Åsa Rudström

Socially Enhanced Travel Booking : a Case Study

The ability to obtain user data in an unobtrusive way is instrumental to the success of recommendations based on collaborative data. In a travel booking scenario, where data about the current user was sparse, a solution based on displaying booking statistics was proposed. A prototype system was built in a joint project with the international transport and travel service company Stena Line. A qualitative user evaluation provided support for two hypotheses: 1) that displaying statistics of other travellers’ booking choices would support users in the booking process, and 2) that users would form their own recommendations if presented with background information.

Information services based on user profile communication

Web-based, user-adaptive information services impose a difficult requirement on user modeling: the inference schema for user modeling and user-adapted information retrieval must be maintained over time. There are two reasons for this: 1) the information itself may change; and 2) the user group is largely unknown from the start, and may change during the usage of the system. To address these problems, we view profile structures and information classifications as means of communication as well as means for automatic information retrieval. Users communicate their information needs, and editors communicate the structure and content of available information. Our focus is to provide tools in which such communication can be efficiently accomplished. These tools are then used to enhance the day-to-day information retrieval in terms of information filtering and search.

Questions, inspiration, feedback, and contributions: how entrepreneurs network online

This work investigates how entrepreneurs use social networking sites for business. Through surveys, online discussions and interviews, we have looked at activities, motives for participating on networking sites for business, motives for contributing, and differences between online and offline networking. Our results show that networking, facts finding, and marketing are very common activities while sharing of experience is quite rare. Entrepreneurs connect with new people online rather than reifying offline networks. A novel use of social media is that of small businesses using Facebook as a web hotel. We believe that an important explanation to our results is that social media are still informal and not yet incorporated in traditional work routines.

Digital Libraries: Information Broker Roles in Collaborative Filtering

The main goal of the EdInfo project [1] is to utilize human information brokers, or editors, as a resource in adaptive information systems. An information broker can be any of the following: The dedicated expert that collects and potentially reviews literature within a restricted area of interest; The journalist that produces articles with specific reader groups in mind; The librarian that organizes incoming information and directs readers to various sources; The professional information broker, that processes specific information requests, seeks for appropriate information sources, and produces summaries of the obtained information.