Developing a Theoretical Framework for a Study on the Impact of Advertising Credibility of Consumer Healthcare Products

The tough competition in the global and national markets and new trends in consumerism resulted in an increase in the volume of advertisements. Sometimes advertisers are successful in achieving their intended objectives with a particular advertisement and sometimes they are not .These factors contributed a lot towards the decision making problems of advertising agencies with regard to the selection of appropriate advertising strategies and tactics. The tough competition and large volume of advertising make the consumers confused and this even created doubts in the minds of consumers about the genuineness and reliability of manufacturers and products. These factors caused a query regarding the active role of credibility element in advertising. The proposed study examines the effects of advertising credibility in consumer health care non durable product advertising on communication effect, purchase behavior and ad skepticism. This paper examines the need for the study of advertising credibility and reviews the advertising- consumer behaviour- credibility – healthcare theories which form a basis for the study. It identifies the different components and dimensions of advertising credibility and the importance of communication effect, purchase behavior and ad skepticism. It also studies the relevance of credibility in the consumer healthcare products advertising and suggests a Theoretical Framework for the proposed study

Analysis of Stochastic Volatility Sequences Generated by Product Autoregressive Models

The classical methods of analysing time series by Box-Jenkins approach assume that the observed series uctuates around changing levels with constant variance. That is, the time series is assumed to be of homoscedastic nature. However, the nancial time series exhibits the presence of heteroscedasticity in the sense that, it possesses non-constant conditional variance given the past observations. So, the analysis of nancial time series, requires the modelling of such variances, which may depend on some time dependent factors or its own past values. This lead to introduction of several classes of models to study the behaviour of nancial time series. See Taylor (1986), Tsay (2005), Rachev et al. (2007). The class of models, used to describe the evolution of conditional variances is referred to as stochastic volatility modelsThe stochastic models available to analyse the conditional variances, are based on either normal or log-normal distributions. One of the objectives of the present study is to explore the possibility of employing some non-Gaussian distributions to model the volatility sequences and then study the behaviour of the resulting return series. This lead us to work on the related problem of statistical inference, which is the main contribution of the thesis

Improved Biometric Authentication System Using Multimodal Cue Integration

Biometrics is an efficient technology with great possibilities in the area of security system development for official and commercial applications. The biometrics has recently become a significant part of any efficient person authentication solution. The advantage of using biometric traits is that they cannot be stolen, shared or even forgotten. The thesis addresses one of the emerging topics in Authentication System, viz., the implementation of Improved Biometric Authentication System using Multimodal Cue Integration, as the operator assisted identification turns out to be tedious, laborious and time consuming. In order to derive the best performance for the authentication system, an appropriate feature selection criteria has been evolved. It has been seen that the selection of too many features lead to the deterioration in the authentication performance and efficiency. In the work reported in this thesis, various judiciously chosen components of the biometric traits and their feature vectors are used for realizing the newly proposed Biometric Authentication System using Multimodal Cue Integration. The feature vectors so generated from the noisy biometric traits is compared with the feature vectors available in the knowledge base and the most matching pattern is identified for the purpose of user authentication. In an attempt to improve the success rate of the Feature Vector based authentication system, the proposed system has been augmented with the user dependent weighted fusion technique.

Ein XML-basiertes Modell für synchrone Gruppenarbeit auf gemeinsamen Informationsräumen

