PANOLA: A Personal Assistant for Supporting Users in Preserving Privacy

Privacy is the right of individuals to keep personal information to themselves. When individuals use online systems, they should be given the right to decide what information they would like to share and what to keep private. When a piece of information pertains only to a single individual, preserving privacy is possible by providing the right access options to the user. However, when a piece of information pertains to multiple individuals, such as a picture of a group of friends or a collaboratively edited document, deciding how to share this information and with whom is challenging. The problem becomes more difficult when the individuals who are affected by the information have different, possibly conflicting privacy constraints. Resolving this problem requires a mechanism that takes into account the relevant individuals’ concerns to decide on the privacy configuration of information. Because these decisions need to be made frequently (i.e., per each piece of shared content), the mechanism should be automated. This article presents a personal assistant to help end-users with managing the privacy of their content. When some content that belongs to multiple users is about to be shared, the personal assistants of the users employ an auction-based privacy mechanism to regulate the privacy of the content. To do so, each personal assistant learns the preferences of its user over time and produces bids accordingly. Our proposed personal assistant is capable of assisting users with different personas and thus ensures that people benefit from it as they need it. Our evaluations over multiagent simulations with online social network content show that our proposed personal assistant enables privacy-respecting content sharing.

An explainable assistant for multiuser privacy

Multiuser Privacy (MP) concerns the protection of personal information in situations where such information is co-owned by multiple users. MP is particularly problematic in collaborative platforms such as online social networks (OSN). In fact, too often OSN users experience privacy violations due to conflicts generated by other users sharing content that involves them without their permission. Previous studies show that in most cases MP conflicts could be avoided, and are mainly due to the difficulty for the uploader to select appropriate sharing policies. For this reason, we present ELVIRA, the first fully explainable personal assistant that collaborates with other ELVIRA agents to identify the optimal sharing policy for a collectively owned content. An extensive evaluation of this agent through software simulations and two user studies suggests that ELVIRA, thanks to its properties of being role-agnostic, adaptive, explainable and both utility- and value-driven, would be more successful at supporting MP than other approaches presented in the literature in terms of (i) trade-off between generated utility and promotion of moral values, and (ii) users’ satisfaction of the explained recommended output.

Personal Assistant Robot

Since the boom in science and technology, humans have been trying to invent machines that could reduce their efforts in day to day activities. In this paper, we develop a personal assistant robot that could pick up objects and return it to the user. The robot is controlled using an android application in mobile phones. The robot can listen to user’s command and then respond in the best way possible. The user can command the robot to move to given location, capture images and pick objects. The robot is equipped with ultrasonic sensor and web camera that helps it to move to different location effectively. It is also equipped with sleds that play important role in object picking process. The robot uses a tiny YOLOv3 model which is rigorously trained on several images of the object. There are some possible improvements that can be achieved which could help this robot to be used in several other fields as well.

Assessment of Smart Home Assistants as an IoT

A smart home personal assistant technology is an intrinsic system, which incorporates many elements such as users, Smart Home Personal Assistants (SPA) devices, cloud, skill provider and other responsive devices. Even though Smart Home Personal Assistants give a robust security and privacy options, the devices face many weaknesses, which make the system vulnerable and can be comprised by adversaries, who can capitalize on limitations to gain access to delicate information and privacy of users. In this research, the aim is to assess how invention and innovation of security and SPA can be harnessed by users to interrelate with the system. Subsequently, this write-up will address both the problems related to the system and attempt to bring in solutions, which makes the technology more adaptable and versatile to all users. Initial studies show that some of the weakness underlying the technology include the open-nature of the voice channel, complexity of the architecture, software implications, and the utility of the technology to less proficient users. As a result, the study anticipates at solving the voice squatting attack, using the SPA intelligent assistant, incorporating a filer to filter the ultrasonic attack and noise as well as trying to assess the efficacy of the elements developed against the voice squatting attacks. The study found out that there is a need to mitigate the attacks on the blockchain technology and Natural Language Processors (NLP) to assure protection of SPA from attacks.

