community-based weight management project were invited to participate, whereas phase 2 recruited families not currently receiving any additional intervention. Families were randomly allocated to either the intervention group (received a smart speaker for use in the family home) or the control group. The IPAP intervention aimed to promote positive health behaviors in the family setting through utilization of the functions of a smart speaker and its linked intelligent personal assistant. Data were collected on recruitment, retention, outcome measures, intervention acceptability, device interactions, and usage. Results In total, 26 families with at least one child aged 5 to 12 years were recruited, with 23 families retained at follow-up. Across phase 1 of the intervention, families interacted with the intelligent personal assistant a total of 65 times. Although device interactions across phase 2 of the intervention were much higher (312 times), only 10.9% (34/312) of interactions were coded as relevant (related to diet, physical activity or well-being). Focus groups highlighted that the families found the devices acceptable and easy to use and felt that the prompts or reminders were useful in prompting healthier behaviors. Some further intervention refinements in relation to the timing of prompts and integrating feedback alongside the devices were suggested by families. Conclusions Using intelligent personal assistants to deliver health-related messages and information within the home is feasible, with high levels of engagement reported by participating families. This novel feasibility study highlights important methodological considerations that should inform future trials testing the effectiveness of intelligent personal assistants in promoting positive health-related behaviors. Trial Registration ISRCTN Registry ISRCTN16792534; http://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN16792534

The intelligent smart assistants are becoming more interactive and helpful for everyday tasks. The Amazon Echo has potential for advanced voice interactions and as a tool for conducting complex tasks. The potential of the Amazon Echo in the area of booking appointments is not being fully exploited by developers. A flexible architecture for developing appointment booking applications for the Amazon Echo was proposed. The architecture serves as guide for developers without experience working with Voice User Interfaces and saves development time by abstracting the complexity of voice interactions. A prototype skill was developed following the architecture principles and evaluated by a group of users. The skill successfully defines how an appointment booking skill should be.

L’ambito sanitario è oggetto di cambiamenti legati alla pervasiva adozione di tecnologie informatiche in grado di supportare i processi legati alla gestione della sanità. Su questa strada vanno le iniziative inerenti agli Smart Hospital, che prevedono una informatizzazione degli ospedali e dei sistemi per la loro gestione. Questa pionieristica visione prevede che vengano messe in campo le più disparate tecniche informatiche con l’obiettivo di supportare l’operato del personale sanitario, specialmente per quanto concerne il processo decisionale e la gestione del flusso di lavoro. La tesi si inserisce nel contesto di Trauma Tracker, un progetto di Smart Hospital nato dalla collaborazione tra il Trauma Center dell’ospedale Maurizio Bufalini e la facoltà di Ingegneria e Scienze Informatiche dell’Università di Bologna, sede di Cesena. Scopo del progetto è quello di sviluppare un Personal Assistant Agent in grado di supportare i medici durante la gestione dei traumi. Tra di queste è presente la generazione di avvisi e suggerimenti il cui obiettivo è quello di guidare l’operato del Trauma Team richiamandone l’attenzione qualora venissero individuate situazioni anomale oppure opportunità circa azioni che è possibile intraprendere. In Trauma Tracker è attualmente presente un sistema per la generazione di avvisi basata su regole. Questo presenta una espressività limitata per cui si intende ampliare le capacità di ragionamento dell’Assistant al fine di considerare informazioni storiche mantenute nell’archivio delle pratiche. Tra le tecniche considerate a tal fine figurano il Machine Learning e il Cognitive Computing. L'obiettivo della tesi è quello di identificare e sviluppare un'estensione architetturale del Trauma Assistant Agent (TAA) in modo che possa integrare la generazione di avvisi basati su regole definite dagli esperti del dominio con la generazione di suggerimenti elaborati e forniti in modo asincrono da servizi cognitivi in rete, in continua interazione con il TAA.

This thesis aims to explore how to shape proactive interactions between ambient artefacts and humans. Where ambient artefacts are represented by smart personal assistants and interactive tabletop robots. The conducted research is of explorative nature, relying on a critical and speculative design approach. Key aspects and their influence in shaping proactivity were identified.  Insights upon different means of feedback, namely coloured light, motion and sound are discussed in connection with the spatial placement of a proactive artefact and the provided user experience. The notion of gaining versus losing control to an artefact is presented and a reflection on the concept of annoyance as a design material. A proactive system featuring a collection of physical and digital interactive artefacts was created as part of this research. Insights and conclusions are based on conducted interviews after user-testing those artefacts.

