1,032 research outputs found

    An argumentation framework with uncertainty management designed for dynamic environments

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    Nowadays, data intensive applications are in constant demand and there is need of computing environments with better intelligent capabilities than those present in today's Database Management Systems (DBMS). To build such systems we need formalisms that can perform complicate inferences, obtain the appropriate conclusions, and explain the results. Research in argumentation could provide results in this direction, providing means to build interactive systems able to reason with large databases and/or di erent data sources. In this paper we propose an argumentation system able to deal with explicit uncertainty, a vital capability in modern applications. We have also provided the system with the ability to seamlessly incorporate uncertain and/or contradictory information into its knowledge base, using a modular upgrading and revision procedurePresentado en el X Workshop Agentes y Sistemas InteligentesRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

    Context management in IPTV

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    An argumentation framework with uncertainty management designed for dynamic environments

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    Nowadays, data intensive applications are in constant demand and there is need of computing environments with better intelligent capabilities than those present in today's Database Management Systems (DBMS). To build such systems we need formalisms that can perform complicate inferences, obtain the appropriate conclusions, and explain the results. Research in argumentation could provide results in this direction, providing means to build interactive systems able to reason with large databases and/or di erent data sources. In this paper we propose an argumentation system able to deal with explicit uncertainty, a vital capability in modern applications. We have also provided the system with the ability to seamlessly incorporate uncertain and/or contradictory information into its knowledge base, using a modular upgrading and revision procedurePresentado en el X Workshop Agentes y Sistemas InteligentesRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

    Maximizing User Engagement In Short Marketing Campaigns Within An Online Living Lab: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective

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    ABSTRACT MAXIMIZING USER ENGAGEMENT IN SHORT MARKETING CAMPAIGNS WITHIN AN ONLINE LIVING LAB: A REINFORCEMENT LEARNING PERSPECTIVE by ANIEKAN MICHAEL INI-ABASI August 2021 Advisor: Dr. Ratna Babu Chinnam Major: Industrial & Systems Engineering Degree: Doctor of Philosophy User engagement has emerged as the engine driving online business growth. Many firms have pay incentives tied to engagement and growth metrics. These corporations are turning to recommender systems as the tool of choice in the business of maximizing engagement. LinkedIn reported a 40% higher email response with the introduction of a new recommender system. At Amazon 35% of sales originate from recommendations, while Netflix reports that ‘75% of what people watch is from some sort of recommendation,’ with an estimated business value of 1billionperyear.Whiletheleadingcompanieshavebeenquitesuccessfulatharnessingthepowerofrecommenderstoboostuserengagementacrossthedigitalecosystem,smallandmediumbusinesses(SMB)arestrugglingwithdecliningengagementacrossmanychannelsascompetitionforuserattentionintensifies.TheSMBsoftenlackthetechnicalexpertiseandbigdatainfrastructurenecessarytooperationalizerecommendersystems.Thepurposeofthisstudyistoexplorethemethodsofbuildingalearningagentthatcanbeusedtopersonalizeapersuasiverequesttomaximizeuserengagementinadataefficientsetting.Weframethetaskasasequentialdecisionmakingproblem,modelledasMDP,andsolvedusingageneralizedreinforcementlearning(RL)algorithm.Weleverageanapproachthateliminatesoratleastgreatlyreducestheneedformassiveamountsoftrainingdata,thusmovingawayfromapurelydatadrivenapproach.Byincorporatingdomainknowledgefromtheliteratureonpersuasionintothemessagecomposition,weareabletotraintheRLagentinasampleefficientandoperantmanner.Inourmethodology,theRLagentnominatesacandidatefromacatalogofpersuasionprinciplestodrivehigheruserresponseandengagement.ToenabletheeffectiveuseofRLinourspecificsetting,wefirstbuildareducedstatespacerepresentationbycompressingthedatausinganexponentialmovingaveragescheme.AregularizedDQNagentisdeployedtolearnanoptimalpolicy,whichisthenappliedinrecommendingone(oracombination)ofsixuniversalprinciplesmostlikelytotriggerresponsesfromusersduringthenextmessagecycle.Inthisstudy,emailmessagingisusedasthevehicletodeliverpersuasionprinciplestotheuser.Atatimeofdecliningclickthroughrateswithmarketingemails,businessexecutivescontinuetoshowheightenedinterestintheemailchannelowingtohigherthanusualreturnoninvestmentof1 billion per year. While the leading companies have been quite successful at harnessing the power of recommenders to boost user engagement across the digital ecosystem, small and medium businesses (SMB) are struggling with declining engagement across many channels as competition for user attention intensifies. The SMBs often lack the technical expertise and big data infrastructure necessary to operationalize recommender systems. The purpose of this study is to explore the methods of building a learning agent that can be used to personalize a persuasive request to maximize user engagement in a data-efficient setting. We frame the task as a sequential decision-making problem, modelled as MDP, and solved using a generalized reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm. We leverage an approach that eliminates or at least greatly reduces the need for massive amounts of training data, thus moving away from a purely data-driven approach. By incorporating domain knowledge from the literature on persuasion into the message composition, we are able to train the RL agent in a sample efficient and operant manner. In our methodology, the RL agent nominates a candidate from a catalog of persuasion principles to drive higher user response and engagement. To enable the effective use of RL in our specific setting, we first build a reduced state space representation by compressing the data using an exponential moving average scheme. A regularized DQN agent is deployed to learn an optimal policy, which is then applied in recommending one (or a combination) of six universal principles most likely to trigger responses from users during the next message cycle. In this study, email messaging is used as the vehicle to deliver persuasion principles to the user. At a time of declining click-through rates with marketing emails, business executives continue to show heightened interest in the email channel owing to higher-than-usual return on investment of 42 for every dollar spent when compared to other marketing channels such as social media. Coupled with the state space transformation, our novel regularized Deep Q-learning (DQN) agent was able to train and perform well based on a few observed users’ responses. First, we explored the average positive effect of using persuasion-based messages in a live email marketing campaign, without deploying a learning algorithm to recommend the influence principles. The selection of persuasion tactics was done heuristically, using only domain knowledge. Our results suggest that embedding certain principles of persuasion in campaign emails can significantly increase user engagement for an online business (and have a positive impact on revenues) without putting pressure on marketing or advertising budgets. During the study, the store had a customer retention rate of 76% and sales grew by a half-million dollars from the three field trials combined. The key assumption was that users are predisposed to respond to certain persuasion principles and learning the right principles to incorporate in the message header or body copy would lead to higher response and engagement. With the hypothesis validated, we set forth to build a DQN agent to recommend candidate actions from a catalog of persuasion principles most likely to drive higher engagement in the next messaging cycle. A simulation and a real live campaign are implemented to verify the proposed methodology. The results demonstrate the agent’s superior performance compared to a human expert and a control baseline by a significant margin (~ up to 300%). As the quest for effective methods and tools to maximize user engagement intensifies, our methodology could help to boost user engagement for struggling SMBs without prohibitive increase in costs, by enabling the targeting of messages (with the right persuasion principle) to the right user

