Integrating collaborative filtering and matching-based search for product recommendations

Currently, recommender systems (RS) have been widely applied in many commercial e-commerce sites to help users deal with the information overload problem. Recommender systems provide personalized recommendations to users and, thus, help in making good decisions about which product to buy from the vast amount of product choices. Many of the current recommender systems are developed for simple and frequently purchased products like books and videos, by using collaborative-filtering and content-based approaches. These approaches are not directly applicable for recommending infrequently purchased products such as cars and houses as it is difficult to collect a large number of ratings data from users for such products. Many of the ecommerce sites for infrequently purchased products are still using basic search-based techniques whereby the products that match with the attributes given in the target user’s query are retrieved and recommended. However, search-based recommenders cannot provide personalized recommendations. For different users, the recommendations will be the same if they provide the same query regardless of any difference in their interest. In this article, a simple user profiling approach is proposed to generate user’s preferences to product attributes (i.e., user profiles) based on user product click stream data. The user profiles can be used to find similarminded users (i.e., neighbours) accurately. Two recommendation approaches are proposed, namely Round- Robin fusion algorithm (CFRRobin) and Collaborative Filtering-based Aggregated Query algorithm (CFAgQuery), to generate personalized recommendations based on the user profiles. Instead of using the target user’s query to search for products as normal search based systems do, the CFRRobin technique uses the attributes of the products in which the target user’s neighbours have shown interest as queries to retrieve relevant products, and then recommends to the target user a list of products by merging and ranking the returned products using the Round Robin method. The CFAgQuery technique uses the attributes of the products that the user’s neighbours have shown interest in to derive an aggregated query, which is then used to retrieve products to recommend to the target user. Experiments conducted on a real e-commerce dataset show that both the proposed techniques CFRRobin and CFAgQuery perform better than the standard Collaborative Filtering and the Basic Search approaches, which are widely applied by the current e-commerce applications.

Principles of information accountability : an eHealth perspective

Information accountability is seen as a mode of usage control on the Web. Due to its many dimensions, information accountability has been expressed in various ways by computer scientists to address security and privacy in recent times. Information accountability is focused on how users participate in a system and the underlying policies that govern the participation. Healthcare is a domain in which the principles of information accountability can be utilised well. Modern health information systems are Internet based and the discipline is called eHealth. In this paper, we identify and discuss the goals of accountability systems and present the principles of information accountability. We characterise those principles in eHealth and discuss them contextually. We identify the current impediments to eHealth in terms of information privacy issues of eHealth consumers together with information usage requirements of healthcare providers and show how information accountability can be used in a healthcare context to address these needs. The challenges of implementing information accountability in eHealth are also discussed in terms of our efforts thus far.

Understanding requirements of novel healthcare information systems for management of advanced prostate cancer

Effective management of chronic diseases is a global health priority. A healthcare information system offers opportunities to address challenges of chronic disease management. However, the requirements of health information systems are often not well understood. The accuracy of requirements has a direct impact on the successful design and implementation of a health information system. Our research describes methods used to understand the requirements of health information systems for advanced prostate cancer management. The research conducted a survey to identify heterogeneous sources of clinical records. Our research showed that the General Practitioner was the common source of patient's clinical records (41%) followed by the Urologist (14%) and other clinicians (14%). Our research describes a method to identify diverse data sources and proposes a novel patient journey browser prototype that integrates disparate data sources.

User expertise in contemporary information systems : conceptualization, measurement and application

This research proposes a method for identifying user expertise in contemporary Information Systems (IS). It also proposes and develops a model for evaluating expertise. The aim of this study was to offer a common instrument that addresses the requirements of a contemporary Information System in a holistic way. This study demonstrates the application of the expertise construct in Information System evaluations, and shows that users of different expertise levels evaluate systems differently.

