Design and implementation of a web-based auction system

Electronic auction has been a popular means of goods distribution. The number of items sold through the internet auction sites have grown in the past few years. Evidently, this has become the medium of choice for customers. This project entails the design and implementation of a web-based auction system for users to trade in goods. The system was implemented in the Django framework. On account that the trade over the Internet lacks any means of ascertaining the quality of goods, there is a need to implement a feedback system to rate the seller’s credibility in order to increase customer confidence in a given business. The feedback system is based on the history of the customer’s rating of the previous seller’s transactions. As a result, the auction system has a built-in feedback system to enhance the credibility of the auction system. The project was designed by using a modular approach to ensure maintainability. There is a number of engines that were implemented in order to enhance the functionality of the auction system. They include the following: commenting engine, search engine, business intelligence (user analytic and statistics), graph engine, advertisement engine and recommendation engine. As a result of this thesis undertaking, a full-fledged system robust enough to handle small or medium-sized traffic has been developed to specification

O impacto da inteligência artificial no negócio eletrónico

Pela importância que a Inteligência Artificial exibe na atualidade, revela-se de grande interesse verificar até que ponto ela está a transformar o Negócio Eletrónico. Para esse efeito, delineou-se uma revisão sistemática com o objetivo de avaliar os impactos da proliferação destes instrumentos. A investigação empreendida pretendeu identificar artigos científicos que, através de pesquisas realizadas a Fontes de Dados Eletrónicas, pudessem responder às questões de investigação implementadas: a) que tipo de soluções, baseadas na Inteligência Artificial (IA), têm sido usadas para melhorar o Negócio Eletrónico (NE); b) em que domínios do NE a IA foi aplicada; c) qual a taxa de sucesso ou fracasso do projeto. Simultaneamente, tiveram de respeitar critérios de seleção, nomeadamente, estar escritos em inglês, encontrarem-se no intervalo temporal 2015/2021 e tratar-se de estudos empíricos, suportados em dados reais. Após uma avaliação de qualidade final, procedeu-se à extração dos dados pertinentes para a investigação, para formulários criados em MS Excel. Estes dados estiveram na base da análise quantitativa e qualitativa que evidenciaram as descobertas feitas e sobre os quais se procedeu, posteriormente, à sua discussão. A dissertação termina com as conclusão e discussão de trabalhos futuros.Due to the importance that Artificial Intelligence exhibits today, it is of great interest to see to what extent it is transforming the Electronic Business. To this end, a systematic review was designed to evaluate the impacts of the proliferation of these instruments. The research aimed to identify scientific articles that, through research carried out on Electronic Data Sources, could answer the research questions implemented: a) what kind of solutions, based on Artificial Intelligence, have been used to improve the Electronic Business; b) in which areas of the Electronic Business Artificial Intelligence has been applied; c) what the success rate or failure of the project is. At the same time, they must comply with selection criteria, to be written in English, to be found in the 2015/2021-time interval and to be empirical studies supported by actual data. After a final quality evaluation, the relevant data for the investigation were extracted for forms created in MS Excel. These data were the basis of the quantitative and qualitative analysis that evidenced the findings found and on which they were subsequently discussed. The dissertation ends with the conclusion and discussion of future works

A context-aware model to improve usability of information presented on mobile devices

