Nous présentons dans cette thèse notre travail dans le domaine de la visualisation. Nous nous sommes intéressés au problème de la génération des bulletins météorologiques. Étant donné une masse énorme d’information générée par Environnement Canada et un utilisateur, il faut lui générer une visualisation personnalisée qui répond à ses besoins et à ses préférences. Nous avons développé MeteoVis, un générateur de bulletin météorologique. Comme nous avons peu d’information sur le profil de l’utilisateur, nous nous sommes basés sur les utilisateurs similaires pour lui calculer ses besoins et ses préférences. Nous utilisons l'apprentissage non supervisé pour regrouper les utilisateurs similaires. Nous calculons le taux de similarité des profils utilisateurs dans le même cluster pour pondérer les besoins et les préférences. Nous avons mené, avec l’aide d'utilisateurs n’ayant aucun rapport avec le projet, des expériences d'évaluation et de comparaison de notre outil par rapport à celui utilisé actuellement par Environnement Canada. Les résultats de cette évaluation montrent que les visualisation générées par MeteoVis sont de loin meilleures que les bulletins actuels préparés par EC. / We present our work in this thesis in the field of information visualization. We dealt with the problem of the generation of weather forecasts reports. Given the huge amount of information produced by Environment Canada and a wide variety of users, it must generate a customized visualization that meets their needs and preferences. We developed MeteoVis, a weather report generator. Given that we have little information on the user profile, we relied on the choices made by similar users to calculate the needs and preferences of a user. We use unsupervised machine learning techniques to group similar users . We compute a degree of similarity of user profiles in the same cluster to determine the needs and preferences. We conducted, with the help of external users experiments for evaluating and comparing our tool with the current site of Environment Canada. The evaluation results show that the visualizations generated by MeteoVis are significantly better than the current bulletins prepared by EC.

This thesis titled The Media Images of Political Leaders - 2010 Elections focuses on descriptions and depictions of Czech political leaders, Vojtěch Filip, Jiří Paroubek, Petr Nečas, Radek John and Karel Schwarzenberg in printed press. The thesis contains an introduction of the leaders and the parties which they led during the 2010 parliamentary elections. The thesis shows the differing images of the leaders in various media. It contains a quantitative content analysis of MF Dnes, Lidové noviny, Hospodářské noviny, Právo and Blesk daily newspapers in the pre-election period between 1 April and 27 May 2010, examining the frequency of informing about the leaders, differences in their presentation and attention given to each of them. The content and tone of individual articles has been examined as well. The thesis also analyses the ratios between informing about the individual leaders and other topics in each newspaper. The theoretical concept of the thesis is media communication in relation to politics. Political communication is examined from the view of the theory of political parallelism and the influence of media on politics.

