A smarthome conversational agent performing implicit demand-response application planning

In recent years, the growing use of Intelligent Personal Agents in different human activities and in various domains led the corresponding research to focus on the design and development of agents that are not limited to interaction with humans and execution of simple tasks. The latest research efforts have introduced Intelligent Personal Agents that utilize Natural Language Understanding (NLU) modules and Machine Learning (ML) techniques in order to have complex dialogues with humans, execute complex plans of actions and effectively control smart devices. To this aim, this article introduces the second generation of the CERTH Intelligent Personal Agent (CIPA) which is based on the RASA framework and utilizes two machine learning models for NLU and dialogue flow classification. CIPA-Generation B provides a dialogue-story generator that is based on the idea of adjacency pairs and multiple intents, that are classifying complex sentences consisting of two users’ intents into two automatic operations. More importantly, the agent can form a plan of actions for implicit Demand-Response and execute it, based on the user’s request and by utilizing AI Planning methods. The introduced CIPA-Generation B has been deployed and tested in a real-world scenario at Centre’s of Research & Technology Hellas (CERTH) nZEB SmartHome in two different domains, energy and health, for multiple intent recognition and dialogue handling. Furthermore, in the energy domain, a scenario that demonstrates how the agent solves an implicit Demand-Response problem has been applied and evaluated. An experimental study with 36 participants further illustrates the usefulness and acceptance of the developed conversational agent-based system.

Habit-change, heightened consciousness, and agential “crises”: impersonal mechanisms, personal agents, and their complex entanglement

The author begins by highlighting Peirce’s claim that every kind of consciousness is more or less like a cognition. He concludes by making a plea for a cognitive semiotics in which both mechanistic explanations and accounts framed in terms of personal agents are necessary for an adequate account of human cognition. The topics of habit-taking and the form of consciousness associated with this process are what link Peirce’s cognitivist approach to consciousness and an inclusive, non-reductionist vision of cognitive semiotics. Impersonal mechanisms play an integral role in even the most sophisticated forms of human cognition. But the self-critical endeavors of personal agents, especially ones susceptible to “crises” such as doubt, play no less an important role.

Teaching the Russian Language in Hungary: History of Cultural Interactions

The paper is dedicated to outlining the main specific features of the spread and reception of Russian language in Hungary, with attention paid to the chronological perspective and the current situation. The text aims at revealing the factors, institutional and personal agents that fuel the interest to studying and teaching Russian in the atmosphere of Hungary. Russian history, culture, literature, traditions, and, consequently, the Russian language have always been of interest in Hungary. The Hungarian national culture developed in parallel with the rise of enthusiasm toward Russia — and in 1849 the Department of Slavic Philology was introduced at the University of Pest. Russian was popularized and spread in Hungary by textbooks and translations of famous oeuvres of Russian writers. The turn of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th marked the growing interest of students to Russian, with the First World War, the October revolution in Russia and the subsequent Russian exodus intensifying mundane interactions. The Second World War, its outcomes and the split of Europe into two zones showed the clout that the Russian language acquired. In 1949, Russian became the only compulsory foreign language at school; Russian was introduced in higher educational institutions on a broader basis, including pedagogical institutes which were training Russian teachers for middle schools. After 1989, Hungary, like other Central and Eastern European countries, saw a sharp decline in the number of Russian language learners due to geopolitical reasons. The current stage of the spread of the Russian language in Hungary is characterized by positive changes: strengthening of economic relations between the countries, expansion of cultural and educational ties that is gradually leading to an increase in emphasis on the Russian language. In particular, it is owed to the liberalization of book industry and publishing of new Russian textbooks, digital promotion via Internet, construction of the Baksi nuclear power plant, and numerous exhibitions and festivals. What can be concluded is that cultural bonds connecting the Hungarians and the Russian language have a long path dependency relative to the post-1917 diaspora, the period of socialism and favourable relations with the USSR. Their effect is maintained by modern funds and associations. Economic ties that have foundation in both historical industrial cooperation and modern projects also foster attention to maintaining closer cultural interactions — and, thus, to studying Russian.

