Information gathering from sources outside the company plays a critical role in most innovation projects. Particularly, it seems promising to approach external market experts to develop an indepth understanding of current use problems, changing customer needs and trends for new product solutions. When planning expert interviews, firms are confronted with the question whether knowledge is distributed rather homogeneously or heterogeneously ("scattered") among a pool of experts. This issue strongly determines how many experts need to be interviewed in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of a given search field for innovation. In the present paper we analyse expert interviews that were conducted in the context of an innovation project in the field of surgical hygiene products. We find high heterogeneity of expert knowledge: Market experts in our sample vary in terms of market information they provide for the particular product field. We argue that this finding is in alignment with the concept of "bounded rationality" and the theory of "contextual development of knowledge". Our findings have implications for the management of external information gathering and the identification of market experts.(author's abstract)

Thesis advisor: Gerald M. Easter / Does the emergence of these newly informatics practices by the Chinese state indicate a future abolishment of the Xinfang mechanism? In order to answer these questions and foster an understanding of today’s state information management in China, this thesis first employs the method of historical analysis. The thesis provides an initial effort in English literature to answer how and why societal petitioning was gradually translated into state-dominated action and whether or not informational engagement impacted state autonomy. The thesis then moves on to field work conducted in S Province since 2014 through 2017 that counted approximately 20 weeks altogether. With such first-hand empirical evidence, the thesis develops three main arguments as below: First and foremost, I find that there exist an increasing number of information seekers among petitioners from the background databases of both Governor’s Mailbox and the Provincial Bureau for Letters and Calls’ online complaint system. Such informational needs of today’s Chinese public may be in need of higher attention from policy makers and scholars. Second, the leadership, whether at central or any local level, have sought to establish various apparatuses, and charged them with building information channels and providing an information stream for policy making. the apparatuses hereby develop two strategies to draw more societal actors to their offices and guarantee their informational supplies to above. Such competition eventually results in a champion among all the informatics offices in the arena. Last but not least, apparatus autonomy cannot be equated with individual official autonomy. While an office is assigned with increased autonomy, the very officials’ individual autonomy may fall down to a lesser degree. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

Online tasks that involve information gathering, those ranging from academic research to vacation planning, often present challenges to users such as information management, clutter and information overload. Studies have shown that users who return to online tasks after an absence have difficulty remembering why particular websites they had saved were useful. This work presents "Webscraps", an innovative web browser extension for Mozilla Firefox, designed to improve information gathering on the Web. Participants in a 30-person user study, significantly preferred Webscraps over webpage "thumbnails" for information gathering tasks that involved comparing information from different websites and remembering important text. / Dr. Keselj was the external to my supervision.

Research has studied information seeking behaviour and several models have been developed. Those models were further modified following the emergence of the web. At the beginning of the 2000s, research started focusing on the concept of a user task instead of an activity or a simple action. The studies conducted were aimed to categorize the user activities into high level tasks. Investigating the tasks identified is anticipated to assist with developing tools and applications that would help the user to accomplish those tasks. After categorizing the user information seeking activities into high-level tasks, research continued to investigate changes in the frequencies of the tasks identified. Changes in the user behaviour that accompanied the evolution of the web and its applications have been targeted for improving how users interact with tools intended for accomplishing user activities. However, there has been little emphasis on studying the high-level tasks identified in the case of the web. Even though those tasks differ substantially, users have been using the same web browsing model to accomplish most of the activities under each type of task. The research discussed in this dissertation is concerned with studying the task of information gathering which is also known as the informational task. This task was selected due to: 1) its high frequency on the web (between 48% and 61.25% of the overall tasks users perform); 2) its complexity and the ambiguity associated with the kind of activities that comprise the task; 3) the need for using multiple applications for accomplishing the requirements of this type of task; and 4) the necessity for collecting different types of data from different sources for satisfying the task requirements. The current state in research related to information gathering identifies this task based on a simple description of the user activities that distinguishes information gathering from other kinds of tasks. The research discussed in this dissertation: 1) provides a thorough definition of the task, 2) models its underlying subtasks (sets of related activities), and 3) investigates difficulties and issues associated with each subtask. The investigations lead to design recommendations that resulted in building specific features to be examined during information gathering tasks. The research concluded by providing final recommendations based on the findings which resulted from investigating those features.

