Personalized content retrieval in context using ontological knowledge

Personalized content retrieval aims at improving the retrieval process by taking into account the particular interests of individual users. However, not all user preferences are relevant in all situations. It is well known that human preferences are complex, multiple, heterogeneous, changing, even contradictory, and should be understood in context with the user goals and tasks at hand. In this paper, we propose a method to build a dynamic representation of the semantic context of ongoing retrieval tasks, which is used to activate different subsets of user interests at runtime, in a way that out-of-context preferences are discarded. Our approach is based on an ontology-driven representation of the domain of discourse, providing enriched descriptions of the semantics involved in retrieval actions and preferences, and enabling the definition of effective means to relate preferences and context

Atomic waveguide QED with atomic dimers

Quantum emitters coupled to a waveguide is a paradigm of quantum optics, whose essential properties are described by waveguide quantum electrodynamics (QED). We study the possibility of observing the typical features of the conventional waveguide QED scenario in a system where the role of the waveguide is played by a one-dimensional subwavelength atomic array. For the role of emitters, we propose to use anti-symmetric states of atomic dimers - a pair of closely spaced atoms - as effective two-level systems, which significantly reduces the effect of free-space spontaneous emission. We solve the dynamics of the system both when the dimer frequency lies inside and when it lies outside the band of modes of the array. Along with well-known phenomena of collective emission into the guided modes and waveguide mediated long-range dimer-dimer interactions, we uncover significant non-Markovian corrections which arise from both the finiteness of the array and through retardation effects

On cycling risk and discomfort: urban safety mapping and bike route recommendations

Bike usage in Smart Cities is paramount for sustainable urban development: cycling promotes healthier lifestyles, lowers energy consumption, lowers carbon emissions, and reduces urban traffic. However, the expansion and increased use of bike infrastructure has been accompanied by a glut of bike accidents, a trend jeopardizing the urban bike movement. This paper leverages data from a diverse spectrum of sources to characterise geolocated bike accident severity and, ultimately, study cycling risk and discomfort. Kernel density estimation generates a continuous, empirical, spatial risk estimate which is mapped in a case study of Zürich city. The roles of weather, time, accident type, and severity are illustrated. A predominance of self-caused accidents motivates an open-source software artifact for personalized route recommendations. This software is used to collect open baseline route data that are compared with alternative routes minimizing risk and discomfort. These contributions have the potential to provide invaluable infrastructure improvement insights to urban planners, and may also improve the awareness of risk in the urban environment among experienced and novice cyclists alike

Ca impurity in small mixed 4^4He-3^3He clusters

The structure of small mixed helium clusters doped with one calcium atom has been determined within the diffusion Monte Carlo framework. The results show that the calcium atom sits at the $^4$He-$^3$He interface. This is in agreement with previous studies, both experimental and theoretical, performed for large clusters. A comparison between the results obtained for the largest cluster we have considered for each isotope shows a clear tendency of the Ca atom to reside in a deep dimple at the surface of the cluster for $^4$He clusters, and to become fully solvated for $^3$He clusters. We have calculated the absorption spectrum of Ca around the $4s4p \leftarrow 4s^2$ transition and have found that it is blue-shifted from that of the free-atom transition by an amount that depends on the size and composition of the cluster.Comment: 24 pages, 11 figures. Accepted on Journal of Chemical Physic

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and International Business Travel: Mobility Allies?

Like forecasts about the paperless office, technological solutions to the problem of international business travel continue to be deferred. As with the increased use of office paper, international business travel is defying predictions of its decline. There is growing evidence to suggest that business sectors which seem ideally placed to substitute information and communication technology (ICT) for travel, are actually generating more physical travel than other sectors. This paper develops a case study of the Irish software industry to exemplify why international travel is not diminishing in importance how and the ICT and business travel relationship is changing in this sector. The paper presents research findings that suggest that a cycle of substitution, generation and modification relationships have occurred as mobility interdependencies have developed.Peer Reviewe

Trust and privacy in distributed work groups

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling and PredictionTrust plays an important role in both group cooperation and economic exchange. As new technologies emerge for communication and exchange, established mechanisms of trust are disrupted or distorted, which can lead to the breakdown of cooperation or to increasing fraud in exchange. This paper examines whether and how personal privacy information about members of distributed work groups influences individuals' cooperation and privacy behavior in the group. Specifically, we examine whether people use others' privacy settings as signals of trustworthiness that affect group cooperation. In addition, we examine how individual privacy preferences relate to trustworthy behavior. Understanding how people interact with others in online settings, in particular when they have limited information, has important implications for geographically distributed groups enabled through new information technologies. In addition, understanding how people might use information gleaned from technology usage, such as personal privacy settings, particularly in the absence of other information, has implications for understanding many potential situations that arise in pervasively networked environments.Preprin

