In this thesis, we present an innovative and novel approach to personalise maps/geo-spatial services for mobile users. With the proposed map personalisation approach, only relevant data will be extracted from detailed maps/geo-spatial services on the fly, based on a user’s current location, preferences and requirements. This would result in dramatic improvements in the legibility of maps on mobile device screens, as well as significant reductions in the amount of data being transmitted; which, in turn, would reduce the download time and cost of transferring the required geo-spatial data across mobile networks. Furthermore, the proposed map personalisation approach has been implemented into a working system, based on a four-tier client server architecture, wherein fully detailed maps/services are stored on the server, and upon a user’s request personalised maps/services, extracted from the fully detailed maps/services based on the user’s current location, preferences, are sent to the user’s mobile device through mobile networks. By using open and standard system development tools, our system is open to everyday mobile devices rather than smart phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) only, as is prevalent in most current map personalisation systems. The proposed map personalisation approach combines content-based information filtering and collaborative information filtering techniques into an algorithmic solution, wherein content-based information filtering is used for regular users having a user profile stored on the system, and collaborative information filtering is used for new/occasional users having no user profile stored on the system. Maps/geo-spatial services are personalised for regular users by analysing the user’s spatial feature preferences automatically collected and stored in their user profile from previous usages, whereas, map personalisation for new/occasional users is achieved through analysing the spatial feature preferences of like-minded users in the system in order to make an inference for the target user. Furthermore, with the use of association rule mining, an advanced inference technique, the spatial features retrieved for new/occasional users through collaborative filtering can be attained. The selection of spatial features through association rule mining is achieved by finding interesting and similar patterns in the spatial features most commonly retrieved by different user groups, based on their past transactions or usage sessions with the system.

<p>Background: From a marketing perspective, personalisation of online advertising is a very promising way of reaching customers and will play an increasingly important role in the future. Personalisation on the Internet is far more widespread than in the offline world and can cover all online interactions when it comes to the question of what information to personalise. It directly relates to the issue of privacy of personal data and creates a need for a privacy policy that clarifies the relation between personalisation and privacy.</p><p>Problem: Personalisation represents one of the main advantages of the Internet and al-lows marketers to target individual customers directly and adapt their marketing communications to the user’s preferences and needs. On the one hand, personalisation can give customers access to better service, products and communication and provides an experience of one. On the other, privacy issues related to the Internet and personalisation in particular are a contemporary topic of growing interest. Internet users are increasingly aware of the fact that websites collect information about them and their privacy concerns are growing. Personal information is necessary for personalising advertisements. Therefore, this development contradicts the customer’s increased demand for personalisation and the trend towards narrowly targeted marketing.</p><p>Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to explore if personalised online advertising could be perceived as a danger to customer’s privacy or on the other hand, facilitate the purchase decision process.</p><p>Method: In order to answer the purpose and the research questions, a survey has been conducted with 152 JIBS students asking them about their opinion on e-advertising and their fears about it. After the questionnaires had been collected, different analysis such as univariate analysis and bivariate analysis has been done using SPSS.</p><p>Conclusions: In summary it can be said that the respondent’s general perception of personalised e-ads is negative; they do not believe that they make shopping easier and they see a danger for their privacy in how companies collect the customer’s information and use it.</p>

Background: From a marketing perspective, personalisation of online advertising is a very promising way of reaching customers and will play an increasingly important role in the future. Personalisation on the Internet is far more widespread than in the offline world and can cover all online interactions when it comes to the question of what information to personalise. It directly relates to the issue of privacy of personal data and creates a need for a privacy policy that clarifies the relation between personalisation and privacy. Problem: Personalisation represents one of the main advantages of the Internet and al-lows marketers to target individual customers directly and adapt their marketing communications to the user’s preferences and needs. On the one hand, personalisation can give customers access to better service, products and communication and provides an experience of one. On the other, privacy issues related to the Internet and personalisation in particular are a contemporary topic of growing interest. Internet users are increasingly aware of the fact that websites collect information about them and their privacy concerns are growing. Personal information is necessary for personalising advertisements. Therefore, this development contradicts the customer’s increased demand for personalisation and the trend towards narrowly targeted marketing. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to explore if personalised online advertising could be perceived as a danger to customer’s privacy or on the other hand, facilitate the purchase decision process. Method: In order to answer the purpose and the research questions, a survey has been conducted with 152 JIBS students asking them about their opinion on e-advertising and their fears about it. After the questionnaires had been collected, different analysis such as univariate analysis and bivariate analysis has been done using SPSS. Conclusions: In summary it can be said that the respondent’s general perception of personalised e-ads is negative; they do not believe that they make shopping easier and they see a danger for their privacy in how companies collect the customer’s information and use it.

