The art of spending and recommendations in personal finance

Happiness is one of the most important aspects of human lives, yet the literature on emotional well-being indicates that people often fail to correctly anticipate the hedonic consequences of future events. As a result, individuals end up being not as happy as they thought they would be. This phenomenon also applies to the domain of personal finance where people make bad decisions about purchases. In this paper, we identified a new opportunity for the research on recommender systems in personal finance and through analysis demonstrated that intelligent recommenders can help to minimize errors in affective forecasts and enhance happiness of people in the domain of consumption. Furthermore, we reviewed problems associated with design of such recommenders and proposed approaches to overcome them.This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 655723

Recommending research colloquia: A study of several sources for user profiling

The study reported in this paper is an attempt to improve content-based recommendation in CoMeT, a social system for sharing information about research colloquia in Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh campuses. To improve the quality of recommendation in CoMeT, we explored three additional sources for building user profiles: tags used by users to annotate CoMeT's talks, partial content of CiteULike papers bookmarked by users, and tags used to annotate CiteULike papers. We also compare different tag integration models to study the impact of information fusion on recommendations outcome. The results demonstrate that information encapsulated in CiteULike bookmarks generally helps to improve several aspects of recommendation. The addition of tags by fusing them into keyword profiles helps to improve precision and novelty of recommendation, but may harm systems ability to recommend generally interesting talks. The effects of tags and bookmarks appeared to be stackable. © 2010 ACM

Agente inteligente para la identificación automática de perfiles de usuarios de turismo

El dominio de turismo es un ambiente muy dinámico, los productos (paquetes turísticos) cambian continuamente, como así también los intereses de los clientes (turistas). Por ejemplo, las preferencias sobre un tipo de lectura son más estables y constantes que las preferencias sobre las visitas turísticas. Las diferentes fuentes de información para poder predecir preferencias más completas, como así también la consideración de múltiples variables para poder realizar las recomendaciones, son los temas centrales a los que apunta el proyecto. En este aspecto el proyecto permitirá el desarrollo e implementación de innovadoras tecnologías de software aplicables al turismo regional que ayudará a mejorar la efectividad de los sitios web locales en cuanto a la atracción de turistas. La incorporación de diferentes fuentes de información del turista y los métodos y técnicas para su recuperación incrementaría la precisión de las recomendaciones. Recomendaciones más precisas incrementa la satisfacción del turista, ocasionando la fidelidad del turista e incrementando la popularidad del sitio web permitiendo una más amplia difusión del turismo local y promoción del patrimonio local. Como así también permitirá definir paquetes turísticos en función de la caracterización del perfil dinámico del turista que se obtendrá a partir de la interacción del turista con los sitios web.Eje: Agentes y Sistemas InteligentesRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Conceptual Design Model of Computerized Personal-Decision AID (ComPDA)

To date, the attentions given to the improvement of decision support at organizational level has been enormous. On the contrary, academic research in improving the performance of computerized decision aid (CDA) for personal decision is lacking, in which some are dated. Nowadays, the existence of CDA which handles personal decision is mushrooming and progressively getting attention from users. Despite that, users’ perceptions of the suitable decision strategy and technique for CDA have not been subjected to systematic investigation. Literature reviews also indicate that most users do not go for complex mathematical techniques despite the fact that these techniques are better at handling the risks and uncertainties in decisions. In fact, more often than not, the development process of CDAs does not seem to adhere to any conceptual and theoretical model. In view of that, this study aims to propose a conceptual design model for computerized personal-decision aid (ComPDA). The following objectives are outlined to support the general aim: (i) to identify appropriate decision strategy and technique for ComPDA, (ii) to incorporate identified strategy and technique in the construction of conceptual design model for ComPDA (iii) to validate the conceptual design model in different situations via prototyping method and (iv) to measure the users’ perceived helpfulness of the ComPDA prototypes. Participatory design method was implemented in order to achieve objective i and ii. The findings were incorporated into the construction of the conceptual design model of ComPDA. In achieving objective iii, the conceptual design model was validated in two different case studies via prototyping: A- choosing development methodology in mobile computing course (md-Matrix); and B- purchasing a mobile phone (ep-Matrix). In achieving objective iv, an instrument (named as Q-HELP) was developed to measure the helpfulness (HLP) of the prototypes. This study identified four relevant constructs pertinent to helpfulness; reliability (REL), decision making effort (EFF), confidence (CON), and decision awareness (AWR). Altogether, 122 respondents participated where 63 were from case study A and 59 from case study B. Eight hypotheses were formulated comprising testing for correlation between all the constructs in Q-HELP with helpfulness, testing the average time spent to make a selection with and without the proposed ComPDA and testing if the mean score of helpfulness of the proposed ComPDA is high. Paired Samples t Test, Pearson Correlation analyses and descriptive analyses were utilized to validate the hypotheses. The results show that: REL and HLP are significantly correlated, EFF and HLP are significantly correlated, CON and HLP are significantly correlated, AWR and HLP are significantly correlated, the use of md-Matrix and ep-Matrix significantly reduces the time spent to make selection, mean score of helpfulness of md-Matrix is fairly high and mean score of helpfulness of ep-Matrix is high. However, it is concluded that the overall results exhibit sufficient indication that md-Matrix and ep-Matrix were found helpful to users in terms of reliability, lessening the decision making effort, increasing confidence and also awareness in decision making. This study has produced the following outcomes, along with achieving all of its objectives: (i) a conceptual design model for ComPDA which incorporates suitable decision strategies and techniques identified via systematic investigations; (ii) two functional ComPDA prototypes to validate the conceptual design model and to demonstrate its applicability in different situations, (iii) an instrument for measuring helpfulness which includes dimensions from outcome and process aspects; and (iv) comparative analyses of decision models, strategies and techniques which provide basis for future studies.

