Open Personalization: Involving Third Parties in Improving the User Experience of Websites

Traditional software development captures the user needs during the requirement analysis. The Web makes this endeavour even harder due to the difficulty to determine who these users are. In an attempt to tackle the heterogeneity of the user base, Web Personalization techniques are proposed to guide the users’ experience. In addition, Open Innovation allows organisations to look beyond their internal resources to develop new products or improve existing processes. This thesis sits in between by introducing Open Personalization as a means to incorporate actors other than webmasters in the personalization of web applications. The aim is to provide the technological basis that builds up a trusty environment for webmasters and companion actors to collaborate, i.e. "an architecture of participation". Such architecture very much depends on these actors’ profile. This work tackles three profiles (i.e. software partners, hobby programmers and end users), and proposes three "architectures of participation" tuned for each profile. Each architecture rests on different technologies: a .NET annotation library based on Inversion of Control for software partners, a Modding Interface in JavaScript for hobby programmers, and finally, a domain specific language for end-users. Proof-of-concept implementations are available for the three cases while a quantitative evaluation is conducted for the domain specific language.

Toolchain para la generación de aplicaciones de control basadas en componentes.

[ES]Con el objetivo de crear un entorno de desarrollo que permita la ejecución de aplicaciones de control en sistemas ARM, se utilizarán diferentes métodos y recursos informáticos y poder crear con esto un Toolchain capaz de generar binarios para los sistemas citados anteriormente.

An enactive and dynamical systems theory account of dyadic relationships

Many social relationships are a locus of struggle and suffering, either at the individual or interactional level. In this paper we explore why this is the case and suggest a modeling approach for dyadic interactions and the well-being of the participants. To this end we bring together an enactive approach to self with dynamical systems theory. Our basic assumption is that the quality of any social interaction or relationship fundamentally depends on the nature and constitution of the individuals engaged in these interactions. From an enactive perspective the self is conceived as an embodied and socially enacted autonomous system striving to maintain an identity. This striving involves a basic two-fold goal: the ability to exist as an individual in one's own right, while also being open to and affected by others. In terms of dynamical systems theory one can thus consider the individual self as a self-other organized system represented by a phase space spanned by the dimensions of distinction and participation, where attractors can be defined. Based on two everyday examples of dyadic relationship we propose a simple model of relationship dynamics, in which struggle or well-being in the dyad is analyzed in terms of movements of dyadic states that are in tension or in harmony with individually developed attractors. Our model predicts that relationships can be sustained when the dyad develops a new joint attractor toward which dyadic states tend to move, and well-being when this attractor is in balance with the individuals' attractors. We outline how this can inspire research on psychotherapy. The psychotherapy process itself provides a setting that supports clients to become aware how they fare with regards to the two-fold norm of distinction and participation and develop, through active engagement between client (or couple) and therapist, strategies to co-negotiate their self-organization.

El control del gasto público en España

En español:El sector público gestiona una gran cantidad de recursos para satisfacer las demandas de la sociedad de bienes y servicios públicos, como sanidad, educación, prestaciones sociales, etc. Y, cada vez más, se reclama por parte de los ciudadanos una utilización eficaz, y eficiente de dichos recursos. Es por ello que el papel de las instituciones que realizan el control del gasto público adquiere una importancia relevante. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar cómo se lleva a cabo el control del gasto público en España, analizando los diferentes niveles de control, así como las instituciones que lo realizan y las relaciones existentes entre ellas, pudiendo constatar la necesidad de coordinación entre ellas para que los recursos que se destinan a la función de control no sean utilizados ineficientemente.