Building smart territories faces challenges for more efficient services and facilities, as well as supporting the intelligent development of the tourism industry in terms of data analysis and prediction, automation and intelligence, personalization and customization, intelligent decision support, and exploration. In this sense, this paper explores the development of an intelligent tourism agent based on computational intelligence and virtual technologies. It combines an immersive 360° virtual tour with a virtual assistant designed to interact in natural language using a large-scale language model (LLM) and natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) techniques, integrating dynamically generated responses using natural language generation (NLG) and transmitted to the user using text-to-speech (TTS) technologies. The assistant is a cognitive entity capable of interpreting contextual questions about the tour and offering precise and personalized answers. Outcomes shown a positive impact on the tourist perception of the environment and the contextual acquisition of knowledge about the natural space, therefore this tool demonstrate how virtual assistant and NLP can be applied to the development of immersive solutions for educational and sustainable tourism, promoting accessibility, personalized interaction, and the digital enhancement of natural spaces.
The results are packaged in the Greenfield Startup Model (GSM), which explains the priority of startups to release the product as quickly as possible, and the need to shorten time-to-market, by speeding up the development through low-precision engineering activities.
Carmine Giardino, Nicolò Paternoster, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al.· IEEE Transactions on Softwar...· 178 citations· ⚡14
Software startup companies develop innovative, software-intensive products within limited timeframes and with few resources, searching for sustainable and scalable business models.
M. Unterkalmsteiner, P. Abrahamsson, Xiaofeng Wang et al.· e-Informatica Software Engin...· 157 citations· ⚡17
This study conducts a case survey study based on the secondary data of the major pivots happened in 49 software startups, and demonstrates that customer need pivot is the most common among all pivot types.
Sohaib Shahid Bajwa, Xiaofeng Wang, Anh Nguyen-Duc et al.· Empirical Software Engineeri...· 127 citations· ⚡15
The comparison of adopter and non-adopter sample reveals three potential adoption inhibitor, security, data privacy, and portability, which underlines the importance of the technical and security perspectives for research investigating the adoption of technology.
Nattakarn Phaphoom, Xiaofeng Wang, S. Samuel et al.· Journal of Systems and Softw...· 111 citations· ⚡8
The ongoing work building a Raspberry Pi cluster consisting of 300 nodes is presented, with potential use cases being an inexpensive and green test bed for cloud computing research and a robust and mobile data center for operating in adverse environments.
P. Abrahamsson, S. Helmer, Nattakarn Phaphoom et al.· IEEE International Conferenc...· 110 citations· ⚡7
The results indicate that software developers are a slightly happy population, but the need for limiting the unhappiness of developers remains, and 219 factors representing causes of unhappiness while developing software are identified.
D. Graziotin, Fabian Fagerholm, Xiaofeng Wang et al.· International Conference on...· 84 citations· ⚡6
Learn how Google DeepMind and GovTech Singapore uses lightweight on-device Gemma models to intercept conversational scams in private chats with zero cloud data egress.
Microsoft Research Blog· microsoft.comOct 12, 2026
StudentSim is a research system for evaluating and improving AI tutoring tools before they are tested with learners. It models how individuals may engage with tutors, giving feedback to improve tutor performance across subjects like chess, writing, and mathematics. The post Simulating student learning for better AI tutoring appeared first on Microsoft Research.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduOct 8, 2026