PROFILING - CONCEPTS AND APPLICATIONS

Profiling is an approach to put a label or a set of labels on a subject, considering the characteristics of this subject. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines profiling as: “recording and analysis of a person’s psychological and behavioral characteristics, so as to assess or predict his/her capabilities in a certain sphere or to assist in identifying a particular subgroup of people”. This research extends this definition towards things demonstrating that many methods used for profiling of people may be applied for a different type of subjects, namely things. The goal of this research concerns proposing methods for discovery of profiles of users and things with application of Data Science methods. The profiles are utilized in vertical and 2 horizontal scenarios and concern such domains as smart grid and telecommunication (vertical scenarios), and support provided both for the needs of authorization and personalization (horizontal usage).:The thesis consists of eight chapters including an introduction and a summary. First chapter describes motivation for work that was carried out for the last 8 years together with discussion on its importance both for research and business practice. The motivation for this work is much broader and emerges also from business importance of profiling and personalization. The introduction summarizes major research directions, provides research questions, goals and supplementary objectives addressed in the thesis. Research methodology is also described, showing impact of methodological aspects on the work undertaken. Chapter 2 provides introduction to the notion of profiling. The definition of profiling is introduced. Here, also a relation of a user profile to an identity is discussed. The papers included in this chapter show not only how broadly a profile may be understood, but also how a profile may be constructed considering different data sources. Profiling methods are introduced in Chapter 3. This chapter refers to the notion of a profile developed using the BFI-44 personality test and outcomes of a survey related to color preferences of people with a specific personality. Moreover, insights into profiling of relations between people are provided, with a focus on quality of a relation emerging from contacts between two entities. Chapters from 4 to 7 present different scenarios that benefit from application of profiling methods. Chapter 4 starts with introducing the notion of a public utility company that in the thesis is discussed using examples from smart grid and telecommunication. Then, in chapter 4 follows a description of research results regarding profiling for the smart grid, focusing on a profile of a prosumer and forecasting demand and production of the electric energy in the smart grid what can be influenced e.g. by weather or profiles of appliances. Chapter 5 presents application of profiling techniques in the field of telecommunication. Besides presenting profiling methods based on telecommunication data, in particular on Call Detail Records, also scenarios and issues related to privacy and trust are addressed. Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 target at horizontal applications of profiling that may be of benefit for multiple domains. Chapter 6 concerns profiling for authentication using un-typical data sources such as Call Detail Records or data from a mobile phone describing the user behavior. Besides proposing methods, also limitations are discussed. In addition, as a side research effect a methodology for evaluation of authentication methods is proposed. Chapter 7 concerns personalization and consists of two diverse parts. Firstly, behavioral profiles to change interface and behavior of the system are proposed and applied. The performance of solutions personalizing content either locally or on the server is studied. Then, profiles of customers of shopping centers are created based on paths identified using Call Detail Records. The analysis demonstrates that the data that is collected for one purpose, may significantly influence other business scenarios. Chapter 8 summarizes the research results achieved by the author of this document. It presents contribution over state of the art as well as some insights into the future work planned

Bidirektionale Abbildung zwischen Geschäftsprozessmodellen und IT-Kommunikationssystemen

Wie können Menschen mit verschiedenen Kenntnissen und Erfahrungen Prozessmodelle in der digitalen Kommunikation verwenden und zugleich Systemunterstützung durch die beschriebenen Prozesse erhalten? Diese Fragestellung wird mit einer beidseitigen Transformation auf Basis natürlicher Sprache gelöst und mit praxisnahen Beispielen erläutert. So können IT-gestützte Workflows über bisher schwer überwindbare Systemgrenzen hinweg umgesetzt werden

Bidirektionale Abbildung zwischen Geschäftsprozessmodellen und IT-Kommunikationssystemen

How can people with different knowledge and experience use process models in the digital communication and at the same time how can they receive system support through the described processes? This question is solved by a mutual transformation based on natural language which is illustrated with practical examples. Thus, more widespread workflows can be implemented by incorporating system boundaries that were previously hard to overcome

Identifying Stylometric Correlates of Social Power

This thesis takes a stylometric approach to the measurement of social power, particularly hierarchical power in an organisational setting. Following the social constructionist view of identity, we infer that construction of identity is an ongoing process incorporating the full scope of human behaviour, including linguistic behaviour. We test the primary hypothesis that stylistic choice in language is indicative of power relations, and that a stylometric signal can be extracted from natural language to enable prediction of relationship status. Additionally, we consider the effect of individual variation versus interpersonal variation, and the effects of aggregating predictions to boost the predictive strength of the model. Three different datasets are used to validate the proposed approach across three different genres: email, spoken conversation, and online chat. We also present a vector space approach to modelling linguistic style accommodation, and undertake a preliminary examination of the correlation between linguistic accommodation and social power

Behavioral profiles for advanced email features

We examine the behavioral patterns of email usage in a large-scale enterprise over a three-month period. In particular, we focus on two main questions: (Q1) what do replies depend on? and (Q2) what is the gain of augmenting contacts through the friends of friends from the email social graph? For Q1, we identify and evaluate the significance of several factors that affect the reply probability and the email response time. We find that all factors of our considered set are significant, provide their relative ordering, and identify the recipient list size, and the intensity of email communication between the correspondents as the dominant factors. We highlight various novel threshold behaviors and provide support for existing hypotheses such as that of the least-effort reply. For Q2, we find that the number of new contacts extracted from the friends-of-friends relationships amounts to a large number, but which is still a limited portion of the total enterprise size. We believe that our results provide significant insights towards informed design of advanced email features, including those of social-networking type