Project

The ASSD project - Social Driven Semantic Accelerators for the generation of glocal tourist itineraries - provides research and development activities aimed at creating a prototype in Italian and English languages able to generate tourist itineraries on the Calabrian territory through social media monitoring.
The research project, funded by the European social fund (ESF) and the European fund for regional development (ERDF), is developed in particular in the context of Axis 1 of the POR Calabria 2014-2020 program which aims to promote research and of innovation as an engine for regional development and local competitiveness.

The project aims to create and experiment an application's prototype that will be able to offer tourists routes to reach certain points of interest located in Calabria. These itineraries will be accessible to users also with the help of an innovative conversational tool, such as the chat-bot.

In a first step, activities will be focused on developing models and semantic algorithms for the automatic recognition of historical, artistic, cultural, food and wines, etc points of interest within to calabrian territory throgh social media monitoring, i.e. informations extraction form social media. Subsequently, AI engines will be committed to convert informations from social networks to points of interest with a GPS coordinates. The itinerary generation and the space-time sustainability verification will be carried out by operational research's algorithms and models.

Users will be profiled automatically through synchronization of their social accounts or through a chat-bot and will recieve suggestions about itineraries in line with their expressed preferences. The chat-bot in italian, english and partially in chinese is one of the most foundamental components of the research project. The standard user interface allows to converse with users through written text or voice in order to answer questions, give infos and advices, as well as gather informations and user's requests.

The final activities will concern the configuration of the prototype so that it can show generated itineraries and the experimentation of the prototype by identifying a sample of users with witch to check if the application's output that matches the expected output in the research phase.

From the point of view of the territorial development, the project purpose is to increase the tourism sector in Calabria, with particular attention to promotion of proximity tourism, from the coast to the cultural heritage including also less visited locations, and the co-creation of new experiencing and cognitive paths, through technologies and digital applications.
The main goals of the research project consist in designing and testing of the technologies needed to achieve project's outputs, in particular:

• definition and implementation of semantic models and algorithms for the automatic recognition of points of interest through social media monitoring and for supporting the consultation of itineraries via chat-bot;
• creation of artificial intelligence engines for the conversion of unstructured information from social networks into points of interest with GPS coordinates and capable of profiling users through synchronization with social networks and recognition of the most suitable tourist patterns to propose the itineraries that match users' tastes and expectations;
• definition and implementation of operational research models and algorithms for the self-generation of tourist itineraries and the verification of space-time sustainability;
• definition of user profiling models via chat-bot.

The expected results from this project's realization, which concern all the SMEs involved can be summarized in the following points.

• Increasing the degree of innovation of the company: having a range of research methodologies and tools that can be used for subsequent (post-project) steps of pre-competitive development and / or any industrialization of innovative products.
• Industrialization: having an application capable of penetrating countless markets and tourism areas through the self-generation of itineraries and the diffusion of multilingual conversational interfaces.
• Engineering of "social driven" artificial intelligence engines so that they are able to self-train in different semantic and territorial contexts, thus defining glocalised itineraries and paths.
• Increase of the intrinsic value of the individual company components thanks to the availability of the models, prototypes and products developed, thus favoring any selling and / or re-capitalization of theme.