Complementing Agents with Cognitive Services: A Case Study in Healthcare

Personal Agents (PAs) have longly been explored as assistants to support users in their daily activities. Surprisingly, few works refer to the adoption of PAs in the healthcare domain, where they can assist physicians’ activities reducing medical errors. Although literature proposes different approaches for modelling and engineering PAs, none of them discusses how they can be integrated with cognitive services in order to empower their reasoning capabilities. In this paper we present an integration model, specifically devised for healthcare applications, that enhances Belief-Desire-Intention agents reasoning with advanced cognitive capabilities. As a case study, we adopt this integrated model in the critical care path of trauma resuscitation, stepping forward to the vision of Smart Hospitals.

Assessment of the competence development level of personal agents in the context of relationship marketing

The paper represents novelty and features of the authors’ understanding of relationship marketing. It is scientific and practically new paradigm in science. The paper outlines the purpose of relationship marketing – to build, maintain and develop privileged relationships with the company’s stakeholders in order to obtain mutual benefits and help to society. The authors focus on definition of personal sales and personal sales’ target. The paper describes behavioral indicators characterizing demonstration of competences included in the “Influencing” cluster and proposes stages of assessment of the competence development level of personal agents. The paper reveals the authors’ questionnaire to assess the competence development level of personal agents. The authors propose three formulas for assessment of the individual competence development level.

Philosophical Quest and Growing up Motif in Ambiguous Adventure by Chiekh Hamidou Kane and Dead Men’s Path by Chinua Achebe

In literary tradition, some of the innovative and formative trends that characterise production and consumption of mimetic art in most third World countries of Africa focuses extensively on formation of the personal agents- specifically, the protagonist.This phenomenon has characterised most of the 21st Century texts and classed them under the literary sub-genre known as Bildungsroman. Bildungsroman is viewed primarily as a nineteenth-century literary phenomenon and the term is used so loosely and broadly that any novel – and even an epic poem like Iliad and Odyssey by Homer – that include elements of coming-of-age narrative might be labelled as a “Bildungsroman”.It is true that the type of novel commonly referred to as the “Bildungsroman” flourished in British literature in Victorian age, and was extremely popular among the realist writers. This accounts for early British publication of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and others who employed the pattern, for their novels of character formation into the fictional model of the Bildungsroman literature; a genre that consists of the literary treatment of the process of development and formation of a character in relation to society. As it were, the variety of Philosophical Bildungsroman is an advance variant of Bildung that offers the necessary extension and complexity to the phenomenological literary concern of Martin Heidegger, who posits the philosophical experience of the individual as the “Dasine”. Dasien is Heidegger’s philosophical concept which means “being there”. As a concept in existential philosophy, Heidegger employs it to explain the very concept of personhood. The philosophical quest in this case is attained through the process of “unconcealment” meaning “the disclosure of truth”. Meanwhile, in rethinking Ambiguous Adventure and Dead Men’s Path as typical Bildung texts, the real unconcealment will be extricated from the “thingly character or the constitutive elements” (Poetry Language Thought, 54)of the protagonists, so as to determine, and have a clear vision and beauty of a (realist) representation of these agent (s) maturing in relation to the modern demands of society woven in universalistic model of growth and development via social background. Thus, ‘‘beauty becomes one way in which truth occurs as unconcealdness’’ (The Origin of the Work of Art, 55). This is because in philosophical Bildung, the attainment of successful maturation remains the object of our inquiry and concern, and this is framed within a large-scale diachronic model of human existence; who engages in the act of “thinking a thought, this kind of thinking concerns the relation of being to man” (Letter to Humanism, 1) and remains the prototype of a true Bildung character and texts understudy, namely: Ambiguous Adventure and The Dead Men’s Path. Therefore, this paper opens up a new pattern of thought by investigating philosophical quest and growing up motif in this two novels using Heidegger’s notion of dasien and unconcealment.

Learning Out-of-Vocabulary Words in Intelligent Personal Agents

Semantic parsers play a vital role in intelligent agents to convert natural language instructions to an actionable logical form representation. However, after deployment, these parsers suffer from poor accuracy on encountering out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, or significant accuracy drop on previously supported instructions after retraining. Achieving both goals simultaneously is non-trivial. In this paper, we propose novel neural networks based parsers to learn OOV words; one incorporating a new hybrid paraphrase generation model, and an enhanced sequence-to-sequence model. Extensive experiments on both benchmark and custom datasets show our new parsers achieve significant accuracy gain on OOV words and phrases, and in the meanwhile learn OOV words while maintaining accuracy on previously supported instructions.