There is increasing attention to information users' feedback comments as they can be used to improve information resources. In contexts where information resources are rich in knowledge, optimal user feedback management is crucial for the information provider to make sure that users' information needs are met.In this dissertation, I worked with the Canadian Pharmacists Association (CPhA), which regularly uses health professionals' feedback to improve its publications. The CPhA wants an appropriate process to enable user feedback management in an effective and efficient manner. Thus, the present research addresses the overarching question "How can user feedback management be optimized for the CPhA?" The problem of how to optimize the management of user feedback was conceptualized in three parts: (1) the feedback comments, (2) the feedback management process, and (3) the factors affecting the development and implementation of optimal user feedback management in the organizational setting. The conceptual framework is derived from information studies, management science and organizational studies. A participatory action research approach was taken to conduct an organizational case study, using qualitative methods such as interview, observation, and document analysis.Research findings provide empirical evidence revealing four types of value of pharmacists' feedback comments to the CPhA, nine key issues in its user feedback management process, and twenty six factors affecting the innovation of user feedback management. Main contributions of this dissertation are as follows: this study empirically examined the usefulness of user feedback comments based on a value perspective in philosophy; two conceptual frameworks were proposed and demonstrated as relevant to studying information use and the related innovation in an organizational setting; and lessons have been learned from a comprehensive examination of the factors that affect innovation processes related to organizational information use. / De plus en plus, on porte attention aux commentaires de rétroaction des utilisateurs d'information car de tels commentaires peuvent être utiles pour améliorer les ressources d'information. Dans les contextes où les ressources d'information sont riches en connaissances, la gestion optimale de la rétroaction est cruciale pour les fournisseurs d'information afin de bien répondre aux besoins d'information des utilisateurs. Pour cette thèse, j'ai travaillé avec l'Association des Pharmaciens du Canada (CPhA) qui utilise régulièrement la rétroaction des professionnels de la santé afin d'améliorer leurs publications. La CPhA désire avoir un processus approprié pour gérer la rétroaction des utilisateurs d'une manière efficace et efficiente. Ce projet de recherche veut répondre à la question globale suivante: Comment la gestion de la rétroaction peut être optimisée pour la CPhA? Le problème d'optimisation de la gestion de la rétroaction des utilisateurs a été défini en trois sections: (1) les commentaires de rétroaction, (2) le processus de gestion de la rétroaction, et (3) les facteurs affectant le développement et l'implantation de la gestion optimale de la rétroaction des utilisateurs dans un milieu organisationnel.Le cadre conceptuel est dérivé des sciences de l'information, des sciences de la gestion, et des études organisationnelles. Une approche participative de recherche-action a été adoptée pour conduire une étude de cas organisationnelle, tout en utilisant des méthodes qualitatives telles que l'entrevue, l'observation et l'analyse documentaire.Les résultats de recherche fournissent des données empiriques révélant quatre types de valeurs reliées aux commentaires de rétroaction des pharmaciens, neuf enjeux critiques dans le processus de gestion de la rétroaction, et vingt-six facteurs affectant l'innovation dans la gestion de la rétroaction des utilisateurs. Les principales contributions de cette recherche sont les suivantes: il s'agit de la première étude empirique qui examine systématiquement l'utilité des commentaires de rétroaction dans un contexte organisationnel selon une perspective philosophique sur la valeur; deux cadres conceptuels ont été proposés et se sont avérés pertinents pour l'étude de l'utilisation de l'information et l'innovation relative dans un cadre organisationnel; et l'étude offrent plusieurs leçons apprises lors de l'examen détaillé des facteurs qui affectent les processus d'innovation associés à l'utilisation de l'information.

