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.

On a Class of Self-Adjoint Compact Operators in Hilbert Spaces and Their Relations with Their Finite-Range Truncations

This paper investigates a class of self-adjoint compact operators in Hilbert spaces related to their truncated versions with finite-dimensional ranges. The comparisons are established in terms of worst-case norm errors of the composite operators generated from iterated computations. Some boundedness properties of the worst-case norms of the errors in their respective fixed points in which they exist are also given. The iterated sequences are expanded in separable Hilbert spaces through the use of numerable orthonormal bases.