Talk by Laurent Nguyen from IDIAP

UBIMPRESSED: behavioral training in hospitality

First impressions play a critical role in the hospitality industry and have been shown to be closely linked to the behavior of the person being judged. In this project, we implemented a behavioral training framework for hospitality students with the goal of improving the impressions that other people make about them. We outline the challenges associated with designing such a framework and embedding it in the everyday practice of a real hospitality school. We collected a dataset of 169 laboratory sessions where two role-plays were conducted, job interviews and reception desk scenarios, for a total of 338 interactions. This work constitutes a step towards applying social sensing technologies to the real world by designing and implementing a living lab for students of an international hospitality management school.

Laurent Son Nguyen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Social Computing Group at Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland. He obtained his PhD in 2015 from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland on the automated analysis of human behavior in job interviews. He is mainly interested in using computational approaches to understand the formation of first impressions in face-to-face interactions, online videos, and social media.