The city as a personal assistant

Utku Günay Acer, Marc Van Den Broeck, Fahim Kawsar

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Conversational agents are increasingly becoming digital partners in our everyday computational experiences. Although rich, and fresh in content, they are oblivious to users’ locality beyond geospatial weather and traffic conditions. We introduce conversational agents that are hyper-local, embedded deeply into the urban infrastructure providing rich, purposeful, detail, and in some cases playful information relevant to a neighborhood. These agents are spatially constrained, and one can only interact with them once she is in close vicinity at street-level granularity. In other words, the city provides personal, stateful, spontaneous service to its citizens through the agents installed in urban landmarks. Drawing lessons from two user studies, we identify the requirements for this system. We then discuss the architecture of these agents that leverage covert communication channels and machine learning algorithms that run on the edge and wearable devices to offer meaningful conversational experience in urban settings.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationUbiComp/ISWC 2019- - Adjunct Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers
EditorsRobert Harle, Katayoun Farrahi, Nicholas Lane
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages1102-1106
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-6869-8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019
Event2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and 2019 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers, UbiComp/ISWC 2019 - London, United Kingdom
Duration: 9 Sept 201913 Sept 2019

Publication series

NameUbiComp/ISWC 2019- - Adjunct Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers

Conference

Conference2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and 2019 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers, UbiComp/ISWC 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period9/09/1913/09/19

Keywords

  • Conversational agents, location based services

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