In dieser Arbeit wird ein generisches Modell fuer synchrone Gruppenarbeit auf gemeinsamen Informationsraeumen entwickelt. Fuer die Entwicklung dieses Modells muessen die Grundfunktionen fuer Anwendungen der synchronen Gruppenarbeit realisiert werden. Neben der Modellierung des Datenraumes (Datenmodell) und der operationellen Schnittstelle (Interaktionsmodell), muessen Mechanismen fuer die Darstellung der Aktivitaeten der Gruppenmitglieder auf dem Informationsraum (Awareness), sowie fuer die Synchronisierung gleichzeitiger Zugriffe verschiedener Benutzer auf dem Datenraum realisiert werden (Nebenlaeufgkeitskontrolle). Das Grundproblem bei der Loesung der Nebenlaeufigkeit liegt bei der Aufgabe der Isolation aus den klassischen ACID-Transaktionen zu gunsten von Awareness. Die rapide Entwicklung von Techniken der mobilen Kommunikation ermoeglicht den Einsatz dieser Geraete fuer den Zugriff auf Daten im Internet. Durch UMTSund WLAN-Technologien koennen Mobilgeraete fuer Anwendungen ueber die reine Kommunikation hinaus eingesetzt werden. Eine natuerliche Folge dieser Entwicklung sind Anwendungen fuer die Zusammenarbeit mehrerer Benutzer. In der Arbeit wird daher auf die Unterstuetzung mobiler Geraete besonderen Wert gelegt. Die Interaktion der Benutzer auf den gemeinsamen Datenraum wird durch einfache Navigationsoperationen mit einem Cursor (Finger) realisiert, wobei der Datenraum durch XML-Dokumente dargestellt wird. Die Visualisierung basiert auf der Transformierung von XML-Dokumenten in andere XML-basierte Sprachen wie HTML oder SVG durch XSLT-Stylesheets. Awareness-Informationen werden, aehnlich dem Fokus/Nimbus-Modell, von der Interaktion der Benutzer und der Ermittlung der sichtbaren Objekte bei dem Benutzer hergeleitet. Fuer eine geeignete Kontrolle der Nebenlaeufigkeit wurde der Begriff der visuellen Transaktion eingefuehrt, wo die Auswirkungen einer Transaktion von anderen Benutzern (Transaktionen) beobachtet werden koennen. Die Synchronisierung basiert auf einem Sperrverfahren und der Einfuehrung der neuen W-Sperre und der Grundoperationen readV und writeV. Das Modell (Groupware-Server) wird in der Arbeit in einem Prototyp implementiert. Weiterhin wird eine Java-Anwendung sowohl auf einem Desktop PC als auch auf einem Pocket PC (iPAQ 3970) implementiert, welche die Einsetzbarkeit dieses Prototyps demonstriert.

A User-Centric Perspective on Parallel Programming with Focus on OpenMP

The process of developing software that takes advantage of multiple processors is commonly referred to as parallel programming. For various reasons, this process is much harder than the sequential case. For decades, parallel programming has been a problem for a small niche only: engineers working on parallelizing mostly numerical applications in High Performance Computing. This has changed with the advent of multi-core processors in mainstream computer architectures. Parallel programming in our days becomes a problem for a much larger group of developers. The main objective of this thesis was to find ways to make parallel programming easier for them. Different aims were identified in order to reach the objective: research the state of the art of parallel programming today, improve the education of software developers about the topic, and provide programmers with powerful abstractions to make their work easier. To reach these aims, several key steps were taken. To start with, a survey was conducted among parallel programmers to find out about the state of the art. More than 250 people participated, yielding results about the parallel programming systems and languages in use, as well as about common problems with these systems. Furthermore, a study was conducted in university classes on parallel programming. It resulted in a list of frequently made mistakes that were analyzed and used to create a programmers' checklist to avoid them in the future. For programmers' education, an online resource was setup to collect experiences and knowledge in the field of parallel programming - called the Parawiki. Another key step in this direction was the creation of the Thinking Parallel weblog, where more than 50.000 readers to date have read essays on the topic. For the third aim (powerful abstractions), it was decided to concentrate on one parallel programming system: OpenMP. Its ease of use and high level of abstraction were the most important reasons for this decision. Two different research directions were pursued. The first one resulted in a parallel library called AthenaMP. It contains so-called generic components, derived from design patterns for parallel programming. These include functionality to enhance the locks provided by OpenMP, to perform operations on large amounts of data (data-parallel programming), and to enable the implementation of irregular algorithms using task pools. AthenaMP itself serves a triple role: the components are well-documented and can be used directly in programs, it enables developers to study the source code and learn from it, and it is possible for compiler writers to use it as a testing ground for their OpenMP compilers. The second research direction was targeted at changing the OpenMP specification to make the system more powerful. The main contributions here were a proposal to enable thread-cancellation and a proposal to avoid busy waiting. Both were implemented in a research compiler, shown to be useful in example applications, and proposed to the OpenMP Language Committee.

