by Chi-ming Wat. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-82). / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Performance analysis of on-line algorithms --- p.2 / Chapter 1.2 --- Randomized algorithms --- p.4 / Chapter 1.3 --- Types of adversaries --- p.5 / Chapter 1.4 --- Overview of the results --- p.6 / Chapter 2 --- The k-server problem --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.8 / Chapter 2.2 --- Related Work --- p.9 / Chapter 2.3 --- The Evolution of Work Function Algorithm --- p.12 / Chapter 2.4 --- Definitions --- p.16 / Chapter 2.5 --- The Work Function Algorithm --- p.18 / Chapter 2.6 --- The Competitive Analysis --- p.20 / Chapter 3 --- The weighted k-server problem --- p.27 / Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.27 / Chapter 3.2 --- Related Work --- p.29 / Chapter 3.3 --- Fiat and Ricklin's Algorithm --- p.29 / Chapter 3.4 --- The Work Function Algorithm --- p.32 / Chapter 3.5 --- The Competitive Analysis --- p.35 / Chapter 4 --- The Influence of Lookahead --- p.41 / Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.41 / Chapter 4.2 --- Related Work --- p.42 / Chapter 4.3 --- The Role of l-lookahead --- p.43 / Chapter 4.4 --- The LRU Algorithm with l-lookahead --- p.45 / Chapter 4.5 --- The Competitive Analysis --- p.45 / Chapter 5 --- Space Complexity --- p.57 / Chapter 5.1 --- Introduction --- p.57 / Chapter 5.2 --- Related Work --- p.59 / Chapter 5.3 --- Preliminaries --- p.59 / Chapter 5.4 --- The TWO Algorithm --- p.60 / Chapter 5.5 --- Competitive Analysis --- p.61 / Chapter 5.6 --- Remarks --- p.69 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusions --- p.70 / Chapter 6.1 --- Summary of Our Results --- p.70 / Chapter 6.2 --- Recent Results --- p.71 / Chapter 6.2.1 --- The Adversary Models --- p.71 / Chapter 6.2.2 --- On-line Performance-Improvement Algorithms --- p.73 / Chapter A --- Proof of Lemma1 --- p.75 / Bibliography --- p.77

O presente trabalho apresenta pesquisa-ação aplicada na redação do jornal Zero Hora, maior periódico de notícias no Rio Grande do Sul. Diante do cenário de desafios enfrentado pelo negócio, o jornal definiu estratégia de monetização através da receita frequente, modelo que depende da fidelização do assinante. O problema de pesquisa é a definição de critérios de percepção de qualidade que justifiquem o pagamento pelo conteúdo online, e consequente necessidade de capacitação dos jornalistas para executar a estratégia definida. Inicialmente, foi realizada uma breve revisão da literatura, através de pesquisa exploratória, em busca de insumos para encontrar critérios definidores de qualidade do conteúdo jornalístico online. Em seguida, a partir da perspectiva da pesquisadora, que atua há mais de três anos como Human Resources Business Partner junto às redações do jornal, analisa o mapeamento de competências proposto com base no modelo de BRANDÃO e BAHRY (2005) e aplicado nas redações e que, apesar de bem aceito pelas equipes, não teve continuidade após sua primeira execução Os relatórios para análise gerados naquela avaliação são apresentados e discutidos, e levantam-se os motivadores da falta de continuidade do projeto. Por fim, através da convergência entre os critérios encontrados na literatura e as competências inicialmente mapeadas, são propostas novas competências profissionais para os jornalistas, além de próximos passos para a gestão das pessoas e capacitação dos jornalistas. Relaciona-se com a área de qualidade, quando investiga critérios que justifiquem o pagamento mensal para acesso às notícias online do jornal, e com gestão de pessoas, na investigação de competências profissionais que garantam a produção de tal conteúdo. A análise de qualidade no jornalismo é tema vasto na literatura; o mesmo não se repete em relação às competências essenciais dos jornalistas, contudo. Este estudo, além de trazer proposta de competências para a redação do jornal Zero Hora, apresenta um processo de investigação replicável em qualquer redação para definição das competências que melhor tiverem afinidade com seu público e estratégia de negócio. / This work presents a action research applied to the Zero Hora newspaper’s editorial department, the largest newspaper in Rio Grande do Sul. Faced by a challenging conjuncture, the business defined a strategy of monetization through frequent income, a model that depends on subscriber loyalty. This research’s problem is the definition of the quality-perception criteria – which would justify the payment for online content – and the subsequent need of training the journalists in order to execute the aforementioned strategy. Initially, the literature is revisited through exploratory research in order to look for elements which will then comprise the defining criteria of quality for online journalistic content. From the researcher’s perspective, who has been working for over three years as a Human Resources Business Partner with this sector of the business, it moves on to review the proposed competences mapping based on BRANDÃO e BAHRY’s 2005 paper, which was applied in the newsrooms, and – in spite of being well accepted by the teams – had no continuity after being executed for the first time The analytic reports generated in that evaluation are presented and discussed, as well as the motivators for the project’s lack of continuity. Finally, through the convergence between the criteria found in literature and the competences that were initially mapped out, new professional competences are suggested, and next steps for people management and journalist-training are recommended. This work is related to the area of quality – when investigating criteria which would justify a monthly payment to access the newspaper’s online news – as well as with people management, when it delves into the professional competences that would assure the production of such content. Journalism’s quality analysis is a vast subject in the literature. The same cannot be said about the translation of which behaviors would be demanded from the journalists so that such content could be produced. This study aims at not only presenting a proposal of competences for Zero Hora newspaper’s editorial department, but also presenting an investigative process which could be replicated in any editorial department to better define the competences which are best attuned to its public and business strategy.