Person re-identification using group information

After first observing a person, the task of person re-identification involves recognising an individual at different locations across a network of cameras at a later time. Traditionally, this task has been performed by first extracting appearance features of an individual and then matching these features to the previous observation. However, identifying an individual based solely on appearance can be ambiguous, particularly when people wear similar clothing (i.e. people dressed in uniforms in sporting and school settings). This task is made more difficult when the resolution of the input image is small as is typically the case in multi-camera networks. To circumvent these issues, we need to use other contextual cues. In this paper, we use "group" information as our contextual feature to aid in the re-identification of a person, which is heavily motivated by the fact that people generally move together as a collective group. To encode group context, we learn a linear mapping function to assign each person to a "role" or position within the group structure. We then combine the appearance and group context cues using a weighted summation. We demonstrate how this improves performance of person re-identification in a sports environment over appearance based-features.

The health information practices of people living with chronic health conditions: Implications for health literacy

The reduction of the health literacy concept to a functional relationship with text, does not acknowledge the range of information sources that people draw from in order to make informed decision about their health and treatment. Drawing from two studies that explored how people with two different but complex and life-threatening chronic health conditions, chronic kidney disease and HIV, a socio-cultural understanding of the practise of health literacy is described. Health information is experienced by patients as a chronic health condition landscape, and develops from three information sources; namely epistemic, social and corporeal sources. Participants in both studies used activities that involved orienting, sharing and creating information to map this landscape which was used to inform their decision-making. These findings challenge the traditional conceptions of health literacy and suggest an approach that views the landscape of chronic illness as being socially, physically and contextually constructed. This approach necessitates a recasting of health literacy away from a sole interest in skills and towards understanding how information practices facilitate people becoming health literate.

Mapping local solutions to entrenched transport problems: Key lessons regarding the use of geographical information technologies in community mapping with disadvantaged communities

There is an increasing interest in the use of information technology as a participatory planning tool, particularly the use of geographical information technologies to support collaborative activities such as community mapping. However, despite their promise, the introduction of such technologies does not necessarily promote better participation nor improve collaboration. In part this can be attributed to a tendency for planners to focus on the technical considerations associated with these technologies at the expense of broader participation considerations. In this paper we draw on the experiences of a community mapping project with disadvantaged communities in suburban Australia to highlight the importance of selecting tools and techniques which support and enhance participatory planning. This community mapping project, designed to identify and document community-generated transport issues and solutions, had originally intended to use cadastral maps extracted from the government’s digital cadastral database as the foundation for its community mapping approach. It was quickly discovered that the local residents found the cadastral maps confusing as the maps lacked sufficient detail to orient them to their suburb (the study area). In response to these concerns and consistent with the project’s participatory framework, a conceptual base map based on resident’s views of landmarks of local importance was developed to support the community mapping process. Based on this community mapping experience we outline four key lessons learned regarding the process of community mapping and the place of geographical information technologies within this process.

On effective accounting information systems in a dynamic business environment : the role of complementing capabilities

The global business environment is witnessing tough times, and this situation has significant implications on how organizations manage their processes and resources. Accounting information system (AIS) plays a critical role in this situation to ensure appropriate processing of financial transactions and availability to relevant information for decision-making. We suggest the need for a dynamic AIS environment for today’s turbulent business environment. This environment is possible with a dynamic AIS, complementary business intelligence systems, and technical human capability. Data collected through a field survey suggests that the dynamic AIS environment contributes to an organization’s accounting functions of processing transactions, providing information for decision making, and ensuring an appropriate control environment. These accounting processes contribute to the firm-level performance of the organization. From these outcomes, one can infer that a dynamic AIS environment contributes to organizational performance in today’s challenging business environment.

Information and Learning Experiences in the Cube: Vision, Implementation and Interaction

Executive Summary This project has commenced an exploration of learning and information experiences in the QUT Cube. Understanding learning in this environment has the potential to inform current implementations and future project development. In this report, we present early findings from the first phase of an investigation into what makes learning possible in the context of a giant interactive multi-media display such as the QUT Cube, which is an award-winning configuration that hosts several projects.

