The design and study of pedagogical paper recommendation

For learners engaging in senior-level courses, tutors in many cases would like to pick some articles as supplementary reading materials for them each week. Unlike researchers ‘Googling’ papers from the Internet, tutors, when making recommendations, should consider course syllabus and their assessment of learners along many dimensions. As such, simply ‘Googling’ articles from the Internet is far from enough. That is, learner models of each individual, including their learning interest, knowledge, goals, etc. should be considered when making paper recommendations, since the recommendation should be carried out so as to ensure that the suitability of a paper for a learner is calculated as the summation of the fitness of the appropriateness of it to help the learner in general. This type of the recommendation is called a Pedagogical Paper Recommender.In this thesis, we propose a set of recommendation methods for a Pedagogical Paper Recommender and study the various important issues surrounding it. Experimental studies confirm that making recommendations to learners in social learning environments is not the same as making recommendation to users in commercial environments such as Amazon.com. In such learning environments, learners are willing to accept items that are not interesting, yet meet their learning goals in some way or another; learners’ overall impression towards each paper is not solely dependent on the interestingness of the paper, but also other factors, such as the degree to which the paper can help to meet their ‘cognitive’ goals.It is also observed that most of the recommendation methods are scalable. Although the degree of this scalability is still unclear, we conjecture that those methods are consistent to up to 50 papers in terms of recommendation accuracy. The experiments conducted so far and suggestions made on the adoption of recommendation methods are based on the data we have collected during one semester of a course. Therefore, the generality of results needs to undergo further validation before more certain conclusion can be drawn. These follow up studies should be performed (ideally) in more semesters on the same course or related courses with more newly added papers. Then, some open issues can be further investigated. Despite these weaknesses, this study has been able to reach the research goals set out in the proposed pedagogical paper recommender which, although sounding intuitive, unfortunately has been largely ignored in the research community. Finding a ‘good’ paper is not trivial: it is not about the simple fact that the user will either accept the recommended items, or not; rather, it is a multiple step process that typically entails the users navigating the paper collections, understanding the recommended items, seeing what others like/dislike, and making decisions. Therefore, a future research goal to proceed from the study here is to design for different kinds of social navigation in order to study their respective impacts on user behavior, and how over time, user behavior feeds back to influence the system performance

An architecture for user preference-based IoT service selection in cloud computing using mobile devices for smart campus

The Internet of things refers to the set of objects that have identities and virtual personalities operating in smart spaces using intelligent interfaces to connect and communicate within social environments and user context. Interconnected devices communicating to each other or to other machines on the network have increased the number of services. The concepts of discovery, brokerage, selection and reliability are important in dynamic environments. These concepts have emerged as an important field distinguished from conventional distributed computing by its focus on large-scale resource sharing, delivery and innovative applications. The usage of Internet of Things technology across different service provisioning environments has increased the challenges associated with service selection and discovery. Although a set of terms can be used to express requirements for the desired service, a more detailed and specific user interface would make it easy for the users to express their requirements using high-level constructs. In order to address the challenge of service selection and discovery, we developed an architecture that enables a representation of user preferences and manipulates relevant descriptions of available services. To ensure that the key components of the architecture work, algorithms (content-based and collaborative filtering) derived from the architecture were proposed. The architecture was tested by selecting services using content-based as well as collaborative algorithms. The performances of the algorithms were evaluated using response time. Their effectiveness was evaluated using recall and precision. The results showed that the content-based recommender system is more effective than the collaborative filtering recommender system. Furthermore, the results showed that the content-based technique is more time-efficient than the collaborative filtering technique

Quantitative analysis of networked environments to improve performance of information systems

In this thesis we encounter networks in three contexts i) as the citation networks between documents in citation databases CiteSeer and DBLP, ii) as the structure of e-government websites that is navigated by users and iii) as the social network of users of a photo-sharing site Flickr and a social networking site Yahoo!360. We study the properties of networks present in real datasets, what are the effects of their structure and how this structure can be exploited. We analyze the citation networks between computer science publications and compare them to those described in Physics community. We also demonstrate the bias of citation databases collected autonomously and present mathematical models of this bias. We then analyze the link structure of three websites extracted by exhaustive crawls. We perform a user study with 134 participants on these websites in an lab. We discuss the structure of the link networks and the performance of subjects in locating information on these websites. We finally exploit the knowledge of users' social network to provide higher quality recommendations than current collaborative filtering techniques and demonstrate the performance benefit on two real datasets.Katedra softwarového inženýrstvíDepartment of Software EngineeringFaculty of Mathematics and PhysicsMatematicko-fyzikální fakult

Identifying collaboration dynamics of bipartite author-topic networks with the influences of interest changes