This PhD study centres on analysing the changing employment service portfolios available to disadvantaged people out of work in Britain and Germany. Looking at the recent wave of comparative studies on ‘activation’ reforms, it springs to mind that the question of the changing portfolio of ‘active’ labour market policy (ALMP) measures has received only little attention in the sense of a rigorous comparative analysis. In order to address that gap, this study develops a novel normative and analytical perspective for the study of ALMP, which then is applied to the empirical cases Britain and Germany. I first develop the concept of personalisation as the normative and analytical framework for the analysis of ALMP. I show that the diversity of ALMP portfolios, which is a precondition for a personalised service provision, can serve as a proxy for measuring personalisation. Equipped with this analytical tool, the analysis subsequently focuses on the changes to ALMP portfolios over the past 15 years in terms of diversity. It is shown that during this period both Britain and Germany reformed working-age benefits in a way that led to a closer integration of the benefit system at an institutional level. Taking the policy rhetoric that closer integration will lead to more ‘personalised’ (UK) or more ‘tailor-made’ (Germany) services as a starting point, I analyse whether these developments at an institutional level have indeed led to a more personalised, or more diverse, provision of employment services. This study looks in particular at the situation of those groups in the two countries who have been most affected by recent integration reforms. These have primarily been claimants of second-tier working-age benefits, namely incapacity related benefits in the UK, and ‘Sozialhilfe’ (SH, social assistance) and ‘Arbeitslosengeld II’ (ALGII, Unemployment Benefit II) in Germany. I find that in both countries, employment services for claimants of these second-tier benefits have become more diverse in the wake of the integration reforms of the past 10 to 15 years, thereby increasing their personalisation potential. However, the two countries have each followed very specific reform trajectories. While the volume and coverage of ALMP have increased in both countries, the portfolio of services for second-tier claimants today is much more diverse in Germany than in Britain. This is primarily due to the existence of a large volume of services directed at claimants more distant from the labour market that follow a social integration & employability approach. These services are more marginal in Britain, where measures that follow a work-first approach are dominant. This divergent development is indicative of major and persistent differences in terms of ideational context as well as institutional (operational) factors. New Public Management reforms have influenced operational policy to different degrees in the two countries, effectively limiting the diversity of employment services in Britain more than in Germany.

The music press and music journalism are rarely subjected to substantial academic investigation. Analysis of journalism often focuses on the production of news across various platforms to understand the nature of politics and public debate in the contemporary era. But it is not possible, nor is it necessary, to analyse all emerging forms of journalism in the same way for they usually serve quite different purposes. Music journalism, for example, offers consumer guidance based on the creation and maintenance of a relationship between reader and writer. By focusing on the changing aspects of this relationship, an analysis of music journalism gives us an understanding of the changing nature of media production, media texts and media readerships. Music journalism is dialogue. It is a dialogue produced within particular critical frameworks that speak to different readers of the music press in different ways. These frameworks are continually evolving and reflect the broader social trajectory in which music journalism operates. Importantly, the evolving nature of music journalism reveals much about the changing consumption of popular music. Different types of consumers respond to different types of guidance that employ a variety of critical approaches. This thesis, therefore, argues that the production of music journalism is one that is influenced by the practices of consumption.

Objectives: This study examined the experiences of older parents who provide long-term care for their adult children with learning disabilities and how they conceptualise their quality of life. Method: Data were collected using semi-structured interviews during the period 2009 to 2012 with 27 older parent carers from four London boroughs and were analysed using framework technique. Findings: Findings indicate benefits as well as challenges. Most participants appraised their quality of life positively, despite the challenges they had to negotiate on a daily basis. They reported rewards and benefits from caregiving, more so in later life, such as: a connected family from shared caregiving; having a sense of belonging; purposeful living; a reciprocal relationship with their adult children; and personal transformations from providing care which improved their quality of life. The challenges that participants regularly encountered were: the added stress of the government’s Personalisation Agenda of caring services (particularly through direct payments); struggles for access to services; multiple losses (sleep, career, identity and friends); worry about future care; fear of abuse when carers are unable to continue in their role; unhelpful attitudes of health and social care professionals; and a lack of empathy from friends as well as the public towards people with learning disabilities. Conclusion: The findings indicate that caregiving and quality of life are inextricably linked. The difficulties that parent carers experienced were mainly associated with socio-structural barriers, rather than their children’s disabilities. Importantly, the findings inform the practice of social workers and others who support this unique group of carers by providing new insights into how caring impacts on quality of life and how best these parents’ needs can be met. This study makes a specific contribution to understanding the phenomenological realities of older carers and extends current conceptualisations of quality of life among older people.