Taming the terabytes : a human-centered approach to surviving the information deluge

A fear of imminent information overload predates the World Wide Web by decades. Yet, that fear has never abated. Worse, as the World Wide Web today takes the lion’s share of the information we deal with, both in amount and in time spent gathering it, the situation has only become more precarious. This chapter analyses new issues in information overload that have emerged with the advent of the Web, which emphasizes written communication, defined in this context as the exchange of ideas expressed informally, often casually, as in verbal language. The chapter focuses on three ways to mitigate these issues. First, it helps us, the users, to be more specific in what we ask for. Second, it helps us amend our request when we don't get what we think we asked for. And third, since only we, the human users, can judge whether the information received is what we want, it makes retrieval techniques more effective by basing them on how humans structure information. This chapter reports on extensive experiments we conducted in all three areas. First, to let users be more specific in describing an information need, they were allowed to express themselves in an unrestricted conversational style. This way, they could convey their information need as if they were talking to a fellow human instead of using the two or three words typically supplied to a search engine. Second, users were provided with effective ways to zoom in on the desired information once potentially relevant information became available. Third, a variety of experiments focused on the search engine itself as the mediator between request and delivery of information. All examples that are explained in detail have actually been implemented. The results of our experiments demonstrate how a human-centered approach can reduce information overload in an area that grows in importance with each day that passes. By actually having built these applications, I present an operational, not just aspirational approach.

Acquiring search expertise : learning experiences and threshold concepts

Expert searchers engage with information as information brokers, researchers, reference librarians, information architects, faculty who teach advanced search, and in a variety of other information-intensive professions. Their experiences are characterized by a profound understanding of information concepts and skills and they have an agile ability to apply this knowledge to interacting with and having an impact on the information environment. This study explored the learning experiences of searchers to understand the acquisition of search expertise. The research question was: What can be learned about becoming an expert searcher from the learning experiences of proficient novice searchers and highly experienced searchers? The key objectives were: (1) to explore the existence of threshold concepts in search expertise; (2) to improve our understanding of how search expertise is acquired and how novice searchers, intent on becoming experts, can learn to search in more expertlike ways. The participant sample drew from two population groups: (1) highly experienced searchers with a minimum of 20 years of relevant professional experience, including LIS faculty who teach advanced search, information brokers, and search engine developers (11 subjects); and (2) MLIS students who had completed coursework in information retrieval and online searching and demonstrated exceptional ability (9 subjects). Using these two groups allowed a nuanced understanding of the experience of learning to search in expertlike ways, with data from those who search at a very high level as well as those who may be actively developing expertise. The study used semi-structured interviews, search tasks with think-aloud narratives, and talk-after protocols. Searches were screen-captured with simultaneous audio-recording of the think-aloud narrative. Data were coded and analyzed using NVivo9 and manually. Grounded theory allowed categories and themes to emerge from the data. Categories represented conceptual knowledge and attributes of expert searchers. In accord with grounded theory method, once theoretical saturation was achieved, during the final stage of analysis the data were viewed through lenses of existing theoretical frameworks. For this study, threshold concept theory (Meyer & Land, 2003) was used to explore which concepts might be threshold concepts. Threshold concepts have been used to explore transformative learning portals in subjects ranging from economics to mathematics. A threshold concept has five defining characteristics: transformative (causing a shift in perception), irreversible (unlikely to be forgotten), integrative (unifying separate concepts), troublesome (initially counter-intuitive), and may be bounded. Themes that emerged provided evidence of four concepts which had the characteristics of threshold concepts. These were: information environment: the total information environment is perceived and understood; information structures: content, index structures, and retrieval algorithms are understood; information vocabularies: fluency in search behaviors related to language, including natural language, controlled vocabulary, and finesse using proximity, truncation, and other language-based tools. The fourth threshold concept was concept fusion, the integration of the other three threshold concepts and further defined by three properties: visioning (anticipating next moves), being light on one's 'search feet' (dancing property), and profound ontological shift (identity as searcher). In addition to the threshold concepts, findings were reported that were not concept-based, including praxes and traits of expert searchers. A model of search expertise is proposed with the four threshold concepts at its core that also integrates the traits and praxes elicited from the study, attributes which are likewise long recognized in LIS research as present in professional searchers. The research provides a deeper understanding of the transformative learning experiences involved in the acquisition of search expertise. It adds to our understanding of search expertise in the context of today's information environment and has implications for teaching advanced search, for research more broadly within library and information science, and for methodologies used to explore threshold concepts.