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Handheld computers may hold the possibility for a one-to-one computer: student ratio. The impact of the use of Palm® (Palm, Inc.) handhelds on information acquisition and use by 5th grade students in a North Texas school during a class research project was investigated. Five research questions were examined using observation, interviews, surveys, and document analysis. Are there differences in information gathering and use with the Palm between gifted, dyslexic, and regular learners? What relevance criteria do students use to evaluate a web site to determine whether to download the site to the Palm and afterwards whether to use the downloaded site's information in the report? How do the Palms affect the writing process? Do the animations and concept maps produced on the Palm demonstrate understanding of the intended concepts? Are there significant differences in results (i.e., final products grade) between Palm users and non-Palm users? Three groups of learners in the class, gifted, dyslexic, and regular learners, participated in the study. The regular and dyslexic students reported using Web sites that had not been downloaded to the Palm. Students reported several factors used to decide whether to download Web sites, but the predominant deciding factor was the amount of information. The students used a combination of writing on paper and the Palm in the preparation of the report. Many students flipped between two programs, FreeWrite and Fling-It, finding information and then writing the facts into the report. The peer review process was more difficult with the Palm. Most students had more grammatical errors in this research report than in previous research projects. By creating animated drawings on the Palm handheld, the students demonstrated their understanding of the invention though sometimes the media or the student's drawing skills limited the quality of the final product. Creating the animations was motivational and addressed different learning styles than a written report alone. No statistically significant difference was found in the scores of the three 6+1 Traits categories, however the Palm users didn't meet the page-length requirement for the research project but the majority of the control class did.

Det övergripande syftet med denna uppsats har varit att genomföra en kvalitativ studie som belyser och diskuterar informationsinsamlande och konfrontativa förhörstekniker vid förhör med misstänkta gärningspersoner. En tematisk analys av förhör med misstänkta har genomförts för att identifiera uttalanden och uttryck som tyder på användandet av respektive förhörsstrategi. Resultaten har tolkats och diskuterats utifrån tidigare forskning och de kognitionspsykologiska områden som berör berättande, minnen och konfirmationsbias. Resultaten har visat att ett informationsinsamlande respektive konfrontativt förhållningssätt kan visa sig genom en mängd olika uttryck och uttalanden. Resultaten har också visat att det till viss del förekommit starkt konfrontativa inslag i några av de analyserade förhören. Utifrån tidigare forskning, de kognitionspsykologiska perspektiven och resultaten från den tematiska analysen är den huvudsakliga slutsatsen att det behövs fler och mer omfattande svenska studier av hur förhör med misstänkta genomförs i praktiken. / Information or confrontation - a theme-based analysis of police interviewing with criminal suspects The purpose of this paper has been to execute a qualitative study to highlight and discuss information-gathering and confrontational approaches in interviewing criminal suspects. A theme-based analysis was implemented to identify statements and expressions that suggests the use of either interrogation strategy. The results have been interpreted and discussed based on previous research and cognitive psychology areas affecting human storytelling, memories and confirmation bias. The results have shown that the information-gathering and confrontational approach may be shown through a variety of expressions and statements. The results have also shown that it to some extent have been highly confrontational elements in some of the analyzed interrogations. Based on previous research, the cognitive psychological perspectives and the results from the theme-based analysis the main conclusion is that quantitatively and extensively more studies of how the interrogation of criminal suspects is implemented in practice, especially in a Swedish context, is needed.

