Automatisering av kundtjänster genom implementering av chatbotar blir allt vanligare för att kunna erbjuda kunder en mer tillgänglig och effektiv service. Vid implementering av chatbotar i kundtjänster lämnas den mänskliga kontrollen och kundens upplevelse delvis över till ett digitalt system, vilket ställer krav på utformning av chatbotars dialoger. Syftet med arbetet är att ta fram en artefakt i form av en chatbot och utveckla dess dialog för en framtida implementation i en kundtjänst. Arbetet ämnar att ta fram designprinciper för utformning och utveckling av chatbotar och deras dialoger i en kundtjänstmiljö. Den forskningsmetod som tillämpades vid utvecklingen av artefakten var Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM). En litteraturstudie genomfördes och data samlades in genom möten samt en intervju med det företag som varit uppdragsgivare till arbetet. Arbetet resulterade i en demosida innehållande en chatbot, samt en sida för administratörer där de har en översikt av chatbotens genomförda interaktioner. Tre designprinciper togs även fram för utveckling av chatbotars dialog inom kundtjänst, vilka blev arbetets bidrag. De slutsatser som identifierades var att en chatbot bör kontrollera att användaren fått svar på sitt kundtjänstärende, en chatbot bör erbjuda mänsklig service vid missförstånd, en chatbot kan inte ersätta mänsklig service fullt ut samt att en chatbot bör ha en strukturerad datainsamling av genomförda interaktioner för att kunna utveckla och förbättra chatbotens dialog. / Automation of customer service through implementation of chatbots is becoming increasingly common in order to provide customers with a more accessible and efficient service. When implementing chatbots in customer services, human control and the customer experience are partially shifted to a digital system, which puts requirement on the chatbot’s dialogue. The purpose of this report is to develop an artifact for a client. The artifact is a web page containing a chatbot. The report aims to develop design principles for development of chatbots and their dialogues in a customer service. The research method used in the development of the artifact was Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM). A literature study was conducted, and data was collected through meetings and an interview with the client. The report resulted in a demo page containing a chatbot and a page for administrators with an overview of saved chats. Three design principles were also formulated for developing chatbots in customer service, which is the contribution of the report. The conclusions identified were that a chatbot should check that the user got the correct answer, a chatbot should offer human service in case of misunderstanding, a chatbot cannot fully replace human service and a chatbot should have a structured data collection of completed interactions for developing and improvement of the chatbot’s dialogue.

IBM Watson is on the verge of becoming a milestone in computer science as it is using a new technology that relies on cognitive systems. IBM Watson is able to understand questions in natural language and give proper answers. The use of cognitive computing in parallel programming is an open research issue. Therefore, the objective of this project is to investigate how IBM Watson can help in parallel programming by using the Dialog Service. In order to answer our research question an application has been built based on the IBM Watson Dialog Service and a survey has been carried out. The results of our research demonstrate that the developed application offers valuable answers to the questions asked by a programmer and the survey reveals that students would be interested in using it.

The implementation of chatbots and service services is becoming more common. The reason for this is that they are constantly available to answer questions, no matter what time it is. To make one chatbot is not just to write questions and specific answers. Communicating with one chatbot should, as much as possible, look like communicating with another human. The purpose of this report is to create a chatbot that will be used at Luleå university of technology and that will answer questions about system science. Furthermore, the goal is to investigate which design principles should be implemented, their possible concretization, when making chatbots, and possibly coming to new principles. The method used to make the chatbot is Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM). DSRM focuses on solving the problem by creating an IT artifact, which in this case is a chatbot. The result of this work is a created chatbot and design principles that were implemented during the development process.

