Examining the Effects of Personalized Explanations in a Multi-list Food Recommender System

In the past decade, food recipe websites have become a popular approach to find a recipe. Due to the vast amount of options, food recommender systems have been devel- oped and used to suggest appetizing recipes. However, recommending appealing meals does not necessarily imply that they are healthy. Recent studies on recommender sys- tems have demonstrated a growing interest in altering the interface, where the usage of multi-list interfaces with explanations has been explored earlier in an unsuccessful at- tempt to encourage healthier food choices. Building upon other research that highlights the ability of personalized explanations to provide a better understanding of presented recommendations, this thesis explores whether a multi-list interface with personalized explanations, which takes into account user preferences, health, and nutritional aspects, can affect users’ evaluation and perception of a food recommender system, as well as steer them towards healthier choices. A food recommender system was develop, with which single- and multi-lists, as well as non-personalized and personalized explana- tions, were compared in an online experiment (N = 163) in which participants were requested to choose recipes they liked and to answer questionnaires. The analysis re- vealed that personalized explanations in a multi-list interface were not able to increase choice satisfaction, choice difficulty, understanding or support healthier choices. Sur- prisingly, users selected healthier recipes if non-personalized rather than personalized explanations were presented alongside them. In addition, users perceived multi-lists to be more diverse and found single-list to be more satisfying.Masteroppgave i informasjonsvitenskapINFO390MASV-INF

Adapting Progress Feedback and Emotional Support to Learner Personality

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Linking information and people in a social system for academic conferences

This paper investigates the feasibility of maintaining a social information system to support attendees at an academic conference. The main challenge of this work was to create an infrastructure where users’ social activities, such as bookmarking, tagging, and social linking could be used to enhance user navigation and maximize the users’ ability to locate two important types of information in conference settings: presentations to attend and attendees to meet. We developed Conference Navigator 3, a social conference support system that integrates a conference schedule planner with a social linking service. We examined its potential and functions in the context of a medium-scale academic conference. In this paper, we present the design of the system’s socially enabled features and report the results of a conference-based study. Our study demonstrates the feasibility of social information systems for supporting academic conferences. Despite the low number of potential users and the short timeframe in which conferences took place, the usage of the system was high enough to provide sufficient data for social mechanisms. The study shows that most critical social features were highly appreciated and used, and provides direction for further research

Paving the way to collaborative context-aware mobile applications: a case study on preventing worsening of allergy symptoms

En los últimos años, la evolución de los teléfonos inteligentes y sus aplicaciones de software ha crecido exponencialmente; junto con el avance del Internet de las Cosas y las ciudades inteligentes, ha generado una gran demanda de servicios y aplicaciones en estos dominios. Aunque la amplia gama de aplicaciones móviles es incuestionable, los ciudadanos ya exigen que las aplicaciones se adapten a sus necesidades y situaciones específicas en tiempo real, es decir, que sean conscientes del contexto. Sin embargo, las aplicaciones móviles conscientes del contexto a menudo son muy limitadas y pierden la oportunidad de beneficiarse de la retroalimentación proporcionada por la colaboración ciudadana. Para llenar este vacío, este documento propone una arquitectura de software y una aplicación móvil colaborativas y conscientes del contexto. En particular, los hemos implementado en el ámbito de la e-salud, más específicamente en el área de las alergias estacionales, que causan que las personas alérgicas experimenten síntomas molestos que podrían evitarse si tuvieran acceso a información sobre el polen en tiempo real. Además, también se beneficiarán de la colaboración ciudadana a través del conocimiento de los síntomas que otras personas alérgicas con la misma alergia y en la misma ubicación están experimentando. Para ello, los usuarios podrán proporcionar sus síntomas en cualquier momento a través de su aplicación móvil y la arquitectura propuesta procesará constantemente esa información en tiempo real, enviando notificaciones a los usuarios tan pronto como se vea que los síntomas reportados superan un cierto umbral. Se han probado el rendimiento de la arquitectura, el consumo de recursos de la aplicación y una encuesta de satisfacción sobre la usabilidad y utilidad de la aplicación; todos los resultados han sido completamente satisfactorios.In recent years, the evolution of smartphones and their software applications has grown exponentially; together with the advance of the Internet of Things and smart cities, it has raised huge demand for services and applications in these domains. Although the wide range of mobile applications is unquestionable, citizens already demand that applications adapt to their specific needs and situations in real time, that is, that they are context-aware. However, context-aware mobile applications are often very limited and miss out on the opportunity of benefiting from feedback provided by citizen collaboration. In order to fill this gap, this paper proposes a context-aware and collaborative software architecture and mobile application. In particular, we have implemented them in the scope of e-health, more specifically in the area of seasonal allergies, which cause allergic people to experience annoying symptoms that could be avoided by having access to pollen information in real time. Furthermore, they will also benefit from citizen collaboration through the knowledge of the symptoms other allergic people with the same allergy and in the same location are experiencing. To this end, users will be able to provide their symptoms at any time through their mobile application and the proposed architecture will constantly process that information in real time, sending notifications to users as soon as reported symptoms are seen to exceed a certain threshold. The architecture’s perfor mance, the application’s resource consumption and a satisfaction survey of the app’s usability and usefulness have been tested; all results have been fully satisfactoryThis work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Union FEDER Funds [grant numbers RTI2018-093608-B-C33, RED2018-102654-T

SHELDON Smart habitat for the elderly.

An insightful document concerning active and assisted living under different perspectives: Furniture and habitat, ICT solutions and Healthcare