stockholm
Conversational Agents for Building Energy Efficiency -- Advising Housing Cooperatives in Stockholm on Reducing Energy Consumption
Ghani, Shadaab, Håkansson, Anne, Pasichnyi, Oleksii, Shahrokni, Hossein
Housing cooperative is a common type of multifamily building ownership in Sweden. Although this ownership structure grants decision-making autonomy, it places a burden of responsibility on cooperative's board members. Most board members lack the resources or expertise to manage properties and their energy consumption. This ignorance presents a unique challenge, especially given the EU directives that prohibit buildings rated as energy classes F and G by 2033. Conversational agents (CAs) enable human-like interactions with computer systems, facilitating human-computer interaction across various domains. In our case, CAs can be implemented to support cooperative members in making informed energy retrofitting and usage decisions. This paper introduces a Conversational agent system, called SPARA, designed to advise cooperatives on energy efficiency. SPARA functions as an energy efficiency advisor by leveraging the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework with a Language Model(LM). The LM generates targeted recommendations based on a knowledge base composed of email communications between professional energy advisors and cooperatives' representatives in Stockholm. The preliminary results indicate that SPARA can provide energy efficiency advice with precision 80\%, comparable to that of municipal energy efficiency (EE) experts. A pilot implementation is currently underway, where municipal EE experts are evaluating SPARA performance based on questions posed to EE experts by BRF members. Our findings suggest that LMs can significantly improve outreach by supporting stakeholders in their energy transition. For future work, more research is needed to evaluate this technology, particularly limitations to the stability and trustworthiness of its energy efficiency advice.
- Banking & Finance > Real Estate (0.71)
- Energy > Renewable (0.48)
- Law > Statutes (0.47)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning > Personal Assistant Systems (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Natural Language > Chatbot (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Neural Networks > Deep Learning (0.35)
Nobel Prize 2025: What they are, when will the awards be announced?
Nobel Prize 2025: What they are, when will the awards be announced? The Nobel Prize 2025 officially kicks off with the first award, for physiology or medicine, to be announced on Monday, setting the stage for a week of global anticipation. The full schedule, spanning from October 6 to 13, maps out a rapid succession of announcements: medicine, followed by physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and finally culminating with the economics prize next Monday. Here are the complete details of the schedule - and what to expect from this year's Nobel Prizes. What is the Nobel Prize?
- North America > United States (0.71)
- Asia > Pakistan (0.15)
- Asia > Middle East > Israel (0.15)
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Linear Correlation in LM's Compositional Generalization and Hallucination
Peng, Letian, An, Chenyang, Hao, Shibo, Dong, Chengyu, Shang, Jingbo
The generalization of language models (LMs) is undergoing active debates, contrasting their potential for general intelligence with their struggles with basic knowledge composition (e.g., reverse/transition curse). This paper uncovers the phenomenon of linear correlations in LMs during knowledge composition. For explanation, there exists a linear transformation between certain related knowledge that maps the next token prediction logits from one prompt to another, e.g., "X lives in the city of" $\rightarrow$ "X lives in the country of" for every given X. This mirrors the linearity in human knowledge composition, such as Paris $\rightarrow$ France. Our findings indicate that the linear transformation is resilient to large-scale fine-tuning, generalizing updated knowledge when aligned with real-world relationships, but causing hallucinations when it deviates. Empirical results suggest that linear correlation can serve as a potential identifier of LM's generalization. Finally, we show such linear correlations can be learned with a single feedforward network and pre-trained vocabulary representations, indicating LM generalization heavily relies on the latter.
- Europe > Austria > Vienna (0.14)
- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Leicestershire > Leicester (0.07)
- Asia > India > Maharashtra (0.06)
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How do Humans take an Object from a Robot: Behavior changes observed in a User Study
Khanna, Parag, Yadollahi, Elmira, Leite, Iolanda, Björkman, Mårten, Smith, Christian
To facilitate human-robot interaction and gain human trust, a robot should recognize and adapt to changes in human behavior. This work documents different human behaviors observed while taking objects from an interactive robot in an experimental study, categorized across two dimensions: pull force applied and handedness. We also present the changes observed in human behavior upon repeated interaction with the robot to take various objects.
