Personalized communication is when the marketing message is adapted to each individual by using information from a databaseand utilizing it in the various, different media channels available today. That gives the marketer the possibility to create a campaign that cuts through today’s clutter of marketing messages and gets the recipients attention. PODi is a non-profit organization that was started with the aim of contributing knowledge in the field of digital printingtechnologies. They have created a database of case studies showing companies that have successfully implemented personalizedcommunication in their marketing campaigns. The purpose of the project was therefore to analyze PODi case studies with the main objective of finding out if/how successfully the PODi-cases have been and what made them so successful. To collect the data found in the PODi cases the authors did a content analysis with a sample size of 140 PODi cases from the year 2008 to 2010. The study was carried out by analyzing the cases' measurable ways of success: response rate, conversion rate, visited PURL (personalized URL:s) and ROI (Return On Investment). In order to find out if there were any relationships to be found between the measurable result and what type of industry, campaign objective and media vehicle that was used in the campaign, the authors put up different research uestions to explore that. After clustering and merging the collected data the results were found to be quite spread but shows that the averages of response rates, visited PURL and conversion rates were consistently very high. In the study the authors also collected and summarized what the companies themselves claim to be the reasons for success with their marketing campaigns. The resultshows that the creation of a personalized campaign is complex and dependent on many different variables. It is for instance ofgreat importance to have a well thought-out plan with the campaign and to have good data and insights about the customer in order to perform creative personalization. It is also important to make it easy for the recipient to reply, to use several media vehicles for multiple touch points and to have an attractive and clever design.

This study examines how management consulting firms work with business- and functional strategy and how these strategies are interrelated. More specifically we focus on business strategy (business unit level) and knowledge strategy (functional level) and whether these are aligned or not, i.e. whether strategic congruence exists. A number of recent studies have examined the importance of business strategy and knowledge strategy in management consulting firms separately, but few have pointed out the importance of the alignment between them. With this study we contribute to the strategic field of research with a model that describes how management consulting firms should work with their knowledge strategy given their business strategy. The model is developed through a synthesis between theories in the field of strategic congruence, business- and functional strategies and thereafter tested by an empirical case study of six management consulting firms. Our main contribution with the model is the finding that the degree of customization is a determining factor of what type of knowledge strategy the firm should undertake. Given a high degree of customization we argue that it is strategic congruent to put an emphasis on personalization as the firms knowledge strategy. With a similar logic we argue that when the degree of customization is lower, the firm should focus on a knowledge strategy like codification. Further, in contrast with former studies, our findings show that it is strategic congruent to work with personalization and codification parallelly. Through our analysis we found that it is strategic congruent to put an emphasis on either personalization or codification in different project phases. We propose that it is a good fit to focus on codification in the beginning of a management consulting project and conversely focus more on personalization in the latter part. In contrast with earlier studies, we can not see why it should be harmful to focus on both strategies parallelly, given that this focus changes over time in a project. Finally, an interesting finding of our case studies is that all of the researched firms want to codify more knowledge and it seems to be easier today than for ten years ago to motivate consultants to codify their knowledge.

