Market-based Recommendation: Agents that Compete for Consumer Attention

The amount of attention space available for recommending suppliers to consumers on e-commerce sites is typically limited. We present a competitive distributed recommendation mechanism based on adaptive software agents for efficiently allocating the 'consumer attention space', or banners. In the example of an electronic shopping mall, the task is delegated to the individual shops, each of which evaluates the information that is available about the consumer and his or her interests (e.g. keywords, product queries, and available parts of a profile). Shops make a monetary bid in an auction where a limited amount of 'consumer attention space' for the arriving consumer is sold. Each shop is represented by a software agent that bids for each consumer. This allows shops to rapidly adapt their bidding strategy to focus on consumers interested in their offerings. For various basic and simple models for on-line consumers, shops, and profiles, we demonstrate the feasibility of our system by evolutionary simulations as in the field of agent-based computational economics (ACE). We also develop adaptive software agents that learn bidding strategies, based on neural networks and strategy exploration heuristics. Furthermore, we address the commercial and technological advantages of this distributed market-based approach. The mechanism we describe is not limited to the example of the electronic shopping mall, but can easily be extended to other domains

Competitive market-based allocation of consumer attention space

The amount of attention space available for recommending suppliers to consumers on e-commerce sites is typically limited. We present a competitive distributed recommendation mechanism based on adaptive software agents for efficiently allocating the 'consumer attention space', or banners. In the example of an electronic shopping mall, the task is delegated to the individual shops, each of which evaluates the information that is available about the consumer and his or her interests (e.g. keywords, product queries, and available parts of a profile). Shops make a monetary bid in an auction where a limited amount of 'consumer attention space' for the arriving consumer is sold. Each shop is represented by a software agent that bids for each consumer. This allows shops to rapidly adapt their bidding strategy to focus on consumers interested in their offerings. For various basic and simple models for on-line consumers, shops, and profiles, we demonstrate the feasibility of our system by evolutionary simulations as in the field of agent-based computational economics (ACE). We also develop adaptive software agents that learn bidding-strategies, based on neural networks and strategy exploration heuristics. Furthermore, we address the commercial and technological advantages of this distributed market-based approach. The mechanism we describe is not limited to the example of the electronic shopping mall, but can easily be extended to other domains

Cost-Effective Location Management for Mobile Agents on the Internet

Many mobile agent system-related services and applications require interacting with a mobile agent by passing messages. However, an agent’s mobility raises several challenges in delivering messages to a mobile agent accurately. Consisting of tracking and message delivery phases, most mobile agent location management schemes create or receive many update messages and interaction messages to ensure the effectiveness of the schemes. In addition to downgrading the overall performance of a mobile agent location management scheme, excessive transmission of messages increases the network load. The migration locality of a mobile agent and the interaction rate between mobile agents significantly affect the performance of a mobile agent location management scheme with respect to location management cost. This work presents a novel Dual Home based Scheme (DHS) that can lower the location management costs in terms of migration locality and interaction rate. While the DHS scheme uniquely adopts dual home location management architecture, a selective update strategy based on that architecture is also designed for cost-effective location management of mobile agents. Moreover, DHS is compared with available schemes based on formulations and simulation experiments from the perspective of location management costs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DHS scheme performs satisfactorily in terms of migration locality and interaction rate

Modelling of reliable service based operations support system (MORSBOSS)

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDThe underlying theme of this thesis is identification, classification, detection and prediction of cellular network faults using state of the art technologies, methods and algorithms

