The aim of this thesis is to find an answer to the question if gender influences news production and news selection. It is hypothesized that in national daily broadsheet newspapers, the editor's gender has no influence on the professional behaviour and therefore editors' preferences of topics and news values should be identical. The theoretical part deals with different approaches to the topic of gender influence on the news production, describes the situation and stereotyping of female journalists and strategies they choose to deal with it. Next it briefly recapitulates the main news values theories and dichotomy of "hard" and "soft" news. The research part describes a study of gender influence on decision-making processes during news selection in Czech national daily broadsheet newspapers. The statistical methods used herein include the Student's T-test, Z-test and ANOVA. The statistics show no significant differences between male and female editors in consideration of news topic importance (to the reader), news values assessment or the selection of printable news. All the editors in the researched respondent population tend to favor "hard" news and to consider the same values and topics important in the same manner regardless of their gender. Despite slight differences in individual topics, this...

M. Tech. (Department of Information and Communication Technology, Faculty of Applied and Computer Sciences), Vaal University of Technology. / Since their emergence in the 1990’s, recommendation systems have transformed the intelligence of both the web and humans. A pool of research papers has been published in various domains of recommendation systems. These include content based, collaborative and hybrid filtering recommendation systems. Recommendation systems suggest items to users and their principal purpose is to increase sales and recommend items that are predicted to be suitable for users. They achieve this through making calculations based on data that is available on the system. In this study, we give evidence that the research on group recommendation systems must look more carefully at the dynamics of group decision-making in order to produce technologies that will be more beneficial for groups based on the individual interests of group members while also striving to maximise satisfaction. The matrix factorization algorithm of collaborative filtering was used to make predictions and three movie recommendation for each and every individual user. The three recommendations were of three highest predicted movies above the pre-set threshold which was three. Thereafter, four virtual groups of varied sizes were formed based on four highest predicted movies of the users in the dataset. Plurality voting strategy was used to achieve this. A publicly available dataset based on Group Recommender Systems Enhanced by Social Elements, constructed by Lara Quijano from the Group of Artificial Intelligence Applications (GIGA), was used for experiments. The developed recommendation system was able to successfully make individual movie recommendations, generate virtual groups, and recommend movies to these respective groups. The system was evaluated for accuracy in making predictions and it was able to achieve 0.7027 MAE and 0.8996 RMSE. This study was able to recommend to virtual groups to enable social network group members to engage in discussions of recommended items. The study encourages members in engaging in similar activities in their respective physical locations and then discuss on social network.

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