Multimodal Agents For Ageing And Multicultural Societies

This book aims to explore and discuss theories and technologies for the development of socially competent and culture-aware embodied conversational agents for elderly care. To tackle the challenges in ageing societies, this book was written by experts who have a background in assistive technologies for elderly care, culture-aware computing, multimodal dialogue, social robotics and synthetic agents. Chapter 1 presents a vision of an intelligent agent to illustrate the current challenges for the design and development of adaptive systems. Chapter 2 examines how notions of trust and empathy may be applied to human–robot interaction and how it can be used to create the next generation of emphatic agents, which address some of the pressing issues in multicultural ageing societies. Chapter 3 discusses multimodal machine learning as an approach to enable more effective and robust modelling technologies and to develop socially competent and culture-aware embodied conversational agents for elderly care. Chapter 4 explores the challenges associated with real-world field tests and deployments. Chapter 5 gives a short introduction to socio-cognitive language processing that describes the idea of coping with everyday language, irony, sarcasm, humor, paralinguistic information such as the physical and mental state and traits of the dialogue partner, and social aspects. This book grew out of the Shonan Meeting seminar entitled “Multimodal Agents for Ageing and Multicultural Societies” held in 2018 in Japan. Researchers and practitioners will be helped to understand the emerging field and the identification of promising approaches from a variety of disciplines such as human–computer interaction, artificial intelligence, modelling, and learning.

Family caregiving affects millions of Americans every day, in all walks of life. At least 17.7 million individuals in the United States are caregivers of an older adult with a health or functional limitation. The nation's family caregivers provide the lion's share of long-term care for our older adult population. They are also central to older adults' access to and receipt of health care and community-based social services. Yet the need to recognize and support caregivers is among the least appreciated challenges facing the aging U.S. population. Families Caring for an Aging America examines the prevalence and nature of family caregiving of older adults and the available evidence on the effectiveness of programs, supports, and other interventions designed to support family caregivers. This report also assesses and recommends policies to address the needs of family caregivers and to minimize the barriers that they encounter in trying to meet the needs of older adults.

What will it be like to admit Artificial Companions into our society? How will they change our relations with each other? How important will they be in the emotional and practical lives of their owners – since we know that people became emotionally dependent even on simple devices like the Tamagotchi? How much social life might they have in contacting each other? The contributors to this book discuss the possibility and desirability of some form of long-term computer Companions now being a certainty in the coming years. It is a good moment to consider, from a set of wide interdisciplinary perspectives, both how we shall construct them technically as well as their personal philosophical and social consequences. By Companions we mean conversationalists or confidants – not robots – but rather computer software agents whose function will be to get to know their owners over a long period. Those may well be elderly or lonely, and the contributions in the book focus not only on assistance via the internet (contacts, travel, doctors etc.) but also on providing company and Companionship, by offering aspects of real personalization.

Books on intercultural communication are rarely written with an intercultural readership in mind. In contrast, this multinational team of authors has put together an introduction to communicating across cultures that uses examples and case studies from around the world. The book further covers essential new topics, including international conflict, social networking, migration, and the effects technology and mass media play in the globalization of communication. Written to be accessible for international students too, this text situates communication theory in a truly global perspective. Each chapter brings to life the links between theory and practice and between the global and the local, introducing key theories and their practical applications. Along the way, you will be supported with first-rate learning resources, including: • theory corners with concise, boxed-out digests of key theoretical concepts • case illustrations putting the main points of each chapter into context • learning objectives, discussion questions, key terms and further reading framing each chapter and stimulating further discussion • a companion website containing resources for instructors, including multiple choice questions, presentation slides, exercises and activities, and teaching notes. This book will not merely guide you to success in your studies, but will teach you to become a more critical consumer of information and understand the influence of your own culture on how you view yourself and others.

Drug overdose, driven largely by overdose related to the use of opioids, is now the leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. The ongoing opioid crisis lies at the intersection of two public health challenges: reducing the burden of suffering from pain and containing the rising toll of the harms that can arise from the use of opioid medications. Chronic pain and opioid use disorder both represent complex human conditions affecting millions of Americans and causing untold disability and loss of function. In the context of the growing opioid problem, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched an Opioids Action Plan in early 2016. As part of this plan, the FDA asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene a committee to update the state of the science on pain research, care, and education and to identify actions the FDA and others can take to respond to the opioid epidemic, with a particular focus on informing FDA's development of a formal method for incorporating individual and societal considerations into its risk-benefit framework for opioid approval and monitoring.

This open access book provides a comprehensive perspective on the concept of ageism, its origins, the manifestation and consequences of ageism, as well as ways to respond to and research ageism. The book represents a collaborative effort of researchers from over 20 countries and a variety of disciplines, including, psychology, sociology, gerontology, geriatrics, pharmacology, law, geography, design, engineering, policy and media studies. The contributors have collaborated to produce a truly stimulating and educating book on ageism which brings a clear overview of the state of the art in the field. The book serves as a catalyst to generate research, policy and public interest in the field of ageism and to reconstruct the image of old age and will be of interest to researchers and students in gerontology and geriatrics.

This Companion provides an authoritative overview of how cultural diversity is managed in Asia. Although the Asian context appears at first sight to be irreconcilably divergent in terms of diversity management approaches, the contributing authors seek to explore thematic and geographical demarcations of the notions of cultural diversity and equality at work. Managing Cultural Diversity in Asia not only examines cultural diversity management in a particular geography but also makes a distinct contribution to the wider theory of managing diversity and equality by revealing the significance of context, time and place in framing policies and practices of management. With empirical and conceptual contributions from eminent scholars from across the Asian continent as well as the Asian diaspora, this volume highlights practices of equality and diversity management in settings across Asia and reveals the key drivers and implications of such practices. This important and path-breaking Companion will be an invaluable resource for both undergraduate and research-based postgraduate students on international and comparative human resource management, employment relations and industrial relations courses.