Les objets connectés de la vie courante ont trouvé leur chemin dans notre quotidien. Connu sous le terme d'Internet des choses, une pluralité de technologies inspire une vaste variété des cas d'utilisation. Une des applications innovatrices est le concept et le développement de la maison intelligente. Actuellement, ce concept est en train de s'étendre vers l'extérieur ; il rend futés des véhicules, bâtiments et même des villes entières. De plus, la technologie devient aussi plus personnelle - comme le port des vêtements futés et d'autres appareils pour l'autosurveillance personnelle devient de plus en plus courant et populaire. Ce phénomène est souvent appelée le soi quantifié.Un cas particulier de l'environnement futé est l'assistance à l'autonomie à domicile (ambient assisted living) conçue pour améliorer la qualité de la vie quotidienne des personnes âgées. Un tel système informatique, omniprésent et discret, peut être porté dans d'autres domaines et tranches d'âge. Par exemple, le suivi des activités du quotidien peut aider jeune adultes à améliorer leur mode de vie. Tout le monde peut être encouragé à maintenir un mode de vie sain, à exercer une activité physique suffisante et prendre les décisions fondées quant à la mobilité. Ce sont les facteurs direct contribuant à la prévention des risques de santé, tel que les maladies métaboliques comme le diabète de type 2 ; et permettent un meilleur maîtrise des maladies respiratoires comme l'asthme.Dirigée par ces idées, cette thèse explore les possibilités d'une plate-forme web avec un raisonnement sémantique basé sur les règles. La thèse détaille le travail sur les améliorations techniques, avancements dans la reconnaissance d'activités, les extensions pour l'analyse des données et une application orientée mobilité.Suivant l'approche centrée utilisateur, un déploiement dans les conditions réelles est necessary. Deux cas d'utilisation sont abordés. Le premier est l'amélioration du système existant, consistant des capteurs et d'une passerelle tous placés dans le domicile de la personne âgée. Le deuxième cas est le déploiement d'une application pour téléphones portables pour l'assistance à la mobilité active. En collectant les donnés relevantes et actuelles, l'application affiche un niveau de recommandation personnalisée pour chaque type de mobilité. Ces recommandations sont basées sur l'appareil de soi quantifié qui incorpore les objectifs personnels, le profil et autres données librement accessible, tel que la météo ou la qualité d'air.Cette thèse décrit les sorties et les leçons tirées des déploiements de ces technologies. Cette thèse apporte une discussion et des analyses des résultats de ces déploiements
Connected objects of everyday living have made their way into our lives. Known as Internet of Things, the various technologies inspire a vast variety of applications. One of the pioneer applications is the concept and development of a smart home. This is now spreading outdoors; making vehicles, buildings, and even large cities smart. Moreover, the technology is getting more personal as well – as wearing smart clothes and other self-tracking devices become increasingly common and popular. This is often referred to as the quantified self.One particular case of a smart environment is ambient assisted living, which is designed to enhance elderly people’s day-to-day life. Such a ubiquitous and unobtrusive computer system can also be ported to other domains and age groups. For instance, the tracking of daily activities can also help younger adults to improve their lifestyle. Everyone can be encouraged to maintain a healthy lifestyle, perform sufficient physical activity, and make more informed decisions about their mobility. These are direct factors in preventing health risks, such as metabolic diseases like the type 2 diabetes, and allow a better control over respiratory diseases like the asthma.Driven by these ideas, this thesis explores the possibilities of a web-based platform with a semantic rule-based reasoning. The thesis details the work on technical improvements, enhancements in activity recognition, extensions for data analysis, and a mobility-oriented application.Following a user-centric approach, a real life deployment of the described technologies is necessary. Two use cases are examined. First, I enhanced and built upon a pre-existing system, which consists of sensors and a gateway placed into elderly participants' homes. The second use case is the deployment of a mobile phone application for active mobility assistance. Collecting relevant and timely data, the application then outputs a level of recommendation for every type of mobility. The recommendations are based on each user’s exercise tracking device, which incorporates their goals, their profiles, and other publicly available data sources such as weather and air quality.This thesis describes the outcomes and lessons learnt from these deployments. In addition, this thesis provides an in-depth discussion as well as analytical insights on the results of the deployments