Dans cette thèse, nous proposons un framework d’adaptation appelé "Personalized vIdeo Adaptation Framework" (PIAF) conçu à partir des standards MPEG. PIAF intègre les contraintes sémantiques et vise à maximiser la qualité perçue par l’utilisateur lors de la visualisation de la vidéo tout en respectant les droits de propriété intellectuelle. Les contributions de cette thèse peuvent être résumées comme suit. Dans un premier temps, nous avons utilisé et étendu les standards MPEG-7 et MPEG-21 afin de représenter les préférences des utilisateurs. Nous avons ensuite proposé un modèle formel du processus d’adaptation sémantique d’une vidéo et défini une fonction d’utilité régissant le mécanisme de prise de décision du MPDA. Cette fonction tient compte de différentes dimensions de qualité (qualité perceptuelle, sémantique, temps d’exécution nécessaire) afin d’évaluer quantitativement la qualité d’un plan d’adaptation. Le processus d’adaptation que nous proposons intègre les droits de propriété intellectuelle dans le processus de décision. Dans certains cas, le plan d’adaptation qui produirait la vidéo de meilleure qualité adaptée aux préférences de l’utilisateur peut être inapplicable car il ne respecte pas les contraintes du propriétaire. Trouver le meilleur plan d’adaptation devient alors un problème NP-complet. Nous avons proposé une solution pratique à ce problème sous la forme d’une heuristique capable de sélectionner un plan très proche de l’optimum en un temps de calcul raisonnable. Afin d’implémenter ce framework, nous avons également développé un outil d’annotation sémantique de contenu vidéo (SVCAT) qui produit des annotations sémantiques structurelles et de haut niveau selon un modèle objet basé sur du contenu vidéo. Nous avons validé nos travaux avec des évaluations qualitatives et quantitatives qui nous ont permis d’étudier la performance et l'efficacité du MPDA. Nous avons validé nos travaux avec des évaluations qualitatives et quantitatives qui nous ont permis d’étudier la performance et l'efficacité du MPDA. Les résultats obtenus démontrent que la fonction d’utilité proposée présente une forte corrélation avec les évaluations subjectives fournies par des utilisateurs concernant la qualité d’une vidéo adaptée, et constitue donc une base tout à fait pertinente pour le MPDA. / Universal Multimedia Experience (UME) is the notion that a user should receive informative adapted content anytime and anywhere. Personalization of videos, which adapts their content according to user preferences, is a vital aspect of achieving the UME vision. User preferences can be translated into several types of constraints that must be considered by the adaptation process, including semantic constraints directly related to the content of the video. The overall goal of this adaptation process is to provide users with adapted content that maximizes their Quality of Experience (QoE). This QoE depends at the same time on the level of the user's satisfaction in perceiving the adapted content, the amount of knowledge assimilated by them, and the adaptation execution time. In video adaptation frameworks, the Adaptation Decision Taking Engine (ADTE), is responsible for achieving this goal. The task of the ADTE is challenging as many adaptation operations can satisfy the same semantic constraint, and thus arising in several feasible adaptation plans. Indeed, for each entity to be adapted, the ADTE must decide on the adequate adaptation operator that satisfies the user's preferences while maximizing his/her quality of experience. The first challenge to achieve in this is to objectively measure the quality of the adapted video, while considering the multiple aspects of the QoE. The second challenge is to assess beforehand this quality in order to choose the most appropriate adaptation plan among all possible ones. The third challenge is to resolve conflicting or overlapping semantic constraints, in particular conflicts arising from constraints expressed by owner's intellectual property rights (IPR) about the modification of the content. In this thesis, we tackled the aforementioned challenges by proposing a Utility Function (UF), which integrates semantic concerns with user's perceptual considerations. This UF models the relationships among adaptation operations, user preferences, and the quality of the video content. We integrated this UF into an ADTE. This ADTE performs a multi-level piecewise reasoning to choose the adaptation plan that maximizes the user-perceived quality. Furthermore, we included IPR in the adaptation process. Thereby, we modeled content owner constraints, and proposed a heuristic to resolve conflicting user and owner constraints. More, we developed SVCAT, which produces structural and high-level semantic annotation according to an original object-based video content model. We modeled as well the user's preferences proposing extensions to MPEG-7 and MPEG-21. All the developed contributions were carried out as part of a coherent framework called PIAF. We validated this research with qualitative and quantitative evaluations, which assess the performance and the efficiency of the proposed adaptation decision-taking engine within PIAF.

行動代理人（Mobile Agent）是一種常被應用於分散式處理及行動運算的技術之一。尤其近幾年在網際網路的普及與Java語言的誕生後，更是結合了這兩者特性，在Web上蔓延開來，許多行動代理開發工具本身便是純Java語言撰寫的，而且亦有為數不少的行動代理人應用系統直接就是建構於Web平台上。 　本研究運用行動代理技術建構一行動代理人服務提供者（Mobile Agent Service Provider，MASP）應用模式，以Web為平台，將各種服務以行動代理人的方式來開發，然後提供給客戶。客戶可藉由這些服務所具備的諸多行動代理人特性，來進行個人資訊管理工作。研究問題主要係針對現今一般人所擁有的金融帳戶過多造成理財困擾，以及目前的網路銀行或金融帳戶管理系統無法做到跨行跨業這兩方面來進行改良。客戶只需連線上站，即可要求代理程式為他服務。不論人在哪裡，便會自動收到代理人從與其有往來的各網路銀行網站中所擷取回來的帳戶最新資料，然後便可用單一帳戶將這些資料加以彙整管理；甚至在離線後，亦能讓代理程式以其預先設定好的工作而自動繼續執行任務，不必擔心作業中斷。客戶可以將其個人帳戶資料儲存於自己的電腦中，而不必擔心若存於系統伺服器可能產生的潛在安全性問題。因此客戶只須利用此單一整合帳戶（All-in-One Account）即可進行跨行整合的個人理財活動，輕鬆達成帳戶彙整（Account Aggregation）管理。 　本研究從使用者主導的角度來發展此服務架構，希望此模式能應用於其他領域上，以使行動代理的發展更加全方位及人性化。

