User Profile Agents for Cultural Heritage fruition Stefania Costantini 1 and Paola Inverardi 2 and Leonardo Mostarda 3 and Arianna Tocchio 4 and Panagiota Tsintza 5 Abstract. In this paper we present an application of a MAS (Multi- Agent System) composed of logical agents in an Ambient Intelli- gence scenario, related to the fruition of cultural assets. The users are located in an area which is known to the agents: in the application, the users are the visitors of Villa Adriana, an archaeological site in Tivoli, near Rome (Italy). Agents are aware of user moves by means of Galileo satellite signal, i.e., the proposed application is based on a blend of different technologies. The agents, developed in the DALI logic programming language, proactively learn and/or enhance users profiles and are thus capable to competently assist the users during their visit, to elicit habits and preferences and to propose cultural assets to the users according to the learned profile. 1 INTRODUCTION The paradigm of Ambient Intelligence implies the objective of build- ing a friendly environment where all of us will be surrounded by “intelligent” electronic devices, and this ambient should be sensitive and responsive to our needs. A multitude of sensors and actuators are already embedded in very-small or very large information and communication technologies, and a challenging task nowadays is to identify which advantages can be gained from these technology sys- tems. Tourism for instance is a context where old and new aspects can be melted for reaching interesting results. In fact, tourism is a grow- ing industry and it needs to evolve according to the tourists changing features. In the past, tourists were satisfied with standardized pack- age tours. Today, with the popularization of traveling, tourists are expecting new tour experiences that are different and authentic [13]. Most cultural tour sites today still maintain a conventional form of tour that is static and provides a visitor with plenty of informa- tion, which is however lacking any form of customization. Several interesting works have proposed a new manner of enjoying cultural places, as technology may support more dynamic and personalized methods to conceive the fruition of cultural assets. Park et al. in [11] propose a system named “Immersive tour post”. It uses audio and video technology to provide improved tour experiences at cultural tour sites and. This system take the form of a post that stays fixed in one location and reproduces the vision and sounds of the historical event that occurred at the particular space. Mobile applications in a mobile-environment have been experimented by Pilato et al. in [12]. Visitors are assisted in their route within the “Parco Archeologico della Valle dei Templi” (archaeological area with ancient Greek tem- ples) in Agrigento (Sicily, Italy) by an user-friendly virtual-guide 1 University of L’Aquila, Italy, email: stefcost@di.univaq.it 2 University of L’Aquila, Italy, email: inverardi@di.univaq.it 3 University of L’Aquila, Italy, email: mostarda@di.univaq.it 4 University of L’Aquila, Italy, email: tocchio@di.univaq.it 5 University of L’Aquila, Italy, email: panagiota.tsintza@di.univaq.it system called MAGA, adaptable to the users needs of mobility. MAGA exploits speech recognition technologies and location detec- tion, thus allowing a natural interaction with the user. Each visitor can access the information on cultural assets via a portable device (PDA, or “Personal Digital Assistant”) that, through RFIDs (which are well-known standard an automatic identification method), is able to capture where the person is in the Parco. Several other proposals can be found in the literature, exploring the integration between human-computer interaction and informa- tion presentation. The system Minerva, proposed by Amigoni et al. in [1] organizes virtual museums, starting from the collections of ob- jects and the environments in which they must be displayed while the DramaTour methodology presented by Damiano et al. in [8] explores a visit scenario in an historical location of Turin. Visitors are assisted by a virtual spider that monitors their behavior and reactively pro- poses the history of the palace in detail and a lot of funny anecdotes about the people. Studying the human behavior during the visit in a cultural heritage scenario is an exciting aim. The systems presented above have a common characteristic: they try to improve the traditional methods to inform the visitor by means of new catchy techniques for making the human-machine interface more friendly and intuitive. But, is it possible to go beyond, towards capturing the visitors desires and expectations? A particular mecha- nism for capturing the visitor interest for one or more cultural assets has been presented by Bhusate at al. in [2]. Each visitor receives a PDA associated to non-invasive sensors that measure “affective” context data such as the user’s skin conductance and temperature. The sensor readings are reported to a control module that determines, according to other data, the visitor’s mood. Preferences can be also catched by asking questions directly to the user before starting the visit. This method has been adopted in the system KORE [3] where pa- rameters such as age, cultural level, preferences in arts, preferred his- torical period, etc., are taken into account for “tuning” the pieces of information provided, by throwing away those useless for the user (either too difficult or too easy to understand) and delivering only data which match the user profile. The architecture of KORE is based on a distributed system composed of some servers, installed in the various areas of museums, which host specialized agents. The KORE system practically demonstrates that intelligent agents can have a rel- evant role in capturing the user profile by observing the visitor behav- ior. They possess the capability to be autonomous and to remain ac- tive while the visitor completes her/his visit; they can percept through the sensors all choices performed by the user and, consequently, ac- tivate a reasoning process. In this paper, we present the architecture of the MAS DALICA ap- plied to the Villa Adriana scenario for capturing the visitors interests and enhancing their profiles. Similarly to what happens in the KORE