L'apprentissage de geste est un processus complexe, impliquant de nombreux processus sous-jacents (psychomoteurs, cognitifs, biophysiques). Cet apprentissage peut être divisé en plusieurs grandes phases, définies par la capacité de l'apprenant à produire et à percevoir son geste. A l'instar d'un formateur adaptant son discours et son attitude à l'apprenant, un environnement d'apprentissage doit pouvoir adapter les aides qu'il fournit, d'une part en analysant l'état de l'apprenant, et d'autre part en prédisant les aides qui bénéficieront à son apprentissage. Nous proposons une approche modélisant les interactions entre l'apprenant et l'environnement d'apprentissage; c'est-à-dire l'évolution de l'état de l'apprenant en fonction des configurations successives de l'environnement, permettant une adaptation automatique et dynamique de la sélection d'aides. En s'appuyant sur des travaux portant sur la reconnaissance de gestes et les tuteurs intelligents, nous proposons un cadre formel permettant de représenter la qualité de l'activité gestuelle dans un espace métrique. Cette représentation interprète les résultats issus de modèles probabilistes comme des variables floues illustrant le niveau de l'apprenant sur chacune des dimensions du geste. Nous représentons l'environnement comme l'ensemble des actions possibles, chaque action étant représentée par un vecteur de paramètres estimant la situation dans laquelle l'action est la plus pertinente. Dans un premier temps, ces paramètres sont fixés par des experts, et nous considérons cette expertise comme parfaite. Dans un second temps, nous étudions une problématique omniprésente dans les domaines des environnements d'apprentissage, qui fait état de l'écart entre l’expertise et la réalité. Les domaines "mal définis" sont en effet répandus, du fait du coût et de la difficulté à réunir des experts, et de la complexité inhérente à la définition précise d'un domaine. Ne considérant plus le seul avis des experts, le processus de sélection d 'aides peut alors être vu comme une séquence de décisions dont l'objectif est de proposer à chaque itération l'action qui maximisera le gain en matière d'apprentissage. En s'appuyant sur des travaux récents portant sur les séquences de décisions, notre approche considère le processus de sélection d'aides comme un problème de bandit. Le problème de bandit vise à maximiser un gain lors d'une séquence de décisions, et modélise le compromis entre exploration (choisir une action dont l'influence est inconnue), et exploitation (choisir la meilleure action connue). Nous proposons dans ce cadre une extension des méthodes SoftMax. L'implémentation de notre modèle sur une plateforme d'apprentissage de la calligraphie a été réalisée dans le cadre d'une collaboration avec des experts de ce domaine. Nous montrons, au travers de deux cas d’étude, l'intérêt de notre modèle pour l'apprentissage de la calligraphie. Dans le premier cas d’étude, l'adaptation est construite depuis notre représentation du geste, et un ensemble de règles fixées par des experts. Nous y montrons l'avantage apporté par l'apport d'une diversité d'aides. Dans le second cas d'étude, nous comparons deux types d 'adaptation : une adaptation basée sur des règles, et une adaptation basée sur notre approche dynamique. Nous montrons les différences entre ces deux approches, et illustrons les avantages de l'approche dynamique lorsque les règles sont imprécises. / Gesture learning is a complex and multi-step process where trainees are supposed to improve several psychomotor and cognitive skills. This process can be divided into phases depending on trainees’ ability to perform and perceive their gestures. As human tutors adapt their behavior according to their perception and understanding of trainees learning situations' a learning environment should select an appropriate behavior from a representation of trainees’ learning states and a prediction of the potential influence of every possible behavior. The work presented in this document describes an approach modeling the interactions between a trainee and a learning environment: it represents trainees’ consecutive performances and the influence of the environment on these performances. This approach aims at permitting an adaptive selection of the pedagogical actions (i.e. behaviors) implemented in the environment. Relying on related works in the domains of gesture recognition and intelligent tutoring systems, we propose to represent the gestural activity in a metric space. This representation interprets results from a probabilistic mode as fuzzy variables highlighting trainees' level on every aspect of the gesture. We represent the environment as the set of actions it can select, every action being represented by a feature vector describing the learning situation maximizing the action's influence. As a first step, these features are given by a set of experts, and we consider the rules provided as perfect. As a second step, we study an ubiquitous issue in the field of learning environments, which is the difference between the rules provided by experts and the reality of trainees’ needs toward feedback. Ill-defined domains are indeed more and more common, as collecting expert knowledge is difficult and costly, and as studied learning domains are becoming more and more complex and difficult to define. In this second step, the selection process does not rely on expert knowledge, and this process can be seen as a sequence of decisions. At each iteration, the goal is thus to select the action which would maximize the reward in terms of benefits for trainees' learning. The action selection process is represented as a multi-armed bandit problem, where the goal is to compromise between exploration of unknown actions and exploitation of known actions. We present an extension of SoftMax methods which handles multi-dimensional contextual rewards. Taking advantage of the collaboration with calligraphy experts, a calligraphy training platform was implemented as part of this work. Two studies, where participants train on this platform, show the benefits of the proposed approach on calligraphy learning. In a first experiment, action selection is based on expert rules, and we show that providing a diversity of feedback improves skill acquisition. In a second experiment, we compare two configurations of the environment: a selection of actions based on expert rules, and a selection of actions based on the SoftMax method. We describe the difference between the influence of these two approaches on trainees' learning, and we point out the benefits of using dynamic rules.