We address the challenge of providing low-cost, universal access of useful information to people in different parts of the globe. We achieve this by following two strategies. First, we focus on the delivery of information through computerized devices and prototype new methods for making that delivery possible in a secure, low-cost, and universal manner. Second, we focus on the use of participatory media, such as blogs, in the context of news related content, and develop methods to recommend useful information that will be of interest to users. To achieve the first goal, we have designed a low-cost wireless system for Internet access in rural areas, and a smartphone-based system for the opportunistic use of WiFi connectivity to reduce the cost of data transfer on multi-NIC mobile devices. Included is a methodology for secure communication using identity based cryptography. For the second goal of identifying useful information, we make use of sociological theories regarding social networks in mass-media to develop a model of how participatory media can offer users effective news-related information. We then use this model to design a recommender system for participatory media content that pushes useful information to people in a personalized fashion. Our algorithms provide an order of magnitude better performance in terms of recommendation accuracy than other state-of-the-art recommender systems. Our work provides some fundamental insights into the design of low-cost communication systems and the provision of useful messages to users in participatory media through a multi-disciplinary approach. The result is a framework that efficiently and effectively delivers information to people in remote corners of the world.

We address the challenge of providing low-cost, universal access of useful information to people in different parts of the globe. We achieve this by following two strategies. First, we focus on the delivery of information through computerized devices and prototype new methods for making that delivery possible in a secure, low-cost, and universal manner. Second, we focus on the use of participatory media, such as blogs, in the context of news related content, and develop methods to recommend useful information that will be of interest to users. To achieve the first goal, we have designed a low-cost wireless system for Internet access in rural areas, and a smartphone-based system for the opportunistic use of WiFi connectivity to reduce the cost of data transfer on multi-NIC mobile devices. Included is a methodology for secure communication using identity based cryptography. For the second goal of identifying useful information, we make use of sociological theories regarding social networks in mass-media to develop a model of how participatory media can offer users effective news-related information. We then use this model to design a recommender system for participatory media content that pushes useful information to people in a personalized fashion. Our algorithms provide an order of magnitude better performance in terms of recommendation accuracy than other state-of-the-art recommender systems. Our work provides some fundamental insights into the design of low-cost communication systems and the provision of useful messages to users in participatory media through a multi-disciplinary approach. The result is a framework that efficiently and effectively delivers information to people in remote corners of the world.

The amount of information on the World Wide Web (WWW) is rapidly growing in pace and topic diversity. This has made it increasingly difficult, and often frustrating, for information seekers to retrieve the content they are looking for as information retrieval systems (e.g., search engines) are unable to decipher the relevance of the retrieved information as it pertains to the information they are searching for. This issue can be decomposed into two aspects: 1) variability of information relevance as it pertains to an information seeker. In other words, different information seekers may enter the same search text, or keywords, but expect completely different results. It is therefore, imperative that information retrieval systems possess an ability to incorporate a model of the information seeker in order to estimate the relevance and context of use of information before presenting results. Of course, in this context, by a model we mean the capture of trends in the information seeker's search behaviour. This is what many researchers refer to as the personalized search. 2) Information diversity. Information available on the World Wide Web today spans multitudes of inherently overlapping topics, and it is difficult for any information retrieval system to decide effectively on the relevance of the information retrieved in response to an information seeker's query. For example, the information seeker who wishes to use WWW to learn about a cure for a certain illness would receive a more relevant answer if the search engine was optimized into such domains of topics. This is what is being referred to in the WWW nomenclature as a 'specialized search'. This thesis maintains that the information seeker's search is not intended to be completely random and therefore tends to portray itself as consistent patterns of behaviour. Nonetheless, this behaviour, despite being consistent, can be quite complex to capture. To accomplish this goal the thesis proposes a Multi-Agent Personalized Information Retrieval with Specialization Ontology (MAPIRSO). MAPIRSO offers a complete learning framework that is able to model the end user's search behaviour and interests and to organize information into categorized domains so as to ensure maximum relevance of its responses as they pertain to the end user queries. Specialization and personalization are accomplished using a group of collaborative agents. Each agent employs a Reinforcement Learning (RL) strategy to capture end user's behaviour and interests. Reinforcement learning allows the agents to evolve their knowledge of the end user behaviour and interests as they function to serve him or her. Furthermore, REL allows each agent to adapt to changes in an end user's behaviour and interests. Specialization is the process by which new information domains are created based on existing information topics, allowing new kinds of content to be built exclusively for information seekers. One of the key characteristics of specialization domains is the seeker centric - which allows intelligent agents to create new information based on the information seekers' feedback and their behaviours. Specialized domains are created by intelligent agents that collect information from a specific domain topic. The task of these specialized agents is to map the user's query to a repository of specific domains in order to present users with relevant information. As a result, mapping users' queries to only relevant information is one of the fundamental challenges in Artificial Intelligent (AI) and machine learning research. Our approach employs intelligent cooperative agents that specialize in building personalized ontology information domains that pertain to each information seeker's specific needs. Specializing and categorizing information into unique domains is one of the challenge areas that have been addressed and various proposed solutions were evaluated and adopted to address growing information. However, categorizing information into unique domains does not satisfy each individualized information seeker. Information seekers might search for similar topics, but each would have different interests. For example, medical information of a specific medical domain has different importance to both the doctor and patients. The thesis presents a novel solution that will resolve the growing and diverse information by building seeker centric specialized information domains that are personalized through the information seekers' feedback and behaviours. To address this challenge, the research examines the fundamental components that constitute the specialized agent: an intelligent machine learning system, user input queries, an intelligent agent, and information resources constructed through specialized domains. Experimental work is reported to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed solution in addressing the overlapping information growth. The experimental work utilizes extensive user-centric specialized domain topics. This work employs personalized and collaborative multi learning agents and ontology techniques thereby enriching the queries and domains of the user. Therefore, experiments and results have shown that building specialized ontology domains, pertinent to the information seekers' needs, are more precise and efficient compared to other information retrieval applications and existing search engines.