The development of decision support systems for equipment diagnosis has been found to be an iterative process whereby functionality and knowledge are continually added to a prototype until satisfactory performance is achieved. In order to reduce both the dependency on compiled knowledge sources and the number of prototype stages necessary to develop diagnostic decision support systems, this thesis examines, adapts and applies a set theoretical approach to mechanism diagnosis first developed in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The approach does not require the development of computational models to simulate equipment behaviour. / The set theoretical approach was applied to the development of a diagnostic decision support system for a semi-automated Atlas Copco Wagner ST-8B Load-Haul-Dump vehicle. Hypothesis sets were generated for the vehicle's hydraulic circuit and Deutz FL-413-FW diesel engine. A high level of diagnostic resolution was achieved for the hydraulic circuit, but limited resolution was achieved for the diesel engine. This was postulated to be due to the ratio of observable system outputs to input sub-systems, and the number of least repairable units making up each system. / Manual knowledge acquisition was undertaken in an underground mine to refine the diagnostic knowledge developed from the hypothesis sets and to add knowledge to discriminate between competing failure hypotheses. Heuristic failure likelihoods were used to rank hypotheses in order of frequency of occurrence. The knowledge base was implemented as a hypertext decision support system using HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML). The resulting decision support system is platform independent, upgradeable and able to be maintained by site personnel. The system is currently installed at surface level and at 1800 level at INCO Limited's Stobie Mine in Sudbury, Ontario. / The thesis makes a number of original contributions, the first two of which are of generic significance. It is the first work to apply set theoretical concepts to structural models of mobile mining equipment in order to diagnose faults. A number of modifications are advanced to the conventional trace-back analysis technique for generating contributor and normality sets, and heuristic guidelines are provided for estimating the costs and benefits of developing, implementing and maintaining diagnostic decision support systems. It is also the first work to formalise a decision support system in HTML and to suggest the application of company-wide internets ("intranets") to disseminate maintenance knowledge within mines.

<p> Cross-organizational business processes are common in today&rsquo;s economy. Of necessity, enterprises conduct their business in cooperation to create products and services for the marketplace. Thus business processes inherently involve autonomous partners with heterogeneous software designs and implementations. The existing business modeling approaches that employ high-level abstractions are difficult to operationalize, and the approaches that employ low-level abstractions lead to highly rigid processes that lack business semantics. We propose a novel business model based on multiagent abstractions. Unlike existing approaches, our model gives primacy to the contractual relationships among the business partners, thus providing a notion of business-level correctness, and offers flexibility to the participants. Our approach employs reusable patterns as building blocks to model recurring business scenarios. A step-by-step methodology guides a modeler in constructing a business model. Our approach employs temporal logic to formalize the correctness properties of a business model, and model checking to verify if a given operationalization satisfies those properties. Developer studies found that our approach yields improved model quality compared to the traditional approaches from the supply chain and healthcare domains.</p><p> Commitments capture how an agent relates with another agent, whereas goals describe states of the world that an agent is motivated to bring about. It makes intuitive sense that goals and commitments be understood as being complementary to each other. More importantly, an agent&rsquo;s goals and commitments ought to be coherent, in the sense that an agent&rsquo;s goals would lead it to adopt or modify relevant commitments and an agent&rsquo;s commitments would lead it to adopt or modify relevant goals. However, despite the intuitive naturalness of the above connections, they have not yet been studied in a formal framework. This dissertation provides a combined operational semantics for goals and commitments. Our semantics yields important desirable properties, including convergence of the configurations of cooperating agents, thereby delineating some theoretically well-founded yet practical modes of cooperation in a multiagent system.</p><p> We formalize the combined operational semantics of achievement commitments and goals in terms of hierarchical task networks (HTNs) and show how HTN planning provides a natural representation and reasoning framework for them. Our approach combines a domain-independent theory capturing the lifecycles of goals and commitments, generic patterns of reasoning, and domain models. We go beyond existing approaches by proposing a first-order representation that accommodates settings where the commitments and goals are templatic and may be applied repeatedly with differing bindings for domain objects. Doing so not only leads to a more perspicuous modeling, it also enables us to support a variety of practical patterns.</p>