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Wong Wai-Yiu. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-120). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction and Outline of the Dissertation --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Collaborative Infomediaries --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Measuring Factors that Influence the Success of Infomediary --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Thesis Contributions --- p.5 / Chapter 1.4 --- Thesis Organization --- p.7 / Chapter 2 --- Related Work on Collaborative Infomediary --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1 --- RECOMMENDER SYSTEM - Infomediary --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Utility-based recommenders --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Knowledge-based recommenders --- p.10 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- Content-based recommenders --- p.11 / Chapter 2.1.4 --- Collaborative recommenders --- p.12 / Chapter 2.1.5 --- Hybrid recommenders --- p.14 / Chapter 2.2 --- Types of Collaborative Filtering --- p.15 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Memory-based methods --- p.15 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- Model-based methods --- p.16 / Chapter 2.3 --- Similarity Measures --- p.16 / Chapter 2.4 --- Prediction algorithm --- p.19 / Chapter 2.5 --- User Profile --- p.20 / Chapter 2.6 --- Relevance Feedback --- p.21 / Chapter 2.7 --- Comparison basis for user similarity --- p.22 / Chapter 3 --- Research Methodology --- p.23 / Chapter 3.1 --- Collaborative Infomediary System Design --- p.24 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- System Functionalities --- p.24 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Overview of System Design --- p.24 / Chapter 3.2 --- User Profile --- p.26 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Sources of news articles --- p.27 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Regions of news --- p.27 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Categories of Industries --- p.28 / Chapter 3.2.4 --- Listed Companies --- p.29 / Chapter 3.2.5 --- User-specified Keywords --- p.30 / Chapter 3.2.6 --- User Profile Scoring (Scoreprofile) --- p.30 / Chapter 3.3 --- User Feedback --- p.31 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Scoring formulation for feedback (Score feedback) --- p.31 / Chapter 3.4 --- User Similarity --- p.33 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- Source --- p.34 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- Regions of news --- p.35 / Chapter 3.4.3 --- Category of Industries --- p.35 / Chapter 3.4.4 --- Listed companies in Hong Kong stock market and Userspecified Keywords --- p.36 / Chapter 3.4.5 --- Overall Similarity --- p.36 / Chapter 3.5 --- News Article Scoring --- p.37 / Chapter 3.6 --- User Interface of Collaborative Infomediary --- p.38 / Chapter 3.6.1 --- User Registration and Preference Setting --- p.38 / Chapter 3.6.2 --- Current Day News Retrieval --- p.42 / Chapter 3.6.3 --- Past News Retrieval --- p.46 / Chapter 3.6.4 --- Search News --- p.47 / Chapter 4 --- Evaluation Methodology & Experimental Results --- p.50 / Chapter 4.1 --- Experimental Design & Setup --- p.51 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- Performance Measures --- p.53 / Chapter 4.2 --- Experiment Results & Discussions --- p.54 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Similarity Threshold against average number of collaborators --- p.54 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Performance Measures among setups --- p.55 / Chapter 4.2.3 --- Performance Measures against Similarity Threshold --- p.59 / Chapter 5 --- Related work on the Measuring Factors that Influence the Success of Infomediary --- p.64 / Chapter 5.1 --- Different approaches to IS success measurement --- p.64 / Chapter 5.2 --- User Information Satisfaction/End-User Computing Satisfaction --- p.66 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- Definition of user satisfaction --- p.66 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- Factors/dimensions affecting IS user satisfaction --- p.67 / Chapter 5.3 --- Evaluation of Web-site --- p.69 / Chapter 5.4 --- Web Customer Satisfaction --- p.70 / Chapter 5.4.1 --- Customer satisfaction --- p.71 / Chapter 5.4.2 --- Factors/Dimensions affecting customer information satisfaction --- p.72 / Chapter 6 --- Research Methodology --- p.78 / Chapter 6.1 --- Methodological Approach --- p.78 / Chapter 6.2 --- Construct Definition and Item Pool Generation --- p.79 / Chapter 6.2.1 --- Customer Values on Infomediary --- p.79 / Chapter 6.2.2 --- Means Objectives and Fundamental Objectives --- p.80 / Chapter 6.3 --- Relationships between Customer Values --- p.85 / Chapter 6.4 --- Survey Instrument --- p.86 / Chapter 6.4.1 --- Task File --- p.87 / Chapter 6.4.2 --- Questionnaire: Demographic Variables and Measures . --- p.87 / Chapter 6.4.3 --- Sample Description and Survey Administration --- p.88 / Chapter 7 --- Data Analysis and Results --- p.90 / Chapter 7.1 --- DATA ANALYSIS APPROACH --- p.90 / Chapter 7.1.1 --- Purification --- p.90 / Chapter 7.1.2 --- Identification of Factor Structure --- p.92 / Chapter 7.1.3 --- Construct validity --- p.97 / Chapter 7.2 --- RESEARCH FINDINGS --- p.98 / Chapter 7.2.1 --- Descriptive statistics --- p.98 / Chapter 7.2.2 --- Purification- Means Objectives --- p.99 / Chapter 7.2.3 --- Factor Structure Identification- Means Objectives --- p.99 / Chapter 7.2.4 --- Construct validity- Means Objectives --- p.104 / Chapter 7.2.5 --- Purification- Fundamental Objectives --- p.104 / Chapter 7.2.6 --- Factor Structure Identification- Fundamental Objectives --- p.105 / Chapter 7.2.7 --- Construct validity- Fundamental Objectives --- p.107 / Chapter 7.2.8 --- A Model for Measuring factors that Influence Infomediary Success --- p.108 / Chapter 8 --- Conclusions and Future Work --- p.109 / Chapter 8.1 --- "Implications, Limitations and Future Work - Collaborative Infomediary" --- p.109 / Chapter 8.2 --- "Implications, Limitations and Future Work - Infomediary Success Factors" --- p.110 / Chapter 8.3 --- Conclusions --- p.112 / Bibliography --- p.113 / Chapter A --- Means Objectives Fundamental Objectives --- p.121 / Chapter A.1 --- List of Means Objectives & Fundamental Objectives --- p.121 / Chapter B --- Statistical Results for Collaborative Infomediary Experiment --- p.129 / Chapter C --- Statistical Results for Measuring Factors that influence success of Infomediary --- p.136 / Chapter D --- Survey Task File Questionnaire --- p.152 / Chapter E --- Tutorial Guide for experiment on Collaborative Infomediary --- p.170

