We have sought to understand the current state of the art on smart tourism and on smart cities. Furthermore, we have sought to understand community awareness and the will to embrace innovation, as they are decisive factors to acquire base knowledge and overcome barriers in (soon to be) overpopulated cities and for those who are looking for a limited time culture experience -known as tourists. We live in an age where technology is increasingly present in our lives and provides us solutions to societal problems. Problems such as traffic, infrastructure and natural resources management, or even increasing citizens' participation in governance, bringing them closer to decision-making. The objective is to understand the current level of people's knowledge about the impact that technologies have on the society in which we live and their perception of the usefulness in solving these same problems. Therefore, an anonymous questionnaire was carried out (176 valid answers were received), as well as a focus group with two experts on the Smart Cities subject. What future is brought by those who live and breathe technology? Are people willing to accept a paradigm shift?
Communication is part of our everyday life and our ability to communicate can have a significant role in a variety of contexts in our personal, academic, and professional lives. For long, the characterization of what is a good communicator has been subject to research and debate by several areas, particularly in Education, with a focus on improving the performance of teachers. In this context, the literature suggests that the ability to communicate is not only defined by the verbal component, but also by a plethora of non-verbal contributions providing redundant or complementary information, and, sometimes, being the message itself. However, even though we can recognize a good or bad communicator, objectively, little is known about what aspects -and to what extent -define the quality of a presentation. The goal of this work is to create the grounds to support the study of the defining characteristics of a good communicator in a more systematic and objective form. To this end, we conceptualize and provide a first prototype for a computational approach to characterize the different elements that are involved in communication, from audiovisual data, illustrating the outcomes and applicability of the proposed methods on a video database of public speakers.
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