Keyword searching (e.g., Google or Yahoo!) is based on uncontrolled vocabulary matching which often produces large and noisy result sets. This can waste the time of the searcher who has to sift through long lists of often irrelevant information. The Semantic Web initiative aims to address this issue and includes the description of content using controlled ontologies (i.e., sets of descriptive terms and their relations). Ontologies are partly hierarchical structures too large to display on a single computer screen and thus difficult for searchers to explore efficiently. In an attempt to address these issues, this research has developed and tested Subject Explorer 3D (SE-3D): an information visualization (IV) virtual reality (VR) information retrieval (IR) application based on the metaphor of exploring a physical space. SE-3D aimed to facilitate the visual exploration of information by offering searchers an interactive representation of the subject structure found in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). SE-3D is a visual subject ontology navigation tool integrated with keyword searching and relevance ranking of a realworld information collection.SE-3D was tested by 24 undergraduate students during a repeated measures within-subject experiment. As compared with a text-only baseline, SE-3D produced an advantage in accuracy. Participants were more patient with SE-3D, they preferred it and perceived it as more useful. The application used a new technique to manage hundreds of overlapping textual labels in virtual reality, and offered a novel integration of explorative and specific keyword searching. The analysis of the collection revealed that subject assignments followed a power law; the top 1% most assigned subjects contained over 58% of the collection and 65% of non-empty subjects contained a single document.The findings suggest it is possible to extract additional value from organized collections by offering untrained users a reconstructed subject structure integrated with keyword searching. This research is significant for the development and testing of improved bridges between information organization and IR, and interactive information visualization. / La recherche d'information textuelle à l'aide de mots clés (e.g., Google, Yahoo!) est basée sur la correspondance du vocabulaire utilisé et produit souvent de nombreux résultats à faible pertinence. Le chercheur perd son temps à examiner de longues listes de résultats contenant beaucoup d'information sans rapport avec le sujet. L'initiative du Web sémantique a pour objectif de pallier à ce problème en décrivant l'information à l'aide d'ontologies contrôlées (c.-à-d. des ensembles de termes descriptifs et leurs relations). Toutes les ontologies sont en partie de vastes structures hiérarchiques trop grandes pour être affichées à l'écran, elles sont donc difficiles à explorer de façon efficiente.Développé dans le cadre de cette recherche, le Subject Explorer 3D (SE-3D) est un logiciel de visualisation de l'information (VI) en réalité virtuelle (RV) basé sur une métaphore d'exploration de l'espace physique. SE-3D tente de faciliter l'exploration visuelle de l'information en offrant aux chercheurs une représentation visuelle de la structure des vedettes-matières de la bibliothèque du Congrès (LCSH). SE-3D est un outil visuel de navigation d'ontologies sémantiques fortement intégrés avec la recherche par mots clés et le classement par pertinence d'une réelle collection d'information.SE-3D a été testé par 24 étudiants au baccalauréat durant une expérience à mesures répétées intra-sujet. En comparaison avec un système purement textuel équivalent, SE-3D a produit une plus grande précision. Les participants se sont révélés plus patients avec SE-3D, ils l'ont préféré et perçu comme étant plus utile. SE-3D utilise une nouvelle technique de gestion des chevauchements entre étiquettes textuelles en RV, et offre une intégration novatrice de la recherche par mots clés permettant de filtrer la structure sémantique. L'analyse de la collection a démontrée que les affectations des termes LCSH au sein de la collection suivent une loi de puissance. Par exemple, 1% des sujets les plus affectés contiennent plus de 58% de la collection, et 65% des sujets non vides contiennent un seul document.Ces résultats suggèrent qu'il est possible d'extraire une valeur ajouté provenant des collections organisées en offrant aux utilisateurs novices une structure sémantique reconstruite intégrée avec la recherche par mot clé. Cette recherche est significative pour le développement de ponts entre les structures d'organisation de l'information et la recherche d'information, ainsi que la visualisation de l'information interactive.

Interaction with information systems today mostly consists of a user's unimodal interaction with a text-based or visual information system. However, human-computer interaction studies have illustrated that information can be successfully conveyed through different sensory modalities. This research focuses on the enhancement of the user experience using auditory feedback for the specific case of a 3D-visualized hierarchical information system, by representing some of the structural and navigational cues using nonspeech sounds. It is hypothesized that engaging the auditory modality may aid in navigation tasks, improve users' affective reactions and consequently enhance the overall user experience. The research involves two studies. In the first study, a user-centred semiotic sound design methodology is used, based on a methodology originally used on visually-impaired users. Three panels of end-users are employed