Scalable intelligent electronic catalogs

The world today is full of information systems which make huge quantities of information available. This incredible amount of information is clearly overwhelming Internet endusers. As a consequence, intelligent tools to identify worthwhile information are needed, in order to fully assist people in finding the right information. Moreover, most systems are ultimately used, not just to provide information, but also to solve problems. Encouraged by the growing popular success of Internet and the enormous business potential of electronic commerce, e-catalogs have been consolidated as one of the most relevant types of information systems. Nearly all currently available electronic catalogs are offering tools for extracting product information based on key-attribute filtering methods. The most advanced electronic catalogs are implemented as recommender systems using collaborative filtering techniques. This dissertation focuses on strategies for coping with the difficulty of building intelligent catalogs which fully support the user in his purchase decision-making process, while maintaining the scalability of the whole system. The contributions of this thesis lie on a mixed-initiative system which is inspired by observations on traditional commerce activities. Such a conversational model consists basically of a dialog between the customer and the system, where the user criticizes proposed products and the catalog suggests new products accordingly. Constraint satisfaction techniques are analyzed in order to provide a uniform framework for modeling electronic catalogs for configurable products. Within the same framework, user preferences and optimization constraints are also easily modeled. Searching strategies for proposing the adequate products according to criteria are described in detail. Another dimension of this dissertation faces the problem of scalability, i.e., the problem of supporting hundreds, or thousands of users simultaneously using intelligent electronic catalogs. Traditional wisdom would presume that in order to provide full assistance to users in complex tasks, the business logic of the system must be complex, thus preventing scalability. SmartClient is a software architectural model that uses constraint satisfaction problems for representing solution spaces, instead of traditional models which represent solution spaces by collections of single solutions. This main idea is supported by the fact that constraint solvers are extreme in their compactness and simplicity, while providing sophisticated business logic. Different SmartClient architecture configurations are provided for different uses and architectural requirements. In order to illustrate the use of constraint satisfaction techniques for complex electronic catalogs with the SmartClient architecture, a commercial Internet-based application for travel planning, called reality, has been successfully developed. Travel planning is a particularly appropriate domain for validating the results of this research, since travel information is dynamic, travel planning problems are combinatorial, and moreover, complex user preferences and optimization constraints must be taken into consideration

Service Futures, Proceedings of the fourth Service Design and Service Innovation Conference

ServDes2014 explores how Service Design is contributing to ‘Service Futures’ and how it is developing as a field of research and practice. We have witnessed how the concept and role of services in the economy and society have come a long way since its first definitions and studies. Services have moved from being a peripheral activity in a manufacturing - centred economy; to an engine for growth and society driven innovation. This transformation has been fully recognised with a flourishing of service innovation and service research studies aimed at deepening understanding; and at supporting the development of services both as a sector and as a concept. We suggest that Service Design is closely following this transformation. Starting from its initial focus on service interactions and experiences; Service Design research and practice have entered more strategic and transformational roles; dealing with issues of organisational change; system design; sustainability and social change; amongst others. Increasingly; Service Design is considering ways to integrate and collaborate with other service related disciplines. Also; questions are emerging on the future of this field; considering the growing areas of application and the expansion of the concept of service itself. ServDes2014 has brought these recent discussions and transformations to the fore and offered an ideal place to collectively reflect on and imagine that future. ServDes.2014 ran over three days: The first day was dedicated to practical explorations of Service Design with eight workshops led by both practitioners and academics; The second day was mostly focused on (long and short) papers presentations organised in three parallel sessions and two extra workshops; The third and final day was partly dedicated to papers presentation and came to an end with three parallel forums exploring the future of Service Design Research and Education and their relationship with Social Innovation. Working at the boundaries of Service Design; Digital and Social Innovation; the keynote speaker Dominic Campbell (Futuregov); projected novel spaces and responsibilities for Service Design in relation to complex societal transformational challenges; while Prof. Pelle Ehn (Malmö University); positioned it within a historical retrospective of Participatory Design in a constant search for more democratic (service) design practices. The conference was organised around five main themes which are reflected in the proceedings structure: Emerging Directions for Service Design; Design for Service Innovation and Transformation; Service Design and Implementation; Novel Service Design Frameworks and Tools; Service Design Across Organisations. Thanks to everyone who contributed and participated to this conference; and we look forward ServDes.2016 further developments and ideas

30th International Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases

Information modelling is becoming more and more important topic for researchers, designers, and users of information systems. The amount and complexity of information itself, the number of abstraction levels of information, and the size of databases and knowledge bases are continuously growing. Conceptual modelling is one of the sub-areas of information modelling. The aim of this conference is to bring together experts from different areas of computer science and other disciplines, who have a common interest in understanding and solving problems on information modelling and knowledge bases, as well as applying the results of research to practice. We also aim to recognize and study new areas on modelling and knowledge bases to which more attention should be paid. Therefore philosophy and logic, cognitive science, knowledge management, linguistics and management science are relevant areas, too. In the conference, there will be three categories of presentations, i.e. full papers, short papers and position papers

Malaysian bilateral trade relations and economic growth

This paper examines the structure and trends of Malaysian bilateral exports and imports and then investigates whether these bilateral exports and imports have caused Malaysian economic growth. Although the structure of Malaysia’s trade has changed quite significantly over the last three decades, the direction of Malaysia’s trade remains generally the same. Broadly, ASEAN, the EU, East Asia, the US and Japan continue to be the Malaysia’s major trading partners. The Granger causality tests have shown that it is the bilateral imports that have caused economic growth in Malaysia rather than the bilateral exports