L'aide ambiante à la personne (ambiant assisted living) a pour objectif d'accompagner le vieillissement de la population. Cela s'instancie notamment par les maisons intelligentes (smart homes), équipées de multiples capteurs connectés, dont un des objectifs est de prolonger le maintien à domicile des personnes âgées. Le manuscrit s'attache d'abord à introduire la problématique générale des maisons intelligentes, avant de présenter plus avant les trois sous-thématiques qui font plus particulièrement l'objet de la thèse, à savoir la reconnaissance d'activités, la confidentialité et les systèmes de dialogue.La reconnaissance d'activités consiste à déterminer les activités courantes d'une personne ou d'un groupe de personnes, à partir des données (brutes) des capteurs dont est équipée la maison. On peut citer comme exemple la détection de la chute d'une personne. Une maison intelligent repose typiquement sur l'internet des objets (Internet of Things, ou IoT). De nombreuses données sont produites, pouvant contenir des informations privées ou sensibles. Une partie de ces données doit être partagée avec l'extérieur, ce qui peut poser des problèmes de confidentialité. Enfin, pour interragir avec la maison intelligente, un moyen naturel pour l'utilisateur est d'utiliser le dialogue, sujet traité par les systèmes de dialogue.Ce travail de thèse propose des contributions sur ces trois versants, la plupart basées sur l'apprentissage profond
Ambient assisted living aims to support the aging population. This is particularly the case with smart homes, equipped with multiple connected sensors, which enables to extend home care for the elderly. The manuscript begins by introducing the general problem of smart homes, after presenting further the three sub-themes that are the subject of the thesis, namely the activity recognition, privacy and dialogue systems.Activity recognition is the process of determining the day-to-day activities of a person or a group of people from the (raw) sensor data that the home is equipped with. An example of this is the detection of a person's fall. A smart home is typically based on the Internet of Things (IoT). Many data are produced, which may contain private or sensitive information. Some of this data must be shared externally, which may pose privacy issues. Finally, a natural way of communication for the user is to use the dialogue to interact with the smart home via dialogue manager.This thesis proposes contributions on these three sides, most of them based on deep learning

碩士
國立陽明大學
醫學工程研究所
99
Insomnia is a common health issue. According to research findings, insomnia had higher prevalence rate year by year. Sleep disturbance is associated with major psychiatric disorders and some chronic diseases such as diabetes mellitus, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, etc. Diagnosis of insomnia is mainly by the method of diagnostic interview, few using instruments. The rate of misdiagnosis of insomnia and misuse of hypnotics is high if diagnosis is made only by interviewing. Examination of insomnia by instrument is difficult due to lack of resources and too expensive in Taiwan. So it is time to develop new tools which are cheap and effective to discover the real problem of insomnia. In our research, computer programs were developed for hand-held equipment to collect data of sleep. Sleep-related questionnaire and diagnostic interview was also done. Data of these diagnostic tools were analyzed and compared. Twenty three subjects, consisting of 11 non-insomnia participants and 12 psychiatric outpatients completed the experiment. The results showed the data of equipment and questionnaire had good consistence in time of go to bed, wake up, visual analog scale. Data of equipment showed superior information about sleep efficiency and some detailed data. But it showed inconsistence in evaluating about difference of difficulty in falling asleep and fragmented sleep. This method could provide more information for diagnosis of insomnia and resolution of problems.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

AbstractWe report on the design, specification and implementation of a situation awareness module used for assistive systems in manufacturing, in the context of Industry 4.0. A recent survey of research done in Germany and Europe, concerning assistive technology in industry shows a very high potential for “intelligent assistance” by combining smart sensors, networking and AI. While the state of the art concerning actual technology in industrial use points more towards user-friendly, speech-based interaction with personal assistants for information retrieval (typically of in-house documentation), the research presented here addresses an enterprise-level assistance system that is supported by a number of specialized Assistance Units that can be customized to the end users’ specifications and that range from tutoring systems to tele-robotics. Key to the approach is situation awareness, which is achieved through a combination of a-priori, task knowledge modelling and dynamic situation assessment on the basis of observation streams coming from sensors, cameras and microphones. The paper describes a working fragment of the industrial task description language and its extensions to cover also the triggering of assistive interventions when the observation modules have sent data that warrants such interventions.