O mercado cinematográfico pode ser caracterizado como uma indústria de entretenimento com a produção de bens de informação que são também bens de experiência, cuja qualidade só é conhecida após o consumo. Deste modo, a revisão crítica se torna importante para induzir seu consumo, fornecendo previamente algum grau de informação sobre a qualidade do bem. Segue-se o trabalho de Reinstein e Snyder (2005) para determinar se as revisões críticas conduzidas por consumidores e por críticos profissionais online afetam o tempo de exibição de filmes no mercado americano de cinema, medido em quantidades de semanas, conforme modelos de duração/sobrevivência na literatura. Para esta finalidade foi gerado, a partir de sites de cinemas americanos (Box Office Mojo e Rotten Tomatoes), um banco de dados extremamente rico com informações semanais de todos os filmes disponíveis no cinema americano de 2004 a 2015. Especificamente, investigou-se os efeitos das revisões críticas de críticos profissionais de primeira linha (Tops) e de consumidores, conforme a média das notas atribuídas na semana de lançamento de cada filme. No que se refere à avaliação dos consumidores foi aplicada a computação afetiva, que reconhece o sentimento e a emoção em suas resenhas online para captar o efeito boca a boca potencializado pelas mídias sociais e fornecendo, portanto, uma análise mais profunda do boca a boca online. O estudo controla por possíveis problemas de endogeneidade decorrente de simultaneidade, usando as críticas somente antes e durante a semana de lançamento dos filmes. Os resultados sugerem que os críticos profissionais exercem grande influência no tempo de duração dos filmes em cartaz, bem como a positividade dos consumidores em relação ao filme. No entanto, o efeito dos críticos profissionais é em média 3 vezes maior do que dos consumidores. Adicionalmente, pode-se observar que algumas emoções afetam a expectativa de vida dos filmes a depender do gênero do mesmo / The movie market may be considered as entertainment industry, which produces experience goods that is also information goods, whose quality is only known only after consumption. Thus, critical reviews becomes important to induce consumption, since it provides some level of information about product quality. We follow Reinstein and Snyder (2005) works in order to determine if experts and consumers online critical reviews affect the survival time of movies at the American movie market, measured by number of weeks, according to survival analysis models in the literature. For this purpose, an extremely rich database with weekly information on all the films available in American cinema from 2004 to 2015 was generated from American movie sites (Box Office Mojo and Rotten Tomatoes). Specifically, we investigate the effects of critical reviews from top professionals and from consumers, according to the average ratings assigned in each movie\'s release week. As far as consumer assessment was concerned, affective computing was applied, which recognizes the sentiment (sentiment analysis) and emotion (emotion mining) in their online reviews to capture the word-of-mouth effect boosted by social media. The study controls for possible problems of endogeneity due to simultaneity, using the criticisms before and during the week of release of the films. The results suggest that the professional critics exert a great influence on the duration of the films in exhibition, as well as the positivity of the consumers in relation to the film. Thus, the effect of professionals are 5 times greater, generally, than the effect of the consumer critics. Additionally, it can be observed that some emotions affect movie life expectancy depending on the its genre

O mercado cinematográfico pode ser caracterizado como uma indústria de entretenimento com a produção de bens de informação que são também bens de experiência, cuja qualidade só é conhecida após o consumo. Deste modo, a revisão crítica se torna importante para induzir seu consumo, fornecendo previamente algum grau de informação sobre a qualidade do bem. Segue-se o trabalho de Reinstein e Snyder (2005) para determinar se as revisões críticas conduzidas por consumidores e por críticos profissionais online afetam o tempo de exibição de filmes no mercado americano de cinema, medido em quantidades de semanas, conforme modelos de duração/sobrevivência na literatura. Para esta finalidade foi gerado, a partir de sites de cinemas americanos (Box Office Mojo e Rotten Tomatoes), um banco de dados extremamente rico com informações semanais de todos os filmes disponíveis no cinema americano de 2004 a 2015. Especificamente, investigou-se os efeitos das revisões críticas de críticos profissionais de primeira linha (Tops) e de consumidores, conforme a média das notas atribuídas na semana de lançamento de cada filme. No que se refere à avaliação dos consumidores foi aplicada a computação afetiva, que reconhece o sentimento e a emoção em suas resenhas online para captar o efeito boca a boca potencializado pelas mídias sociais e fornecendo, portanto, uma análise mais profunda do boca a boca online. O estudo controla por possíveis problemas de endogeneidade decorrente de simultaneidade, usando as críticas somente antes e durante a semana de lançamento dos filmes. Os resultados sugerem que os críticos profissionais exercem grande influência no tempo de duração dos filmes em cartaz, bem como a positividade dos consumidores em relação ao filme. No entanto, o efeito dos críticos profissionais é em média 3 vezes maior do que dos consumidores. Adicionalmente, pode-se observar que algumas emoções afetam a expectativa de vida dos filmes a depender do gênero do mesmo / The movie market may be considered as entertainment industry, which produces experience goods that is also information goods, whose quality is only known only after consumption. Thus, critical reviews becomes important to induce consumption, since it provides some level of information about product quality. We follow Reinstein and Snyder (2005) works in order to determine if experts and consumers online critical reviews affect the survival time of movies at the American movie market, measured by number of weeks, according to survival analysis models in the literature. For this purpose, an extremely rich database with weekly information on all the films available in American cinema from 2004 to 2015 was generated from American movie sites (Box Office Mojo and Rotten Tomatoes). Specifically, we investigate the effects of critical reviews from top professionals and from consumers, according to the average ratings assigned in each movie\'s release week. As far as consumer assessment was concerned, affective computing was applied, which recognizes the sentiment (sentiment analysis) and emotion (emotion mining) in their online reviews to capture the word-of-mouth effect boosted by social media. The study controls for possible problems of endogeneity due to simultaneity, using the criticisms before and during the week of release of the films. The results suggest that the professional critics exert a great influence on the duration of the films in exhibition, as well as the positivity of the consumers in relation to the film. Thus, the effect of professionals are 5 times greater, generally, than the effect of the consumer critics. Additionally, it can be observed that some emotions affect movie life expectancy depending on the its genre

