Joint analysis of user-generated content and product information to enhance user experience in e-commerce

The development of Internet has brought us a more convenient way to purchase goods through e-commerce, which has gradually pervaded our life. However, shopping experience of users in e-commerce has been far from the optimum. In order to enhance user experience in e-commerce, we propose a series of novel studies based on joint analysis of user-generated content and product information; in this dissertation, user-generated content includes user reviews and social media text data, and product information includes product descriptions and product specifications in general. This dissertation aims at assisting e-commerce users in two directions: discovering products and making purchase decisions. To help users discover products, we first propose to leverage user reviews to improve accuracy of product search. We carefully combine product descriptions and user reviews to improve product search. Then, we also propose to recommend products via inference of implicit intent in social media text. We infer implicit intent in user status text leveraging parallel corpora we build from social media, and we recommend products whose descriptions satisfy the inferred intent. In order to help users make purchase decisions, we first propose to generate augmented product specifications leveraging user reviews. Product specifications are often difficult to understand especially for high-technology products that contain many advanced features. We jointly model user reviews and product specifications to augment product specifications with useful information in the user reviews. We also propose to retrieve relevant opinions for new products. New or unpopular products often have no reviews, and such lack of information makes consumers hesitate to make a purchase decision. We leverage user reviews of similar products, where similarity is estimated using product specifications, to retrieve relevant opinions for new products. The experiment results show the proposed models are effective in general. The models are also general enough to be applied to any entities with their text data. Furthermore, the models can benefit both product manufacturers and consumers, so their potential impact may be even bigger

City Systems: Building Blocks for Achieving Sustainability and Creating Good Jobs

In this issue brief, we examine three different systems that underlie cities and keep them running: water, waste, and energy. Within each of these systems are opportunities for states and cities to modernize their local infrastructure, improve their communities, and ultimately create jobs

CO-OPERATING TO COMPETE IN HIGH VELOCITY GLOBAL MARKETS: THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF FLEXIBLE SUPPLY CHAIN ARCHITECTURES

Continued value creation is paramount for the survival of firms competing in today's high velocity global business environment. This paper presents a conceptual framework for understanding how firms can create and capture value within a highly volatile and uncertain business environment by exploiting both performance gaps and opportunity gaps through the development and use of flexible supply chain architectures. The choice of flexible organizational architecture allows for the continued reconfiguration of the independent modular components of the supply chain so as to achieve optimal leverage of both the firms core competencies as well as their collaborative partners complementary resources. The case of Cellars of Canterbury, a New Zealand based International wine marketing and distribution cooperative enterprise provides empirical support.Industrial Organization, International Relations/Trade,

CO-OPERATING TO COMPETE IN HIGH VELOCITY GLOBAL MARKETS: THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF FLEXIBLE SUPPLY CHAIN ARCHITECTURES

Continued value creation is paramount for the survival of firms competing in today's high velocity global business environment. This paper presents a conceptual framework for understanding how firms can create and capture value within a highly volatile and uncertain business environment by exploiting both performance gaps and opportunity gaps through the development and use of flexible supply chain architectures. The choice of flexible organizational architecture allows for the continued reconfiguration of the independent modular components of the supply chain so as to achieve optimal leverage of both the firms core competencies as well as their collaborative partners complementary resources. The case of "Cellars of Canterbury," a New Zealand based International wine marketing and distribution cooperative enterprise provides empirical support. Keywords: value creation, flexible supply chain architectures, leverage, core competencies.value creation, flexible supply chain architectures, leverage, core competencies., Industrial Organization, Marketing,

Predicting Motivations of Actions by Leveraging Text

Understanding human actions is a key problem in computer vision. However, recognizing actions is only the first step of understanding what a person is doing. In this paper, we introduce the problem of predicting why a person has performed an action in images. This problem has many applications in human activity understanding, such as anticipating or explaining an action. To study this problem, we introduce a new dataset of people performing actions annotated with likely motivations. However, the information in an image alone may not be sufficient to automatically solve this task. Since humans can rely on their lifetime of experiences to infer motivation, we propose to give computer vision systems access to some of these experiences by using recently developed natural language models to mine knowledge stored in massive amounts of text. While we are still far away from fully understanding motivation, our results suggest that transferring knowledge from language into vision can help machines understand why people in images might be performing an action.Comment: CVPR 201

An Analysis of Chinese acquisitions of Made in Italy firms in the luxury sector

Outward Foreign Direct Investment (OFDI) from emerging economies has begun to increase significantly and has been growing at a faster pace than Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from the developed world. This research seeks to assess the impact of Chinese acquisitions and their implications for the “Made in Italy” luxury sector and its firms. This paper presents a cross-case analysis of two Chinese acquisitions in order to provide some in-depth insights into the influences and the motives driving Chinese firms to invest in the luxury Made in Italy sector, the patterns and modes of the Chinese acquisitions as well as the competitive strategies and the distinctive challenges that both investors and acquired firms have to face. From the findings, it emerges that both the investor and the acquired firm need to overcome several key challenges to be mutual benefits from the acquisition

A Study on Platform's New Strategy in Media 2.0 Era - Based on “Keystone” concept & Google case

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a new strategy of the platform in Media 2.0 era. This goal is approached by firstly examining conceptual change of the platform strategy from mass media world (Media 1.0) to micro media world (Media 2.0). Then, it will discuss "Keystone" strategy by Iansiti & Levien (2004) who introduced four different types of platform and will give an example, Google. The data shows, how Google's keystone strategy could be successfully accomplished with three sources for value creation, revelation, aggregation and plasticity, and how healthy it is in terms of productivity, robustness, and niche creation. Finally, an applicable framework to Media 2.0 will be constructed on the basis sources for value creation and "Keystone" capabilities of ecosystem management. Three main parts of the keystone strategy are the openness, synchronization, and mass customization focus. --Media platform,Keystone,ecosystem

Persuasive technology and digital design for behaviour change

Copyright @ 2012 Social Science Research NetworkThe convergence of the 'digital' and 'real' worlds has been rapid and transformative of everyday life, as well as design practice - to the extent that talking about 'digital design' and 'the digital context' seems anachronistic and redundant. Nevertheless, the arrival of digital technology, the Internet and social media has, from a design perspective, created a new field of a ffordances, constraints, information flows and possibilities. This paper reviews some of the ways in which digital architecture infl uences behaviour, and what the implications could be for designers seeking to infl uence behaviour for social and environmental bene fit. Topics covered include Persuasive Technology, gami fication, Lessig's 'Code is Law' perspective, digital rights management and Zittrain's concept of generativity