SOA-enabled compliance management: Instrumenting, assessing, and analyzing service-based business processes

Facilitating compliance management, that is, assisting a company's management in conforming to laws, regulations, standards, contracts, and policies, is a hot but non-trivial task. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) has evolved traditional, manual business practices into modern, service-based IT practices that ease part of the problem: the systematic definition and execution of business processes. This, in turn, facilitates the online monitoring of system behaviors and the enforcement of allowed behaviors-all ingredients that can be used to assist compliance management on the fly during process execution. In this paper, instead of focusing on monitoring and runtime enforcement of rules or constraints, we strive for an alternative approach to compliance management in SOAs that aims at assessing and improving compliance. We propose two ingredients: (i) a model and tool to design compliant service-based processes and to instrument them in order to generate evidence of how they are executed and (ii) a reporting and analysis suite to create awareness of a company's compliance state and to enable understanding why and where compliance violations have occurred. Together, these ingredients result in an approach that is close to how the real stakeholders-compliance experts and auditors-actually assess the state of compliance in practice and that is less intrusive than enforcing compliance. © 2013 Springer-Verlag London

Optimising eco-feedback design

Eco-feedback has become one of the most popular behavioural interventions for promoting household water and energy conservation. Since its inception, it has been adopted by various companies and governments around the world as one path to addressing climate change. Due to its ubiquity, eco-feedback interventions have been designed in various ways, potentially leading to heterogeneity in its treatment effects. This thesis investigates the different components of eco-feedback interventions, and how these can moderate its treatment effects Through four field experiments, I study the moderating effects of duration, frequency, medium, and to an extent, content of eco-feedback interventions. I find that 1) eco-feedback is effective at reducing household water/energy consumption across various contexts, achieving between 1-2% reduction in consumption, 2) the effects of the treatment attenuates over time once the treatment has ceased, 3) the medium by which the feedback is delivered is critical to its effectiveness, 4) delivering feedback for both water and energy at the same time may have a negative effects, and 5) the treatment effects are heterogeneous, mostly based on a household’s baseline consumption. Insights from this thesis should help inform the design of future eco-feedback interventions to better maximise its effects in the most cost effective manner

ActiveLifestyle: a persuasive platform to monitor and motivate physical training plan compliance in elderly people

The primary public health goal is to increase the number of years of good health and, therefore, maintain independence and quality of life as long as possible. Healthy ageing is characterized by the avoidance of disease and disability, the maintenance of high physical and cognitive function, and sustained engagement in social and productive activities. These three components together define successful ageing. An important part of successful ageing, hence, is maximisation of physical performance. The ability to fully participate in productive and recreational activities of daily life may be af-fected when the capacity to easily perform common physical functions decreases. Health status, thus, is an important indicator of quality of life among older people. It appears that especially components of health-related fitness and functional performance, or serious, chronic conditions and diseases that directly influence the components of fitness and performance, are related to perceived health among middle-aged and older adults. Regular physical activity or exercise substantially prevents the development and progres-sion of most chronic degenerative diseases. In summary, it is evident that to increase older adults’ quality of life and fitness, we need to encourage the elderly to become more physically active and increase their fitness through training. Home environmental interventions to prevent functional decline seem to be effective and are, furthermore, preferred by elderly. Such interventions with integrated assistive technology devices have, in this context, the potential to further help in overcoming some of the barriers to start training and, thereby, maintaining physical independence for independently living elderly. Hence, the objective of this thesis is to identify how, through IT or IT-mediated persuasive soft-ware applications, we can enable independently living and healthy elderly people to perform balance and strength training plans autonomously at home and keep them motivated, in order to increase their compliance toward the plans

Paradigmatic approach to managing complexity in knowledge-driven marketing

This research develops a measure of Customer Lifetime Value, extending existing measures, that provides organisations having large customer databases the means to place a financial value on customers. Using this measure, new models are developed that provide a framework to use knowledge to drive marketing decisions

Segmentation-based modeling for advanced targeted marketing

Fingerhut Business Intelligence (BI) has a long and successful history of building statistical models to predict consumer behavior. The models constructed are typically segmentationbased models in which the target audience is split into subpopulations (i.e., customer segments) and individually tailored statistical models are then developed for each segment. Such models are commonly employed in the direct-mail industry; however, segmentation is often performed on an ad-hoc basis without directly considering how segmentation affects the accuracy of the resulting segment models. Fingerhut BI approached IBM Research with the problem of how to build segmentation-based models more effectively so as to maximize predictive accuracy. The IBM Advanced Targeted Marketing – Single Events ™ (IBM ATM-SE™) solution is the result of IBM Research and Fingerhut BI directing their efforts jointly towards solving this problem. This paper presents an evaluation of ATM-SE’s modeling capabilities using data from Fingerhut’s catalog mailings