Knowing driving factors and understanding researcher behaviors from the dynamics of collaborations over time offer some insights, i.e. help funding agencies in designing research grant policies. We present longitudinal network analysis on the observed collaborations through co-authorship over 15 years. Since co-authors possibly influence researchers to have interest changes, by focusing on researchers who could become the influencer, we propose a stochastic actor-oriented model of bipartite (two-mode) author-topic networks from article metadata. Information of scientific fields or topics of article contents, which could represent the interests of researchers, are often unavailable in the metadata. Topic absence issue differentiates this work with other studies on collaboration dynamics from article metadata of title-abstract and author properties. Therefore, our works also include procedures to extract and map clustered keywords as topic substitution of research interests. Then, the next step is to generate panel-waves of co-author networks and bipartite author-topic networks for the longitudinal analysis. The proposed model is used to find the driving factors of co-authoring collaboration with the focus on researcher behaviors in interest changes. This paper investigates the dynamics in an academic social network setting using selected metadata of publicly-available crawled articles in interrelated domains of "natural language processing" and "information extraction". Based on the evidence of network evolution, researchers have a conformed tendency to co-author behaviors in publishing articles and exploring topics. Our results indicate the processes of selection and influence in forming co-author ties contribute some levels of social pressure to researchers. Our findings also discussed on how the co-author pressure accelerates the changes of interests and behaviors of the researchers

Modeling Scholar Profile in Expert Recommendation based on Multi-Layered Bibliographic Graph

A recommendation system requires the profile of researchers which called here as Scholar Profile for suggestions based on expertise. This dissertation contributes on modeling unbiased scholar profile for more objective expertise evidence that consider interest changes and less focused on citations. Interest changes lead to diverse topics and make the expertise levels on topics differ. Scholar profile is expected to capture expertise in terms of productivity aspect which often signified from the volume of publications and citations. We include researcher behavior in publishing articles to avoid misleading citation. Therefore, the expertise levels of researchers on topics is influenced by interest evolution, productivity, dynamicity, and behavior extracted from bibliographic data of published scholarly articles. As this dissertation output, the scholar profile model employed within a recommendation system for recommending productive researchers who provide academic guidance. The scholar profile is generated from multi layers of bibliographic data, such as layers of author, topic, and relations between those layers to represent academic social network. There is no predefined information of topics in a cold-start situation, such that procedures of topic mapping are necessary. Then, features of productivity, dynamicity and behavior of researchers within those layers are taken from some observed years to accommodate the behavior aspect. We experimented with AMiner dataset often used in the following bibliographic data related studies to empirically investigate: (a) topic mapping strategies to obtain interest of researchers, (b) feature extraction model for productivity, dynamicity, and behavior aspects based on the mapped topics, and (c) expertise rank that considers interest changes and less focused on citations from the scholar profile. Ensuring the validity results, our experiments worked on standard expert list of AMiner researchers. We selected Natural Language Processing and Information Extraction (NLP-IE) domains because of their familiarity and interrelated context to make it easier for introducing cases of interest changes. Using the mapped topics, we also made minor contributions on transformation procedures for visualizing researchers on maps of Scopus subjects and investigating the possibilities of conflict of interest

Evaluating collaborative filtering over time

Recommender systems have become essential tools for users to navigate the plethora of content in the online world. Collaborative filtering—a broad term referring to the use of a variety, or combination, of machine learning algorithms operating on user ratings—lies at the heart of recommender systems’ success. These algorithms have been traditionally studied from the point of view of how well they can predict users’ ratings and how precisely they rank content; state of the art approaches are continuously improved in these respects. However, a rift has grown between how filtering algorithms are investigated and how they will operate when deployed in real systems. Deployed systems will continuously be queried for personalised recommendations; in practice, this implies that system administrators will iteratively retrain their algorithms in order to include the latest ratings. Collaborative filtering research does not take this into account: algorithms are improved and compared to each other from a static viewpoint, while they will be ultimately deployed in a dynamic setting. Given this scenario, two new problems emerge: current filtering algorithms are neither (a) designed nor (b) evaluated as algorithms that must account for time. This thesis addresses the divergence between research and practice by examining how collaborative filtering algorithms behave over time. Our contributions include: 1. A fine grained analysis of temporal changes in rating data and user/item similarity graphs that clearly demonstrates how recommender system data is dynamic and constantly changing. 2. A novel methodology and time-based metrics for evaluating collaborative filtering over time, both in terms of accuracy and the diversity of top-N recommendations. 3. A set of hybrid algorithms that improve collaborative filtering in a range of different scenarios. These include temporal-switching algorithms that aim to promote either accuracy or diversity; parameter update methods to improve temporal accuracy; and re-ranking a subset of users’ recommendations in order to increase diversity. 4. A set of temporal monitors that secure collaborative filtering from a wide range of different temporal attacks by flagging anomalous rating patterns. We have implemented and extensively evaluated the above using large-scale sets of user ratings; we further discuss how this novel methodology provides insight into dimensions of recommender systems that were previously unexplored. We conclude that investigating collaborative filtering from a temporal perspective is not only more suitable to the context in which recommender systems are deployed, but also opens a number of future research opportunities