User Profile Management and Selection in Context-Aware Service Platforms for Networks Beyond 3G

In recent years, progress in the area of mobile telecommunications has changed our way of life, in the private as well as the business domain. Mobile and wireless networks have ever increasing bit rates, mobile network operators provide more and more services, and at the same time costs for the usage of mobile services and bit rates are decreasing. However, mobile services today still lack functions that seamlessly integrate into users’ everyday life. That is, service attributes such as context-awareness and personalisation are often either proprietary, limited or not available at all. In order to overcome this deficiency, telecommunications companies are heavily engaged in the research and development of service platforms for networks beyond 3G for the provisioning of innovative mobile services. These service platforms are to support such service attributes. Service platforms are to provide basic service-independent functions such as billing, identity management, context management, user profile management, etc. Instead of developing own solutions, developers of end-user services such as innovative messaging services or location-based services can utilise the platform-side functions for their own purposes. In doing so, the platform-side support for such functions takes away complexity, development time and development costs from service developers. Context-awareness and personalisation are two of the most important aspects of service platforms in telecommunications environments. The combination of context-awareness and personalisation features can also be described as situation-dependent personalisation of services. The support for this feature requires several processing steps. The focus of this doctoral thesis is on the processing step, in which the user’s current context is matched against situation-dependent user preferences to find the matching user preferences for the current user’s situation. However, to achieve this, a user profile management system and corresponding functionality is required. These parts are also covered by this thesis. Altogether, this thesis provides the following contributions: The first part of the contribution is mainly architecture-oriented. First and foremost, we provide a user profile management system that addresses the specific requirements of service platforms in telecommunications environments. In particular, the user profile management system has to deal with situation-specific user preferences and with user information for various services. In order to structure the user information, we also propose a user profile structure and the corresponding user profile ontology as part of an ontology infrastructure in a service platform. The second part of the contribution is the selection mechanism for finding matching situation-dependent user preferences for the personalisation of services. This functionality is provided as a sub-module of the user profile management system. Contrary to existing solutions, our selection mechanism is based on ontology reasoning. This mechanism is evaluated in terms of runtime performance and in terms of supported functionality compared to other approaches. The results of the evaluation show the benefits and the drawbacks of ontology modelling and ontology reasoning in practical applications.

An algorithmic approach for collaborative-based prediction of user contexts in ubiquitous environments under consideration of legal implications