    i-LINK, an integrated messaging framework

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    Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 74).For many people, online communication has meant a plethora of communication media - emails, instant messages, blogs, etc. Often this has led to clustered desktop displays and ineffective integration between communication media. Software development teams are adversely affected by the lack of integration between applications. When project managers, software developers and clients come together to work on one or more projects, certain communication and managerial considerations and requirements become apparent. A server-based Integrated Messaging Framework (IMF) provides all communication media messages with a common messaging format. i-LINK, an intelligent client application uses IMF to send, receive, log, and store messages from different communication channels. There are contrasting database models from which to choose when designing the IMF data model (i.e.: flat file, relational, object oriented, objected relational). However, the IMF was designed using a relational data model due to the stability it offered, the protection provided through referential integrity and constraints, as well as other unique benefits. When considering the services that IMF is designed to provide, certain existing messaging standards are conceptually useful to analyze before designing the IMF data model. The RFC 2778 provides a universal Instant Messaging (IM) data model which can be mapped to provide such services as presence and instant messaging. Microsoft Outlook, a Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI), presents a data storage mechanism. The IMF database model integrates concepts from existing messaging standards and refines the integration of different communication media while acting as a central repository.by Pamela Michel Chahine.M.Eng

    Linked Research on the Decentralised Web

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    This thesis is about research communication in the context of the Web. I analyse literature which reveals how researchers are making use of Web technologies for knowledge dissemination, as well as how individuals are disempowered by the centralisation of certain systems, such as academic publishing platforms and social media. I share my findings on the feasibility of a decentralised and interoperable information space where researchers can control their identifiers whilst fulfilling the core functions of scientific communication: registration, awareness, certification, and archiving. The contemporary research communication paradigm operates under a diverse set of sociotechnical constraints, which influence how units of research information and personal data are created and exchanged. Economic forces and non-interoperable system designs mean that researcher identifiers and research contributions are largely shaped and controlled by third-party entities; participation requires the use of proprietary systems. From a technical standpoint, this thesis takes a deep look at semantic structure of research artifacts, and how they can be stored, linked and shared in a way that is controlled by individual researchers, or delegated to trusted parties. Further, I find that the ecosystem was lacking a technical Web standard able to fulfill the awareness function of research communication. Thus, I contribute a new communication protocol, Linked Data Notifications (published as a W3C Recommendation) which enables decentralised notifications on the Web, and provide implementations pertinent to the academic publishing use case. So far we have seen decentralised notifications applied in research dissemination or collaboration scenarios, as well as for archival activities and scientific experiments. Another core contribution of this work is a Web standards-based implementation of a clientside tool, dokieli, for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions. dokieli can be used to fulfill the scholarly functions of registration, awareness, certification, and archiving, all in a decentralised manner, returning control of research contributions and discourse to individual researchers. The overarching conclusion of the thesis is that Web technologies can be used to create a fully functioning ecosystem for research communication. Using the framework of Web architecture, and loosely coupling the four functions, an accessible and inclusive ecosystem can be realised whereby users are able to use and switch between interoperable applications without interfering with existing data. Technical solutions alone do not suffice of course, so this thesis also takes into account the need for a change in the traditional mode of thinking amongst scholars, and presents the Linked Research initiative as an ongoing effort toward researcher autonomy in a social system, and universal access to human- and machine-readable information. Outcomes of this outreach work so far include an increase in the number of individuals self-hosting their research artifacts, workshops publishing accessible proceedings on the Web, in-the-wild experiments with open and public peer-review, and semantic graphs of contributions to conference proceedings and journals (the Linked Open Research Cloud). Some of the future challenges include: addressing the social implications of decentralised Web publishing, as well as the design of ethically grounded interoperable mechanisms; cultivating privacy aware information spaces; personal or community-controlled on-demand archiving services; and further design of decentralised applications that are aware of the core functions of scientific communication