Using NLP to resolve mismatches between jobseekers and positions in recruitment

Recruiting through online portals has seen a dramatic increase in recent decades and it is challenging for job seekers to evaluate the overwhelming amount of data to efficiently identify positions that align with their skills and qualifications. This research addresses this issue by investigating automatic approaches that leverage recent developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that search, parse, and evaluate the often unstructured data in order to find appropriate matches. We present the development of a benchmark suite consisting of an annotation schema, training corpus and baseline model for Entity Recognition (ER) in job descriptions, published under a Creative Commons licence. The dataset contains 18.6k entities comprising five types: Skill; Qualification; Experience; Occupation; and Domain. We develop a benchmark Conditional Random Fields (CRF) ER model which achieves an F1 score of 0.59, and our best performing model utilises Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and achieves an F1 score of 0.73. We consider different ways of framing the matching problem and develop Machine Learning (ML) models to address each. We propose that the Natural Language Inference (NLI) paradigm most closely aligns with the matching problem. Our best performing model utilises decomposable attention and achieves an F1 score of 0.73 on a job application success prediction task. Finally, we integrate the ER and success prediction models into a cohesive pipeline that predicts whether a given job application made by a user will be successful, which can be extended into a system that recommends suitable jobs to a user. Although we observe poorer results on this pipeline relative to a more simple input truncation approach, we suggest this may be limited by the ER component for feature selection and the entity encoding process

Managing the Evolution of Corporate Portals - A User-Centric Approach

Corporate portals have become an important component in company intranets. This work focuses on the challenges that arise due to constant evolution of such portals. A concept framework is presented to cope with these challenges. As part of this framework the implementation of a recommender system is proposed and specified in detail. The applicability of the concept is demonstrated by a case study

Linking Research and Policy: Assessing a Framework for Organic Agricultural Support in Ireland

This paper links social science research and agricultural policy through an analysis of support for organic agriculture and food. Globally, sales of organic food have experienced 20% annual increases for the past two decades, and represent the fastest growing segment of the grocery market. Although consumer interest has increased, farmers are not keeping up with demand. This is partly due to a lack of political support provided to farmers in their transition from conventional to organic production. Support policies vary by country and in some nations, such as the US, vary by state/province. There have been few attempts to document the types of support currently in place. This research draws on an existing Framework tool to investigate regionally specific and relevant policy support available to organic farmers in Ireland. This exploratory study develops a case study of Ireland within the framework of ten key categories of organic agricultural support: leadership, policy, research, technical support, financial support, marketing and promotion, education and information, consumer issues, inter-agency activities, and future developments. Data from the Irish Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority (Teagasc), and other governmental and semi-governmental agencies provide the basis for an assessment of support in each category. Assessments are based on the number of activities, availability of information to farmers, and attention from governmental personnel for each of the ten categories. This policy framework is a valuable tool for farmers, researchers, state agencies, and citizen groups seeking to document existing types of organic agricultural support and discover policy areas which deserve more attention

Ekstraksi Fitur Produktivitas Dinamis berdasarkan Topik Artikel Ilmiah untuk Klasterisasi Peneliti

Pengelompokkan peneliti seringkali menggunakan informasi tekstual yang terdapat pada artikel ilmiah peneliti, contohnya judul, abstrak, dan kata kunci sehingga menghasilkan kelompok peneliti dengan kemiripan informasi tekstual pada artikel ilmiah mereka. Pengelompokkan peneliti juga seringkali menggunakan jumlah publikasi dan sitasi sehingga menghasilkan kelompok peneliti yang memiliki jumlah publikasi dan sitasi yang cenderung sama. Berdasarkaan kedua metode di atas, penelitian ini mencoba untuk menganalisis penggunaan topik artikel ilmiah pada proses ekstraksi fitur produktivitas. Fitur ini merupakan fitur yang didapatkan melalui penghitungan kinerja peneliti berdasarkan jumlah publikasi dan sitasi. Hasil ekstraksi fitur akan digunakan untuk klasterisasi peneliti menggunakan metode K-Means++. Sebelum data peneliti diklasterisasi, terlebih dahulu data peneliti dianalisis untuk menghilangkan kemungkinan adanya outlier. Evaluasi hasil klaster dilakukan dengan mempertimbangkan nilai Sum Squared Error dan Silhouette. Hasilnya, klaster optimal didapatkan dengan nilai K sama dengan 8 dan nilai silhouette sama dengan 0.15396. Kemudian, hasil klaster dianalisis untuk dapat memberikan label terhadap masing-masing klaster dengan mempertimbangkan topik artikel ilmiah, jumlah publikasi dan jumlah sitasi