- Europe > Sweden > Stockholm > Stockholm (0.06)
- Europe > Sweden > Vaestra Goetaland > Gothenburg (0.06)
- North America > United States > New York > New York County > New York City (0.04)
- Research Report (0.91)
- Questionnaire & Opinion Survey (0.80)
The Hottest Startups in Stockholm in 2024
Why is Stockholm, a capital city with a population less than one million, home to global brands such as Skype, Spotify, Klarna and Minecraft? "I think it has to do with the Swedish creed," says Ben Eliass, CEO of bodycare brand Estrid. "It's a nation which put emphasis on high-quality education and invested heavily in telecoms infrastructure in the nineties, so we all grew up with high-speed internet." "It allows people to take high risk and start companies, not needing to be too afraid of the downsides," says Max Junestrand, CEO of legaltech startup Leya. Indeed, Sweden has now produced more unicorns per capita than any other country in Europe, except for Estonia, earning a reputation as the Silicon Valley of Europe"Stockholm has a truly unique ecosystem where you can stand on the shoulders of giants," says Colin Treseler, CEO of Supernormal.
- Europe > Sweden > Stockholm > Stockholm (0.82)
- North America > United States > California (0.25)
- Europe > Estonia (0.25)
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- Information Technology (1.00)
- Energy > Power Industry (1.00)
- Banking & Finance (1.00)
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On a Scale-Invariant Approach to Bundle Recommendations in Candy Crush Saga
Katsarou, Styliani, Carminati, Francesca, Dlask, Martin, Braojos, Marta, Patra, Lavena, Perkins, Richard, Ling, Carlos Garcia, Paskevich, Maria
A good understanding of player preferences is crucial for increasing content relevancy, especially in mobile games. This paper illustrates the use of attentive models for producing item recommendations in a mobile game scenario. The methodology comprises a combination of supervised and unsupervised approaches to create user-level recommendations while introducing a novel scale-invariant approach to the prediction. The methodology is subsequently applied to a bundle recommendation in Candy Crush Saga. The strategy of deployment, maintenance, and monitoring of ML models that are scaled up to serve millions of users is presented, along with the best practices and design patterns adopted to minimize technical debt typical of ML systems. The recommendation approach is evaluated both offline and online, with a focus on understanding the increase in engagement, click- and take rates, novelty effects, recommendation diversity, and the impact of degenerate feedback loops. We have demonstrated that the recommendation enhances user engagement by 30% concerning click rate and by more than 40% concerning take rate. In addition, we empirically quantify the diminishing effects of recommendation accuracy on user engagement.
- Europe > Sweden > Stockholm > Stockholm (0.05)
- North America > United States > New York > New York County > New York City (0.04)
- North America > United States > District of Columbia > Washington (0.04)
- (3 more...)
- Information Technology > Data Science > Data Mining (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Statistical Learning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Neural Networks (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning > Personal Assistant Systems (0.96)
On the impact of robot personalization on human-robot interaction: A review
Yang, Jinyu, Vindolet, Camille, Olvera, Julio Rogelio Guadarrama, Cheng, Gordon
Firstly, the various strategies used to achieve personalization As robots are expected to become increasingly integrated into are briefly described. Secondly, the effects of personalization people's daily lives, it seems important to create more natural and known to date are discussed. They are presented along with the personalized interactions between humans and robots. Indeed, they personalized parameters, personalized features, used technology, should become companions that provide both mental and physical and use case they relate to. It is observed that various positive effects support. This type of interactions require an emotional intelligence have been discussed in the literature while possible negative from the robot side with a capacity to adapt to the user's state effects seem to require further investigation.