在本論文中我們提出了一種個人化情緒／情境音樂檢索方法。主要的概念為根據使用者的feedback來找出符合該使用者情緒／情境的音樂在features上所具備的特性，藉此達到個人化的效果。為了更明確表示出音樂的特性，我們利用統計features分布情況的方式來做為音樂的表示法。同時，定義了兩層features自動weighting的方法來決定每個feature在不同情緒／情境下的鑑別度。最後，我們將探討音樂特性與音色對不同的情緒／情境會造成什麼樣的影響，並試著分析音樂與情緒／情境間的關係。 / In this paper, an approach for personalized music retrieval based on emotions / situations is proposed. The main concept is to find out the properties of music that caused the user have emotions / situations responses via the user feedback. And using the user feedback will help us to establish a personalized music retrieval system based on emotions / situations. To represent the music properties clearly, we proposed a new method of music representation based on statistics. And we defined a two-phase features re-weighting method to find out the importance of features in different emotions / situations. At last, we will discuss the influence of music properties and timbre on different emotions / situations, and try to analyze the relationship between the emotions / situations.

L'avancement des communications sans-fil permet l'obtention de nouveaux services bases sur l'habileté des fournisseurs de services sans-fil à déterminer avec précision, et avec l'utilisation de technologies de pistage, la localisation et position géographiquement d'appareils sans-fil Cette habileté permet d'offrir aux utilisateurs de sans-fil de nouveaux services bases sur la localisation et la position géographique de leur appareil. Le développement des services basés sur la localisation des utilisateurs de sans-fil soulevé certains problèmes relatifs à la protection de la vie privée qui doivent être considérés. En effet, l'appareil sans-fil qui suit et enregistre les mouvements de I 'utilisateur permet un système qui enregistre et entrepose tous les mouvements et activités d'un tel utilisateur ou encore qui permet l'envoi de messages non anticipes à ce dernier. Pour ce motif et afin de protéger la vie privée des utilisateurs de sans-fil, une compagnie désirant développer ou déployer une technologie permettant d'offrir ce genre de services personnalisés devra analyser l'encadrement légal touchant la protection des données personnelles--lequel est dans certains cas vague et non approprié à ce nouveau contexte--ainsi que la position de l'industrie dans ce domaine, et ce, afin d'être en mesure de traduire cet encadrement en pratiques commerciales. Cette analyse permettra d'éclairer le fournisseur de ces services sur la façon d'établir son modèle d'affaires et sur le type de technologie à développer afin d'être en mesure de remédier aux nouveaux problèmes touchant la vie privée tout en offrant ces nouveaux services aux utilisateurs de sans-fil. / The proliferation of mobile communications is leading to new services based on the ability of service providers to determine, with increasing precision and through the use of location determination technologies, the geographic location of wireless devices and allow their users to receive services based on such location. The development of location-based services introduces new privacy risks for consumers that must be addressed. The portability of wireless devices coupled with their ability to pinpoint the location of wireless users and reveal it to others could produce a system where the everyday activities and movements of these users are tracked and recorded, and where wireless users receive unanticipated messages on their device. For this reason and in order to preserve the privacy of wireless users, a company looking to deploy a technology related to the providing of personalized location-based services ("LBS Provider") will have to analyze the privacy legal framework, coming either from legal sources--that may be in some case vague and not specific to this new context--or from the industry, and translate such framework into business practices. Such analysis may help in establishing what kind of business model and technology should be adopted and developed by LBS Providers in order to ensure the privacy of wireless users while providing this new type of service.