Abstract The era of mobile communications and mobile services has begun. The ongoing mobile revolution has dramatically and fundamentally changed our daily lifestyles, and it will continue to do so in a foreseeable future. For the next generation, mobile service end users have more demands for such services. This thesis examines the challenging user perspectives in designing and developing high value added mobile services. The aim of this research is to develop reference models and elicit user requirements for 3G and beyond mobile services in order to improve the quality of mobile services. This thesis first examines the existing architectures and models for high value added mobile services, followed by the contributions of the thesis. In this thesis, a Cyberworld model, which is a contribution to the WWRF reference modeling initiative and a specification of the WSI reference model, was developed and it serves as a basis for 3G and beyond mobile services design and development. A series of definitions of the Cyberworld model and a roadmap of the enabling technologies were also built up. The emphasis of this part is on how to describe and model user participation in mobile services. For this purpose, a model of the communication element to represent the components of the wireless world was created. Both static and dynamic reference modeling steps were established to better describe and understand user participation in mobile services. The validation was achieved through the CyPhone navigation mobile service. In order to enhance mobile service mobility, personalisation, and security, an ontology based model was developed to extend the Cyberworld model functionalities. The innovative ontology based mobile system will greatly increase service mobility, personalisation and security, thus improving the quality of mobile services. The ontology based model was illustrated and validated using a healthcare mobile service. A Quality Function Deployment (QFD) approach was adopted in this research in order to elicit, weigh and prioritise actual user requirements and link them to technical design requirements of mobile services. Traditionally QFD is employed in manufacturing industry. This approach is now extended to the mobile service industry for the first time. In this thesis, a detailed step by step QFD approach was proposed for designing high value added mobile services. As a result, the developed mobile services will better meet users' wants and needs which also means that the quality of mobile services will be significantly improved. The QFD approach was validated through a mobile e-learning service and another dedicated healthcare service for senior citizens. Through development of reference models and examination of user requirements for 3G and beyond mobile services from user perspectives, this thesis contributes to the design and development of high value added mobile services.

