How to Do Things With Words

Part I. Introduction: 1. Economic perspectives Part II. Media-Dependent Entertainment: 2. Movie macroeconomics 3. Making and marketing movies 4. Financial accounting in movies and television 5. Music 6. Broadcasting 7. Cable 8. Publishing and New Media 9. Toys and Games Part III. Live Entertainment: 10. Gaming and wagering 11. Sports 12. Performing arts and culture 13. Amusement/theme parks Part IV. Roundup: 14. Epilogue.

Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis

Computer systems commonly cache the values of variables to gain efficiency. In applications where the goal is to track attributes of a continuously moving or deforming physical system over time, caching relations between variables works better than caching individual values. The reason is that, as the system evolves, such relationships are more stable than the values of individual variables.Kinetic data structures (KDSs) are a novel formal framework for designing and analyzing sets of assertions to cache about the environment, so that these assertion sets are at once relatively stable and tailored to facilitate or trivialize the computation of the attribute of interest. Formally, a KDS is a mathematical proof animated through time, proving the validity of a certain computation for the attribute of interest. KDSs have rigorous associated measures of performance and their design shares many qualities with that of classical data structures.The KDS framework has led to many new and promising algorithms in applications where the efficient modeling of motion is essential. Among these are collision detection for moving rigid and deformable bodies, connectivity maintenace in ad-hoc networks, local environment tracking for mobile agents, and visibility/occlusion maintenance. This talk will survey the general ideas behind KDSs and illustrate their application to simple geometric problems that arise in virtual and physical environments.

Data structures for mobile data (invited talk) (abstract only)

Text messaging-based conversational agents (CAs), popularly called chatbots, received significant attention in the last two years. However, chatbots are still in their nascent stage: They have a low penetration rate as 84% of the Internet users have not used a chatbot yet. Hence, understanding the usage patterns of first-time users can potentially inform and guide the design of future chatbots. In this paper, we report the findings of a study with 16 first-time chatbot users interacting with eight chatbots over multiple sessions on the Facebook Messenger platform. Analysis of chat logs and user interviews revealed that users preferred chatbots that provided either a 'human-like' natural language conversation ability, or an engaging experience that exploited the benefits of the familiar turn-based messaging interface. We conclude with implications to evolve the design of chatbots, such as: clarify chatbot capabilities, sustain conversation context, handle dialog failures, and end conversations gracefully.

Evaluating and Informing the Design of Chatbots

What began as a quest for artificial general intelligence branched into several pursuits, including intelligent assistants developed by tech companies and task-oriented chatbots that deliver more information or services in specific domains. Progress quickened with the spread of low-latency networking, then accelerated dramatically a few years ago. In 2016, task-focused chatbots became a centerpiece of machine intelligence, promising interfaces that are more engaging than robotic answering systems and that can accommodate our increasingly phone-based information needs. Hundreds of thousands were built. Creating successful non-trivial chatbots proved more difficult than anticipated. Some developers now design for human-chatbot (humbot) teams, with people handling difficult queries. This paper describes the conversational agent space, difficulties in meeting user expectations, potential new design approaches, uses of human-bot hybrids, and implications for the ultimate goal of creating software with general intelligence.

Chatbots, Humbots, and the Quest for Artificial General Intelligence

Many conversational agents (CAs) are developed to answer users' questions in a specialized domain. In everyday use of CAs, user experience may extend beyond satisfying information needs to the enjoyment of conversations with CAs, some of which represent playful interactions. By studying a field deployment of a Human Resource chatbot, we report on users' interest areas in conversational interactions to inform the development of CAs. Through the lens of statistical modeling, we also highlight rich signals in conversational interactions for inferring user satisfaction with the instrumental usage and playful interactions with the agent. These signals can be utilized to develop agents that adapt functionality and interaction styles. By contrasting these signals, we shed light on the varying functions of conversational interactions. We discuss design implications for CAs, and directions for developing adaptive agents based on users' conversational behaviors.