to design the required nonspeech sounds. Based on the results of this study, recommendations are made for extending the sound design method to novel interfaces and sighted users.The second study is a controlled experiment that compares user experience with the visualization system and with the auditory-feedback enhanced system. The goal is to evaluate the effect of the auditory feedback on user experience. This effect is measured using a measurement model which draws on concepts derived from three conceptual frameworks, based in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Information Science (IS) and auditory interface studies. A combination of measures is examined, including utilitarian variables such as time taken on hierarchy navigation and information retrieval tasks, and accuracy of the answers. Hedonic variables, which influence the affective reactions, were also examined. These include preference, perceived ease of use, usefulness and ease of learning, and user engagement and satisfaction. We observed that 79% of the participants preferred the audio-visual system to the visual-only system. The audio-visual system was also perceived as easier to use and received higher ratings in terms of aesthetic appeal and perceived usability, which are attributes of user engagement. Furthermore, the audio-visual system was often perceived as being faster and more engaging even though no significant differences were observed in terms of utilitarian variables of task times and accuracy. Findings suggest hedonic variables play an important role in enhancing user experience when interacting with information systems. This research contributes to the field of information science by showcasing that designing multimodal information systems with a focus on the user has the potential to improve user experience. Our findings also provides evidence that utilitarian variables need not be the principle focus of user experience enhancement in information navigation and retrieval tasks, as preference appears to be linked to hedonic variables. / L'interaction avec les systèmes d'information consiste essentiellement, à l'heure actuelle, en une interaction unimodale, où l'utilisateur se sert d'un système d'information textuel ou graphique. Cependant, les études en interaction humain-machine démontrent que le recours à différentes modalités sensorielles permet de communiquer de l'information de façon enrichissante. La présente recherche porte sur le rehaussement de l'expérience utilisateur au moyen de rétroaction auditive dans un système de visualisation de l'information hiérarchique en trois dimensions, en représentant certains éléments structurels et navigationnels à l'aide de sons non oraux. L'hypothèse de base stipule que la modalité auditive pourrait alléger les tâches de navigation, améliorer les réactions affectives de l'utilisateur et ainsi rehausser l'expérience globale d'utilisation. La recherche comprend deux études. La première étude comporte une méthodologie centrée sur l'utilisateur, basée sur une méthodologie utilisée à l'origine avec des utilisateurs non voyants, pour concevoir des sons ayant une valeur sémiotique. Trois panels d'utilisateurs finaux ont participé à la conception des sons non oraux à utiliser. Les résultats de cette étude permettent de formuler des recommandations afin d'étendre la méthode de conception des sons aux interfaces novatrices et aux utilisateurs voyants. La seconde étude est un essai contrôlé comparant l'expérience d'utilisation du système de visualisation avec celle du système enrichi avec rétroaction auditive. L'objectif est d'évaluer l'effet de la rétroaction auditive sur l'expérience utilisateur. Cet effet est mesuré à l'aide d'un modèle de mesure fondé sur des concepts provenant de trois cadres théoriques : l'interaction humain-machine, les sciences de l'information et l'étude d'interfaces auditives. Une combinaison de mesures est effectuée pour les variables utilitaires telles que le temps requis pour la navigation hiérarchique et pour les tâches de repérage de l'information, et l'exactitude de la réponse. Les variables hédoniques, qui influent sur les réactions affectives, ont également été examinées. Celles-ci comprennent la préférence, la facilité d'utilisation perçue, l'utilité perçue et la facilité d'apprentissage perçue ainsi que l'engagement et la satisfaction de l'utilisateur. Les résultats démontrent que plus de 79% des participants préfèrent le système audiovisuel au système uniquement visuel. Le système audiovisuel est également perçu comme étant plus facile à utiliser et a obtenu des scores plus élevés relativement à l'apparence (l'esthétisme) et à la convivialité perçue, deux attributs de l'engagement de l'utilisateur. Par ailleurs, le système audiovisuel est souvent perçu comme plus rapide et plus engageant, même si aucune différence significative n'a été notée pour les variables utilitaires comme le temps requis pour effectuer les tâches et l'exactitude. Les résultats suggèrent que les variables hédoniques jouent un rôle important dans le rehaussement de l'expérience utilisateur lors d'interactions avec des systèmes d'information. Cette recherche contribue au domaine des sciences de l'information en démontrant que la conception de systèmes d'information multimodaux centrés sur l'utilisateur a le potentiel de rehausser l'expérience utilisateur. Les résultats démontrent également que les variables utilitaires n'ont pas à être le principal indicateur du rehaussement de l'expérience utilisateur pour les tâches de navigation et de repérage de l'information, puisque la préférence semble être liée aux variables hédoniques.

