Birgul Kutlu

Multi User Virtual Environments and Serious Games for Team Building

Abstract In this study, a team building Multi User Virtual Environment (MUVE) is designed specifically for professional teams to practice and improve communication and collaboration skills in a relaxed, non-task related, game like environment. Web.alive platform is used as MUVE. The game “Zoom”, by Istvan Banyai, that is used for improving team building skills in real life is adapted into this environment. The game is applied to a pilot group. The results are promising, implying that MUVEs can be substituted for face-to-face played serious games and organizations can benefit from these environments.

HybRecSys: Content-based contextual hybrid venue recommender system

The popularity of location-based social networks has prompted researchers to study recommendation systems for location-based services. When used separately, each existing venue recommendation system algorithm has its own drawbacks (e.g. cold start, data sparsity, scalability). Another issue is that critical information about context is not commonly used in venue recommendation systems. This article proposes a hybrid recommendation model that combines contextual information, user-based and item-based collaborative filtering and content-based filtering. For this purpose, we collected user visit histories, venue-related information (distance, category, popularity and price) and contextual information (weather, season, date and time of visits) related to individual user visits from Twitter, Foursquare and Weather Underground. Experimental evaluation of the proposed hybrid system (HybRecSys) using a real-world dataset shows better results than baseline approaches.

Perceptions about and attitude toward the usage of e-learning in corporate training

As companies are driven to reshape their established practices with the impact of advancements in information and communication technologies, corporate training emerges as a distinct area requiring technological transformation. This exploratory study aims to examine the attitudes of a sample of 106 of the top 500 corporations in Turkey regarding the usage of e-learning for corporate training. Findings show that most of these firms currently have a hesitant attitude toward this development. Through factor analysis, the main advantages for using e-learning in corporate training have been classified as employee commitment and motivation, convenience and accessibility, customization and outsourcing, and cost effectiveness while the disadvantages have been grouped as personal and organizational. Consequently, attitudinal differences toward e-learning between companies have been explored according to two scale-related variables (employee size and company revenue) and two variables about organizational readiness (the existence of a Learning & Education Department and the current use of e-learning). Blended learning is preferred instead of purely traditional or totally online learning in companies.Employee motivation, convenience, customization and cost effectiveness are the main advantages of corporate e-learning.Main drawbacks are lack of sociability, possible difficulty, and lack of awareness of the benefits of such systems.Perceived advantages of e-learning prevail the disadvantages in an organizational context.

Developing a Contextually Personalized Hybrid Recommender System

It is hard to choose places to go from an endless number of options for some specific circumstances. Recommender systems are supposed to help us deal with these issues and make decisions that are more appropriate. The aim of this study is to recommend new venues to users according to their preferences. For this purpose, a hybrid recommendation model is proposed to integrate user-based and item-based collaborative filtering, content-based filtering together with contextual information in order to get rid of the disadvantages of each approach. Besides that, in which specific circumstances the user will like a specific venue is predicted for each user-venue pair. Moreover, threshold values determining the user’s liking toward a venue are determined separately for each user. Results are evaluated with both offline experiments (precision, recall, F-1 score) and a user study. Both the experimental evaluation with a real-world dataset and a user study of the proposed system showed improvement upon the baseline approaches.

Tele-health monitoring platform

The aim of the study is to design a platform for tele-health monitoring system. This system will achieve the vital signs, such as blood pressure, body temperature, heart rate or blood oxygen, of patients, who need to be continuously monitored, with medical devices. This device will transmit the data to a clinical center using Internet. The data will be monitored through a web interface, necessary reports will be prepared according to the analysis of data and 3rd parties will be informed in case of emergency situations. After the development of the platform a preliminary work will be prepared in order to evaluate the system for the willingness of Turkish patients to use these kind of devices and improvement of health risk.