64 research outputs found

    Incentive-Centered Design for User-Contributed Content

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    We review incentive-centered design for user-contributed content (UCC) on the Internet. UCC systems, produced (in part) through voluntary contributions made by non-employees, face fundamental incentives problems. In particular, to succeed, users need to be motivated to contribute in the first place ("getting stuff in"). Further, given heterogeneity in content quality and variety, the degree of success will depend on incentives to contribute a desirable mix of quality and variety ("getting \emph{good} stuff in"). Third, because UCC systems generally function as open-access publishing platforms, there is a need to prevent or reduce the amount of negative value (polluting or manipulating) content. The work to date on incentives problems facing UCC is limited and uneven in coverage. Much of the empirical research concerns specific settings and does not provide readily generalizable results. And, although there are well-developed theoretical literatures on, for example, the private provision of public goods (the "getting stuff in" problem), this literature is only applicable to UCC in a limited way because it focuses on contributions of (homogeneous) money, and thus does not address the many problems associated with heterogeneous information content contributions (the "getting \emph{good} stuff in" problem). We believe that our review of the literature has identified more open questions for research than it has pointed to known results.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100229/1/icd4ucc.pdf7

    An architecture for evolving the electronic programme guide for online viewing

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    Watching television and video content is changing towards online viewing due to the proliferation of content providers and the prevalence of high speed broadband. This trend is coupled to an acceleration in the move to watching content using non-traditional viewing devices such as laptops, tablets and smart phones. This, in turn, poses a problem for the viewer in that it is becoming increasingly difficult to locate those programmes of interest across such a broad range of providers. In this thesis, an architecture of a generic cloud-based Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) system has been developed to meet this challenge. The key feature of this architecture is the way in which it can access content from all of the available online content providers and be personalized depending on the viewer’s preferences and interests, viewing device, internet connection speed and their social network interactions. Fundamental to its operation is the translation of programme metadata adopted by each provider into a unified format that is used within the core system. This approach ensures that the architecture is extensible, being able to accommodate any new online content provider through the addition of a small tailored search agent module. The EPG system takes the programme as its core focus and provides a single list of recommendations to each user regardless of their origins. A prototype has been developed in order to validate the proposed system and evaluate its operation. Results have been obtained through a series of user trials to assess the system’s effectiveness in being able to extract content from several sources and to produce a list of recommendations which match the user’s preferences and context. Results show that the EPG is able to offer users a single interface to online television and video content providers and that its integration with social networks ensures that the recommendation process is able to match or exceed the published results from comparable, but more constrained, systems

    Designing Incentives Enabled Decentralized User Data Sharing Framework

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    Data sharing practices are much needed to strike a balance between user privacy, user experience, and profit. Different parties collect user data, for example, companies offering apps, social networking sites, and others, whose primary motive is an enhanced business model while giving optimal services to the end-users. However, the collection of user data is associated with serious privacy and security issues. The sharing platform also needs an effective incentive mechanism to realize transparent access to the user data while distributing fair incentives. The emerging literature on the topic includes decentralized data sharing approaches. However, there has been no universal method to track who shared what, to whom, when, for what purpose and under what condition in a verifiable manner until recently, when the distributed ledger technologies emerged to become the most effective means for designing a decentralized peer-to-peer network. This Ph.D. research includes an engineering approach for specifying the operations for designing incentives and user-controlled data-sharing platforms. The thesis presents a series of empirical studies and proposes novel blockchains- and smart contracts-based DUDS (Decentralized User Data Sharing) framework conceptualizing user-controlled data sharing practices. The DUDS framework supports immutability, authenticity, enhanced security, trusted records and is a promising means to share user data in various domains, including among researchers, customer data in e-commerce, tourism applications, etc. The DUDS framework is evaluated via performance analyses and user studies. The extended Technology Acceptance Model and a Trust-Privacy-Security Model are used to evaluate the usability of the DUDS framework. The evaluation allows uncovering the role of different factors affecting user intention to adopt data-sharing platforms. The results of the evaluation point to guidelines and methods for embedding privacy, user transparency, control, and incentives from the start in the design of a data-sharing framework to provide a platform that users can trust to protect their data while allowing them to control it and share it in the ways they want

    Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation

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    The 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) was held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. There were 327 delegates from 22 countries. The program included 12 long papers, 15 short papers, 33 posters, 3 demos, 6 workshops, 3 tutorials and 5 panels, as well as several interactive sessions and a Digital Preservation Showcase

    Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation

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    The 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) was held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. There were 327 delegates from 22 countries. The program included 12 long papers, 15 short papers, 33 posters, 3 demos, 6 workshops, 3 tutorials and 5 panels, as well as several interactive sessions and a Digital Preservation Showcase

    Chain-based recommendations

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    Recommender systems are discovery tools. Typically, they infer a user's preferences from her behaviour and make personalized suggestions. They are one response to the overwhelming choices that the Web affords its users. Recent studies have shown that a user of a recommender system is more likely to be satisfied by the recommendations if the system provides explanations that allow the user to understand their rationale, and if the system allows the user to provide feedback on the recommendations to improve the next round of recommendations so that they take account of the user's ephemeral needs. The goal of this dissertation is to introduce a new recommendation framework that offers a better user experience, while giving quality recommendations. It works on content-based principles and addresses both the issues identified in the previous paragraph, i.e.\ explanations and recommendation feedback. We instantiate our framework to produce two recommendation engines, each focusing on one of the themes: (i) the role of explanations in producing recommendations, and (ii) helping users to articulate their ephemeral needs. For the first theme, we show how to unify recommendation and explanation to a greater degree than has been achieved hitherto. This results in an approach that enables the system to find relevant recommendations with explanations that have a high degree of both fidelity and interpretability. For the second theme, we show how to allow users to steer the recommendation process using a conversational recommender system. Our approach allows the user to reveal her short-term preferences and have them taken into account by the system and thus assists her in making a good decision efficiently. Early work on conversational recommender systems considers the case where the candidate items have structured descriptions (e.g.\ sets of attribute-value pairs). Our new approach works in the case where items have unstructured descriptions (e.g.\ sets of genres or tags). For each of the two themes, we describe the problem settings, the state-of-the-art, our system design and our experiment design. We evaluate each system using both offline analyses as well as user trials in a movie recommendation domain. We find that the proposed systems provide relevant recommendations that also have a high degree of serendipity, low popularity-bias and high diversity

    A Social Dimension for Digital Architectural Practice

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    Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/1296 on 14.03.2017 by CS (TIS)This thesis proceeds from an analysis of practice and critical commentary to claim that the opportunities presented to some architectural practices by the advent of ubiquitous digital technology have not been properly exploited. The missed opportunities, it claims, can be attributed largely to the retention of a model of time and spaces as discrete design parameters, which is inappropriate in the context of the widening awareness of social interconnectedness that digital technology has also facilitated. As a remedy, the thesis shows that some social considerations essential to good architecture - which could have been more fully integrated in practice and theory more than a decade ago - can now be usefully revisited through a systematic reflection on an emerging use of web technologies that support social navigation. The thesis argues through its text and a number of practical projects that the increasing confidence and sophistication of interdisciplinary studies in geography, most notably in human geography, combined with the technological opportunities of social navigation, provide a useful model of time and space as a unified design parameter. In so doing the thesis suggests new possibilities for architectural practices involving social interaction. Through a literature review of the introduction and development of digital technologies to architectural practice, the thesis identifies the inappropriate persistence of a number of overarching concepts informing architectural practice. In a review of the emergence and growth of 'human geography' it elaborates on the concept of the social production of space, which it relates to an analysis of emerging social navigation technologies. In so doing the thesis prepares the way for an integration of socially aware architecture with the opportunities offered by social computing. To substantiate its claim the thesis includes a number of practical public projects that have been specifically designed to extend and amplify certain concepts, along with a large-scale design project and systematic analysis which is intended to illustrate the theoretical claim and provide a model for further practical exploitation
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