Online information access on mobile devices is increasing as a result of the growth in the use of Internet-enabled handheld (or pocket-size) devices. The combined influence of recent enabling technologies such as Web 2.0, mobile app stores and improved wireless networks have driven the increase in online applications that allow users to access various types of information on mobile devices regardless of time and location. Examples of such applications (usually shortened to app) include: social media, such as FacebookTM App and TwitterTM App, banking applications such as (Standard Bank South Africa)TM Mobile Banking App and First National Bank (FNB) BankingTM App, and news application such as news 24TM App and BBCTM News App. Online businesses involved in buying, selling and business transaction processing activities via the Internet have exploited the opportunity to extend electronic commerce (e-commerce) initiatives into mobile commerce (m-commerce). Online businesses that interact with end user customers implement business to consumer (B2C) m-commerce applications that enable customers to access and browse product catalogue information on mobile devices, anytime, anywhere. Customers accessing electronic product catalogue information on a mobile device face a number of challenges such as a long list of products presented on a small screen and a longer information download time. These challenges mainly originate from the limiting and dynamic nature of the mobile apps operating environment, for example, dynamic location, bandwidth fluctuations and, diverse and limited device features, collectively referred to as context. The goal of this research was to design and implement a context-aware model that can be incorporated into an m-commerce application in order to improve the presentation of product catalogue information on m-commerce storefronts. The motivation for selecting product catalogue is prompted by literature which indicates that improved presentation of information in m-commerce (and e-commerce) applications has a positive impact on usability of the websites. Usable m-commerce (and e-commerce) websites improve efficiency in consumer behaviour that impacts sales, profits and business growth. The context-aware model aimed at collecting context information within the user environment and utilising it to determine optimal retrieval and presentation of product catalogue in m-commerce. An integrated logical context sensor and Mathematical algorithms were implemented in the context-aware model. The integrated logical context sensor was responsible for the collection of different types of predetermined context information such as device specification or capabilities, connection bandwidth, location and time of the day as well as the user profile. The algorithms transformed the collected context information into usable formats and enabled optimal retrieval and presentation of product catalogue data on a specific mobile device. Open-source implementation tools were utilised to implement components of the model including: HTML5, PhP, JavaScript and MySQL database. The context-aware model was incorporated into an existing m-commerce application. Two user evaluation studies were conducted during the course of the research. The first evaluation was to evaluate the accuracy of information collected by the context sensor component of the model. This survey was conducted with a sample of 30 users from different countries across the world. In-between the context sensor and main evaluation surveys, a pilot study was conducted with a sample of 19 users with great experience in mobile application development and use from SAP Next Business and Technology, Africa. Finally an overall user evaluation study was conducted with a sample of 30 users from a remote area called Kgautswane in Limpopo Province, South Africa. The results obtained indicate that the context-aware model was able to determine accurate context information in real-time and effectively determine how much product information should be retrieved and how the information should be presented on a mobile device interface. Two main contributions emerged from the research, first the research contributed to the field of mobile Human Computer Interaction. During the research, techniques of evaluating and improving usability of mobile applications were demonstrated. Secondly, the research made a significant contribution to the upcoming field of context-aware computing. The research brought clarity with regard to context-aware computing which is lacking in existing, current research despite the field’s proven impact of improving usability of applications. Researchers can utilise contributions made in this research to develop further techniques and usable context-aware solutions

An evaluation of the challenges of Multilingualism in Data Warehouse development

In this paper we discuss Business Intelligence and define what is meant by support for Multilingualism in a Business Intelligence reporting context. We identify support for Multilingualism as a challenging issue which has implications for data warehouse design and reporting performance. Data warehouses are a core component of most Business Intelligence systems and the star schema is the approach most widely used to develop data warehouses and dimensional Data Marts. We discuss the way in which Multilingualism can be supported in the Star Schema and identify that current approaches have serious limitations which include data redundancy and data manipulation, performance and maintenance issues. We propose a new approach to enable the optimal application of multilingualism in Business Intelligence. The proposed approach was found to produce satisfactory results when used in a proof-of-concept environment. Future work will include testing the approach in an enterprise environmen

BIG DATA и анализ высокого уровня : материалы конференции

В сборнике опубликованы результаты научных исследований и разработок в области BIG DATA and Advanced Analytics для оптимизации IT-решений и бизнес-решений, а также тематических исследований в области медицины, образования и экологии

Bioinspired metaheuristic algorithms for global optimization

This paper presents concise comparison study of newly developed bioinspired algorithms for global optimization problems. Three different metaheuristic techniques, namely Accelerated Particle Swarm Optimization (APSO), Firefly Algorithm (FA), and Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) are investigated and implemented in Matlab environment. These methods are compared on four unimodal and multimodal nonlinear functions in order to find global optimum values. Computational results indicate that GWO outperforms other intelligent techniques, and that all aforementioned algorithms can be successfully used for optimization of continuous functions

Experimental Evaluation of Growing and Pruning Hyper Basis Function Neural Networks Trained with Extended Information Filter

In this paper we test Extended Information Filter (EIF) for sequential training of Hyper Basis Function Neural Networks with growing and pruning ability (HBF-GP). The HBF neuron allows different scaling of input dimensions to provide better generalization property when dealing with complex nonlinear problems in engineering practice. The main intuition behind HBF is in generalization of Gaussian type of neuron that applies Mahalanobis-like distance as a distance metrics between input training sample and prototype vector. We exploit concept of neuron’s significance and allow growing and pruning of HBF neurons during sequential learning process. From engineer’s perspective, EIF is attractive for training of neural networks because it allows a designer to have scarce initial knowledge of the system/problem. Extensive experimental study shows that HBF neural network trained with EIF achieves same prediction error and compactness of network topology when compared to EKF, but without the need to know initial state uncertainty, which is its main advantage over EKF