Building an augmented map for road risk assessment

Recent road safety statistics show that the decades-long fatalities decreasing trend is stopping and stagnating. Statistics further show that crashes are mostly driven by human error, compared to other factors such as environmental conditions and mechanical defects. Within human error, the dominant error source is perceptive errors, which represent about 50% of the total. The next two sources are interpretation and evaluation, which accounts together with perception for more than 75% of human error related crashes. Those statistics show that allowing drivers to perceive and understand their environment better, or supplement them when they are clearly at fault, is a solution to a good assessment of road risk, and, as a consequence, further decreasing fatalities. To answer this problem, currently deployed driving assistance systems combine more and more information from diverse sources (sensors) to enhance the driver's perception of their environment. However, because of inherent limitations in range and field of view, these systems' perception of their environment remains largely limited to a small interest zone around a single vehicle. Such limitations can be overcomed by increasing the interest zone through a cooperative process. Cooperative Systems (CS), a specific subset of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), aim at compensating for local systems' limitations by associating embedded information technology and intervehicular communication technology (IVC). With CS, information sources are not limited to a single vehicle anymore. From this distribution arises the concept of extended or augmented perception. Augmented perception allows extending an actor's perceptive horizon beyond its "natural" limits not only by fusing information from multiple in-vehicle sensors but also information obtained from remote sensors. The end result of an augmented perception and data fusion chain is known as an augmented map. It is a repository where any relevant information about objects in the environment, and the environment itself, can be stored in a layered architecture. This thesis aims at demonstrating that augmented perception has better performance than noncooperative approaches, and that it can be used to successfully identify road risk. We found it was necessary to evaluate the performance of augmented perception, in order to obtain a better knowledge on their limitations. Indeed, while many promising results have already been obtained, the feasibility of building an augmented map from exchanged local perception information and, then, using this information beneficially for road users, has not been thoroughly assessed yet. The limitations of augmented perception, and underlying technologies, have not be thoroughly assessed yet. Most notably, many questions remain unanswered as to the IVC performance and their ability to deliver appropriate quality of service to support life-saving critical systems. This is especially true as the road environment is a complex, highly variable setting where many sources of imperfections and errors exist, not only limited to IVC. We provide at first a discussion on these limitations and a performance model built to incorporate them, created from empirical data collected on test tracks. Our results are more pessimistic than existing literature, suggesting IVC limitations have been underestimated. Then, we develop a new CS-applications simulation architecture. This architecture is used to obtain new results on the safety benefits of a cooperative safety application (EEBL), and then to support further study on augmented perception. At first, we confirm earlier results in terms of crashes numbers decrease, but raise doubts on benefits in terms of crashes' severity. In the next step, we implement an augmented perception architecture tasked with creating an augmented map. Our approach is aimed at providing a generalist architecture that can use many different types of sensors to create the map, and which is not limited to any specific application. The data association problem is tackled with an MHT approach based on the Belief Theory. Then, augmented and single-vehicle perceptions are compared in a reference driving scenario for risk assessment,taking into account the IVC limitations obtained earlier; we show their impact on the augmented map's performance. Our results show that augmented perception performs better than non-cooperative approaches, allowing to almost tripling the advance warning time before a crash. IVC limitations appear to have no significant effect on the previous performance, although this might be valid only for our specific scenario. Eventually, we propose a new approach using augmented perception to identify road risk through a surrogate: near-miss events. A CS-based approach is designed and validated to detect near-miss events, and then compared to a non-cooperative approach based on vehicles equiped with local sensors only. The cooperative approach shows a significant improvement in the number of events that can be detected, especially at the higher rates of system's deployment.

