Beatrice Valeri

Come Along: Understanding and Motivating Participation to Social Leisure Activities

In this paper we study the factors that affect peoples decision in participating in leisure activities in the social and cultural environment. To this end, we collected the ratings of local people from three different cities around the world on standard leisure activities, and looked at the personal, social and contextual features shaping their preferences. We then used this dataset to evaluate how these features can be exploited to recommend places people would actually like. Our initial results suggest that friends are a good source for recommending places, with higher precision and recall than considering only popular places, but these can be improved reducing the scope to similar friends in the context of the particular activity. We have also found that people preferences are sensitive to the companion (e.g., partner, friends, tourists) for which they look for different features. The results also suggest that similarities in the preferences of people can be extended to other activities, which points to the potential of profiling users based on lifestyle. We finally present the design and prototype of a system, namely Come Along, which aims at helping people discover, find and participate to social and leisure activities.

Collecting memories of the museum experience

When we go to the museum, we see many interesting objects that have fascinating stories related to them. However, visitors do not often share these experiences with people that have not visited the exhibition. Sharing is beneficial both because it can create interest and attract people to the museum, and because it can help people who cannot attend the visit (for example, is physically unable to do so) to still enjoy it. We were interested to understand the extent and motivation behind sharing (or not sharing) and test how to encourage visitors to do so. We conducted and are conducting various surveys and trials, for which we report the preliminary results in this paper. Initial findings show that i) people today rarely share their visits for lack of content to complement their storytelling, and ii) by providing visitors with a simple and easy-to-create virtual photobook with their dearest memories from the visit we can significantly enhance this sharing.

Crowdsourcing Reliable Ratings for Underexposed Items

We address the problem of acquiring reliable ratings of items such as restaurants or movies from the crowd. A reliable rating is a truthful rating from a worker that is knowledgeable enough about the item she is rating. We propose a crowdsourcing platform that considers workers’ expertise with respect to the items being rated and assigns workers the best items to rate. In addition, our platform focuses on acquiring ratings for items that only have a few ratings. Traditional crowdsourcing platforms are not suitable for such a task for two reasons. First, ratings are subjective and there is no single correct rating for an item which makes most existing work on predicting the expertise of crowdsourcing workers inapplicable. Second, in traditional crowdsourcing platforms there is no control over task assignment by the requester. In our case, we are interested in providing workers with the best items to rate based on their estimated expertise for the items and the number of ratings the items have. We evaluate the effectiveness of our system using both synthetic and real-world data about

Gelee: Cooperative Lifecycle Management for (Composite) Artifacts

In this demonstration we introduce Gelee , our online platform for the hosted specification and cooperative execution of lifecycles of artifacts of any kind. With Gelee we aim at filling two lacks we identify in current cooperative software systems when it comes to unstructured, artifact-based works (e.g., the writing of a project deliverable): the lack of state and the complete lack of automated actions. Lifecycles allow us to model the state of any object, and if we focus on online resources (e.g., a Google Doc) then we can also automate some lifecycle actions. If we apply Gelee to composite artifacts, e.g., a set of web services, lifecycles provide for the human-driven orchestration of services.

A Model for Knowledge Elicitation, Organization and Distribution in the Cultural Entertainment Sector

In the past museums have been slow in fully utilising new technologies, but in the last decade this situation has changed dramatically. The need for more support to visitors and more collaboration between experts and between museums has led to the exploration of how new technologies can extend the traditional museum. In this paper a new concept of such an extended museum is presented, with particular attention to gathering, organization and consumption of knowledge.