The recent emergence of intelligent agent technology and advances in information gathering have been the important steps forward in efficiently managing and using the vast amount of information now available on the Web to make informed decisions. There are, however, still many problems that need to be overcome in the information gathering research arena to enable the delivery of relevant information required by end users. Good decisions cannot be made without sufficient, timely, and correct information. Traditionally it is said that knowledge is power, however, nowadays sufficient, timely, and correct information is power. So gathering relevant information to meet user information needs is the crucial step for making good decisions. The ideal goal of information gathering is to obtain only the information that users need (no more and no less). However, the volume of information available, diversity formats of information, uncertainties of information, and distributed locations of information (e.g. World Wide Web) hinder the process of gathering the right information to meet the user needs. Specifically, two fundamental issues in regard to efficiency of information gathering are mismatch and overload. The mismatch means some information that meets user needs has not been gathered (or missed out), whereas, the overload means some gathered information is not what users need. Traditional information retrieval has been developed well in the past twenty years. The introduction of the Web has changed people's perceptions of information retrieval. Usually, the task of information retrieval is considered to have the function of leading the user to those documents that are relevant to his/her information needs. The similar function in information retrieval is to filter out the irrelevant documents (or called information filtering). Research into traditional information retrieval has provided many retrieval models and techniques to represent documents and queries. Nowadays, information is becoming highly distributed, and increasingly difficult to gather. On the other hand, people have found a lot of uncertainties that are contained in the user information needs. These motivate the need for research in agent-based information gathering. Agent-based information systems arise at this moment. In these kinds of systems, intelligent agents will get commitments from their users and act on the users behalf to gather the required information. They can easily retrieve the relevant information from highly distributed uncertain environments because of their merits of intelligent, autonomy and distribution. The current research for agent-based information gathering systems is divided into single agent gathering systems, and multi-agent gathering systems. In both research areas, there are still open problems to be solved so that agent-based information gathering systems can retrieve the uncertain information more effectively from the highly distributed environments. The aim of this thesis is to research the theoretical framework for intelligent agents to gather information from the Web. This research integrates the areas of information retrieval and intelligent agents. The specific research areas in this thesis are the development of an information filtering model for single agent systems, and the development of a dynamic belief model for information fusion for multi-agent systems. The research results are also supported by the construction of real information gathering agents (e.g., Job Agent) for the Internet to help users to gather useful information stored in Web sites. In such a framework, information gathering agents have abilities to describe (or learn) the user information needs, and act like users to retrieve, filter, and/or fuse the information. A rough set based information filtering model is developed to address the problem of overload. The new approach allows users to describe their information needs on user concept spaces rather than on document spaces, and it views a user information need as a rough set over the document space. The rough set decision theory is used to classify new documents into three regions: positive region, boundary region, and negative region. Two experiments are presented to verify this model, and it shows that the rough set based model provides an efficient approach to the overload problem. In this research, a dynamic belief model for information fusion in multi-agent environments is also developed. This model has a polynomial time complexity, and it has been proven that the fusion results are belief (mass) functions. By using this model, a collection fusion algorithm for information gathering agents is presented. The difficult problem for this research is the case where collections may be used by more than one agent. This algorithm, however, uses the technique of cooperation between agents, and provides a solution for this difficult problem in distributed information retrieval systems. This thesis presents the solutions to the theoretical problems in agent-based information gathering systems, including information filtering models, agent belief modeling, and collection fusions. It also presents solutions to some of the technical problems in agent-based information systems, such as document classification, the architecture for agent-based information gathering systems, and the decision in multiple agent environments. Such kinds of information gathering agents will gather relevant information from highly distributed uncertain environments.

Problem: Research shows that it is crucial to acknowledge the information search step to understand consumer decision-making. Moreover, consumers‟ buying behavior is affected by their brand awareness. A problem is however that there exist a gap in previous research on understanding the consumers‟ actual behavior and why they choose certain platforms for their information gathering. Purpose: The purpose of the thesis is to get an understanding of consumers‟ information gathering process about cosmetic products and in turn to what extent that can create brand- awareness and attitudes. The thesis aims at filling the gap of truly understanding consumers inter-action in media and their behavior. The target audience to be stud-ied is young women, age 18-26, in the cosmetic industry. The inten-tion is to take an exploratory research view and to understand how this group of customers behave and also to describe why that is the reason. Methodology: To meet the purpose of the thesis, a qualitative research design was chosen since it allows the participants to express their opinions, re-flections and feelings as well as truly understanding the target in the way it enables deeper discussions. Three focus groups were con-ducted with young female consumers, and one in-depth interview was held with the partner company The Body Shop. The data was color-coded and presented separately in the result section, so that every participant‟s opinion was visible, before combining the results with theoretical reasoning in the analysis section. Conclusion: This study shows that young female consumers spend most of their information search on Instagram and Youtube since it is quick, fun and give inspiration, but they also value recommendations from friends. On all platforms they highly value a feeling of personal rela-tionships. Regarding brand- awareness and attitudes, it was found that brands are for the most part very important for the young fe-male consumers and they learn about brands both in their infor-mation search online and offline when talking to friends or visiting stores.

The relationships between and among questions from a survey in three different areas, namely food and food related health, food safety and hygiene, and information gathering concerning food, with the main focus on the first two areas, are investigated. Data from older people have been analyzed. The questions are both about knowledge and behavior in relation to the areas mentioned above. Earlier studies have shown that people in general do not know about or act according to dietary advises about health and hygiene. The results from this study show that there are fairly strong correlations for all groups but men when it comes to knowledge and behavior about fruit and vegetable consumption. The results also show a significant association between fruit and vegetable consumption and gender and that women consume more than men. A factor model estimating the relationships between health, hygiene and information shows that the fitted factor model can be considered having an acceptable fit, with at least two variables, knowledge about the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables to eat per day and trust for grocery stores concerning food and health, being classified as good indicators.