Sensemaking and sustainable practicing: Functional affordances of information systems in green transformations

This paper explores how a world-wide operating software solutions provider implemented environmentally sustainable business practices in response to emerging environmental concerns. Through an interpretive case study, we develop a theoretical framework that identifies four important functional affordances originating in information systems, which are required in environmental sustainability transformations as they create an actionable context in which (1) organizations can engage in a sensemaking process related to understanding emerging environmental requirements, and (2) individuals can implement environmentally sustainable work practices. Through our work, we provide several contributions, including a better understanding of IS-enabled organizational change and the types of functional affordances of information systems that are required in sustainability transformations. We describe implications relating to (1) how information systems can contribute to the creation of environmentally sustainable organizations, (2) the design of information systems to create required functional affordances, (3) the management of sustainability transformations, and (4) the further development of the concept of functional affordances in IS research.

Health Information Literacy and the Experience of 65 to 79 Year Old Australians

Information literacy is presented here from a relational perspective, as people’s experience of using information to learn in a particular context. A detailed practical example of such a context is provided, in the health information literacy experience of 65–79 year old Australians. A phenomenographic investigation found five qualitatively distinct ways of experiencing health information literacy: Absorbing (intuitive reception), Targeting (a planned process), Journeying (a personal quest), Liberating (equipping for independence) and Collaborating (interacting in community). These five ways of experiencing indicated expanding awareness of context (degree of orientation towards their environment), source (breadth of esteemed information), beneficiary (the scope of people who gain) and agency (amount of activity), across HIL core aspects of information, learning and health. These results illustrate the potential contribution of relational information literacy to information science.

Understanding and measuring information security culture in developing countries : case of Saudi Arabia

The purpose of the current study was to develop a measurement of information security culture in developing countries such as Saudi Arabia. In order to achieve this goal, the study commenced with a comprehensive review of the literature, the outcome being the development of a conceptual model as a reference base. The literature review revealed a lack of academic and professional research into information security culture in developing countries and more specifically in Saudi Arabia. Given the increasing importance and significant investment developing countries are making in information technology, there is a clear need to investigate information security culture from developing countries perspective such as Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, our analysis indicated a lack of clear conceptualization and distinction between factors that constitute information security culture and factors that influence information security culture. Our research aims to fill this gap by developing and validating a measurement model of information security culture, as well as developing initial understanding of factors that influence security culture. A sequential mixed method consisting of a qualitative phase to explore the conceptualisation of information security culture, and a quantitative phase to validate the model is adopted for this research. In the qualitative phase, eight interviews with information security experts in eight different Saudi organisations were conducted, revealing that security culture can be constituted as reflection of security awareness, security compliance and security ownership. Additionally, the qualitative interviews have revealed that factors that influence security culture are top management involvement, policy enforcement, policy maintenance, training and ethical conduct policies. These factors were confirmed by the literature review as being critical and important for the creation of security culture and formed the basis for our initial information security culture model, which was operationalised and tested in different Saudi Arabian organisations. Using data from two hundred and fifty-four valid responses, we demonstrated the validity and reliability of the information security culture model through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), followed by Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA.) In addition, using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) we were further able to demonstrate the validity of the model in a nomological net, as well as provide some preliminary findings on the factors that influence information security culture. The current study contributes to the existing body of knowledge in two major ways: firstly, it develops an information security culture measurement model; secondly, it presents empirical evidence for the nomological validity for the security culture measurement model and discovery of factors that influence information security culture. The current study also indicates possible future related research needs.