All Work and No Play

We address the problem of efficient maintenance of the answer to a new type of query: Continuous Maximizing Range- Sum (Co-MaxRS) for moving objects trajectories. The traditional static/spatial MaxRS problem finds a location for placing the centroid of a given (axes-parallel) rectangle R so that the sum of the weights of the point-objects from a given set O inside the interior of R is maximized. However, moving objects continuously change their locations over time, so the MaxRS solution for a particular time instant need not be a solution at another time instant. In this paper, we devise the conditions under which a particular MaxRS solution may cease to be valid and a new optimal location for the query-rectangle R is needed. More specifically, we solve the problem of maintaining the trajectory of the centroid of R. In addition, we propose efficient pruning strategies (and corresponding data structures) to speed-up the process of maintaining the accuracy of the Co-MaxRS solution. We prove the correctness of our approach and present experimental evaluations over both real and synthetic datasets, demonstrating the benefits of the proposed methods.

https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10040589

Towards Efficient Maintenance of Continuous MaxRS Query for Trajectories.

We address the problem of maintaining the correct answer-sets to the Conditional Maximizing Range-Sum (C-MaxRS) query in spatial data streams. Given a set of (possibly weighted) 2D point objects, the traditional MaxRS problem determines an optimal placement for an axes-parallel rectangle r so that the number -- or, the weighted sum -- of objects in its interior is maximized. In many practical settings, the objects from a particular set -- e.g., restaurants -- can be of distinct types -- e.g., fast-food, Asian, etc. The C-MaxRS problem deals with maximizing the overall sum, given class-based existential constraints, i.e., a lower bound on the count of objects of interests from particular classes. We first propose an efficient algorithm to the static C-MaxRS query, and extend the solution to handle dynamic (data streams) settings. Our experiments over datasets of up to 100,000 objects show that the proposed solutions provide significant efficiency benefits.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3085504.3085517

Class-based Conditional MaxRS Query in Spatial Data Streams

This work presents a system for augmenting the functionality of Yelp-like recommendation sites by enabling users to search for places bounded by travel-time when using public transportation, and modifying recommendations based on updated weather conditions. Using public transport, although is cheaper and efficient, entails that only fixed places of boarding/exiting may be used which, in turn, implies walking to (from) a particular location from (to) a given station. Given the impact of the weather on the mood and activities, preferences for a certain type of services may need to be dynamically adjusted based on the current weather or the near-future forecast, modulo travel-routes to preferred locations. In this work, we develop a model to predict a user's preferred mode of transport (car, or public transit) from their old check-ins and incorporate the weather context into the recommendation process. We use event-based modeling to control the extent of walking depending on user-defined tolerance information and live weather conditions. We implemented a web application (both desktop and mobile platforms), utilizing existing tools such as Google Maps Direction API and Open Weather Map API for retrieving real-time information.

Incorporating Weather Updates for Public Transportation Users of Recommendation Systems

This work presents a distributed implementation for processing Maximizing Range Sum (MaxRS) query in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). MaxRS query is useful in many spatially-distributed event monitoring and target tracking applications. Given the location and current readings of the nodes, and a rectangle R, MaxRS finds a location of R that maximizes the sum of the readings of all the nodes covered by R. Our system performs MaxRS query in a user-specified time-interval γ and using the result obtained, attempts to maintain a certain degree of energy conservation in the WSN, based on a user-defined threshold δ. Since centralized processing of the raw readings and subsequently determining the MaxRS may incur significant communication overheads, we developed a distributed algorithm to compute MaxRS. We implemented our system in a heterogeneous WSN consisting of TelosB and SunSPOT motes, and illustrate the end-user tools: GUI for specifying required parameters, and real-time visualization of MaxRS solutions and estimated network energy consumption.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2809695.2817863

Muhammed Mas-ud Hussain

Papers

All Work and No Play

Towards Efficient Maintenance of Continuous MaxRS Query for Trajectories.

Class-based Conditional MaxRS Query in Spatial Data Streams

Incorporating Weather Updates for Public Transportation Users of Recommendation Systems

Demo: Distributed MaxRS in Wireless Sensor Networks