Towards Understanding User Preferences from User Tagging Behavior for Personalization

Personalizing image tags is a relatively new and growing area of research, and in order to advance this research community, we must review and challenge the de-facto standard of defining tag importance. We believe that for greater progress to be made, we must go beyond tags that merely describe objects that are visually represented in the image, towards more user-centric and subjective notions such as emotion, sentiment, and preferences. We focus on the notion of user preferences and show that the order that users list tags on images is correlated to the order of preference over the tags that they provided for the image. While this observation is not completely surprising, to our knowledge, we are the first to explore this aspect of user tagging behavior systematically and report empirical results to support this observation. We argue that this observation can be exploited to help advance the image tagging (and related) communities. Our contributions include: 1.) conducting a user study demonstrating this observation, 2.) collecting a dataset with user tag preferences explicitly collected.Comment: 6 page

Proceedings of the African Diaspora Conference on Sustainable Development

The authors urge the Western donor organizations to facilitate and support the take up of such more sustainable models

A co-operative parallel heuristic for integer linear programming: Combining simulated annealing with branch & bound

This paper considers the exact approach of branch and bound (B&B) and the metaheuristic known as simulated annealing (SA) for processing integer programs (IP). We extend an existing SA implementation (GPSIMAN) for pure zero–one integer programs (PZIP) to process a wider class of IP models, namely mixed zero–one integer programs (MZIP). The extensions are based on depth-first B&B searches at different points within the SA framework. We refer to the resultant SA implementation as MIPSA. Furthermore, we have exploited the use of parallel computers by designing a co-operative parallel heuristic whereby concurrent executions of B&B and MIPSA, linked through a parallel computer, exchange information in order to influence their searches. Results reported for a wide range of models taken from a library of MIP benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of using a parallel computing approach which combines B&B with SA

HandyBroker - An intelligent product-brokering agent for M-commerce applications with user preference tracking

One of the potential applications for agent-based systems is m-commerce. A lot of research has been done on making such systems intelligent to personalize their services for users. In most systems, user-supplied keywords are generally used to help generate profiles for users. In this paper, an evolutionary ontology-based product-brokering agent has been designed for m-commerce applications. It uses an evaluation function to represent a user’s preference instead of the usual keyword-based profile. By using genetic algorithms, the agent tracks the user’s preferences for a particular product by tuning some parameters inside its evaluation function. A prototype called “Handy Broker” has been implemented in Java and the results obtained from our experiments looks promising for m-commerce use

A Two Stage Parallel Branch and Bound Algorithm for Mixed Integer programs

Mixed integer programming (MIP) models are extensively used to aid strategic and tactical decision making in many business sectors. Solving MIP models is a computationally intensive process and there is a need to develop solution approaches that enable larger models to be solved within acceptable timeframes. In this paper, we describe the implementation of a two-stage parallel branch and bound (PB & B) algorithm for MIP. In stage 1 of the algorithm, a multiple heuristic search is implemented in which a number of alternative search trees are investigated using a forest search in the hope of finding a good solution quickly. In stage 2, the search is reorganized so that the branches of a chosen tree are investigated in parallel. A new heuristic is introduced, based on a best projection criterion, which evaluates alternative B & B trees in order to choose one for investigation in stage 2 of the algorithm. The heuristic also serves as a way of implementing a quality load balancing scheme for stage 2 of the algorithm. The results of experimental investigations are reported for a range of models taken from the MIPLIB library of benchmark problems

Edible Insects of the Niger Delta Area in Nigeria.

The use of insects as food by the people of the Niger Delta in Nigeria is not new. A survey of the insects used by the people of this region revealed a total of twenty species used as food. The species cut across six orders namely: Isoptera, Orthoptera, Coleoptera, Lepidotera, Hemiptera and Diptera. Order Coleoptera had the highest number of species (6) followed closely by orders Lepidoptera and Orthoptera with 5 species each. The species consumed differed in each of the assessed states however, the most commonly consumed species were termites  recording 29% on a pie-chart followed closely by R. phoenicis larva with 22%. These insects are sourced from the wild. The different times in the year they are harvested are listed. They are prepared for eating either by boiling, frying or roasting while some are eaten raw. These insects form an integral part of the people of the Niger Delta region of my country as they are consumed by all ages in the population. Key words: Entomophagy, Niger Delta, Nigeria, Wil

Coleopteran Fauna Of Agroecosystems In Awka, Nigeria

A study was carried out to investigate the coleopteran fauna of two agroecosystems (cultivated farmland and fallow plot at the Permanent Site of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka) for a twelve-month period using the pitfall technque. Eight pitfall traps made up o plastic containers with mouth diameters of 9.80 cm and 6.20 cm deep were set monthly at random in the two sampling sites. The traps, which were filed to one-third with 5 % formalin, serving a preservative, were inspected every twenty-four hours and the insects caught sorted and counted under a dissecting microscope. Species of Coleoptera obtained from the cultivated plot were Macrocheilus labrosus, Hyparpalus sp., Carpophilus fumatus, Podagrica uniforma, Tetragonothorax sp., Chlaenius sp., Pheropsophus parallus, Silidas apicalis, Tenebroides mauritanicus, Heteroderes sp., and Heterorynchus licas while only Hyparpalus sp., and Mylabris sp., were obtained from the fallow plot. The result of Fisher\'s Least Significance Difference (F-LSD) test shows that the pitfall catchesof Coleopterans from the two sampling sites were significantly different at p-value of 00053 and mean difference of 2.500. The heterogeneity of the coleopteran species at the cultivated plot was traced to cultivation. The role of certain coleopteran families as faunal indicators was highlighted Other factors, which influenced the Coleopteran species at the farmlands were also discussed. Keywords: Coleoptera, Fauna, Agroecosystems, Pitfall trapsAnimal Research International Vol. 4 (2) 2007 pp. 647-64