Stanley Loh

A tourism recommender system based on collaboration and text analysis.

This work presents a recommender system that helps travel agents in discovering options for customers, especially those who do not know where to go and what to do. The system analyzes textual messages exchanged between a travel agent and a customer through a private Web chat. Text mining techniques help discover interesting areas in the messages. After that, the system searches a database and retrieves tourist options (like cities and attractions) classified in these interesting areas. The system makes use of a tourism ontology, containing themes and a controlled vocabulary, to identify themes in the textual messages. The system acts as a decision support system, because it does not make recommendations directly to the customer.

Applying Text Mining on Electronic Messages for Competitive Intelligence

This paper presents an application of text mining to support Competitive Intelligence (CI). A case study was built using the ETO System, which enables trade-related bodies to exchange information by e-mail. As this information is available in textual formats, we used text-mining tools to support the CI process. The strategy uses domain knowledge to extract concepts from the texts. A mining tool searches for patterns in concept distributions and correlations, aiding the identification of strategic information. The main contribution of the paper is the use of an inexpensive strategy to allow a competitive advantage to Small and Medium Enterprises with minimal cost.

PersonalTour: A Recommender System for Travel Packages

This paper describes the Personal Tour recommender system that helps customers to find best travel packages according to their preferences. Personal Tour is based on the paradigm of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence and a customer recommendation request is divided into partial recommendations that are handled by different agents. Experiments were run with real customers and the results are presented.

Organizations and social networking: Utilizing social media to engage consumers

The modern business landscape demands that organizations maintain an online presence to network with their customers and investors. Therefore, understanding the link between social media and e-business is an important first step in cultivating these internet-based relationships. Organizations and Social Networking: Utilizing Social Media to Engage Consumers provides a broad investigation into the use of social technologies in business practices through theoretical research and practical applications. This book explores the opportunities and challenges brought about by the advent of various 21st century online business web tools and platforms, presenting professionals and researchers in e-business, social marketing, online collaborative communities, and social analytics with cutting-edge information and technological developments to implement in their own enterprises. This book is part of the Advances in Marketing, Customer Relationship Management, and E-Services series collection.

Using ontological modeling in a context-aware summarization system to adapt text for mobile devices

This paper presents a context-aware text summarizer based on ontologies intended to be used for adapting information to mobile devices. The system generates summaries from texts according to the profile of the user and the context where he/she is at the moment. Context is determined by spatial and temporal localization. Ontologies are used to allow identifying which parts of the texts are related to the users profile and to the context. Ontologies are structured as hierarchies of concepts and concepts are represented by keywords with a weight associated.

Hyperdictionary: a knowledge discovery tool to help information retrieval

We present a knowledge discovery tool to help the information retrieval process. This tool, which we define as Hyperdictionary, is capable of acquiring and holding relationships among words to describe the context of some information-the knowledge about some subject. This knowledge is then used to retrieve information by contextual search in a document collection. Our preliminary studies indicate that this structure can be used in conjunction with some information retrieval tool, to aid the user in the elaboration of his query. The users query is automatically expanded with words strongly related to the information the user is wanting, facilitating the retrieval process.

Enhancing the Quality of Recommendations through Expert and Trusted Agents

In multi-agent recommender systems, agents are able to generate recommendations according to the preferences of the customer. However, in some domains, specific knowledge is required in order to compose a recommendation and this knowledge may be not available for the agent. In these cases, agents need to communicate with other agents in the community searching for the specific information to complete the recommendation. This paper presents a multi-agent recommender system based on trust and expert agents. It aims at improving the quality of the information exchanged among agents because communication will occur primarily with trusted sources in the hope to decrease the communication load. Also, agents become experts in specific types of recommendation. The approach was validate in the tourism domain by means of recommendations of travel packages and experiments were performed to illustrate the impact of using trust assignment in the quality of the recommendations generated by expert agents. Results corroborate the intuition that expert agents that use a trust mechanism are able to increase the quality of recommendation provided.

