Understanding Effects and Determinants of Mobile Support Tools: A Usability-Centered Field Study on IT Service Technicians

The integration of mobile workplaces is a major challenge for companies. First-wave mobile solutions mostly support existing business processes through adding value in terms of increased efficiency. Second-wave mobile solutions comprise a re-engineering of the mobile business processes, add value through increased effectiveness and may even enable new forms of mobility. In order to achieve a systematic approach to mobile integrated business processes it is important to analyze existing processes, focusing on the effects and determinants of mobile solutions that might be used to support those processes. For this purpose we examined a typical example, the field technician support process of an IT service providing company. Our research approach combines usability and process performance issues. The results show which tasks are suitable for mobile application support, which personnel is most likely to benefit from mobile technology and what improvements on business metrics such as labor time, back office capacity, and invoice cycle are to be expected.

Fractal Descriptors in the Fourier Domain Applied to Color Texture Analysis

The present work proposes the development of a novel method to provide descriptors for colored texture images. The method consists in two steps. In the first, we apply a linear transform in the color space of the image aiming at highlighting spatial structuring relations among the color of pixels. In a second moment, we apply a multiscale approach to the calculus of fractal dimension based on Fourier transform. From this multiscale operation, we extract the descriptors used to discriminate the texture represented in digital images. The accuracy of the method is verified in the classification of two color texture datasets, by comparing the performance of the proposed technique to other classical and state-of-the-art methods for color texture analysis. The results showed an advantage of almost 3% of the proposed technique over the second best approach.Comment: Chaos, Volume 21, Issue 4, 201

Deep Interest Evolution Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction

Click-through rate~(CTR) prediction, whose goal is to estimate the probability of the user clicks, has become one of the core tasks in advertising systems. For CTR prediction model, it is necessary to capture the latent user interest behind the user behavior data. Besides, considering the changing of the external environment and the internal cognition, user interest evolves over time dynamically. There are several CTR prediction methods for interest modeling, while most of them regard the representation of behavior as the interest directly, and lack specially modeling for latent interest behind the concrete behavior. Moreover, few work consider the changing trend of interest. In this paper, we propose a novel model, named Deep Interest Evolution Network~(DIEN), for CTR prediction. Specifically, we design interest extractor layer to capture temporal interests from history behavior sequence. At this layer, we introduce an auxiliary loss to supervise interest extracting at each step. As user interests are diverse, especially in the e-commerce system, we propose interest evolving layer to capture interest evolving process that is relative to the target item. At interest evolving layer, attention mechanism is embedded into the sequential structure novelly, and the effects of relative interests are strengthened during interest evolution. In the experiments on both public and industrial datasets, DIEN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions. Notably, DIEN has been deployed in the display advertisement system of Taobao, and obtained 20.7\% improvement on CTR.Comment: 9 pages. Accepted by AAAI 201

Capturing Evolution Genes for Time Series Data

The modeling of time series is becoming increasingly critical in a wide variety of applications. Overall, data evolves by following different patterns, which are generally caused by different user behaviors. Given a time series, we define the evolution gene to capture the latent user behaviors and to describe how the behaviors lead to the generation of time series. In particular, we propose a uniform framework that recognizes different evolution genes of segments by learning a classifier, and adopt an adversarial generator to implement the evolution gene by estimating the segments' distribution. Experimental results based on a synthetic dataset and five real-world datasets show that our approach can not only achieve a good prediction results (e.g., averagely +10.56% in terms of F1), but is also able to provide explanations of the results.Comment: a preprint version. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1703.10155 by other author

Discovering learning processes using inductive miner: A case study with learning management systems (LMSs)

Resumen tomado de la publicaciónDescubriendo procesos de aprendizaje aplicando Inductive Miner: un estudio de caso en Learning Management Systems (LMSs). Antecedentes: en la minería de procesos con datos educativos se utilizan diferentes algoritmos para descubrir modelos, sobremanera el Alpha Miner, el Heuristic Miner y el Evolutionary Tree Miner. En este trabajo proponemos la implementación de un nuevo algoritmo en datos educativos, el denominado Inductive Miner. Método: hemos utilizado datos de interacción de 101 estudiantes universitarios en una asignatura de grado desarrollada en la plataforma Moodle 2.0. Una vez prepocesados se ha realizado la minería de procesos sobre 21.629 eventos para descubrir los modelos que generan los diferentes algoritmos y comparar sus medidas de ajuste, precisión, simplicidad y generalización. Resultados: en las pruebas realizadas en nuestro conjunto de datos el algoritmo Inductive Miner es el que obtiene mejores resultados, especialmente para el valor de ajuste, criterio de mayor relevancia en lo que respecta al descubrimiento de modelos. Además, cuando ponderamos con pesos las diferentes métricas seguimos obteniendo la mejor medida general con el Inductive Miner. Conclusiones: la implementación de Inductive Miner en datos educativos es una nueva aplicación que, además de obtener mejores resultados que otros algoritmos con nuestro conjunto de datos, proporciona modelos válidos e interpretables en términos educativos.Universidad de Oviedo. Biblioteca de Psicología; Plaza Feijoo, s/n.; 33003 Oviedo; Tel. +34985104146; Fax +34985104126; [email protected]