This thesis will discuss the emerging influence of film review aggregators and their effect on the changing landscape for reviews in the film industry. Specifically, this study will look at the top 150 domestic grossing films of 2010 to empirically study the effects of two specific review aggregators. A time-delayed approach to regression analysis is used to measure the influencing effects of these aggregators in the long run. Subsequently, other factors crucial to predicting film success are also analyzed in the context of sustained earnings.

Online aggregation is a new trend in today’s world. It is developed from an IT concept to a much broader idea that applies to a variety of areas such as information, human capital, social power, and so on. The power of online aggregation has not only changed the way of business, but also affected the process of social development. The current study identified three models of online aggregation and provided examples of each. Some future implications and downsides of online aggregation are also discussed in this paper. / text

This thesis presents the development of a Social Network Aggregator, which makes the experience of the users who manage several social nets easier. The goal of this application is to link in the same environment different social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Hence, the user is able to use several services from the same platform, fast and simple. With the aim of making easier the user´s experience, the aggregator has been divided in 3 main parts: Easy Social Networks, which is a simple sample of each social net with the basic functionalities; Fast Post that allows the user to post easily in each social network or in all networks at the same time and Normal Social Networks, that open the real social nets. Finally, this thesis present some possible extensions of the implementations as future work. Since this is the “first step” for a social network aggregator, this future works is about add new functionalities that interacts with the APIs so that the user has not need of going to the real social networks anymore to update, chat, watch the last news and so on. / -

Aggregators targeting smaller customers, and their possibility to alleviate grid congestions through local flexibility markets, is a new concept in Sweden. The study’s purpose consisted of four main objectives. Investigate SthlmFlex and compare it to two other European flexibility markets. Explore the institutional, technical, financial and social considerations of an aggregator in Sweden. Identify barriers for the aggregators considerations as well as market barriers for SthlmFlex. Lastly, estimate the potential of aggregated demand side flexibility from heat pumps and electric vehicles in single-family houses to alleviate grid congestions in Stockholm 2021-2030. The study mainly followed an exploratory research approach where literature review was combined with interviews. A quantitative approach was applied for the estimation of the potential. SthlmFlex is an open market that offers trade of flexibility services as well as temporary subscriptions that allows Ellevio and Vattenfall to manage grid congestions through different solutions. The most noticeable difference in the comparison of markets was that SthlmFlex did not offer an integrated rebalancing mechanism. New Swedish regulations that will enable independent aggregation will be enforced in the beginning of 2022 and will facilitate the operation and acquisition of customers for aggregators. The aggregator requires a technical setup of both hardware and software to gain control of the technology and active the flexibility service. The business model is centred on sales of the technical system, which enables implicit and explicit services. Explicit services constitute a small part of the total revenue stream which is due to the low prices offered on flexibility markets. The aggregator has to consider the customers’ view on demand side flexibility and their competence within the electricity system. The study concluded that there is enough demand side flexibility potential in single-family houses to alleviate grid congestions in Stockholm from 2021-2030. However, several barriers were identified that limits the realization of this potential and the development of aggregators in Sweden. These include barriers related to balance responsibility, measurements and low revenue streams. Barriers in terms of market design and market approach were also identified specifically for SthlmFlex. / Aggregatorer som riktar sig mot mindre kunder, samt deras möjligheter att bidra till att minska flaskhalsarna i elnätet, är ett nytt koncept i Sverige. Studiens syfte bestod av fyra huvudmål. Utforska SthlmFlex och jämföra den med två andra europeiska flexibilitetsmarknader. Undersöka de institutionella, tekniska, finansiella och sociala övervägandena för en aggregator i Sverige. Identifiera barriärer för aggregatorns överväganden samt marknadsbarriärer för SthlmFlex. Slutligen, uppskatta potentialen av aggregerad efterfrågeflexibilitet från värmepumpar och elbilar i småhus för att underlätta flaskhalsar i elnätet i Stockholm från 2021–2030. Studien följde en utforskande ansats där litteraturstudier kombinerades med intervjuer. En kvantitativ metod användes för att uppskatta potentialen.SthlmFlex är en öppen marknad som erbjuder handel av flexibilitetstjänster samt tillfälliga abonnemang som tillåter Ellevio och Vattenfall hantera flaskhalsar i elnätet genom olika lösningar. Den mest noterbara skillnaden i jämförelsen av marknader var att SthlmFlex inte erbjöd en integrerad åter balanserande mekanism. Nya svenska regler som möjliggör oberoende aggregering träder i kraft i början av 2022 och kommer underlätta driften och införskaffning av kunder för aggregatorn. Aggregatorn kräver en teknisk struktur som med både hårdvara och mjukvara för att få kontroll av teknologin och aktivera flexibilitetstjänster. Affärsmodellen kretsar kring försäljning av det tekniska systemet som möjliggör tjänster som implicit, explicit och övriga. Explicita tjänster utgör en väldigt liten del av den totala intäktsmodellen, bland annat på grund av de låga priserna som erbjuds på flexibilitetsmarknader. Aggregatorn måste ta hänsyn till kundernas inställning till efterfrågeflexibilitet samt deras kompetens inom elsystemet. Studiens slutsats visar att den potentiella efterfrågeflexibiliteten hos småhus är tillräcklig för att underlätta flaskhalsar i elsystemet i Stockholm från 2021–2030. Flera barriärer identifierades som begränsar realisationen av denna potential och utvecklingen av aggregatorer i Sverige. Dessa inkluderade barriärer relaterade till balansansvar, mätning och låga inkomstströmmar. Barriärer i form av marknadsdesign och syfte med marknad identifierades även för SthlmFlex.