Enligt läroplanen (Lgr11) och skollagen (SFS 2010:800) är det lärarens uppdrag att individanpassa sin undervisning. Dessa styrdokument är tydligare kring den individanpassade undervisningen än vad tidigare styrdokument har varit. Min erfarenhet var att detta inte gjordes fullt ut som det förväntades. Med detta som bakgrund ville jag undersöka lärares förståelse av individanpassad undervisning. Därmed blev mitt syfte att undersöka och studera lärares skilda uppfattningar av individanpassad undervisning. Detta valde jag att göra genom en kvalitativ metod med intervju som datainsamlingsteknik. Studien har sin utgångspunkt i fenomenografin. I studien har fyra verksamma lärare intervjuats. Resultatet visade två skilda uppfattningar av individanpassad undervisning: Individanpassad undervisning som generell princip för undervisning och Individanpassad undervisning som utopi. Det som blev tydligt i resultatet är att kategorin Individanpassad undervisning som generell princip för undervisning är den kategori som var mest frekvent förekommande i det empiriska materialet, det vill säga lärarna uppehöll sig i intervjuerna kring resonemang som kan hänföras till innehållet i den beskrivningskategorin. Lärarna ger alltså uttryck för att de använder sig mycket av individanpassad undervisning. Innan studien antog jag att lärarna i större utsträckning skulle se den individanpassade undervisningen som något som de ville jobba med, men inte ansåg sig ha tid, resurser eller möjligheter till. Vid en analys av relationen mellan de skilda uppfattningarna kunde det konstateras att kategorin Individanpassad undervisning som generell princip för undervisning kan betraktas i ett elevperspektiv som mer utvecklande än kategorin Individanpassad undervisning som utopi. / According to the curriculum (Lgr11) and Education Act (SFS 2010:800) is the teacher's assignment to individualize their education. These policy documents are clearer about the individualized education than previous policy documents have been. My experience was that this wasn´t done fully as it should. With this as background, I wanted to investigate teachers' understanding of individualized education. This made my purpose to examine and study the teachers' different conceptions of individualized education. This, I chose to do through a qualitative approach to interview data collection techniques. The study was based on phenomenography. The study has four active teachers interviewed. The results showed two different conceptions of individualized education: Individually tailored teaching as a general principles of teaching and individualized education as a utopia. What became clear in the results is that the category Individually tailored teaching as a general principle of teaching is the category most frequently occurring in the empirical material. The teachers expressed that they use a lot of individualized education as a general principle of teaching. Before the study, I assumed that teachers in the greater would see the personalized education as a utopia, as something they wanted to work with, but felt they had time, resources or opportunities. When analyzing the relationship between the different positions, was it clear that the category Individually tailored teaching as a general principle of teaching can be seen in a student perspective as more developed than the category Individually tailored teaching as a utopia.

Over the last decade, excess amount of information is being provided on the web and information filtering systems such as recommender systems have become one of the most important technologies to overcome the &bdquo / Information Overload&amp / #8223 / problem by providing personalized services to users. Several researches have been made to improve quality of recommendations and provide maximum user satisfaction within a single domain based on the domain specific knowledge. However, the current infrastructures of the recommender systems cannot provide the complete mechanisms to meet user needs in several domains and recommender systems show poor performance in cross-domain item recommendations. Within this thesis work, a dynamic framework is proposed which differs from the previous works as it focuses on the easy development of knowledge-based recommenders and it proposes an intensive cross domain capability with the help of domain knowledge. The framework has a generic and flexible structure that data models and user interfaces are generated based on ontologies. New recommendation domains can be integrated to the framework easily in order to improve recommendation diversity. The cross-domain recommendation is accomplished via an abstraction in domain features if the direct matching of the domain features is not possible when the domains are not very close to each other.

Data analysis has become a very important area for both companies and researchers as a consequence of the technological developments in recent years. Companies are trying to increase their profit by analyzing the existing data about their customers and making decisions for the future according to the results of these analyses. Parallel to the need of companies, researchers are investigating different methodologies to analyze data more accurately with high performance. Recommender systems are one of the most popular and widespread data analysis tools. A recommender system applies knowledge discovery techniques to the existing data and makes personalized product recommendations during live customer interaction. However, the huge growth of customers and products especially on the internet, poses some challenges for recommender systems, producing high quality recommendations and performing millions of recommendations per second. In order to improve the performance of recommender systems, researchers have proposed many different methods. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) technique based on dimension reduction is one of these methods which produces high quality recommendations, but has to undergo very expensive matrix calculations. In this thesis, we propose and experimentally validate some contributions to SVD technique which are based on the user and the item categorization. Besides, we adopt tags to classical 2D (User-Item) SVD technique and report the results of experiments. Results are promising to make more accurate and scalable recommender systems.

Mobilitätseingeschränkte Fußgänger, wie etwa Rollstuhlfahrer, blinde und sehbehinderte Menschen oder Senioren, stellen besondere Anforderungen an die Berechnung geeigneter Routen. Die kürzeste Route ist nicht immer die am besten geeignete. In dieser Arbeit wird das Verfahren der multimodalen Annotation entwickelt, welches die Erweiterung der geographischen Basisdaten durch die Benutzer selbst erlaubt. Auf Basis der durch das Verfahren gewonnenen Daten werden Konzepte zu personalisierten Routenberechnung auf Grundlage der individuellen Anforderungen der Benutzer entwickelt. Das beschriebene Verfahren wurde erfolgreich mit insgesamt 35 Benutzern evaluiert und bildet somit die Grundlage für weiterführende Arbeiten in diesem Bereich. / Mobility impaired pedestrians such as wheelchair users, blind and visually impaired, or elderly people impose specific requirements upon the calculation of appropriate routes. The shortest path might not be the best. Within this thesis, the concept of multimodal annotation is developed. The concept allows for extension of the geographical base data by users. Further concepts are developed allowing for the application of the acquired data for the calculation of personalized routes based on the requirements of the individual user. The concept of multimodal annotation was successfully evaluated incorporating 35 users and may be used as the base for further research in the area.

