Preference-aware publish/subscribe delivery with diversity

In publish/subscribe systems, users describe their interests via subscriptions and are notified whenever new interesting events become available. Typically, in such systems, all sub-scriptions are considered equally important. However, due to the abundance of information, users may receive over-whelming amounts of events. In this paper, we propose us-ing a ranking mechanism based on user preferences, so that only top-ranked events are delivered to each user. Since many times top-ranked events are similar to each other, we also propose increasing the diversity of delivered events. Furthermore, we examine a number of different delivering policies for forwarding ranked events to users, namely a pe-riodic, a sliding-window and a history-based one. We have fully implemented our approach in SIENA, a popular pub-lish/subscribe middleware system, and report experimental results of its deployment. 1

Unifying Qualitative and Quantitative Database Preferences to Enhance Query Personalization

Data drives all aspects of our society, from everyday life, to business, to medicine, and science. It is well-known that query personalization can be an effective technique in dealing with the data scalability challenge, primarily from the human point of view. In order to personalize their query results, users need to express their preferences in an effective manner. There are two types of preferences: qualitative and quantitative. Each preference type has advantages and disadvantages with respect to expressiveness. The most important disadvantage of the quantitative model is that it cannot support all types of preferences while the qualitative model can only create a partial order over the data, which makes it impossible to rank all the results. The hypothesis of this dissertation is that it is possible to overcome the disadvantages of each preference type by combining both of them, in a single model, using the notion of intensity. This dissertation presents such a hybrid model and a practical system that has the ability to convert the intensity values of qualitative preferences into intensity values of quantitative preferences, without losing the qualitative information. The intensity values allow to create a total order over the tuples in the database that match a user’s preferences as well as to significantly increase the coverage of preferences. Hence, the proposed model eliminates the disadvantages of the existing two types of preferences. This dissertation formalizes the hybrid model using a preference graph and proposes an algorithm for efficient preference combination, which is evaluated in an experimental prototype. The experiments show that: (1) intensity plays a crucial role in determining the order of selecting and applying the preferences, and simply ordering the preferences based on the intensity value is not necessarily sufficient; (2) the model can achieve three orders of magnitude increase in coverage compared to other alternatives; (3) the solution proposed outperforms other Top-k algorithms by being able to use both qualitative and quantitative preferences at the same time, and (4) the algorithm proposed is efficient in terms of time complexity, returning tuples ordered by the intensity value in a matter of seconds