Multiple social network integration framework for recommendation across system domain

A recommender system is a special software that recommends items to a user based on the user’s history. A recommender system comprises users, items and a rating matrix. Rating matrix stores the interactions between users and items. The system faces a variety of problems among which three are the main concerns of this research. These problems are cold start, sparsity, and diversity. Majority of the research use a conventional framework for solving these problems. In a conventional recommender system, user profiles are generated from a single feedback source, whereas, Cross Domain Recommender Systems (CDRS) research relies on more than one source. Recently researchers have started using “Social Network Integration Framework”, that integrates social network as an additional feedback source. Although the existing framework alleviates recommendation problems better than the conventional framework, it still faces limitations. Existing framework is designed only for a single source domain and requires the same user participation in both the source and the target domain. Existing techniques are also designed to integrate knowledge from one social network only. To integrate multiple sources, this research developed a “Multiple Social Network Integration Framework”, that consists of two models and three techniques. Firstly, the Knowledge Generation Model generates interaction matrices from “n” number of source domains. Secondly, the Knowledge Linkage Model links the source domains to the target domain. The outputs of the models are inputs of the techniques. Then multiple techniques were developed to address cold start, sparsity and diversity problem using multiple source networks. Three techniques addressed the cold start problem. These techniques are Multiple Social Network integration with Equal Weights Participation (MSN-EWP), Multiple Social Network integration with Local Adjusted Weights Participation (MSNLAWP) and Multiple Social Network integration with Target Adjusted Weights Participation (MSN-TAWP). Experimental results showed that MSN-TAWP performed best by producing 47% precision improvement over popularity ranking as the baseline technique. For the sparsity problem, Multiple Social Network integration for K Nearest Neighbor identification (MSN-KNN) technique performed at least 30% better in accuracy while decreasing the error rate by 20%. Diversity problem was addressed by two combinations of the cold start and sparsity techniques. These combinations, EWP + MSN-KNN, TAWP + MSN-KNN and TAWP + MSN-KNN outperformed the rest of the diversity combinations by 56% gain in diversity with a precision loss of 1%. In conclusion, the techniques designed for multiple sources outperformed existing techniques for addressing cold start, sparsity and diversity problem. Finally, an extension of multiple social network integration framework for content-based and hybrid recommendation techniques should be considered future work

Customer profiling using a service-orientated architecture

Customer profiling has recently gained much recognition in the e-commerce domain because of the benefits it is capable of bringing to online business. Customer profiling has been implemented in various systems development approaches such as in a client-server environment. Recently there has been an increase in the number of organisations adopting and implementing e-commerce systems using service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles. This research set out to determine how a customer profile can be implemented using open source SOA implementation tools, and how SOA-based customer profiles can be utilised to provide appropriate personalisation in an SOA environment. The research further endeavoured to complete a comparative study on customer profile implementation in two different architectures, namely SOA and client-server. An extensive literature review was conducted on SOA, customer profiling and e-commerce systems development. SOA enabling technologies, such as, web services, enterprise service bus (ESB) and open source Sun Java SOA implementation tools, for example, Open ESB, GlassFish application server and Netbeans IDE were analysed. A Java web services-based customer profiling system was prototyped following SOA design principles. An end-user evaluation survey was conducted using eye tracking with a sample of 30 participants. The evaluation was done on two e-commerce systems with the same interface but running on two different customer profile back-ends, SOA and client-server. The results show that participants did not experience significant difference between the two systems, however, eye tracking results showed a significant difference between the two systems. The research concluded that customer profiling using SOA offers more benefits than implementations using other architectures such as client-server. SOA component-based development proved to be easier to manage, develop, integrate and improves interoperability between different technologies. The research brought together necessary techniques and technologies that organisations can use to implement SOA. Using SOA, organisations can integrate and utilise different technologies seamlessly to achieve business goals