- Information Technology > Security & Privacy (1.00)
- Education (0.93)
- Health & Medicine > Therapeutic Area > Neurology (0.46)
- Health & Medicine > Therapeutic Area > Psychiatry/Psychology > Mental Health (0.34)
Testing Human-Robot Interaction in Virtual Reality: Experience from a Study on Speech Act Classification
Kaszuba, Sara, Sabbella, Sandeep Reddy, Leotta, Francesco, Serrarens, Pascal, Nardi, Daniele
In recent years, an increasing number of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) approaches have been implemented and evaluated in Virtual Reality (VR), as it allows to speed-up design iterations and makes it safer for the final user to evaluate and master the HRI primitives. However, identifying the most suitable VR experience is not straightforward. In this work, we evaluate how, in a smart agriculture scenario, immersive and non-immersive VR are perceived by users with respect to a speech act understanding task. In particular, we collect opinions and suggestions from the 81 participants involved in both experiments to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of these different experiences.
- Europe > Sweden > Stockholm > Stockholm (0.05)
- Europe > Italy > Lazio > Rome (0.05)
- North America > United States > New York > New York County > New York City (0.04)
- (3 more...)
- Health & Medicine (1.00)
- Education > Educational Setting (0.46)
- Food & Agriculture > Agriculture (0.35)
The Effect of Robot Skill Level and Communication in Rapid, Proximate Human-Robot Collaboration
Lee, Kin Man, Krishna, Arjun, Zaidi, Zulfiqar, Paleja, Rohan, Chen, Letian, Hedlund-Botti, Erin, Schrum, Mariah, Gombolay, Matthew
As high-speed, agile robots become more commonplace, these robots will have the potential to better aid and collaborate with humans. However, due to the increased agility and functionality of these robots, close collaboration with humans can create safety concerns that alter team dynamics and degrade task performance. In this work, we aim to enable the deployment of safe and trustworthy agile robots that operate in proximity with humans. We do so by 1) Proposing a novel human-robot doubles table tennis scenario to serve as a testbed for studying agile, proximate human-robot collaboration and 2) Conducting a user-study to understand how attributes of the robot (e.g., robot competency or capacity to communicate) impact team dynamics, perceived safety, and perceived trust, and how these latent factors affect human-robot collaboration (HRC) performance. We find that robot competency significantly increases perceived trust ($p<.001$), extending skill-to-trust assessments in prior studies to agile, proximate HRC. Furthermore, interestingly, we find that when the robot vocalizes its intention to perform a task, it results in a significant decrease in team performance ($p=.037$) and perceived safety of the system ($p=.009$).
- Europe > Sweden > Stockholm > Stockholm (0.05)
- North America > United States > Georgia > Fulton County > Atlanta (0.05)
- North America > United States > New York > New York County > New York City (0.04)
- (3 more...)
- Research Report > New Finding (0.93)
- Research Report > Experimental Study (0.67)
- Health & Medicine (1.00)
- Leisure & Entertainment > Sports > Tennis (0.68)
Crafting with a Robot Assistant: Use Social Cues to Inform Adaptive Handovers in Human-Robot Collaboration
Tian, Leimin, He, Kerry, Xu, Shiyu, Cosgun, Akansel, Kulić, Dana
We study human-robot handovers in a naturalistic collaboration scenario, where a mobile manipulator robot assists a person during a crafting session by providing and retrieving objects used for wooden piece assembly (functional activities) and painting (creative activities). We collect quantitative and qualitative data from 20 participants in a Wizard-of-Oz study, generating the Functional And Creative Tasks Human-Robot Collaboration dataset (the FACT HRC dataset), available to the research community. This work illustrates how social cues and task context Figure 1: Experimental space layout: the participant and inform the temporal-spatial coordination in human-robot the experimenter sat at the work space and storage space, handovers, and how human-robot collaboration is shaped by and respectively. The Fetch robot moves in between to pass in turn influences people's functional and creative activities.
- Europe > Sweden > Stockholm > Stockholm (0.05)
- Oceania > Australia (0.05)
- North America > United States > New York > New York County > New York City (0.04)
- Research Report > Experimental Study (0.93)
- Research Report > New Finding (0.68)