AbstractWork processes and assembly processes are increasingly gaining in complexity in the industrial context and demand a wealth of knowledge from assembly employees, as well as from service and maintenance personnel. The article describes a system developed in order to support assembly workers using a live video assistance system in combination with “wearables” - in particular smart glasses - in complex assembly processes by experts and reports findings from an acceptance analysis study.

This chapter focuses on mobile app Google Assistant as an example of algorithmic personalization. The chapter draws on the accounts of six Google users who engaged with the app over the space of six weeks. The chapter explores participants’ framing of the app as “smart” and “impressive” even as the app failed to be “useful”; participants’ invocation of self-blame in order to explain the app’s failures; their faith that Google would uphold its side in the data-for-services exchange; and finally, participants’ expectations that the app could and should know them to an extraordinarily complex degree. The chapter proposes that the Google app’s interface constructs and evokes an ideologically normative “ideal user” in order to present “personalized” information. The author argues that participants articulated an enduring sense of trust to predict, construct, and legitimize identity articulation. This trust is embedded not only in the app itself, but also in Google as a broader technological, sociocultural, and commercial force.

Developments in the field of smart education – trend in the world educational space. Smart education is the result of the evolution of the application of information and communication technologies (the first personal computers), e-learning (personal computers for working in the Internet), m-learning (laptops) and u-learning (smartphones) in education. Key elements to support smart education: mobile computing, smart electronic textbooks, and cloud computing. The model, architecture and scenario of context-dependent system-assistant for smart education, able to analyze the individual characteristics of the student, the environment, adapt their work when conditions change are presented in the article. The novelty of the approach lies in the formalization of the context model so that the context-dependent system-assistant «computes on the fly» a specific scenario taking into account the individual characteristics of users and the current educational situation. When building a content management system, it is proposed to use a model based on biologically plausible machines. Context-dependent smart system should be able to personalize the best learning style, help to choose the optimal educational trajectory. For this purpose the device of Bayesian networks and biologically plausible methods are used. Prospective developments aimed at expanding the research base of smart education are the creation of adaptive systems that support an individual approach to learning, content management systems that provide for the possibility of contextual use of educational resources repositories and provide mobility and deep personalization of educational services. In Russia, nowadays there are the necessary prerequisites for the successful implementation of the smart education system: the focus in training are educational, social, civil, professional competencies, forms and methods for the individualization of the educational trajectory change, focus on open world intellectual resources, the emphasis is shifted to self-control and self-assessment of students, to assessment the education quality by employers, professional communities.

The chapter presents the authors' study on the smart museum concept. Semantic Web technology and ontology modeling methods are applied to construct advanced digital services, supporting the study and evolution of museum collections. The concept aims at significant increase of the information impact of museum exhibits by providing augmented annotations, identifying semantic relations, assisting the visitors to follow individual trajectories in exposition study, finding relevant information, opening the collection to knowledge from visitors. A museum collection is advanced to a knowledge base where new information is created and evolved by museum visitors and personnel. The chapter discusses reference information assistance services, which are oriented for use as mobile applications on users' smartphones. The proof-of-the-concept case study is the History Museum of Petrozavodsk State University. The pilot implementation demonstrates the feasibility of the smart museum concept in respect to the user mobility, service personalization, and collaborative work opportunity.

Mobile learning requires a methodology for creating mobile learning scenarios and producing learning objects to implement them. It also requires a technology to deliver the learning objects to users via mobile computing devices such as personal digital assistants, smart phones, and tablet computers. This article will describe both the pedagogic methodology and the technology using the European research project MOBIlearn as an example.

The A.D.A. – Advanced Distributed Assistant – project aims to build a smart distributed personal assistant, that is, a virtual agent that can interact with the user through an ecosystem of devices, such as IoT (Internet of Things), by voice commands in Portuguese. The project is divided into six scientific initiation subprojects from different areas of computer science, where each one is co-advised by a graduate student. An open source proof of concept is being created in order to demonstrate the assistant capabilities and its applications in public and private domains.