The influence of national culture on the attitude towards mobile recommender systems

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2013 Elsevier B.V.This study aimed to identify factors that influence user attitudes towards mobile recommender systems and to examine how these factors interact with cultural values to affect attitudes towards this technology. Based on the theory of reasoned action, belief factors for mobile recommender systems are identified in three dimensions: functional, contextual, and social. Hypotheses explaining different impacts of cultural values on the factors affecting attitudes were also proposed. The research model was tested based on data collected in China, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Findings indicate that functional and social factors have significant impacts on user attitudes towards mobile recommender systems. The relationships between belief factors and attitudes are moderated by two cultural values: collectivism and uncertainty avoidance. The theoretical and practical implications of applying theory of reasoned action and innovation diffusion theory to explain the adoption of new technologies in societies with different cultures are also discussed.National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean governmen

Analysis domain model for shared virtual environments

The field of shared virtual environments, which also encompasses online games and social 3D environments, has a system landscape consisting of multiple solutions that share great functional overlap. However, there is little system interoperability between the different solutions. A shared virtual environment has an associated problem domain that is highly complex raising difficult challenges to the development process, starting with the architectural design of the underlying system. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution is a broad domain analysis of shared virtual environments, which enables developers to have a better understanding of the whole rather than the part(s). The second contribution is a reference domain model for discussing and describing solutions - the Analysis Domain Model

On the Relation Between Mobile Encounters and Web Traffic Patterns: A Data-driven Study

Mobility and network traffic have been traditionally studied separately. Their interaction is vital for generations of future mobile services and effective caching, but has not been studied in depth with real-world big data. In this paper, we characterize mobility encounters and study the correlation between encounters and web traffic profiles using large-scale datasets (30TB in size) of WiFi and NetFlow traces. The analysis quantifies these correlations for the first time, across spatio-temporal dimensions, for device types grouped into on-the-go Flutes and sit-to-use Cellos. The results consistently show a clear relation between mobility encounters and traffic across different buildings over multiple days, with encountered pairs showing higher traffic similarity than non-encountered pairs, and long encounters being associated with the highest similarity. We also investigate the feasibility of learning encounters through web traffic profiles, with implications for dissemination protocols, and contact tracing. This provides a compelling case to integrate both mobility and web traffic dimensions in future models, not only at an individual level, but also at pairwise and collective levels. We have released samples of code and data used in this study on GitHub, to support reproducibility and encourage further research (https://github.com/BabakAp/encounter-traffic).Comment: Technical report with details for conference paper at MSWiM 2018, v3 adds GitHub lin

Layered evaluation of interactive adaptive systems : framework and formative methods

Peer reviewedPostprin

Generating Effective Recommendations Using Viewing-Time Weighted Preferences for Attributes

Recommender systems are an increasingly important technology and researchers have recently argued for incorporating different kinds of data to improve recommendation quality. This paper presents a novel approach to generating recommendations and evaluates its effectiveness. First, we review evidence that item viewing time can reveal user preferences for items. Second, we model item preference as a weighted function of preferences for item attributes. We then propose a method for generating recommendations based on these two propositions. The results of a laboratory evaluation show that the proposed approach generated estimated item ratings consistent with explicit item ratings and assigned high ratings to products that reflect revealed preferences of users. We conclude by discussing implications and identifying areas for future research

Personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries

Widespread use of the Internet has resulted in digital libraries that are increasingly used by diverse communities of users for diverse purposes and in which sharing and collaboration have become important social elements. As such libraries become commonplace, as their contents and services become more varied, and as their patrons become more experienced with computer technology, users will expect more sophisticated services from these libraries. A simple search function, normally an integral part of any digital library, increasingly leads to user frustration as user needs become more complex and as the volume of managed information increases. Proactive digital libraries, where the library evolves from being passive and untailored, are seen as offering great potential for addressing and overcoming these issues and include techniques such as personalisation and recommender systems. In this paper, following on from the DELOS/NSF Working Group on Personalisation and Recommender Systems for Digital Libraries, which met and reported during 2003, we present some background material on the scope of personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries. We then outline the working group’s vision for the evolution of digital libraries and the role that personalisation and recommender systems will play, and we present a series of research challenges and specific recommendations and research priorities for the field

Collaborative trails in e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on collaboration within groups of learners, and hence collaborative trails. We begin by reviewing the theoretical background to collaborative learning and looking at the kinds of support that computers can give to groups of learners working collaboratively, and then look more deeply at some of the issues in designing environments to support collaborative learning trails and at tools and techniques, including collaborative filtering, that can be used for analysing collaborative trails. We then review the state-of-the-art in supporting collaborative learning in three different areas – experimental academic systems, systems using mobile technology (which are also generally academic), and commercially available systems. The final part of the deliverable presents three scenarios that show where technology that supports groups working collaboratively and producing collaborative trails may be heading in the near future