Mit Hilfe der Vorhersage von Kontexten können z. B. Dienste innerhalb einer ubiquitären Umgebung proaktiv an die Bedürfnisse der Nutzer angepasst werden. Aus diesem Grund hat die Kontextvorhersage einen signifikanten Stellenwert innerhalb des ’ubiquitous computing’. Nach unserem besten Wissen, verwenden gängige Ansätze in der Kontextvorhersage ausschließlich die Kontexthistorie des Nutzers als Datenbasis, dessen Kontexte vorhersagt werden sollen. Im Falle, dass ein Nutzer unerwartet seine gewohnte Verhaltensweise ändert, enthält die Kontexthistorie des Nutzers keine geeigneten Informationen, um eine zuverlässige Kontextvorhersage zu gewährleisten. Daraus folgt, dass Vorhersageansätze, die ausschließlich die Kontexthistorie des Nutzers verwenden, dessen Kontexte vorhergesagt werden sollen, fehlschlagen könnten. Um die Lücke der fehlenden Kontextinformationen in der Kontexthistorie des Nutzers zu schließen, führen wir den Ansatz zur kollaborativen Kontextvorhersage (CCP) ein. Dabei nutzt CCP bestehende direkte und indirekte Relationen, die zwischen den Kontexthistorien der verschiedenen Nutzer existieren können, aus. CCP basiert auf der Singulärwertzerlegung höherer Ordnung, die bereits erfolgreich in bestehenden Empfehlungssystemen eingesetzt wurde. Um Aussagen über die Vorhersagegenauigkeit des CCP Ansatzes treffen zu können, wird dieser in drei verschiedenen Experimenten evaluiert. Die erzielten Vorhersagegenauigkeiten werden mit denen von drei bekannten Kontextvorhersageansätzen, dem ’Alignment’ Ansatz, dem ’StatePredictor’ und dem ’ActiveLeZi’ Vorhersageansatz, verglichen. In allen drei Experimenten werden als Evaluationsbasis kollaborative Datensätze verwendet. Anschließend wird der CCP Ansatz auf einen realen kollaborativen Anwendungsfall, den proaktiven Schutz von Fußgängern, angewendet. Dabei werden durch die Verwendung der kollaborativen Kontextvorhersage Fußgänger frühzeitig erkannt, die potentiell Gefahr laufen, mit einem sich nähernden Auto zu kollidieren. Als kollaborative Datenbasis werden reale Bewegungskontexte der Fußgänger verwendet. Die Bewegungskontexte werden mittels Smartphones, welche die Fußgänger in ihrer Hosentasche tragen, gesammelt. Aus dem Grund, dass Kontextvorhersageansätze in erster Linie personenbezogene Kontexte wie z.B. Standortdaten oder Verhaltensmuster der Nutzer als Datenbasis zur Vorhersage verwenden, werden rechtliche Evaluationskriterien aus dem Recht des Nutzers auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung abgeleitet. Basierend auf den abgeleiteten Evaluationskriterien, werden der CCP Ansatz und weitere bekannte kontextvorhersagende Ansätze bezüglich ihrer Rechtsverträglichkeit untersucht. Die Evaluationsergebnisse zeigen die rechtliche Kompatibilität der untersuchten Vorhersageansätze bezüglich des Rechtes des Nutzers auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung auf. Zum Schluss wird in der Dissertation ein Ansatz für die verteilte und kollaborative Vorhersage von Kontexten vorgestellt. Mit Hilfe des Ansatzes wird eine Möglichkeit aufgezeigt, um den identifizierten rechtlichen Probleme, die bei der Vorhersage von Kontexten und besonders bei der kollaborativen Vorhersage von Kontexten, entgegenzuwirken.

The Human in the Loop: User Participation in Self-Adaptive Software

Self-adaptive software provides a profound solution for adapting applications to changing contexts in dynamic and heterogeneous environments. Having emerged from Autonomic Computing, it incorporates fully autonomous decision making based on predefined structural and behavioural models. The most common approach for architectural runtime adaptation is the MAPE-K adaptation loop implementing an external adaptation manager without manual user control. However, it has turned out that adaptation behaviour lacks acceptance if it does not correspond to a user’s expectations – particularly for Ubiquitous Computing scenarios with user interaction. Adaptations can be irritating and distracting if they are not appropriate for a certain situation. In general, uncertainty during development and at run-time causes problems with users being outside the adaptation loop. In a literature study, we analyse publications about self-adaptive software research. The results show a discrepancy between the motivated application domains, the maturity of examples, and the quality of evaluations on the one hand and the provided solutions on the other hand. Only few publications analysed the impact of their work on the user, but many employ user-oriented examples for motivation and demonstration. To incorporate the user within the adaptation loop and to deal with uncertainty, our proposed solutions enable user participation for interactive selfadaptive software while at the same time maintaining the benefits of intelligent autonomous behaviour. We define three dimensions of user participation, namely temporal, behavioural, and structural user participation. This dissertation contributes solutions for user participation in the temporal and behavioural dimension. The temporal dimension addresses the moment of adaptation which is classically determined by the self-adaptive system. We provide mechanisms allowing users to influence or to define the moment of adaptation. With our solution, users can have full control over the moment of adaptation or the self-adaptive software considers the user’s situation more appropriately. The behavioural dimension addresses the actual adaptation logic and the resulting run-time behaviour. Application behaviour is established during development and does not necessarily match the run-time expectations. Our contributions are three distinct solutions which allow users to make changes to the application’s runtime behaviour: dynamic utility functions, fuzzy-based reasoning, and learning-based reasoning. The foundation of our work is a notification and feedback solution that improves intelligibility and controllability of self-adaptive applications by implementing a bi-directional communication between self-adaptive software and the user. The different mechanisms from the temporal and behavioural participation dimension require the notification and feedback solution to inform users on adaptation actions and to provide a mechanism to influence adaptations. Case studies show the feasibility of the developed solutions. Moreover, an extensive user study with 62 participants was conducted to evaluate the impact of notifications before and after adaptations. Although the study revealed that there is no preference for a particular notification design, participants clearly appreciated intelligibility and controllability over autonomous adaptations.

