Personalization platform for multimodal ubiquitous computing applications

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaWe currently live surrounded by a myriad of computing devices running multiple applications. In general, the user experience on each of those scenarios is not adapted to each user’s specific needs, without personalization and integration across scenarios. Moreover, developers usually do not have the right tools to handle that in a standard and generic way. As such, a personalization platform may provide those tools. This kind of platform should be readily available to be used by any developer. Therefore, it must be developed to be available over the Internet. With the advances in IT infrastructure, it is now possible to develop reliable and scalable services running on abstract and virtualized platforms. Those are some of the advantages of cloud computing, which offers a model of utility computing where customers are able to dynamically allocate the resources they need and are charged accordingly. This work focuses on the creation of a cloud-based personalization platform built on a previously developed generic user modeling framework. It provides user profiling and context-awareness tools to third-party developers. A public display-based application was also developed. It provides useful information to students, teachers and others in a university campus as they are detected by Bluetooth scanning. It uses the personalization platform as the basis to select the most relevant information in each situation, while a mobile application was developed to be used as an input mechanism. A user study was conducted to assess the usefulness of the application and to validate some design choices. The results were mostly positive

Volunteer Coordinators’ Practices to Motivate and Retain Volunteers in Animal Welfare Organizations

Animal welfare organizations depend on volunteers to continue to take care of animals and rehome them. Animal overpopulation is estimated at 70 million animals and without enough volunteers to help socialize them, they can be unadoptable and subject to euthanasia. The problem addressed through this study was volunteer turnover in animal welfare organizations and resulting negative impacts on animal welfare. Researchers have examined person-organization fit related to employee retention in for-profit environments but not the experience of volunteer coordinators in animal welfare organizations. The purpose of this general qualitative study was to examine practices and experiences of volunteer coordinators to motivate, personalize experiences, and retain volunteers in animal welfare organizations. Eight participants were interviewed via semi-structured interviews and data were interpreted through the lens of person-organization fit theory. Each question was analyzed with holistic coding as well as in vivo coding. Results of the analysis indicated that when volunteer coordinators aligned volunteer interests with tasks they performed, personalized experiences through task alignment, communication, and recognized volunteers’ efforts, volunteers were more motivated and more likely to remain in their role long-term. If values were not aligned and training was not adequately provided, volunteers were less motivated to remain with the organization. Findings may provide information to volunteer coordinators regarding the importance of designing and employing a structured training program that determines the values fit and outlines expectations of the volunteer, to avoid dissatisfaction and burnout among volunteers and increase retention

Open Personalization: Involving Third Parties in Improving the User Experience of Websites

Traditional software development captures the user needs during the requirement analysis. The Web makes this endeavour even harder due to the difficulty to determine who these users are. In an attempt to tackle the heterogeneity of the user base, Web Personalization techniques are proposed to guide the users’ experience. In addition, Open Innovation allows organisations to look beyond their internal resources to develop new products or improve existing processes. This thesis sits in between by introducing Open Personalization as a means to incorporate actors other than webmasters in the personalization of web applications. The aim is to provide the technological basis that builds up a trusty environment for webmasters and companion actors to collaborate, i.e. "an architecture of participation". Such architecture very much depends on these actors’ profile. This work tackles three profiles (i.e. software partners, hobby programmers and end users), and proposes three "architectures of participation" tuned for each profile. Each architecture rests on different technologies: a .NET annotation library based on Inversion of Control for software partners, a Modding Interface in JavaScript for hobby programmers, and finally, a domain specific language for end-users. Proof-of-concept implementations are available for the three cases while a quantitative evaluation is conducted for the domain specific language

Misinformation Detection in Social Media

abstract: The pervasive use of social media gives it a crucial role in helping the public perceive reliable information. Meanwhile, the openness and timeliness of social networking sites also allow for the rapid creation and dissemination of misinformation. It becomes increasingly difficult for online users to find accurate and trustworthy information. As witnessed in recent incidents of misinformation, it escalates quickly and can impact social media users with undesirable consequences and wreak havoc instantaneously. Different from some existing research in psychology and social sciences about misinformation, social media platforms pose unprecedented challenges for misinformation detection. First, intentional spreaders of misinformation will actively disguise themselves. Second, content of misinformation may be manipulated to avoid being detected, while abundant contextual information may play a vital role in detecting it. Third, not only accuracy, earliness of a detection method is also important in containing misinformation from being viral. Fourth, social media platforms have been used as a fundamental data source for various disciplines, and these research may have been conducted in the presence of misinformation. To tackle the challenges, we focus on developing machine learning algorithms that are robust to adversarial manipulation and data scarcity. The main objective of this dissertation is to provide a systematic study of misinformation detection in social media. To tackle the challenges of adversarial attacks, I propose adaptive detection algorithms to deal with the active manipulations of misinformation spreaders via content and networks. To facilitate content-based approaches, I analyze the contextual data of misinformation and propose to incorporate the specific contextual patterns of misinformation into a principled detection framework. Considering its rapidly growing nature, I study how misinformation can be detected at an early stage. In particular, I focus on the challenge of data scarcity and propose a novel framework to enable historical data to be utilized for emerging incidents that are seemingly irrelevant. With misinformation being viral, applications that rely on social media data face the challenge of corrupted data. To this end, I present robust statistical relational learning and personalization algorithms to minimize the negative effect of misinformation.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

DEVELOPING AN E-CRM PROTOTYPE FOR MEDIUMSIZED COMPANIES

This report is a final year project involving a research of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System focusing on a medium-sized company and using a computer supplier company as a testing platform for the E-CRM prototypical. CRM is a strategy used to learn more about customer needs and behaviors in order to develop a stronger relationship with them. The problems such as the use of manual activity in generating quotation, no centralized database of customer and no proper channel for communication process in medium sized company can lead to customer dissatisfactions. The E-CRM system hopefully can give the solution. The main question now is what kind of E-CRM system best suited for a medium-sized company? Thus, the author has been using the data from the computer supplier company as a way for testing the effectiveness of E-CRM in a medium-sized company. This project basically concentrates on the study of E-CRM system in order to support the salesperson of the medium-sized company to automate their work in maintaining a healthy relationship with all contacts and prospective customers. This report also gives further information about the system in the literature review section, which is mainly supporting information that comes from the website, journal and research by an expert in this field. Methodology plays a vital role in completing any project. Waterfall model is used as the methodology, which consists of planning, analysis, design, implementation and operation. The final result of this study is a discussion, conclusion and prototypical E-CRM system which are strengthening relationship between an organization and their customers