L’évolution des technologies numériques a transformé la manière dont on accède aux contenus de presse ; de nouvelles utilisations et de nouveaux acteurs sont apparus. En ligne, le public peut désormais s’informer aussi des faits d’actualité au moyen de liens hypertexte établis par les agrégateurs d’actualités vers les pages des sites de presse. Cette étude propose une analyse des difficultés autour de la reprise des contenus de presse numériques par les agrégateurs d’actualités. D’un côté, la production de contenus d’actualités nécessite d’importants investissements et à ce titre les éditeurs de presse aspirent à ce que l’indexation de leurs contenus sur les plateformes des agrégateurs d’actualités donne lieu à rémunération. De l’autre, les agrégateurs d’actualités facilitent l’accès aux publications et incidemment l’exercice du droit à l’information du public. S’il faut encourager le développement de nouvelles activités en ligne qui facilitent l’accès aux contenus informationnels, il faut aussi préserver les ressources financières des éditeurs de presse en les rémunérant pour l’utilisation de la valeur économique de leurs publications. C’est à cette problématique que la présente thèse s’efforce de répondre. Pour cela les contenus de presse sont d’abord étudiés sous l’angle d’une valeur économique protégée par le droit de la propriété littéraire et artistique. Ensuite, à titre complémentaire, les comportements des agrégateurs d’actualités vis-à-vis des éditeurs de presse lors de leur activité de référencement sont analysés au regard du droit économique. / The evolution of digital technologies has transformed the way people read press contents; new uses and new actors have emerged. Online, the public can now also read the news through hypertext links established by news aggregators leading to press publisher’s websites. This study provides an analysis of the difficulties around the reuse of digital press contents by news aggregators. On the one hand, the production of news contents requires significant investment for press publishers, which explains why they want to earn money from these hypertext links. On the other hand, news aggregators facilitate access to publications and, incidentally, the exercise of the public's right to information. If the development of new online activities facilitating access to information is to be encouraged, it is also necessary to make sure that press publishers are getting paid for the use of their publications. It is to this issue that the present thesis endeavors to answer. For this reason, press contents are first studied from the point of view of an economic value protected by copyright law. Then, in addition, the behavior of news aggregators towards press publishers is analyzed under economic law.

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is one of the most important components of smart grid (SG) which aggregates data from smart meters (SMs) and sends the collected data to the utility center (UC) to be analyzed and stored. In traditional centralized AMI architecture, there is one meter data management system to process all gathered information in the UC, therefore, by increasing the number of SMs and their data rates, this architecture is not scalable and able to satisfy SG requirements, e.g., delay and reliability. Since scalability is one of most important characteristics of AMI architecture in SG, we have investigated the scalability of different AMI architectures and proposed a scalable hybrid AMI architecture. We have introduced three performance metrics. Based on these metrics, we formulated each AMI architecture and used a genetic-based algorithm to minimize these metrics for the proposed architecture. We simulated different AMI architectures for five demographic regions and the results proved that our proposed AMI hybrid architecture has a better performance compared with centralized and decentralized AMI architectures and it has a good load and geographic scalability.