Failure-Oblivious Computing and Boundless Memory Blocks

Memory errors are a common cause of incorrect software execution and security vulnerabilities. We have developed two new techniques that help software continue to execute successfully through memory errors: failure-oblivious computing and boundless memory blocks. The foundation of both techniques is a compiler that generates code that checks accesses via pointers to detect out of bounds accesses. Instead of terminating or throwing an exception, the generated code takes another action that keeps the program executing without memory corruption. Failure-oblivious code simply discards invalid writes and manufactures values to return for invalid reads, enabling the program to continue its normal execution path. Code that implements boundless memory blocks stores invalid writes away in a hash table to return as the values for corresponding out of bounds reads. he net effect is to (conceptually) give each allocated memory block unbounded size and to eliminate out of bounds accesses as a programming error. We have implemented both techniques and acquired several widely used open source servers (Apache, Sendmail, Pine, Mutt, and Midnight Commander).With standard compilers, all of these servers are vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks as documented at security tracking web sites. Both failure-oblivious computing and boundless memory blocks eliminate these security vulnerabilities (as well as other memory errors). Our results show that our compiler enables the servers to execute successfully through buffer overflow attacks to continue to correctly service user requests without security vulnerabilities.

Adaption of Courses and Learning Environment to the User Context in dotLRN

The explosive growth of Internet during the last years has been reflected in the ever-increasing amount of the diversity and heterogeneity of user preferences, types and features of devices and access networks. Usually the heterogeneity in the context of the users which request Web contents is not taken into account by the servers that deliver them implying that these contents will not always suit their needs. In the particular case of e-learning platforms this issue is especially critical due to the fact that it puts at stake the knowledge acquired by their users. In the following paper we present a system that aims to provide the dotLRN e-learning platform with the capability to adapt to its users context. By integrating dotLRN with a multi-agent hypermedia system, online courses being undertaken by students as well as their learning environment are adapted in real time

TU Graz: Course: 707.000 Web Science and Web Technology: Lecture 12: User Intentions and Intentional Structures on the Web II

In this lecture, we will focus on analyzing user goals in search query logs. Readings: M. Strohmaier, P. Prettenhofer, M. Lux, Different Degrees of Explicitness in Intentional Artifacts - Studying User Goals in a Large Search Query Log, CSKGOI'08 International Workshop on Commonsense Knowledge and Goal Oriented Interfaces, in conjunction with IUI'08, Canary Islands, Spain, 2008.

TU Graz: Course: 707.000 Web Science and Web Technology: Lecture 11: User Intentions and Intentional Structures on the Web

Search engines - such as Google - have been characterized as "Databases of intentions". This class will focus on different aspects of intentionality on the web, including goal mining, goal modeling and goal-oriented search. Readings: M. Strohmaier, M. Lux, M. Granitzer, P. Scheir, S. Liaskos, E. Yu, How Do Users Express Goals on the Web? - An Exploration of Intentional Structures in Web Search, We Know'07 International Workshop on Collaborative Knowledge Management for Web Information Systems in conjunction with WISE'07, Nancy, France, 2007. [Web link] Readings: Automatic identification of user goals in web search, U. Lee and Z. Liu and J. Cho WWW '05: Proceedings of the 14th International World Wide Web Conference 391--400 (2005) [Web link]

Proyección del CEDISIMAR.