Magister Educationis - MEd / This Research sets out to understand the participation experiences of a selected group of adult learners at one of the partner institutionsof the online Intercontinental Masters in Adult Learning and Global Change. The study offers an understanding of adult learners' experiences of success and persistence in relation to online study within a higher education context, and also offers insights into what may costitute successful learning communities. In relation to literature, , the student perceptions obtained via the study largely affirm what 'successiful' can mean to a group of postgraduate adult learners in an online learning environment. This stidy also contributes to the ongoing conversation in terms of the unique experiences of students in one particular cohort of the programme. / South Africa

之前和社交網絡相關的研究，大多數都非常關注積極正面的用戶鏈接關係；與這些研究不同，我們研究同時含有正面與負面鏈接關係的帶符號社交網絡。具體來講，我們特別關注如何在一個帶符號的社交網絡（該網絡又稱為“目標網絡“）中可信並且有效地去預測鏈接關係的符號為正或是為負，且該網絡中僅有一小部份的鏈接關係符號已知，作為訓練樣本。我們採取遷移學習的機器學習方法，借助於另外一個帶符號社交網絡（該網絡又稱為“源網絡“）中充足的鏈接關係符號信息，從而訓練得到一個有效的鏈接關係分類器；需要注意的是，該 “源網絡同“目標網絡，在鏈接關係樣本和鏈接關係符號的聯合分佈上，並不相同。 / 由於在帶符號社交網絡中沒有事先定義好的屬性向量，我們需要構造一種普適的屬性特徵，從而可以把“源網絡“的拓撲結構信息有效地遷移到“目標網絡“中去。借助於構造好的普適屬性，我們使用了一種類似AdaBoost的遷移學習算法，通過調整訓練樣本的權重，從而可以更好地利用“源網絡“中的樣本信息輔助模型的學習。我們使用兩個真實的大型帶符號社交網絡進行實驗，結果顯示我們的遷移學習算法可以較基準方案，在鏈接關係符號預測的準確度上，提高百分之四十。 / Different from a large body of research on social networks that almost exclusively focused on positive relationships, we study signed social networks with both positive and negative links. Specifically, we focus on how to reliably and effectively predict the signs of links in a signed social network (called a target network), where a very small amount of edge sign information is available as the training data. To train a good classifier, we adopt the transfer learning approach to leverage the abundant edge signs from another signed social network (called a source network) which may have a different joint distribution of the observed instance and the class label. / As there is no predefined feature vector for the edge instances in a signed network, we construct generalizable features that can transfer the topological knowledge from the source network to the target. With the extracted features, we adopt an AdaBoost-like transfer learning algorithm with instance weighting to utilize more useful training instances in the source network for model learning. Experimental results on two real large signed social networks demonstrate that our transfer learning algorithm can improve the prediction accuracy by 40% over baseline schemes. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Ye, Jihang. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 51-56). / Abstracts also in Chinese. / Abstract --- p.ii / Acknowledgement --- p.v / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Related Work --- p.8 / Chapter 3 --- Problem Formulation --- p.13 / Chapter 4 --- Feature Construction --- p.16 / Chapter 4.1 --- Explicit Topological Features --- p.17 / Chapter 4.2 --- Latent Topological Feature --- p.19 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Optimization Algorithm --- p.22 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Convergence Analysis --- p.23 / Chapter 5 --- Edge Sign Prediction by Transfer Learning --- p.28 / Chapter 5.1 --- Transfer Learning with Instance Weighting --- p.29 / Chapter 5.2 --- Training Loss Analysis --- p.31 / Chapter 6 --- Experimental Evaluation --- p.35 / Chapter 6.1 --- Data Preparation --- p.35 / Chapter 6.2 --- Evaluation of Transfer Learning with InstanceWeighting --- p.37 / Chapter 6.3 --- Effectiveness of Topological Features --- p.41 / Chapter 7 --- Conclusion --- p.45 / Chapter A --- Proof of Theorem 1 --- p.48 / Bibliography --- p.51

PayPal has faced many different challenges over the years. In the beginning of their journey the biggest challenge of PayPal was the overall ignorance to prevent fraudulent activities and to provide high safety systems. By solving this, PayPal has changed and improved the opportunities of secure online purchases. During couple of years new mobile payment services have developed around the world. They are quick, safe and simple. Especially in the market of peer-to-peer PayPal will meet more competition in the future. Another big challenge of PayPal will be if more online retailers follow Amazon.com´s example and start using their own payment options and by this isolate PayPal as a payment option.

PayPal has faced many different challenges over the years. In the beginning of their journey the biggest challenge of PayPal was the overall ignorance to prevent fraudulent activities and to provide high safety systems. By solving this, PayPal has changed and improved the opportunities of secure online purchases. During couple of years new mobile payment services have developed around the world. They are quick, safe and simple. Especially in the market of peer-to-peer PayPal will meet more competition in the future. Another big challenge of PayPal will be if more online retailers follow Amazon.com´s example and start using their own payment options and by this isolate PayPal as a payment option.

We study online scheduling policies for buffer management models, in which packets are arriving over time to a buffer of a network switch to be sent through its single output port. However, the bandwidth of the port is limited and some packets need to be dropped, based on their weights. The goal of the scheduler is to maximize the weighted throughput, that is, the total weight of packets transmitted. Due to the natural lack of information about future, an optimal performance cannot be achieved, we thus pursue competitive analysis and its refinements to analyze online algorithms on worst-case inputs. Specifically, in the first part of the thesis, we focus on a simple online scheduling model with unit-size packets and deadlines, called Bounded-Delay Packet Scheduling. We design an optimal φ-competitive deterministic algo- rithm for the problem, where φ ≈ 1.618 is the golden ratio. It is based on a detailed understanding of an optimal schedule of pending packets, called the plan, which may be of independent interest. We also propose a semi-online setting with lookahead that allows the algorithm to see a little bit of future, namely, packets arriving in the next few steps. We provide an algorithm with lookahead for instances in which each packet can be scheduled in at most two consecutive slots and prove lower...

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2010