Oliviero Stock

Date

May 26, 2011

Title

Persuasive Systems for Small Groups in a Museum

Abstract

Persuasion is an art with a long tradition. Argumentation is only one of the available means, and several scholars have emphasized the importance of a peripheral route to persuasion, the one that for instance is at the basis of most forms of advertisements. Computers can help provide flexibility and adaptivity to persuasion and in this talk I will talk about some persuasive systems we are developing.
The dimension of small group face-to-face interaction has recently become an important topic of research. In this talk I take a specific aim: can technology help orienting natural face to face communication to a cultural discussion?

One main contextual aspect for our work has been the museum visit. 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 cultural experience develops among its members.
People often stop at the museum café to have a break during the visit or before leaving. We foresee it is the ideal situation to introduce a tabletop interface meant to foster the conversation of the visitors. A second situation is concerned with the mobile visit itself. A dramatic computer-based presentation genre has been devised specifically for influencing and assessing mobile small group conversation.

Biography

Oliviero Stock, IRST (Trento, Italy) senior fellow, has been its Director from 1997 to 2001. His activity is in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, intelligent user interfaces, cognitive technologies. He is the author of over two hundred peer-reviewed papers and author or editor of twelve volumes, and member of the editorial board of a dozen scientific journals. He has also been an invited speaker at over sixty conferences; participant or coordinator at over twenty panels. He has been Chairman of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence, President of the Association for Computational Linguistics and of the Italian AI Association and is an ECCAI Fellow and a AAAI Fellow. He has been program co-chair of the first INTETAIN conference.

Francois Pachet

Date

May 27, 2011

Title

Bebop Virtuosity

Biography

Francois Pachet received the Ph.D. degree and Habilitation à diriger des Recherches from University of Paris 6, Paris, France. He is a Civil Engineer (Ecole des Ponts and Chaussées) and was an Assistant Professor in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Paris 6 University, until 1997.

He then set up the music research team at SONY Computer Science Laboratory, Paris, and developed the vision that metadata can greatly enhance the musical experience in all its dimensions, from listening to performance.

His team conducts research in interactive music listening and performance and musical metadata and developed several innovative technologies and award winning systems (MusicSpace, constraint-based spatialization, PathBuilder, intelligent music scheduling using metadata, The Continuator for Interactive Music Improvization). He is the author of over 80 scientific publications in the fields of musical metadata and interactive instruments.