    Electronic Communication for Professionals—Challenges and Opportunities

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    abstract: The 21st-century professional or knowledge worker spends much of the working day engaging others through electronic communication. The modes of communication available to knowledge workers have rapidly increased due to computerized technology advances: conference and video calls, instant messaging, e-mail, social media, podcasts, audio books, webinars, and much more. Professionals who think for a living express feelings of stress about their ability to respond and fear missing critical tasks or information as they attempt to wade through all the electronic communication that floods their inboxes. Although many electronic communication tools compete for the attention of the contemporary knowledge worker, most professionals use an electronic personal information management (PIM) system, more commonly known as an e-mail application and often the ubiquitous Microsoft Outlook program. The aim of this research was to provide knowledge workers with solutions to manage the influx of electronic communication that arrives daily by studying the workers in their working environment. This dissertation represents a quest to understand the current strategies knowledge workers use to manage their e-mail, and if modification of e-mail management strategies can have an impact on productivity and stress levels for these professionals. Today’s knowledge workers rarely work entirely alone, justifying the importance of also exploring methods to improve electronic communications within teams.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering 201

    Progress Notes

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    https://scholarlyworks.lvhn.org/progress_notes/1321/thumbnail.jp

    Services in pervasive computing environments : from design to delivery

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    The work presented in this thesis is based on the assumption that modern computer technologies are already potentially pervasive: CPUs are embedded in any sort of device; RAM and storage memory of a modern PDA is comparable to those of a ten years ago Unix workstation; Wi-Fi, GPRS, UMTS are leveraging the development of the wireless Internet. Nevertheless, computing is not pervasive because we do not have a clear conceptual model of the pervasive computer and we have not tools, methodologies, and middleware to write and to seamlessly deliver at once services over a multitude of heterogeneous devices and different delivery contexts. Our thesis addresses these issues starting from the analysis of forces in a pervasive computing environment: user mobility, user profile, user position, and device profile. The conceptual model, or metaphor, we use to drive our work is to consider the environment as surrounded by a multitude of services and objects and devices as the communicating gates between the real world and the virtual dimension of pervasive computing around us. Our thesis is thus built upon three main “pillars”. The first pillar is a domain-object-driven methodology which allows developer to abstract from low level details of the final delivery platform, and provides the user with the ability to access services in a multi-channel way. The rationale is that domain objects are self-contained pieces of software able to represent data and to compute functions and procedures. Our approach fills the gap between users and domain objects building an appropriate user interface which is both adapted to the domain object and to the end user device. As example, we present how to design, implement and deliver an electronic mail application over various platforms. The second pillar of this thesis analyzes in more details the forces that make direct object manipulation inadequate in a pervasive context. These forces are the user profile, the device profile, the context of use, and the combinatorial explosion of domain objects. From the analysis of the electronic mail application presented as example, we notice that according to the end user device, or according to particular circumstances during the access to the service (for instance if the user access the service by the interactive TV while he is having his breakfast) some functionalities are not compulsory and do not fit an adequate task sequence. So we decided to make task models explicit in the design of a service and to integrate the capability to automatically generate user interfaces for domain objects with the formal definition of task models adapted to the final delivery context. Finally, the third pillar of our thesis is about the lifecycle of services in a pervasive computing environment. Our solutions are based upon an existing framework, the Jini connection technology, and enrich this framework with new services and architectures for the deployment and discovery of services, for the user session management, and for the management of offline agents
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