Tour recommendation for groups

Consider a group of people who are visiting a major touristic city, such as NY, Paris, or Rome. It is reasonable to assume that each member of the group has his or her own interests or preferences about places to visit, which in general may differ from those of other members. Still, people almost always want to hang out together and so the following question naturally arises: What is the best tour that the group could perform together in the city? This problem underpins several challenges, ranging from understanding people’s expected attitudes towards potential points of interest, to modeling and providing good and viable solutions. Formulating this problem is challenging because of multiple competing objectives. For example, making the entire group as happy as possible in general conflicts with the objective that no member becomes disappointed. In this paper, we address the algorithmic implications of the above problem, by providing various formulations that take into account the overall group as well as the individual satisfaction and the length of the tour. We then study the computational complexity of these formulations, we provide effective and efficient practical algorithms, and, finally, we evaluate them on datasets constructed from real city data

Determinants of Students’ Satisfaction with Higher Education Institutions in Face-to-Face and Online Learning Environments

While there is a large number of research work performed on presenting different factors influencing students’ satisfaction with Higher Education institutions, there is a need to combine all these efforts and provide a comprehensive framework of challenges and factors influencing the students’ satisfaction in face-to-face and online learning environments. Such frameworks would provide researchers and academic institutions a better picture of the interest of students. This paper is an effort towards understanding the determinants of students’ satisfaction with higher education institutions in face-to-face and online learning environments. In this paper, we review the literature, tabulate, and summarize predominant factors influencing students’ satisfaction in online learning and face-to-face learning. We also identify and discuss challenges faced by students that affect their satisfaction levels in higher education learning

Digital transformation in higher education: a framework for maturity assessment

Literature in digital transformation maturity is scarce. Digital transformation in higher education, especially after COVID-19 is seen as inevitable. This research explores digital transformation maturity and challenges within Higher Education. The significance of this study stems from the role digital transformation plays in today’s knowledge economy. This study proposes a new framework based on Deloitte’s 2019 digital transformation assessment framework with Petkovic 2014 mega and major higher education process mapping. The study triangulates the findings of multiple research instruments, including survey, interviews, case study, and direct observation. The research findings show a significant variance between the respondents’ perception of digital transformations maturity levels, and the core requirements of digital transformation maturity. The findings also show the lack of holistic vision, digital transformation competency, and data structure and processing as the leading challenges of digital transformation

Towards a personalized recommendation model in location-based social networks

We propose a hybrid recommendation model in Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN). The model is designed to recommend a list of Points of Interest (POIs), which is a tailored list of top-k venues, that meets user’s preferences. The model utilizes heterogeneous relations in location-based social networks to produce a high-quality recommendation and improve the user’s satisfaction on the recommended venues. The proposed model utilizes Meta Path-Based Search, to estimate the similarity between the user and the venues located within the area of interest

Personal Revolutions : Women Artists from Syria

"The objective of this exhibition is to start researchig and shedding light on Syrian female artist and attempt to highlight female experiments throughout successive generations, along with their various daring and impactful methods and techniques. In particular, the development that has taken place in the female artistic scene during the past two decades must be demonstrated." -- page 9