<p>Today’s increasing information supply raises the needfor more effective and automated information processing whereindividual information adaptation (personalization) is onepossible solution. Earlier computer systems for personalizationlacked the ability to easily define and measure theeffectiveness of personalization efforts. Numerous projectsfailed to live up to the their expectations, and the demand forevaluation increased.</p><p>This thesis presents some underlying concepts and methodsfor implementing personalization in order to increase statedbusiness objectives. A personalization system was developedthat utilizes descriptions of information characteristics(metadata) to perform content based filtering in anon-intrusive way.</p><p>Most of the described measurement methods forpersonalization in the literature are focused on improving theutility for the customer. The evaluation function of thepersonalization system described in this thesis takes thebusiness operator’s standpoint and pragmatically focuseson one or a few measurable business objectives. In order toverify operation of the personalization system, a functioncalled bifurcation was created. The bifurcation functiondivides the customers stochastically into two or morecontrolled groups with different personalizationconfigurations. Bygiving one of the controlled groups apersonalization configuration that deactivates thepersonalization, a reference group is created. The referencegroup is used to measure quantitatively objectives bycomparison with the groups with active personalization.</p><p>Two different companies had their websites personalized andevaluated: one of Sweden’s largest recruitment servicesand the second largest Swedish daily newspaper. The purposewith the implementations was to define, measure, and increasethe business objectives. The results of the two case studiesshow that under propitious conditions, personalization can bemade to increase stated business objectives.</p><p><b>Keywords:</b>metadata, semantic web, personalization,information adaptation, one-to-one marketing, evaluation,optimization, personification, customization,individualization, internet, content filtering, automation.</p>

Deal Organizer is a web-based application that scans multiple websites for online bargains. It allows users to specify their preferences in order for them to receive notifications based on personalized content. The application obtains deals from other websites through data extraction techniques that include reading RSS feeds and web scraping. In order to better facilitate content personalization, the application tracks the user's activity by recording clicks on both links to deals and rating buttons, e.g., the Facebook like button. Due to the dynamic nature of the source websites offering these deals and the ever-evolving web technologies available to software developers, the Deal Organizer application was designed to implement an interface-based design using the Spring Framework. This yielded to an extensible, pluggable and flexible system that accommodates maintenance and future work gracefully. The application's performance was evaluated by executing resource-intensive tests on a constrained environment. Results show the application responded positively. / text

本研究使用眼動儀器與神經科學的分析方式，探討網站設計時運用虛擬替身與個人化推薦而設計出不同的個人化購物網站，是否會影響使用者對網站親密度與產品購買意願上有不同感受。研究問題共有三個：1.網站個人化設計對網站親密度的影響程度。2.網站個人化設計對於產品購買意願的影響程度。3.使用者是否會注意到網站的個人化設計。研究結果發現個人化推薦會對網站親密度及購買意願產生正向影響，而虛擬替身則只會對親密感產生正面的影響。虛擬替身及個人化推薦都會提高消費者的對該區域的首次瀏覽時間。 / The purpose of this study is to use eye tracking analysis to investigate whether different designs of shopping websites using personalization and avatar will influence users’ website intimacy and product buying attention. First, we want to know the relationship between personalized design and website intimacy. Second, we want to know the relationship between personalized design and product buying attention. The last one is whether users pay attention to personalized designs on websites. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of personalized recommendation and avatar. The results indicate that personalization had positive impacts on users’ perceived intimacy, and users’ total gaze duration has positive effects on both website intimacy and product buying attention.

