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Technologie en leren op de werkvloer

The digital skills divide: evidence from the European tourism industry

Purpose: This paper aims to present the findings from a European study on the digital skills gaps in tourism and hospitality companies. Design/methodology/approach: Mixed methods research was adopted. The sample includes 1,668 respondents (1,404 survey respondents and 264 interviewees) in 5 tourism sectors (accommodation establishments, tour operators and travel agents, food and beverage, visitor attractions and destination management organisations) in 8 European countries (UK, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands and Bulgaria). Findings: The most important future digital skills include online marketing and communication skills, social media skills, MS Office skills, operating systems use skills and skills to monitor online reviews. The largest gaps between the current and the future skill levels were identified for artificial intelligence and robotics skills and augmented reality and virtual reality skills, but these skills, together with computer programming skills, were considered also as the least important digital skills. Three clusters were identified on the basis of their reported gaps between the current level and the future needs of digital skills. The country of registration, sector and size shape respondents’ answers regarding the current and future skills levels and the skills gap between them. Originality/value: The paper discusses the digital skills gap of tourism and hospitality employees and identifies the most important digital skills they would need in the future.

Interaction fields: intuitive sketch-based steering behaviors for crowd simulation.

The real-time simulation of human crowds has many applications. In a typical crowd simulation, each person ('agent') in the crowd moves towards a goal while adhering to local constraints. Many algorithms exist for specific local ‘steering’ tasks such as collision avoidance or group behavior. However, these do not easily extend to completely new types of behavior, such as circling around another agent or hiding behind an obstacle. They also tend to focus purely on an agent's velocity without explicitly controlling its orientation. This paper presents a novel sketch-based method for modelling and simulating many steering behaviors for agents in a crowd. Central to this is the concept of an interaction field (IF): a vector field that describes the velocities or orientations that agents should use around a given ‘source’ agent or obstacle. An IF can also change dynamically according to parameters, such as the walking speed of the source agent. IFs can be easily combined with other aspects of crowd simulation, such as collision avoidance. Using an implementation of IFs in a real-time crowd simulation framework, we demonstrate the capabilities of IFs in various scenarios. This includes game-like scenarios where the crowd responds to a user-controlled avatar. We also present an interactive tool that computes an IF based on input sketches. This IF editor lets users intuitively and quickly design new types of behavior, without the need for programming extra behavioral rules. We thoroughly evaluate the efficacy of the IF editor through a user study, which demonstrates that our method enables non-expert users to easily enrich any agent-based crowd simulation with new agent interactions.