El CEDISIMAR es el Centro de Documentación e Información del Instituto Pedagógico de Miranda José Manuel Siso Martínez, el cual tiene como misión brindar información especializada para la realización de las actividades de investigación de pregrado y postgrado, extensión y docencia del IPMJMSM y de otras Universidades, por lo que se realizó un Proyecto Especial, el cual tuvo como objetivo general: Rediseñar el Centro de Información y Documentación del Instituto Pedagógico de Miranda José Manuel Siso Martínez, ubicado en la Urbina Estado Miranda en el segundo piso del edificio Mirage, tomando en consideración la misión que tiene este centro de gran relevancia para la institución. Este proyecto tuvo seis fases: I fase diagnóstico; II fase detección de las necesidades; III fase la propuesta con soporte de la factibilidad; IV fase de ejecución; V fase resultados y producto y VI fase estudio de impacto sobre los usuarios. Los resultados evidenciaron a través de los cambios que se generan en los centros de este tipo, en cuanto a la remodelación, la infraestructura y los distintos servicios que ofrece, lo cual favoreció un mejor servicio y atención al usuario.

Análisis de las estrategias emprendidas por el área de mercadeo de GlaxoSmithKline en el producto Emulsión de Scott

Emulsión de Scott es en la actualidad uno de los productos con mayor participación en el mercado colombiano dentro de la categoría vitaminas y suplementos. Este logro es el resultado de una larga trayectoria y una clara ventaja competitiva, la cual ha permitido a este producto tener un valor de marca muy significativo tal como su tradición, reconocimiento de marca y calidad percibida. Sin embargo diferentes aspectos del micro y macro entorno tales como los cambios culturales, la poca innovación y las debilidades del producto, han generado que en el área de mercadeo de la farmacéutica GlaxoSmithKline se pongan en marcha una serie de estrategias que le permitan a la marca generar valor agregado tanto a la compañía como a sus clientes. Dichas estrategias se han concentrado en aumentar la participación y ventas del producto en el mercado.

Introducción de la metodología análisis modal de fallos y efectos (AMFE) como herramienta de gestión en una ese del distrito capital de II nivel

El presente trabajo expone la elaboración de un proceso sistemático para la identificación y clasificación de modos de fallo utilizando la metodología ANÁLISIS MODAL DE FALLOS Y EFECTOS (AMFE), como un procedimiento de gran utilidad para mejorar la calidad y seguridad de la prestación de servicios asistenciales. Se analizaron 254 modos de fallo, en el servicio de urgencias de una ESE de II Nivel del Distrito Capital, se utilizó una herramienta de selección de procesos denominada Matriz de Priorización utilizada por el Centro de Gestión Hospitalaria con algunas adaptaciones de acuerdo con las necesidades institucionales. Se calificaron 227 de ellos correspondiendo a un 89,37%. Se entrevistaron 48 médicos, 27 enfermeras, 27 auxiliares de enfermería y 9 camilleros, para un total de 111 colaboradores que corresponden al 30% del total del personal del servicio de urgencias. Se generó una hoja de control de calidad (aceptación) del ejercicio con un porcentaje total del 85%, teniendo como resultado que 102 personas de las 111 encuestadas, diligenciaron correctamente la totalidad de los campos del formato AMFE. Se buscó Implementar el uso de la metodología AMFE como herramienta de gestión y mejora de procesos institucionales, realizando una prueba piloto al proceso seleccionado y evaluando si esta metodología se podía aplicar a otros procesos asistenciales. Se observó que de la totalidad de los modos de fallo el mayor valor de criticidad se encontró en el rango de 45 puntos. Se determinaron 11 modos de fallos en esta categoría, los cuales se encuentran dos asociados dos están asociados con el acceso del paciente a la institución, siete relacionados con el Registro e Ingreso del usuario, uno relacionado con la planeación de la atención y dos relacionados con la ejecución del tratamiento. Palabras claves: Análisis Modal De Fallos y Efectos (AMFE), urgencias, mejora continua.