System Learning of User Interactions

The case presented in this paper describes an early prototype and next steps for developing a user-adaptive recommender system using semantic analysis and matching of user profiles and content. Machine learning methods optimize semantic analysis and matching based on implicit and explicit feedback of users. The constant interaction with users provides a valuable data source that is used to improve human-computer interaction and for adapting to specific user preferences. This can lead to, among others, higher accuracy and relevance in content matching, more intuitive graphical user interfaces, improved system performance, and better prioritization of tasks

Intelligence Augmentation: Human Factors in AI and Future of Work

The availability of parallel and distributed processing at a reasonable cost and the diversity of data sources have contributed to advanced developments in artificial intelligence (AI). These developments in the AI computing environment are not concomitant with changes in the social, legal, and political environment. While considering deploying AI, the deployment context and the end goal of human intelligence augmentation for that specific context have surfaced as significant factors for professionals, organizations, and society. In this research commentary, we highlight some important socio-technical aspects associated with recent growth in AI systems. We elaborate on the intricacies of human-machine interaction that form the foundation of augmented intelligence. We also highlight the ethical considerations that relate to these interactions and explain how augmented intelligence can play a key role in shaping the future of human work

The Computer Science Ontology: A Large-Scale Taxonomy of Research Areas

Ontologies of research areas are important tools for characterising, exploring, and analysing the research landscape. Some fields of research are comprehensively described by large-scale taxonomies, e.g., MeSH in Biology and PhySH in Physics. Conversely, current Computer Science taxonomies are coarse-grained and tend to evolve slowly. For instance, the ACM classification scheme contains only about 2K research topics and the last version dates back to 2012. In this paper, we introduce the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a large-scale, automatically generated ontology of research areas, which includes about 26K topics and 226K semantic relationships. It was created by applying the Klink-2 algorithm on a very large dataset of 16M scientific articles. CSO presents two main advantages over the alternatives: i) it includes a very large number of topics that do not appear in other classifications, and ii) it can be updated automatically by running Klink-2 on recent corpora of publications. CSO powers several tools adopted by the editorial team at Springer Nature and has been used to enable a variety of solutions, such as classifying research publications, detecting research communities, and predicting research trends. To facilitate the uptake of CSO we have developed the CSO Portal, a web application that enables users to download, explore, and provide granular feedback on CSO at different levels. Users can use the portal to rate topics and relationships, suggest missing relationships, and visualise sections of the ontology. The portal will support the publication of and access to regular new releases of CSO, with the aim of providing a comprehensive resource to the various communities engaged with scholarly data

Vision of a Visipedia

The web is not perfect: while text is easily searched and organized, pictures (the vast majority of the bits that one can find online) are not. In order to see how one could improve the web and make pictures first-class citizens of the web, I explore the idea of Visipedia, a visual interface for Wikipedia that is able to answer visual queries and enables experts to contribute and organize visual knowledge. Five distinct groups of humans would interact through Visipedia: users, experts, editors, visual workers, and machine vision scientists. The latter would gradually build automata able to interpret images. I explore some of the technical challenges involved in making Visipedia happen. I argue that Visipedia will likely grow organically, combining state-of-the-art machine vision with human labor

Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading in Smart Residential Environment with User Behavioral Modeling

Electric power systems are transforming from a centralized unidirectional market to a decentralized open market. With this shift, the end-users have the possibility to actively participate in local energy exchanges, with or without the involvement of the main grid. Rapidly reducing prices for Renewable Energy Technologies (RETs), supported by their ease of installation and operation, with the facilitation of Electric Vehicles (EV) and Smart Grid (SG) technologies to make bidirectional flow of energy possible, has contributed to this changing landscape in the distribution side of the traditional power grid. Trading energy among users in a decentralized fashion has been referred to as Peer- to-Peer (P2P) Energy Trading, which has attracted significant attention from the research and industry communities in recent times. However, previous research has mostly focused on engineering aspects of P2P energy trading systems, often neglecting the central role of users in such systems. P2P trading mechanisms require active participation from users to decide factors such as selling prices, storing versus trading energy, and selection of energy sources among others. The complexity of these tasks, paired with the limited cognitive and time capabilities of human users, can result sub-optimal decisions or even abandonment of such systems if performance is not satisfactory. Therefore, it is of paramount importance for P2P energy trading systems to incorporate user behavioral modeling that captures users’ individual trading behaviors, preferences, and perceived utility in a realistic and accurate manner. Often, such user behavioral models are not known a priori in real-world settings, and therefore need to be learned online as the P2P system is operating. In this thesis, we design novel algorithms for P2P energy trading. By exploiting a variety of statistical, algorithmic, machine learning, and behavioral economics tools, we propose solutions that are able to jointly optimize the system performance while taking into account and learning realistic model of user behavior. The results in this dissertation has been published in IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking 2021, Proceedings of IEEE Global Communication Conference 2022, Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications 2023 and ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization 2023

The development of internet platforms for supplier relationship management: the case of Ecratum platform

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementA supply chain can be defined as a network of people, companies, resources, processes, and technology, involving all the steps in creating and selling a product. It incorporates processes starting with the distribution of raw materials from the supplier to the manufacturer, through to the operation of providing the product to the end-user (Stadtler, 2015). Supplier relationship management (hereinafter: SRM) is a structured, enterprise-wide evaluation of the overall business strategy of suppliers and their capabilities. It determines the activities needed to interact with suppliers, and the arrangements and execution of these activities in an organised manner. SRM develops a beneficial two-way relationship with potential partners and maximises values to deliver innovation and efficiency by aligning strategic objectives (SDI Point of View, 2016). The supply chain is more complicated than just one-to-one or business-to-business relationships; a supply chain implies a bigger network of businesses and complex business processes (Lambert & Cooper, 2000). Supply chain management (hereinafter: SCM) involves the integration and management of these complex relationships between the supply chain members. It also acts as a way of facilitating and creating value from the supply chain business processes (Lambert & Cooper, 2000)