Discovery Is Never By Chance: Designing for (Un)Serendipity

Serendipity has a long tradition in the history of science as having played a key role in many significant discoveries. Computer scientists, valuing the role of serendipity in discovery, have attempted to design systems that encourage serendipity. However, that research has focused primarily on only one aspect of serendipity: that of chance encounters. In reality, for serendipity to be valuable chance encounters must be synthesized into insight. In this paper we show, through a formal consideration of serendipity and analysis of how various systems have seized on attributes of interpreting serendipity, that there is a richer space for design to support serendipitous creativity, innovation and discovery than has been tapped to date. We discuss how ideas might be encoded to be shared or discovered by ‘association-hunting’ agents. We propose considering not only the inventor’s role in perceiving serendipity, but also how that inventor’s perception may be enhanced to increase the opportunity for serendipity. We explore the role of environment and how we can better enable serendipitous discoveries to find a home more readily and immediately

Using recommender systems to support idea generation stage

In order to successfully cope with this era of rapid changes, organizations need to develop effective and efficient innovation processes that ensure continuous stream of new valuable ideas that lead to useful innovations. However, generating novel and useful ideas remains a challenging and crucial innovation task. The current paper presents a new use of recommendation systems in the first key activity of the Front End of innovation, and which can assist organizations to improve their ways of generating new ideas. Actually in this paper, we investigate the particular use of recommender systems in the idea generation context to encourage actors to contribute their ideas and ensure the good quality of submitted content. We first present the motivation behind this work and define the concept of recommendation. From this, we deduct the different advantages of using recommender systems in idea generation stage. Next, we provide an overview of existing recommendation approaches. From the literature, we draw a synthesis of important learning gathered. Then, we analyze and discuss based on a set of defined characteristics the use of recommendation systems in this initial phase of idea generation. From the results of this analysis, we formulate a concluding remarks aiming to identify the technique which seems the most suitable to meet our qualitative approach in this specific context.Keywords: idea generation, Recommendation Systems, creativity, collaboration, quality,Innovation

Personality in Computational Advertising: A Benchmark

In the last decade, new ways of shopping online have increased the possibility of buying products and services more easily and faster than ever. In this new context, personality is a key determinant in the decision making of the consumer when shopping. A person’s buying choices are influenced by psychological factors like impulsiveness; indeed some consumers may be more susceptible to making impulse purchases than others. Since affective metadata are more closely related to the user’s experience than generic parameters, accurate predictions reveal important aspects of user’s attitudes, social life, including attitude of others and social identity. This work proposes a highly innovative research that uses a personality perspective to determine the unique associations among the consumer’s buying tendency and advert recommendations. In fact, the lack of a publicly available benchmark for computational advertising do not allow both the exploration of this intriguing research direction and the evaluation of recent algorithms. We present the ADS Dataset, a publicly available benchmark consisting of 300 real advertisements (i.e., Rich Media Ads, Image Ads, Text Ads) rated by 120 unacquainted individuals, enriched with Big-Five users’ personality factors and 1,200 personal users’ pictures

Contextual Social Networking

The thesis centers around the multi-faceted research question of how contexts may be detected and derived that can be used for new context aware Social Networking services and for improving the usefulness of existing Social Networking services, giving rise to the notion of Contextual Social Networking. In a first foundational part, we characterize the closely related fields of Contextual-, Mobile-, and Decentralized Social Networking using different methods and focusing on different detailed aspects. A second part focuses on the question of how short-term and long-term social contexts as especially interesting forms of context for Social Networking may be derived. We focus on NLP based methods for the characterization of social relations as a typical form of long-term social contexts and on Mobile Social Signal Processing methods for deriving short-term social contexts on the basis of geometry of interaction and audio. We furthermore investigate, how personal social agents may combine such social context elements on various levels of abstraction. The third part discusses new and improved context aware Social Networking service concepts. We investigate special forms of awareness services, new forms of social information retrieval, social recommender systems, context aware privacy concepts and services and platforms supporting Open Innovation and creative processes. This version of the thesis does not contain the included publications because of copyrights of the journals etc. Contact in terms of the version with all included publications: Georg Groh, [email protected] zentrale Gegenstand der vorliegenden Arbeit ist die vielschichtige Frage, wie Kontexte detektiert und abgeleitet werden können, die dazu dienen können, neuartige kontextbewusste Social Networking Dienste zu schaffen und bestehende Dienste in ihrem Nutzwert zu verbessern. Die (noch nicht abgeschlossene) erfolgreiche Umsetzung dieses Programmes führt auf ein Konzept, das man als Contextual Social Networking bezeichnen kann. In einem grundlegenden ersten Teil werden die eng zusammenhängenden Gebiete Contextual Social Networking, Mobile Social Networking und Decentralized Social Networking mit verschiedenen Methoden und unter Fokussierung auf verschiedene Detail-Aspekte näher beleuchtet und in Zusammenhang gesetzt. Ein zweiter Teil behandelt die Frage, wie soziale Kurzzeit- und Langzeit-Kontexte als für das Social Networking besonders interessante Formen von Kontext gemessen und abgeleitet werden können. Ein Fokus liegt hierbei auf NLP Methoden zur Charakterisierung sozialer Beziehungen als einer typischen Form von sozialem Langzeit-Kontext. Ein weiterer Schwerpunkt liegt auf Methoden aus dem Mobile Social Signal Processing zur Ableitung sinnvoller sozialer Kurzzeit-Kontexte auf der Basis von Interaktionsgeometrien und Audio-Daten. Es wird ferner untersucht, wie persönliche soziale Agenten Kontext-Elemente verschiedener Abstraktionsgrade miteinander kombinieren können. Der dritte Teil behandelt neuartige und verbesserte Konzepte für kontextbewusste Social Networking Dienste. Es werden spezielle Formen von Awareness Diensten, neue Formen von sozialem Information Retrieval, Konzepte für kontextbewusstes Privacy Management und Dienste und Plattformen zur Unterstützung von Open Innovation und Kreativität untersucht und vorgestellt. Diese Version der Habilitationsschrift enthält die inkludierten Publikationen zurVermeidung von Copyright-Verletzungen auf Seiten der Journals u.a. nicht. Kontakt in Bezug auf die Version mit allen inkludierten Publikationen: Georg Groh, [email protected]

Panorama of Recommender Systems to Support Learning

This chapter presents an analysis of recommender systems in TechnologyEnhanced Learning along their 15 years existence (2000-2014). All recommender systems considered for the review aim to support educational stakeholders by personalising the learning process. In this meta-review 82 recommender systems from 35 different countries have been investigated and categorised according to a given classification framework. The reviewed systems have been classified into 7 clusters according to their characteristics and analysed for their contribution to the evolution of the RecSysTEL research field. Current challenges have been identified to lead the work of the forthcoming years.Hendrik Drachsler has been partly supported by the FP7 EU Project LACE (619424). Katrien Verbert is a post-doctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). Olga C. Santos would like to acknowledge that her contributions to this work have been carried out within the project Multimodal approaches for Affective Modelling in Inclusive Personalized Educational scenarios in intelligent Contexts (MAMIPEC -TIN2011-29221-C03-01). Nikos Manouselis has been partially supported with funding CIP-PSP Open Discovery Space (297229