USING EXTERNAL SOURCES TO IMPROVE RESEARCH TALK RECOMMENDATION IN SMALL COMMUNITIES

In academic research communities, a typical way to spread ideas or seek for collaboration is through research talks, which might be presented at departmental colloquia or might be in given at conferences. Given a large number of research talks, with some of them happening in parallel, it becomes increasingly harder to focus on those of that are of most interest. To solve this problem, talk recommendation systems can help academics identify the most useful talks among many. This dissertation investigates methods to improve research talk recommendations, both for conference attendees and for faculty and students at a research university. More specifically, the focus of this thesis is the use of external information about user interests as a way to address the challenges of having limited data about target users. The thesis examines several kinds of external sources such as user home page, bibliography, external bookmarks, and user profiles from external information systems and explores impact of this information on the quality of talk recommendation in a general situation and in a cold-start context. For this study, the dissertation uses data from two existing talk recommendation systems, CoMeT and Conference Navigator 3, and an academic paper search system, SciNet

Sustainable Transformation of Individuals and Families: Design and Implementation of Holistic Personalised Socially Driven Persuasive Systems

Sustainability is a topic that has matured and has evolved from organisational sustain ability to societal sustainability and more recently to individual sustainability. As an individual is the core, basic component of society, and plays a critical role in societal transformation, there is growing interest and discussions on individual sustainability and wellbeing. Since the publication of Our Common Future – the report commis sioned by the UN General Assembly in tackling environmental and natural resources issues – the concept of ‘sustainable development’ has taken root in firms and govern ments, both in optimising their supply chain and in the planning of the sustainability of the society. However, counterintuitively, the fabric of the society – individuals and families – has been neglected in this journey of understanding their roles in sustaina bility, as well as in the nexus between their decisions and social outcomes. This thesis bridges the gap. Sustainability is a transformative process of improving the quality of lives by balancing various of our life aspects, such as economic, ecological, and societal dimensions. In this process, information systems often take a critical part as an analytical tool, which provides insightful decision support and recommendations based on collected data and information. In contrast to systems employed by corporates and governments, the development of sustainability systems for individuals and families is still in its infancy. Existing systems mostly are only focusing on one aspect of life and prescribe a single dimensional solution, without regard to the contextual and circumstantial complexi ties of life. In this light, this thesis aims to design and implement systems that adopt a holistic approach in understanding users’ individualistic needs, and in synthesising their life status and goals. The vision is to recognise the multifaceted aspirations of the users, and to nudge them toward a lifestyle that is sustainable, practical, and, above all, enjoyable. To realise this vision, the thesis adopts the multimethodological design science approaches (Hevner, March, Park, & Ram, 2004; Nunamaker, Chen, & Purdin, 1991) with the design eval uation methods from Hevner, March, Park, and Ram (2004) to address the challenges. ii First, the thesis defines individual and family sustainability and a set of nine principles named SSHARRPPP (Sustainable, Social, Holistic, Adaptive, Real-time, Real-world, Precise, Personalised, Persuasive). Based on these principles, the thesis develops sus tainable transformative processes that are applied to key activities and can bring fun damental changes for one’s life. From these conceptual and procedural foundations, the thesis designs system architectures and implements four systems as proof of con cepts. They are, namely, the SSHARRPPP Measurement, Shopping, Modelling, and Games. SSHARRPPP systems support individual and family sustainability holistically as they work together seamlessly. SSHARRPPP Measurement and Shopping measure key ac tivities that are performed by individuals and families. Based on the measured data, SSHARRPPP Modelling grasps causal effect relationships of one’s life dimensions and develops models. Lastly, SSHARRPPP Games helps people to stick with sustainable lives by making their journey enjoyable. All systems are designed to educate people to transform their lives. During the research, all of these conceptual, procedural, and sys tem artefacts are validated through publications, presentations and peer-review pro cesses. This thesis fills the gap in individual and family sustainability by bringing understand ing of human nature and systems together. Taken as a whole, it provides holistic un derstanding on sustainable life transformation and benefits researchers in both infor mation systems and sustainability. The thesis also lays the ground for future work in health and self-management, as it provides system solutions by synthesising core ideas from purposes of life and values, various human processes, and mechanisms to trans form our lives. At the practical level, the system architecture and the applications guide the system developers to design and implement systems for the sustainable transfor mation of individuals and families. Importantly, this thesis benefits individuals and families by making their sustainable life transformations holistic