This study explored the information needs of rehabilitation therapists (occupational therapists, physiotherapists and speech-language pathologists) working with patients with stroke, to characterize their clinical questions, that is, their formalized information needs. This study also investigated how rehabilitation therapists decide whether or not to pursue answers to their clinical questions. To accomplish these objectives, a constructivist, interpretive approach was employed in which 15 rehabilitation therapists working in various settings were recruited. Data were gathered using diaries followed by diary-guided interviews and thematically analyzed.Rehabilitation therapists' clinical questions were characterized as having one or more of twelve foci: treatment selection, assessment tool selection, treatment procedures, assessment tool procedures, terminology, prognosis, etiology, clinical manifestations of disease, epidemiology, practice-related self-improvement, patient and family experiences or concerns, as well as anatomy, physiology, and pathophysiology. Clinical questions contained one or more of eight possible structural elements: problem, population, intervention, context, temporality, patient stakeholder, professional stakeholder, and outcome measure. Most clinical questions contained one or two elements. Several themes emerged regarding rehabilitation therapists' decisions to pursue answers to clinical questions, including the potential use of the answer to a question, the belief in the existence of an answer, the therapist's self-efficacy, the perception of organizational support, and workload demands.This research supplements current knowledge of the information behaviour of health professionals by contributing findings on rehabilitation therapists, thus far an understudied population. Findings from the research demonstrate how the evidence-based practice framework currently applied in rehabilitation is inadequate for representing rehabilitation therapists' clinical questions and proposes a new framework which is more comprehensive and descriptive. The research therefore provides a more complete understanding of the foci and structure of rehabilitation therapists' clinical questions. In addition, the research builds on existing models of information behaviour by highlighting the process which takes place subsequent to the recognition of an information need and prior to information seeking by describing factors influencing rehabilitation therapists' decisions to pursue answers to their questions. / Les questions cliniques posées et approfondies par les thérapeutes en réadaptation: une etude exploratoire des besoins informationnelsLe but de la présente étude de recherche est d'explorer les besoins informationnels des thérapeutes en réadaptation (ergothérapeutes, physiothérapeutes, orthophonistes) qui interviennent auprès de patients ayant subi un accident vasculaire cérébral. Plus précisément, l'étude vise à caractériser les questions cliniques des thérapeutes, c'est-à-dire leurs besoins informationnels formalisés, et à déterminer comment ils décident d'approfondir ou non les réponses à ces questions. Pour atteindre ces objectifs, une approche constructiviste et interprétative a été privilégiée où 15 thérapeutes en réadaptation oeuvrant dans différents contextes cliniques ont été recrutés. Les données, recueillies au moyen d'un journal de questions cliniques et complétées par des entrevues post-journal, ont été analysées sous forme thématique.L'analyse des questions cliniques des thérapeutes en réadaptation a démontré qu'elles portent sur au moins un des 12 sujets suivants: la sélection du traitement, la sélection de l'outil d'évaluation, les procédures relatives au traitement, les procédures relatives aux outils d'évaluation, la terminologie, le pronostic, l'étiologie, les manifestions cliniques de la maladie, l'épidémiologie, l'auto-amélioration liée à la pratique, l'expérience ou les préoccupations du patient et de sa famille, et l'anatomie, la physiologie et la pathophysiologie. Les questions cliniques contiennent au moins un des huit éléments structurels suivants: le problème, la population, l'intervention, le contexte, la temporalité, l'entourage du patient, les intervenants professionnels et la mesure des résultats. La plupart des questions cliniques contiennent un ou deux éléments. Plusieurs thèmes ont émergé de l'analyse de la décision des thérapeutes en réadaptation d'approfondir les réponses à leurs questions cliniques, notamment l'utilisation potentielle de la réponse à leur question, la croyance de l'existence d'une réponse, l'auto-efficacité des thérapeutes, la perception d'un soutien organisationnel et les exigences relatives à la charge de travail.Cette recherche vient compléter l'état actuel de la connaissance des comportements informationnels des professionnels de la santé en éclairant les besoins d'une population sous-évaluée: les thérapeutes en réadaptation. Les résultats de l'étude démontrent que le cadre de pratique actuel fondé sur des données probantes tel qu'appliqué en réadaptation est inadéquat pour la représentation des questions cliniques des thérapeutes en réadaptation. Les conclusions permettent de proposer un nouveau cadre plus global et descriptif. La recherche offre ainsi une meilleure compréhension du sujet et de la structure des questions cliniques des thérapeutes en réadaptation. En outre, la recherche se fonde sur des modèles de comportement informationnels existants en mettant en lumière le processus postérieur à la reconnaissance d'un besoin informationnel, mais antérieur à la recherche de l'information en décrivant les facteurs qui modulent la décision des thérapeutes en réadaptation d'approfondir les réponses à leurs questions.

