Factors Influencing the Quality of the User Experience in Ubiquitous Recommender Systems

The use of mobile devices and the rapid growth of the internet and networking infrastructure has brought the necessity of using Ubiquitous recommender systems. However in mobile devices there are different factors that need to be considered in order to get more useful recommendations and increase the quality of the user experience. This paper gives an overview of the factors related to the quality and proposes a new hybrid recommendation model.Comment: The final publication is available at www.springerlink.com Distributed, Ambient, and Pervasive Interactions Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 8530, 2014, pp 369-37

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF MOBILE NEWS SERVICES: SUPPORTING SOCIAL NETWORKING FEATURES

This paper discusses and implements features both for a mobile Web and for a mobile native application, capable to provide news services enriched with indicative social networking elements. The objective was to facilitate the involvement of mobile users to produce and upload new content on the News Website and to facilitate their participation in the promotion and evaluation of the existing content. A significant addition was the implementation of an application for the automatic storing of articles derived from external sources, such as RSS/Atom feeds and emails. The results of our work are primarily related with the investigation and understanding of serious technical challenges, as well as the eventual development of proper solutions regarding the support of the ‘participative relation’ of mobile users with news-oriented Web content

Can e-Government applications contribute to performance improvement in public administration?

Electronic Government applications have been the focus of hundreds of local and national government administrations all over the world during the past decade. The emphasis of most of these applications lies in their effort to improve the experience of the user in interacting with public administration services and to minimise waiting times in completing transactions public services and citizens. Early applications were relying mainly on the speed and simplicity of submitting a request by the user while most of the work beyond the web based interaction was carried out as in the era before the introduction of the web based applications. The benefits from such endeavours have been short lived as citizens are looking for real enhancements in the way public administration serves their needs and responds to their requests. The authors argue that for e-government applications to succeed, considerable changes in the way public administration organizes itself and how it utilizes information management systems to respond to user / citizen requirements including and addressing the goals of all stakeholders involved are required. Currently the number of successful applications to that end is quite low when compared to the projects implemented and the resources invested in such systems so far. The authors propose steps that would maintain the focus of future implementations in doing so. They also identify the next steps for research in addressing this complex and ever evolving issue

A dynamic multi-level collaborative filtering method for improved recommendations

One of the most used approaches for providing recommendations in various online environments such as e-commerce is collaborative filtering. Although, this is a simple method for recommending items or services, accuracy and quality problems still exist. Thus, we propose a dynamic multi-level collaborative filtering method that improves the quality of the recommendations. The proposed method is based on positive and negative adjustments and can be used in different domains that utilize collaborative filtering to increase the quality of the user experience. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by providing an extensive experimental evaluation based on three real datasets and by comparisons to alternative methods

Web services for rural areas—Security challenges in development and use

Web services (WS) are the modern response of traders and online service providers to satisfying the increasing needs and demands of the digital communities. WS formation and operation is based on a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Security is of paramount importance to WS and the ability to measure and evaluate the level of security available is key to establishing and continuing to develop the level of trust based on reputation developed by the provider of the WS. The greatest challenge in offering secure WS is to groups of people where the level of expertise of the user is low and the need for transparency of the service provision quite high, such as the case with services offered primarily to people in rural areas. Providers of such services face many challenges in balancing the requirements for performance, interoperability, and security against the cost of implementing secure systems and running profitable operations through low income generating WS. A review of services offered, of the users and the challenges in building online trust among providers and users are discussed for the case of rural areas in the United Kingdom

Web services security evaluation considerations

Web services development is a key theme in utilisation of the commercial exploitation of the semantic web. Paramount to the development and offering of such services is the issue of security features and the way these are applied in instituting trust amongst participants and recipients of the service. Implementing such security features is a major challenge to developers as they need to balance these with performance and interoperability requirements. Being able to evaluate the level of security offered is a desirable feature for any prospective participant. The authors attempt to address the issues of security requirements and evaluation criteria, while they discuss the challenges of security implementation through a simple web service application case

Analyzing M-Service Quality Dimensions Using Multivariate Statistical Techniques

This paper continues previous work of the authors concerning the identification and statistical analysis of the quality dimensions in mobile services (m-services). In this work, the structure of mservice quality into dimensions and criteria, which these dimensions are further analyzed into, is examined and grounded through an empirical analysis. The use of multivariate statistical techniques is decomposed into two stages: in the first stage, Factor Analysis in order to explore the relationship between the examined items (quality criteria) and the constructs (dimensions) proposed through the study of the relevant literature. In the second stage, Cluster Analysis and Principal Component Analysis are employed in order to explore intra-construct relationships. The contribution of this paper lies on the fact that a mix of multivariate statistical techniques is all integrated in a single framework, so that information about the structure of m-service quality criteria and constructs is obtained. The findings of the study confirm the theoretical background and provide valuable managerial insights

Can e-Government Systems Bridge the Digital Divide?

Electronic Government systems are often seen as panacea in the remedy of all failings of governance. With a history span of almost two decades, e-government implementations have often reached dead ends and have regularly failed to deliver the promise that the governments that have initiated them have made to their citizens. Despite an abundance of development models and best case scenarios identified in literature, e-government services are continually failing to attract the citizens and to capture their trust and faith. The main reason quoted for such failures is the lack of innovation and inclusivity in the way a service is designed and delivered. The digital divide is the major risk of marginalizing sectors of society or even whole continents due to lack of access to web based services. In the developing world it is mainly the lack of, or poor infrastructure that maintains and often widens the divide, while in the developed world it is lack of skills and difficulty of accessing services that leads citizens to abandon their efforts in using services online. Whatever the reason that leads to non-access of services the effect is similar and those citizens that fall victim to it are increasingly consumed into the trap of the digital divide. Efforts and initiatives to address the divide have primarily focused on building the infrastructure and providing access to the web. However, the quality and accessibility of online services is quite often then reason why citizens distance themselves from web-based services and the internet in total. This paper attempts to explore the shortfall in criteria for evaluating a government’s efforts in planning, implementing and delivering services that address the operational requirements of efficient government, but equally cater for the needs of the citizens as end users of the service

Privacy-preserving recommendations in context-aware mobile environments

© Emerald Publishing Limited. Purpose - This paper aims to address privacy concerns that arise from the use of mobile recommender systems when processing contextual information relating to the user. Mobile recommender systems aim to solve the information overload problem by recommending products or services to users of Web services on mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets, at any given point in time and in any possible location. They use recommendation methods, such as collaborative filtering or content-based filtering and use aconsiderable amount of contextual information to provide relevant recommendations. However, because of privacy concerns, users are not willing to provide the required personal information that would allow their views to be recorded and make these systems usable. Design/methodology/approach - This work is focused on user privacy by providing a method for context privacy-preservation and privacy protection at user interface level. Thus, a set of algorithms that are part of the method has been designed with privacy protectionin mind, which isdone byusing realistic dummy parameter creation. Todemonstrate the applicability of the method, arelevant context-aware data set has been used to run performance and usability tests. Findings - The proposed method has been experimentally evaluated using performance and usability evaluation tests and is shown that with a small decrease in terms of performance, user privacy can be protected. Originality/value - This is a novel research paper that proposed a method for protecting the privacy of mobile recommender systems users when context parameters are used