BIG DATA IN MARKETING & RETAILING

Data is increasingly being created, stored, analyzed, and applied. Big Data is becoming an everyday phrase that appears in popular media and people’s daily conversations. This paper provides a framework to define Big Data from technical and business perspectives, to present its enormous value in different fields, to share its applications in marketing and retailing, market segmentation, targeting and positioning as well in developing marketing mix. We also provide some real life industry examples, to shed light on the challenges in harnessing the potential of Big Data, and to discuss its future. Big Data will separate the winners from the losers in the business field in the future. The leading companies in the Big Data field, such as Google, Amazon, and Wal-Mart, will continue to build their competitive advantage, both in marketing and other areas, by acting on the insights developed from Big Data analysis

Declassification of Faceted Values in JavaScript

This research addresses the issues with protecting sensitive information at the language level using information flow control mechanisms (IFC). Most of the IFC mechanisms face the challenge of releasing sensitive information in a restricted or limited manner. This research uses faceted values, an IFC mechanism that has shown promising flexibility for downgrading the confidential information in a secure manner, also called declassification. In this project, we introduce the concept of first-class labels to simplify the declassification of faceted values. To validate the utility of our approach we show how the combination of faceted values and first-class labels can build various declassification mechanisms

Constructing Knowledge Graph for Cybersecurity Education

abstract: There currently exist various challenges in learning cybersecuirty knowledge, along with a shortage of experts in the related areas, while the demand for such talents keeps growing. Unlike other topics related to the computer system such as computer architecture and computer network, cybersecurity is a multidisciplinary topic involving scattered technologies, which yet remains blurry for its future direction. Constructing a knowledge graph (KG) in cybersecurity education is a first step to address the challenges and improve the academic learning efficiency. With the advancement of big data and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, constructing large KGs and mining concepts, from unstructured text by using learning methodologies, become possible. The NLP-based KG with the semantic similarity between concepts has brought inspiration to different industrial applications, yet far from completeness in the domain expertise, including education in computer science related fields. In this research work, a KG in cybersecurity area has been constructed using machine-learning-based word embedding (i.e., mapping a word or phrase onto a vector of low dimensions) and hyperlink-based concept mining from the full dataset of words available using the latest Wikipedia dump. The different approaches in corpus training are compared and the performance based on different similarity tasks is evaluated. As a result, the best performance of trained word vectors has been applied, which is obtained by using Skip-Gram model of Word2Vec, to construct the needed KG. In order to improve the efficiency of knowledge learning, a web-based front-end is constructed to visualize the KG, which provides the convenience in browsing related materials and searching for cybersecurity-related concepts and independence relations.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Computer Science 201

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design

Performance measures of net-enabled hypercompetitive industries: the case of tourism

This paper investigates the theory and practise of e-metrics. It examines the tourism sector as one of the most successful sectors on-line and identifies best practice in the industry. Qualitative research with top e-Marketing executives demonstrates the usage and satisfaction levels from current e-metrics deployment, selection of e-metrics for ROI calculation as well as intention of new e-metrics implementation and future trends and developments. This paper concludes that tourism organizations gradually realise the value of e-measurement and are willing to implement e-metrics to enable them evaluate the effectiveness of their planning processes and assess their results against their short and the long term objectives

TreatJS: Higher-Order Contracts for JavaScript

TreatJS is a language embedded, higher-order contract system for JavaScript which enforces contracts by run-time monitoring. Beyond providing the standard abstractions for building higher-order contracts (base, function, and object contracts), TreatJS's novel contributions are its guarantee of non-interfering contract execution, its systematic approach to blame assignment, its support for contracts in the style of union and intersection types, and its notion of a parameterized contract scope, which is the building block for composable run-time generated contracts that generalize dependent function contracts. TreatJS is implemented as a library so that all aspects of a contract can be specified using the full JavaScript language. The library relies on JavaScript proxies to guarantee full interposition for contracts. It further exploits JavaScript's reflective features to run contracts in a sandbox environment, which guarantees that the execution of contract code does not modify the application state. No source code transformation or change in the JavaScript run-time system is required. The impact of contracts on execution speed is evaluated using the Google Octane benchmark.Comment: Technical Repor

Web Tracking: Mechanisms, Implications, and Defenses

This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web resources are from years 2012-2014. Privacy seems to be the Achilles' heel of today's web. Web services make continuous efforts to obtain as much information as they can about the things we search, the sites we visit, the people with who we contact, and the products we buy. Tracking is usually performed for commercial purposes. We present 5 main groups of methods used for user tracking, which are based on sessions, client storage, client cache, fingerprinting, or yet other approaches. A special focus is placed on mechanisms that use web caches, operational caches, and fingerprinting, as they are usually very rich in terms of using various creative methodologies. We also show how the users can be identified on the web and associated with their real names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or even street addresses. We show why tracking is being used and its possible implications for the users (price discrimination, assessing financial credibility, determining insurance coverage, government surveillance, and identity theft). For each of the tracking methods, we present possible defenses. Apart from describing the methods and tools used for keeping the personal data away from being tracked, we also present several tools that were used for research purposes - their main goal is to discover how and by which entity the users are being tracked on their desktop computers or smartphones, provide this information to the users, and visualize it in an accessible and easy to follow way. Finally, we present the currently proposed future approaches to track the user and show that they can potentially pose significant threats to the users' privacy.Comment: 29 pages, 212 reference