Le présent texte porte sur l’état de la démocratie au Sénégal depuis l’alternance politique survenue en 2000. Adoptant une définition minimale de la démocratie – respect des libertés civiles et politiques, et tenue d’élections libres et justes – à laquelle il ajoute le principe de séparation des pouvoirs, son principal objectif est de répondre à la question suivante : pourquoi le fonctionnement de la démocratie est-il entravé au Sénégal? L’hypothèse avancée pour répondre à cette interrogation est la présence du néo-patrimonialisme. Celui-ci, par l’intermédiaire de la personnalisation du pouvoir et le clientélisme, sape le respect des règles démocratiques dans ce pays d’Afrique de l’Ouest. Pour analyser l’impact du néo-patrimonialisme sur la démocratie au Sénégal, ce mémoire privilégie le néo-institutionnalisme sociologique comme cadre théorique. Cette approche définit les institutions de façon large : celles-ci peuvent englober non seulement des normes formelles mais également des règles informelles. En vertu de cette approche, le néo-patrimonialisme et la démocratie représentent des institutions puisque le premier englobe un ensemble de règles informelles et le second un ensemble de normes et procédures formelles. Ces deux institutions structurent et façonnent le comportement des individus. Dans cette confrontation institutionnelle, les règles néo-patrimoniales influencent davantage l’action des élites politiques sénégalaises – notamment le chef de l’État – que les normes démocratiques. La vérification de l’hypothèse s’appuie sur des études sur la démocratie et le néo-patrimonialisme aussi bien au Sénégal qu’en Afrique. Elle se base également sur l’actualité et les faits politiques saillants depuis l’alternance. L’analyse est essentiellement qualitative et se divise en deux chapitres empiriques. Le premier de ceux-ci (chapitre II dans le texte) concerne la séparation des pouvoirs. Le but de ce chapitre est d’observer la manière dont l’actuel président de la République, Abdoulaye Wade, contrôle le parlement et la justice. Le second chapitre empirique (chapitre III dans le texte) se divise en deux sections. La première s’intéresse aux libertés civiles et politiques qui subissent des restrictions dues au penchant autoritaire de Wade. La seconde section porte sur les élections dont le déroulement est entaché par de nombreuses irrégularités : violence électorale, manque de ressources de l’autorité électorale, instabilité du calendrier électoral, partialité de la justice. L’étude confirme l’hypothèse, ce qui est très problématique pour la plupart des États africains. En effet, le néo-patrimonialisme est une caractéristique fondamentale de la gouvernance en Afrique. Ainsi, beaucoup de régimes du continent noir qui enclenchent ou enclencheront un processus de démocratisation comme le Sénégal, risquent de connaître les mêmes difficultés liées à la persistance des pratiques néo-patrimoniales. / This text is about state of democracy in Senegal since the political changeover in 2000. Using a minimal definition of democracy – respect of political and civil liberties, free and fair elections – completed by the separation of state powers, it aims to answer to the following question : why is the functioning of democracy hampered in Senegal? The hypothesis is that neopatrimonialism, through personalization of power and clientelism, hinders the respect of democratic rules in this West African country. To analyze the impact of neopatrimonialism on democracy in Senegal, this text draws from the sociological institutionalism as theory. This approach provides a broad definition of institutions which includes formal norms as well as informal rules. In this perspective, neopatrimonialism and democracy embody institutions because the former has a set of informal rules and the later a set of formal norms and procedures. These two institutions structure and shape the individual behaviour. In this institutional confrontation, the neopatrimonial rules have a deeper impact on the action of Senegalese elites, particularly the president. To verify the hypothesis, one refers to studies that analyze the link between democracy and neopatrimonialism in Senegal and in Africa. This text also takes into account current events and striking political facts since 2000. The analysis is essentially qualitative and divided in two empirical chapters. The first one (chapter II in the text) studies the separation of powers and how the Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade, control the parliement and courts. The second empirical chapter (chapter III in the text) is subdivided in two sections. The first section examines how civil and political liberties are restricted by Wade’s inclination to authoritarianism. The second section analyses the numerous irregular situations that characterize senegalese elections : violence, lack of ressources for the electoral authority, frequent change of electoral timetable, partiality of the justice. On the whole, the hypothesis is confirmed, which is problematic to most of subsaharian African states. Neopatrimonialism is a fundamental feature of African politics. Its persistence could constitute a source of difficulty for African regimes that begin or will begin democratization like Senegal did.