The electronic mail has become one of the most popular communication channels in the modern world. Due to its convenience and low cost, however, many business salesmen utilize this channel to promote their products by distributing e-mails to people as far as they can reach, which causes troubles to irrelevant e-mail receivers. As a result, many a research has been devoted to filtering irrelevant e-mails based on data mining techniques to alleviate users¡¦ mental loadings in processing e-mails they receive. Nevertheless, current approaches have their own drawbacks. Issues on what appropriate classifies to construct, how to endow such classifiers with the adaptive learning ability, and how to customize the e-mail management process for each user are still under investigation. The objective of this research is therefore to construct an e-mail classifier with learning ability to self-correct from erroneous outcomes. Furthermore, we propose a customized e-mail management process that can handle users¡¦ e-mails based on their own preferences. Ultimately, it can adapt itself to the changes of users¡¦ preferences when handling their e-mails. Several experiments are conducted to verify the performance of the constructed classifier. The results show that our proposed classifier possesses high accuracy and high precision with outstanding adaptive learning ability. We also illustrate a real application of the customized e-mail management process. It shows that our approach can detect the changes of users¡¦ preferences and learn to follow the changes. The feasibility of employing our approach to constructing e-mail classifiers is thus justified.

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For this master degree project I have confronted the phenomenon of a new generation of users who identify themselves more with services they can reach than with things they actually own. Such insight relates to both an increasing environmental awareness and socio-economical factors that conflict with the way the automotive industry has been developing. Commercial vehicles are a segment that could logically benefit from applying a service-approach to its design and development process. What is the aesthetic that derives from the needs of these future users? That has been the main question and focus of my thesis. My goal was to explore such aesthetic in a tangible application in the interior design of a multi-purpose van. I partner with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles in this process. My conclusion is that the “Aesthetic of Use“ lies in a triangularity of vehicle architecture, surface treatment and flexibility of usage. With this understanding I developed an “evaluation key” to help me judge the ideation material in order to select the best design proposal to illustrate a service based vehicle for VW. The chosen interior design proposal represents a modular system offering two distinct configurations: Labour and Premium. The Labour architecture could be upgraded by applying and changing rentable components and would act as the base for the Premium version. The modular principle of this architecture would allow to serve the different needs of the users by mixing and combining these components.

A discussion paper prepared by the UBC Library’s Working Group on Teaching and Learning amidst changing scholarly communication and electronic resources faced by libraries, faculty, and students.

Over the last few years, research about trust in e-commerce has been conducted. Research has found different elements that might induce trust in such a website. However, this paper examines how trust in mobile travel applications and applications where the users can meet new people can be increased, by conducting an online survey and interviews. Different trust increasing elements are found, while using the application Travls as a case study in this research.

The broad purpose of this study was to find a more effective way for librarians to assist elementary grade students in learning to use the library as an educational resource. Since ability to use a card catalog appeared to be significant to the process, and since instruction in its use was an area of concern to librarians, this special aspect of the problem was selected for investigation.Experimental and control groups of fourth grade children were identified. Under controlled conditions, the experimental group received instruction in use of a library card catalog through a programmed learning text designed for the study, while the control group was taught in the traditional way by the librarian. Group gains based on pre and post-test scores were computed and treated statistically to measure relative effects of selected variables.The following hypotheses were tested:A. There will be no significant difference in gains between groups of children in learning how to use the card catalog attributable to:1. Method of instruction2. Sex3. Sex by method interaction

Our work addresses a well documented problem: users are frequently unable to articulate a query that clearly and comprehensively expresses their information need. This can be attributed to the information need being too ambiguous and not clearly defined in the user's mind, to a lack of knowledge of the domain of interest on the part of the user, to a lack of understanding of a retrieval system's conceptual model, or to an inability to use a certain query syntax. This thesis proposes a software tool that emulates the human search mediator. It helps a user explore a domain of interest, learn its structure, terminology and key concepts, and clarify and refine an information need. It can also help a user generate high-quality queries for searching the World Wide Web or other such large and heterogeneous document collections. Our work was inspired by library studies which have highlighted the role of the librarian in helping the user explore her information need, define the problem to be solved, articulate a formulation of the information need and adapt it for the retrieval system at hand in order to get information. Our approach, mediated access through a clustered collection, is based on an information access environment in which the user can explore a relatively small, well structured, pre-clustered document collection covering a particular subject domain, in order to understand the concepts encompassed and to clarify and refine her information need. At the same time, the user can ostensively indicate clusters and documents of interest so that the system builds a model of the user's topic of interest. Based on this model, the system assists and guides the user's exploration, or generates `mediated queries' that can be used to search other collections. We present the design and evaluation of WebCluster, a system that reifies the concept of mediated retrieval. Additionally, a variety of mediation experiments are presented,which provide guidelines as to which mediation strategies are more appropriate for different types of tasks. A set of experiments is presented that evaluate document clustering's capacity to group together topical documents and support mediation. In this context we propose and experimentally test a new formulation for the cluster hypothesis. We also look at the ability of language models to convey content, to represent topics and to highlight specific concepts in a given context. They are also successfully applied to generate flexible, task-dependent cluster representatives for supporting exploration through browsing and respectively searching. Our experimental results show that mediation has potential to significantly improve user queries and consequently the retrieval effectiveness.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dept. of Communication, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2007. / Advisers: George A. Barnett, Thomas H. Feeley. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Hong Kong Baptist University, 2002. / Thesis submitted to Dept. of Communication Studies. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 170-184).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wyoming, 2005. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Oct. 10, 2007). Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-76).