Cognitive Computing is a new and quickly advancing technology. In thelast decade Cognitive Computing has been used to assist researchers in theirendeavors in many different scientific fields such as Health & medicine,Education, Marketing, Psychology and Financial Services. On the otherhand, Parallel programming is a more complex concept than sequentialprogramming. The additional complexity of Parallel Programming isintroduced by its nature that requires implementations of more complexalgorithms and it introduces additional concepts to the developers, namelythe communication between the processes (Distributed memory systems)that execute the parallel program and their synchronization (Share memorysystems). As a result of this additional complexity, a lot of novice developersare reserved in their attempts to implement parallel programs. The objectiveof this research project was to investigate whether we can assist parallelprogramming process through cognitive computing solutions. In order toachieve our objective, the MPI Assistant, a Q&A system has been developedand a case study has been carried out to determine our application’s efficiencyin our attempt to assist parallel programming developers. The case studyshowed that our MPI Assistant system indeed helped developers reduce thetime they spend to develop their solutions, but not improve the quality ofthe program or its efficiency as these improvements require features that areout of this research project’s scope. However, the case study had limitednumber of participants, which may affect our results’ reliability. As a nextstep in our attempt to determine if cognitive computing technologies are ableto assist developers in their parallel programming development, we movedto investigate if cognitive solutions can extract better and more completeresponses compared to our manually-created responses that we created forthe MPI Assistant. We have experimented with 2 different approaches to theproblem. An approach where we manually created responses for the MPIAssistant, and an approach where we investigated if cognitive solutions canautomatically extract better and complete responses. We compared the qualityof the latter automatic responses with the quality of the former which weremanually created.

The thesis is focused on the analysis of presently offered products supporting Business Intelligence (BI) which are affordable for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Current BI solutions available to SMEs are mostly offered via Cloud computing, specifically in the form of Software as a Service (SaaS) as it requires low initial acquisition costs. The objectives of this thesis are to analyse the work in applications for BI in cloud that can be used by SMEs and to analyse in detail the comparison the worldwide extended reporting tools distributed as SaaS in the lower price category. The theoretical part provides a description of the Cloud computing and the BI system. In the practical part are selected following products: IBM Watson Analytics, Qlik Sense Cloud, Zoho Reports, Tableau Public and Microsoft Power BI. Practical testing of these applications was based on evaluation of the selected metrics with weights calculated by using the Fuller's triangle. Analyses and the information form the basis for comparison of selected applications. The contribution of this thesis is in discovering the strengths and weaknesses of these BI solutions. The output of this thesis can be used as a source for the selection of BI applications for SMEs.

Chat-bots are computer programs designed to conduct textual or audible conversations with a single user. The job of a chat-bot is to be able to find the best response for any request the user issues. The best response is considered to answer the question and contain relevant information while following grammatical and lexical rules. Modern chat-bots often have trouble accomplishing all these tasks. State-of-the-art approaches, such as deep learning, and large datasets help chat-bots tackle this problem better. While there is a number of different approaches that can be applied for different kind of bots, datasets of suitable size are not always available. In this work, we introduce and evaluate a method of expanding the size of datasets. This will allow chat-bots, in combination with a good learning algorithm, to achieve higher precision while handling their tasks. The expansion method uses the continual learning approach that allows the bot to expand its own dataset while holding conversations with its users. In this work we test continual learning with IBM Watson Assistant chat-bot as well as a custom case study chat-bot implementation. We conduct the testing using a smaller and a larger datasets to find out if continual learning stays effective as the dataset size increases. The results show that the more conversations the chat-bot holds, the better it gets at guessing the intent of the user. They also show that continual learning works well for larger and smaller datasets, but the effect depends on the specifics of the chat-bot implementation. While continual learning makes good results better, it also turns bad results into worse ones, thus the chat-bot should be manually calibrated should the precision of the original results, measured before the expansion, decrease.

The master’s thesis deal with design and realization of measuring station, which process data from environmental sensors in IoT environment. Thesis includes research of sensors, cloud services for IoT, microcontrollers and environmental data available online. Thesis contains detailed procedure for realization of designed system, including code description for microcontrollers STM32W55 and STM32 B-L475E-IOT01A2 Discovery kit, configuration of IBM Watson IoT Platform cloud service and procedure for correct programming of Node-RED application responsible for logic of whole system. Source code, which might be used for simple implementation of designed system, is attached to the master’s thesis.

Cieľom práce je navrhnúť a vytvoriť hlasom ovládaného asistenta(voicebota), ktorý bude ľahko nasaditeľný na webovú stránku. Používateľom tak bude poskytnutý moderný spôsob, ako prirodzene komunikovať cez internetový prehliadač. Hlavný dôraz je kladený na synchronizáciu medzi hlasovým asistentom a obsahom na webovej stránke. Synchronizácia je dosiahnutá obojsmerným prenosom hlasu a textových príkazov medzi klientom a serverom. Na to je použitá technológia WebRTC v kombinácií so signalizačným protokolom SIP. Práca sa zaoberá oblasťami ako VoIP telefonovanie, počítačové siete a strojové učenie(proprietárne rečové technológie od Phonexie). Benefitom nasadenia hlasového asistenta je zníženie nákladov na odchádzajúce hovory pre klientov, odľahčenie agentov na call centrách pri odpovedaní na často kladené otázky a zvýšenie záujmu zákazníkov vďaka použitiu nových technológií.