Αυτή η εργασία περιγράφει το όραμα των I-centric επικοινωνιών (ατομοκεντρικών) - ένα νέο παράδειγμα για μελλοντικά συστήματα τηλεπικοινωνιών. Ο κύριος στόχος αυτής της προσέγγισης είναι να εξετάσει την ανθρώπινη επικοινωνιακή συμπεριφορά. Η εργασία αυτή εστιάζει στην εννοιολογική ολοκλήρωση όλων των πτυχών των ατομοκεντρικών επικοινωνιών. Εξετάζοντας την επικοινωνιακή συμπεριφορά του ανθρώπου, είναι προφανές, ότι οι άνθρωποι συχνά αλληλεπιδρούν με ένα σύνολο αντικειμένων στο περιβάλλον τους. Σύμφωνα με αυτήν την άποψη, μια προσέγγιση είναι να μη δημιουργηθούν συστήματα επικοινωνίας που βασίζονται σε εξειδικευμένες τεχνολογίες αλλά να βασίζονται στην ανάλυση του μεμονωμένου χώρου επικοινωνίας. Το αποτέλεσμα θα είναι ένα σύστημα επικοινωνιών που προσαρμόζεται στις απαιτήσεις κάθε ατόμου (ατομοκεντρικό). Το σύστημα επικοινωνιών θα ενεργεί σύμφωνα με τις απαιτήσεις του ανθρώπου, που απεικονίζουν τις πρόσφατες ενέργειές του ώστε να προσαρμόζεται αυτόματα σε αυτές. Οι ατομοκεντρικές υπηρεσίες προσαρμόζονται στους μεμονωμένους χώρους επικοινωνίας και τις καταστάσεις. Σε αυτό το πλαίσιο το «I», σημαίνει το εγώ ή το άτομο, και Centric σημαίνει προσαρμογή στις απαιτήσεις του «εγώ» και το περιβάλλον του ατόμου. Οι παραπάνω λογικές απαιτούν νοημοσύνη στην παροχή υπηρεσιών προκειμένου να προσωποποιηθούν, να προσαρμοστούν στις περιστασιακές και περιβαλλοντικές συνθήκες και να ελέγχουν το μεμονωμένο χώρο επικοινωνίας. Ένα ατομοκεντρικό σύστημα επικοινωνιών παρέχει τη νοημοσύνη που απαιτείται για τη διαμόρφωση του χώρου επικοινωνίας του κάθε ατόμου που προσαρμόζεται στα ενδιαφέροντα, το περιβάλλον, και τις προτιμήσεις του. Η εργασία εισάγει το όραμα των ατομοκεντρικών επικοινωνιών, που ακολουθείται από την ανάπτυξη ενός προτύπου αναφοράς για τις ατομοκεντρικές επικοινωνίες. Από τη στιγμή που το όραμα και το πρότυπο αναφοράς είναι γενικές έννοιες, εισάγεται στη συνέχεια ένα αρχιτεκτονικό πλαίσιο για τις ατομοκεντρικές επικοινωνίες. Αυτό το πλαίσιο χρησιμοποιείται για να σχεδιαστεί και να υλοποιηθεί ένα ατομοκεντρικό σύστημα επικοινωνιών. / This thesis describes the vision of I-centric communications – a new paradigm for future telecommunication systems. The main objective of this approach is to consider the human communication behaviour. The focus of this thesis is on the conceptual integration of all aspects of I-centric communications. Looking at the communication behaviour of human, it is obvious, that human beings frequently interact with a set of objects in their environment. Following this view, a new approach is not to build communication systems based on specific technologies, but on the analysis of the individual communication space. The result is a communication system that adapts to the demands of each individual (I-centric). The communication system will act on behalf of human’s demands, reflecting recent actions to enable self-adaptation. I-centric Services adapt to individual communication spaces and situations. In this context ‘I’ means I, or individual, ‘Centric’ means adaptable to I requirements and the individual’s environment. The rationales above require intelligence in service provisioning in order to personalize, adapt to situational and environmental conditions, to monitor and to control the individual communication space. I-centric communications system will provide the intelligence required for modelling the communication space of each individual adapting to its interests, environment, and preferences. The thesis introduces the vision of I-centric communications, followed by the development of a reference model for I-centric communications. Since both, the vision and the reference model, are general, an architectural framework for I-centric communications is introduced later on. This framework is used to design and implement an I-centric communications system.