Using Scientific Publications to Identify People with Similar Interests

In many situations, related to some types of systems or organizations’ tasks, it is necessary to identify people with similar profiles. In the case of a collaborative recommender system, items to be recommended are those associated to similar users. Another example, in the academic environment, is to identify new members to be part of a research group (people with similar profiles). This task of identifying people with similar profiles can be time-consuming. In this sense, this work considers that scientific papers written by people can be used to identify users with similar profiles. Considering this assumption, we have done some experiments to identify which parts of papers, which type of indexes (terms or concepts) and which type of similarity functions (Jaccard or a Fuzzy function) are more suitable to identify similar people. The paper presents the results of some experiments and some application scenarios considering academic environments.

Comparing keywords and taxonomies in the representation of users profiles in a content-based recommender system

This work investigates the use of keywords and classes to represent users profiles in order to improve a content-based recommender system. The techniques were implemented and tested in a recommender system for a website that gathers commercial ads. Ads are posted by individuals and contain a title and a textual description. Profiles are created and maintained through the analysis of ads seen by the user during a certain period of time and may be represented by classes, keywords or both kinds. Keywords are automatically extracted from the textual description of the ads. Classes come from a taxonomy defined by the website. Ads must be posted within a leaf class of the taxonomy. The items to be recommended are ads containing keywords associated to the user in his/her profile and/or ads classified in the leaf-classes present in the users profile. The paper demonstrates that the combination of both techniques (keywords and classes) outperforms the use of each one separately.

Sistema de Recomendações em Discussões Eletrônicas - Apoio à Construção do Conhecimento em Comunidades Virtuais de Aprendizagem

Webgrade is an on-line system for managing and publishing student grades on web. Webgrade provides: (1) to the teachers, features for managing grade plans, publishing student grades, and sending messages to the students by email; (2) to the students, access to their grades and number of absences to the classes, in a private and restrict page on the internet. All interactions between Webgrade and users are done by a web browser. Webgrade was developed with open-source technology and can be freely distributed under GPL.Resumo: Este artigo relata uma experiencia de inclusao digital (ID) do Programa de Extensao Onda Digital com 40 jovens carentes. O curso de Informatica Basica de 36 horas fez parte do programa educacional da ONG Eletrocooperativa. Este programa visa a formacao musical, melhoria das condicoes de trabalho e de cidadania de jovens afro-descendentes brasileiros. A experiencia de ID contou com a participacao de alunos do curso de graduacao em Ciencia da Computacao da UFBA, que atuaram como instrutores. O gerenciamento do curso, a elaboracao das aulas e do material didatico foram feitos com a utilizacao de ferramentas colaborativas livres. O proprio conteudo do curso de informatica foi baseado em solucoes livres, dentro do sistema operacional GNU/Linux. O resultado foi encorajador: dos 22 alunos que concluiram o curso com sucesso, 13 ja estao empregados em menos de 6 meses e 2 decidiram matricular-se em curso pre-vestibular. Acreditamos que iniciativas como esta despertam nos jovens a motivacao de engajar-se na universidade ou no mercado de trabalho. Abstract: This paper describes a digital inclusion (DI) experience of the OndaDigital Extension Program with 40 deprived teenagers. The IntroductoryInformatics Course had a total of 36 hours and was part of the EducationalProgram from the NGO Eletrocooperativa. Their program focuses on musicalformation, improvement of work condition and citizenship of afro-descendantsBrazilian youngsters. This DI experience counted with the participation ofstudents from the Computer Science undergraduate course of UFBA asmonitors and instructors. The management of the course, preparation oflessons and pedagogical material was done using a collaborative tool basedon free software. The course content was also based on free softwareapplications using GNU/Linux operating system. The results were veryencouraging: from the 22 students that successfully finished the course, 13found a job in less than six months and 2 decided to take preparatory coursesfor entering university. We believe that initiatives like this one motivateteenagers to aim for the university or enter the job market.