The topic of this thesis revolves around the organization of geographical information in permanent memory. Our premise is that a recognized and fully documented direct access storage technique called Multidimensional Paging or Multipaging would provide a well balanced storing structure for this category of data. Since multipaging uses a multidimensional perspective on the information to allocate it to pages in secondary storage then spatial data, which is fundamentally multidimensional by nature, would surely offer a suitable profile. / First, we attempt to evaluate the efficiency of multipaging on static files and to suggest possible modifications to the standard algorithm to better serve spatial data. / Our solution to this problem consists in compressing the pages that overflow. Because geographical information is often a representation of occurences of Nature, we hypothesize that Fractal Geometry, which serves to formalize a mathematical description of such elements, could provide the theoretical background to derive an efficient fractal-based compression algorithm. An appreciable improvement is obtained by compressing the pages of the multipaged administrative regions data that exceed their capacity: $ alpha=0.7272$ and $ pi=1.0$. / The outcome of these experiments led us to elaborate a mixed system based on two relatively different approaches: multipaging and fractal-based data compression. The first part consisted in the implementation of the standard static multipaging algorithm using a relational database management system named Relix. The other approach was developed using the C programming language to accommodate some particularities of the multipaged spatial data. The preliminary results were encouraging and allowed us to establish the parameters for a more formal implementation. Also, it brought out the limits of the compression method in view of the intended usage of the data. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

<p> Radio Frequency Identification, RFID, is a type of automatic identification system which has gained popularity in recent years for being fast and reliable in keeping track of individual objects. Due to limited available resources in RFID tags, providing privacy and security for RFID systems is one of the important challenges nowadays. In this dissertation, a lightweight symmetric encryption algorithm called RBS, Redundant Bit Security, is presented which is suitable for resource constrained applications like RFID systems. Confidentiality of the plaintext in this algorithm is achieved through inserting some redundant bits inside the plaintext bits where the location of redundant bits inside the ciphertext is the secret key shared between sender and receiver. Besides confidentiality, these redundant bits are calculated in such a way that they provide authentication and integrity as well. The security of the algorithm is analyzed against some well-known attacks such as known plaintext, known ciphertext, chosen plaintext, and differential attacks. Experimental and simulation results confirm that RBS implementation requires less power and area overhead compared to other known symmetric algorithms proposed for RFID systems, especially when the authentication is essential like in harsh environments. </p>

<p> The purpose of this paper was to create a primer for a security awareness program to educate senior level executives on the key aspects of cyber security. This is due to the gap area that was discovered in the lack of both executive security awareness programs, and the lack of executives that fully abide by their company's security policies. This, coupled with research showing that executives are highly targeted by attackers, was the impetus behind this project. It was determined that the content of an executive security awareness program should be similar to that of a security awareness program for all other employees, with the differences being in the delivery and time frame of each segment. Due to this, literature was reviewed on the various topics of security awareness. Research revealed the importance of capturing an executive's attention, in order to keep their interest in the program. It was recommended that individuals charged with creating an executive security awareness program begin by having one on one meetings with the executives in their company. These meetings will help assess the time constraints of their company executives as well as their current knowledge of the various security awareness topics. This will help with tailoring the program specifically to their company executives. This primer may be used by any company or organization in the beginning stages of creating their own security awareness program for executives. Keywords: Cybersecurity, Professor Albert Orbinati, Executive Security Awareness, Internet Safety.</p>

<p> Algorithmic curation is a growing influence on our information flows as it complements and sometimes supplants traditional mass media and personal information sharing. One of the primary agents of this rise in algorithmically-curated information flows is the Facebook News Feed, a onetime source of primarily entertainment that has, as of late, taken large strides towards the news business. It is fair to say that Facebook has a huge influence on our information, one that will likely expand in the future; even if not Facebook, similar systems will rule our information. Yet, we know next to nothing about how they work, as the algorithms that power them are sealed inside a black box. This thesis approaches the Facebook News Feed through a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods in a process dubbed &ldquo;Negative Reverse Engineering&rdquo; in an attempt to gain access to the contents of the black box not through traditional technical means, but through an analysis of Facebook&rsquo;s values structure and needs. Components include an extensive, cross-disciplinary review of the literature, an experiment based around the generation of filter bubbles through the application of negative pressure, a grounded content analysis of Facebook&rsquo;s statements and documents, an autoethnography of Facebook use, and a regression analysis of Facebook under duress. From this data, a Hierarchy of Needs for the News Feed is created, rejecting the model of News Feed filtering as an equation in favor of a holistic, values-based model.</p>