Personalized information retrieval based on context and ontological knowledge

The article has been accepted for publication and appeared in a revised form, subsequent to peer review and/or editorial input by Cambridge University PressExtended papers from C&O-2006, the second International Workshop on Contexts and Ontologies, Theory, Practice and Applications1 collocated with the seventeenth European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI)Context modeling has been long acknowledged as a key aspect in a wide variety of problem domains. In this paper we focus on the combination of contextualization and personalization methods to improve the performance of personalized information retrieval. The key aspects in our proposed approach are a) the explicit distinction between historic user context and live user context, b) the use of ontology-driven representations of the domain of discourse, as a common, enriched representational ground for content meaning, user interests, and contextual conditions, enabling the definition of effective means to relate the three of them, and c) the introduction of fuzzy representations as an instrument to properly handle the uncertainty and imprecision involved in the automatic interpretation of meanings, user attention, and user wishes. Based on a formal grounding at the representational level, we propose methods for the automatic extraction of persistent semantic user preferences, and live, ad-hoc user interests, which are combined in order to improve the accuracy and reliability of personalization for retrieval.This research was partially supported by the European Commission under contracts FP6-001765 aceMedia and FP6-027685 MESH. The expressed content is the view of the authors but not necessarily the view of the aceMedia or MESH projects as a whole

Competitiveness and sustainability: can ‘smart city regionalism’ square the circle?

Increasingly, the widely established, globalisation-driven agenda of economic competitiveness meets a growing concern with sustainability. Yet, the practical and conceptual co-existence—or fusion—of these two agendas is not always easy. This includes finding and operationalising the ‘right’ scale of governance, an important question for the pursuit of the distinctly transscalar nature of these two policy fields. ‘New regionalism’ has increasingly been discussed as a pragmatic way of tackling the variable spatialities associated with these policy fields and their changing articulation. This paper introduces ‘smart (new) city-regionalism’, derived from the principles of smart growth and new regionalism, as a policy-shaping mechanism and analytical framework. It brings together the rationales, agreed principles and legitimacies of publicly negotiated polity with collaborative, network-based and policy-driven spatiality. The notion of ‘smartness’, as suggested here as central feature, goes beyond the implicit meaning of ‘smart’ as in ‘smart growth’. When introduced in the later 1990s the term embraced a focus on planning and transport. Since then, the adjective ‘smart’ has become used ever more widely, advocating innovativeness, participation, collaboration and co-ordination. The resulting ‘smart city regionalism’ is circumscribed by the interface between the sectorality and territoriality of policy-making processes. Using the examples of Vancouver and Seattle, the paper looks at the effects of the resulting specific local conditions on adopting ‘smartness’ in the scalar positioning of policy-making

Esquemes argumentatius i coneixement científic. Un estudi sobre la comprensió de la flotabilitat a diferents nivells educatius

Es presenta un estudi sobre les respostes escrites d’estudiants de diversos nivells educatius a una activitat presentada com una narrativa en forma de conte. L’anàlisi es basa en identificar arguments dels estudiants que són estudiats en base a teories d’argumentació. L’estudi dels elements dels arguments ens permet inferir sobre les concepcions científiques i alternatives dels estudiants i trobar esquemes o patrons argumentatius comuns. La comparació entre nivells educatius ens mostra que els tipus d’arguments no varien gaire entre nivells educatius però sí que es troben diferencies quant al tipus d’explicacions que poden ser animistes o que no tenir res a veure amb la física als nivells educatius més baixos

Indymedia and the long story of rebellion against neoliberal capitalism

Indymedia was born of the anti-globalisation movement of the late 1990s and quickly spread to become a social movement in its own right. This article reflects on how prescient the claims of the anti-globalisation movement have proven to be and how 20 years ago Indymedia and the anti-globalisation movement predicted there was trouble ahead and that neoliberalism was a central part of the problem. It notes how a history of struggle and protest emanating from the days of Indymedia has developed over time building a counter-politics that is becoming ever wiser about the multiple intersectional harms of capitalism and ever more sophisticated in its political response. The challenge is what comes next