The New Labour government’s (1997-2010) policy of personalised learning was announced as an idea ‘exciting’ the profession and promising ‘radical implications’ for the shape of education in England. The policy attracted much debate and criticism and its enactment is a site worthy of research. This study makes a contribution to knowledge through researching the rarely heard stories of young people in this policy enactment. It makes a further contribution to policy scholarship through the interplay of the data from school practices and moral philosophy drawn from Alasdair MacIntyre.Qualitative interviews and focus group activities were conducted with young people in three different secondary schools in order to understand their stories of personalised learning some two years into New Labour’s third term of government. To understand more of the context for the stories of the young people, some strategic actors in policy dissemination were interviewed, as were the headteachers of the three schools.Personalised learning promised to engage the voice of the learner in learning practices. The research finds a young peoples’ story that is consistently one of a mute and invisible identity within the schools. An argument is presented that the purposes of schools ought to be judged on standards of excellence definitive of, and extended by, a concept of virtues. A distinction is made between effectiveness in producing exam results and a richer sense of excellence in education practice. It is argued that virtues that define standards of excellence at the institutional level of practice can enrich and prefigure wider concepts of justice than are contained in policy. Young peoples’ stories in this research indicate that, contrary to policy ideals, they often perceived unfairness and arbitrariness in their school experiences. Personalised learning needs to be set within the narrative of the personalisation of public services: a reforming rubric, employing the motif of the citizen-consumer as a proposition about social justice and modernisation. New Labour’s ideology and models of governance are explored and related to the testimony of headteachers to understand more about the young peoples’ perceptions. Literatures are drawn upon to place personalisation in a historical context, linking it to moral orders of contemporary social imaginaries. New Labour made a case for personalised learning as furthering the cause of social justice and is thus a policy in need of ethical examination. Following MacIntyre, it is argued that modernity has left few moral resources by which to evaluate the personal, but the experiences of young people suggested that a richer moral agency is glimpsed within their stories of schooling. The social practice at the level of schools is thus critical but requires policy to enable ethical spaces for schools to re-invigorate their purposes. I argue that in the light of some critical fault lines, such as neoliberalism and a reconfiguration of tiers of local governance, personalisation as a ‘modernising’ policy proposition could do little to extend the goods of schooling beyond some narrow conceptions of effectiveness.

Purpose – At the beginning of this year the number of social media user worldwide was recorded to be at 3.80 billion and is estimated to keep rising (Kemp, 2020). Along with this connectivity, new concepts have been acknowledged that have caused some controversy. These concepts have been named echo chambers and filter bubbles. This study investigates how social media users experience personalisation algorithms and the perceived existence of filter bubbles and echo chambers on various social media platforms and channels. Furthermore, it explores to what extent these users make use of strategies when navigating their social media feeds and if they believe that said strategies have any effect on personalisation algorithms, filter bubbles, and echo chambers. Method – Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 participants currently studying at Jönköping University. The interviews were then transcribed and analysed using a thematic approach.  Findings – The perception of students at Jönköping University is that filter bubbles and echo chambers exist in a varying degree of visibility and commonality depending on the situation and medium. These are also experienced to be interconnected with personalisation algorithms. The experience of personalisation algorithms is mainly positive, as it allows the users to easily navigate the feed but negative implications are also mentioned.  These are isolation, the negative strengthening and creation of filter bubbles or echo chambers. However, the algorithm is not believed to be the only thing responsible for the creation. The users believe that their own navigation and strategies can have such an effect. The strategies that users use are (1) Passive navigation, (2) Source evaluation, (3) Multiple source searching, (4) Responsibility taking, and the (5) Creation of filter bubbles. The effect these have on filter bubbles, personalisation algorithms and echo chambers is helping, to an extent, alleviate some of the negative effects that these are experienced to have. However, the passive navigation and creation of filter bubbles have a somewhat opposite effect as they help the creation or maintaining of filter bubbles and personalisation algorithms. Implications – The findings in this study build on existing evidence of echo chambers being more easily formed when the topic of discussion is of a political nature, as it is described by Barberá, Jost, Nagler, Tucker, and Bonneau (2015) in their research on how echo chambers form on Twitter. Furthermore, these findings could be considered to disagree with the research of Dubois and Blank (2018) who found that people who had a high political interest were less likely of ending up in an echo chamber. Although, due to their research taking all media into account, such as television, radio, newspaper, and so forth, while the current study is focused on social media alone the comparison is a bit more difficult to make. Finally, in the study made by Seargeant and Tagg (2019), it was concluded that the personalisation algorithms are not the sole contributor to filter bubbles forming on Facebook and that the users play a key role in how their online environment is shaped. The results of this study build on their research that the users do use strategies when navigating that affect what is being shown to them on their social media feeds. However, the participants of the current study claimed that the algorithms played a pretty large role too, which is not quite in line with the research conducted by Seargeant and Tagg (2019). Limitations – The generalisability of this study is limited due to the small sample size chosen to conduct this study, although instead, it provides deeper insight into the relationship between humans and their social media platforms and channels. Moreover, a bias that should be acknowledged is that when conducting interviews there is a risk of encountering response bias, which is when the participants assume the purpose of the study and adapt their answers to fit what they believe the researcher(s) want to hear. To avoid this precautions were taken when designing the questions to make sure that they would not lead the participants in any directions.