ALPHA : Personal Assistant in Chat Box

This research paper gives a comprehensive view of a virtual assistant named “Alpha” which is developed using the concept of Artificial intelligence, to aid in education, market, business and many other fields.This bot is programmed in python and is stored in raspberry pi, providing it a user friendly environment by making the bot move along with the user. A virtual assistant is an application that takes voice input, processes it and then gives output according to the input. Alpha is a real time, interactive bot and it is built on the latest technologies. It uses numerous python Libraries to help perform various functions that enable the Assistant to assist its user in day to day activities. The Assistant can convert text to speech and vice versa using gTTS and speech Recognition libraries respectively. It is a multilingual digital employee that speaks, listens and comprehends over 26 languages. It has other interesting features of face recognition and registration, smog sensing and alcohol sensing. It is also capable of making payments using the QR scanner feature added to it.

A Versatile Personal Assistant Dedicated to B/VIP

Today, there are different systems on the market that aim to help Blind or Visually Impaired People (B/VIP) to gain more independency and self-trust. From the classic white cane to various intelligent devices to guide people with vision problems, most of the systems are expensive, difficult to be used or with low efficiency. The subject is a very important one because, according to the World Health Organization, there are approximately 2.2 billion people in the world that have a vision impairment or blindness. Thus, the purpose of this work is to make a short survey on solutions available on the market, in order to develop a low-cost, efficient and easy-to-use system for both indoor and outdoor use. The versatile personal assistant dedicated to B/VIP aims to enhance their independence and also improved outdoor navigation. The smart warning system addressed here is an innovative device aiming to detect obstacles with the help of ultrasonic sensors and warning of their presence by means of a buzzer or vibration. The system, when used outdoor, also gives the possibility to send short message to the B/VIP’s own assistant, in the form of an SMS with the exact location of the B/VIP. Moreover, the SMS’ content can easily create the optimal route to the B/VIP’s location with the Google Maps support for a fast-time assistance.

Analyzing Determinants for Adoption of Intelligent Personal Assistant: An Empirical Study

With the accelerating advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, the rising demand for the intelligent personal assistant is expected to rapidly increase in the following decades. As customer loyalty has become a critical element in gaining a competitive advantage and many marketers pay great attention to it, this research aims to explore the factors that directly affect customer loyalty toward the intelligent personal assistant. The main motivation is to investigate and identify the direct effects that variables such as customer innovativeness and perceived value have on customer loyalty. Additionally, both product knowledge and corporate image will be examined as moderators. The results obtained demonstrate that perceived value has a positive influence on customer loyalty. Furthermore, product knowledge moderates the influence of functional and hedonic innovativeness on customer satisfaction. The study’s main contributions provide a better understanding of customer loyalty. This research aims to be viewed as a specific guide to provide effective practices that companies should implement to help them reallocate resources appropriately and enhance customer value creation. The results indicate that the higher the level of customer perceived value, the better the customer loyalty will be. The findings represent that corporate image has a positive moderating effect on the influence of customer innovativeness on perceived value. This study draws on the outcomes of administrative suggestions and recommends a few observational strategies to improve the monetary administration in the intelligent personal assistant industry.

Assistive Robot For Visually Impaired People

The proposed robot aims to serve as a personal assistant for visually impaired people in obstacle avoidance, in identifying the person (known or unknown) with whom they are interacting with and in navigating. The robot has a special feature in truly locating the subject’s location using GPS. The novel feature of this robot is to identify people with whom the subject interacts. Facial detection and identification in real-time has been a challenge and achieved with accurate image processing using viola jones and SURF algorithms. An obstacle avoidance design has been implanted in the system with many sensors to guide in the correct path. Hence, the robot is a fusion of providing the best of the comfort and safety with minimal cost.