In CARSWe Trust: How Context-Aware Recommendations Affect Customers’ Trust And Other Business Performance Measures Of Recommender Systems

Most of the work on Context-Aware Recommender Systems (CARSes) has focused on demonstrating that the contextual information leads to more accurate recommendations and on developing efficient recommendation algorithms utilizing this additional contextual information. Little work has been done, however, on studying how much the contextual information affects purchasing behavior and trust of customers. In this paper, we study how including context in recommendations affects customers’ trust, sales and other crucial business-related performance measures. To do this, we performed a live controlled experiment with real customers of a commercial European online publisher. We delivered content-based recommendations and context-aware recommendations to two groups of customers and to a control group. We measured the recommendations’ accuracy and diversification, how much customers spent purchasing products during the experiment, quantity and price of their purchases and the customers’ level of trust. We aim at demonstrating that accuracy and diversification have only limited direct effect on customers’ purchasing behavior, but they affect trust which drives the customer purchasing behavior. We also want to prove that CARSes can increase both recommendations’ accuracy and diversification compared to other recommendation engines. This means that including contextual information in recommendations not only increases accuracy, as was demonstrated in previous studies, but it is crucial for improving trust which, in turn, can affect other business-related performance measures, such as company’s sales.Polytechnic of Bari, Italy; NYU Stern School of Busines

An Examination of the Challenges Experienced by Canadian Ice-Hockey Players in the National Hockey League

Semistructured interviews were used in this study to learn about the challenges experienced by four groups of National Hockey League (NHL) players (N=11): prospects (n=3), rookies (n=3), veterans (n=2), and retirees (n=3). The database is comprised of 757 meaning units grouped into 11 contextual challenges pertaining to scouting demands, training camp, increased athletic demands, team expectations, and earning team trust. The veterans spoke mostly of challenges including scouting demands, athletic demands, and team expectations. Retirees considered mostly challenges pertaining to team expectations, athletic demands, lifestyle, media demands, transactions, cross-cultural encounters, and playoffs. An expert panel ensured that the interview guide, data analysis, and the findings represented the participants’ experiences in the NHL. Recommendations for practitioners and researchers working with NHL players are proposed

Exploratory Research Methods for the Extremely Mobile: Supporting Community Interaction Amongst Backpackers

Mobile communities of backpackers represent a challenging population to study because of frequent and long-duration of movement, distributed group structure, and adventuresome activities. Five types of mobile group studies are presented here, which address challenges posed by this context to existing methods. Methods used include: contextual interviews, site surveys, participatory activities, field trips, team ethnography, contextual questionnaires, and electronic diary methods. The structure of each method is described, reflected upon and recommendations are made for its effective use. Many existing mobile and CSCW methods have difficulties when applied to mobile groups, and many are not designed for exploratory research dealing with product conceptualization or requirements analysis. We propose that improvising with a diverse set of available methods is appropriate for many mobile research situations. It may also be advantageous to use multiple methods which explore different aspects of target user groups' behaviour from a variety of perspectives. Furthermore, piloting studies to test methods with new user groups or situations, and using in-situ methods is advisable

African American Adults’ Experiences with the Health Care System: In Their Own Words

African Americans suffer a disproportionate burden of death and illness from a number of different chronic diseases. Inequalities in health care practices and poor patient and provider communication between African American patients and health care professionals contribute to these disparities. We describe findings from focus groups with 79 urban African Americans in which the participants discussed their interactions with the healthcare system as well as beliefs and opinions of the healthcare system and professionals. Analysis revealed five major themes: (1) historical and contextual foundations; (2) interpersonal experiences with physicians and other health care workers; (3) discrimination; (4) trust, opinions and attitudes, and (5) improving health care experiences. These findings indicate that perceptions of discrimination and racism were prevalent among African Americans in this study, and that the expectation of a negative interaction is a barrier to seeking care. Authors discuss prevention and public health implications of these findings and make recommendations for health care practitioners

Young people's involvement in service evaluation and decision making

This study examined young people‟s decision making on issues that affect their life, i.e., bullying, across different contexts (eg, family, peer, school) and involvement in evaluating the availability and effectiveness of services for young carers, young people with disabilities and their families. Key aims of this study were to offer young people a platform to evaluate existing services and make recommendations towards their improvement and to discuss ways of tackling bullying at school. Focus groups were formed with 54 young people who had experienced challenges due to bullying, learning difficulties / disabilities, and caring responsibilities for family members with disabling conditions, and discussions about services and decision making on issues that affect their life were facilitated. The findings point to a sense of agency in young people‟s life with regard to evaluating and negotiating services and offering suggestions for their improvement within their family and peers. However, in their view, their decisions regarding bullying exerted limited influence within the school context. These results raised interesting issues about young people‟s capacity to evaluate services and the contextual influences on their involvement in decision making

How do environmental factors influence walking in groups? A walk-along study.

Insufficient attention has been given to the influence of context on health-related behaviour change. This article reports on walk-along interviews conducted with 10 leaders of walking groups while leading their groups to investigate the influence of contextual factors on walking behaviours in groups. Data analysis used ideas from thematic analysis and grounded theory, approaching the data inductively. We identified that characteristics of place influenced the type of walking that people do in groups and the processes used by walkers to make sense of their behaviours in the places they walk. This research provides insight into how place influences walking in groups. It also suggests recommendations for co-ordinators and policymakers that could be used to facilitate behaviour change, when designing interventions targeting public health within the community

Improving tag recommendation using social networks

In this paper we address the task of recommending additional tags to partially annotated media objects, in our case images. We propose an extendable framework that can recommend tags using a combination of different personalised and collective contexts. We combine information from four contexts: (1) all the photos in the system, (2) a user's own photos, (3) the photos of a user's social contacts, and (4) the photos posted in the groups of which a user is a member. Variants of methods (1) and (2) have been proposed in previous work, but the use of (3) and (4) is novel. For each of the contexts we use the same probabilistic model and Borda Count based aggregation approach to generate recommendations from different contexts into a unified ranking of recommended tags. We evaluate our system using a large set of real-world data from Flickr. We show that by using personalised contexts we can significantly improve tag recommendation compared to using collective knowledge alone. We also analyse our experimental results to explore the capabilities of our system with respect to a user's social behaviour