Today’s digital environment has revolutionized the way journalism is manufactured and consumed. Recent changes both empower citizens and present challenges for news organizations and their journalists. Among these challenges is the rapidly growing news aggregation business. News aggregators are websites that do not produce much original content, but curate and organize news articles created by others using human editorial judgment, computer algorithms, or a combination of both. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to evaluate the state of the news media and its relationship with news aggregators in an attempt to answer this central question: Do news aggregators facilitate or impede the news industry’s ability to serve its normative functions in a democratic society? I will argue that while aggregators have improved access to news and amplified the amount of information available to citizens, effective democracy requires the existence of news organizations that employ professional journalists who know how to report new information, not merely to restate and repurpose existing articles. News aggregators build their businesses around monetizing third-party content, effectively stealing readership and advertising revenue from the original publishers. This has created a news industry that is undermanned and struggles to produce quality journalism.

Nos últimos anos, a tecnologia de Web Services vem sendo pesquisada nas mais diversas áreas da computação, incluindo a de gerenciamento de redes de computadores. A composição de serviços, uma nova funcionalidade surgida recentemente, parece ter a potencialidade de resolver diversos problemas de diversas áreas da computação, incluindo a área de gerenciamento de redes e seu respectivo protocolo padrão de facto, o SNMP. Através da composição de serviços, é possível construir serviços mais sofisticados, usando-se serviços mais simples como componentes. Este trabalho tem por objetivo investigar a composição de Web Services aplicada ao gerenciamento de redes de computadores. Para tanto, modelos e padrões para composição foram estudados e uma arquitetura de composição, usando o padrão WS-BPEL, aplicada ao gerenciamento foi proposta. Tal arquitetura permite iniciar uma cadeia de ações de gerenciamento em gerentes de nível mais baixo baseados em Web Services através de uma única requisição Web Service. Para definir novas composições, uma ferramenta Web foi desenvolvida, a qual gera automaticamente o código WS-BPEL. Além disso, foram realizadas avaliações de desempenho para verificar o impacto na rede das composições. Os resultados obtidos mostraram que composições podem reduzir o tráfego gerado na rede junto à estação de gerenciamento, pois permitem concentrar diversas informações em uma única requisição Web Services. O tempo de resposta também pôde ser reduzido em algumas situações devido às requisições nativamente paralelas do WS-BPEL. / In the recent years, the Web Services technology has been researched in many areas of computer science, including computers network management. Service composition, a new feature recently raised, seems to have the potentiality to solve several problems in computer science, including the network management field and its Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Through service composition, it is possible to build up more sophisticated services using simpler services as components. Therefore, this work aims at investigating Web Services composition applied to network management. Towards this goal, models and standards for composition were reviewed and a WS-BPEL-based composition architecture devoted to management was proposed. Such architecture allows starting a chain of management actions on lowerlevel Web Services-based managers through only one Web Services request. In order to define new compositions, a Web-based tool was developed to automatically generate the WS-BPEL required code. In addition, performance evaluations were carried out in order to verify the compositions’ impact on the managed network. The results showed that compositions can reduce the management traffic in the surroundings of the management station by aggregating several information in only one Web Services request. Response time could also be decreased in some situations due to the native parallel requests of WS-BPEL.

Nos últimos anos, a tecnologia de Web Services vem sendo pesquisada nas mais diversas áreas da computação, incluindo a de gerenciamento de redes de computadores. A composição de serviços, uma nova funcionalidade surgida recentemente, parece ter a potencialidade de resolver diversos problemas de diversas áreas da computação, incluindo a área de gerenciamento de redes e seu respectivo protocolo padrão de facto, o SNMP. Através da composição de serviços, é possível construir serviços mais sofisticados, usando-se serviços mais simples como componentes. Este trabalho tem por objetivo investigar a composição de Web Services aplicada ao gerenciamento de redes de computadores. Para tanto, modelos e padrões para composição foram estudados e uma arquitetura de composição, usando o padrão WS-BPEL, aplicada ao gerenciamento foi proposta. Tal arquitetura permite iniciar uma cadeia de ações de gerenciamento em gerentes de nível mais baixo baseados em Web Services através de uma única requisição Web Service. Para definir novas composições, uma ferramenta Web foi desenvolvida, a qual gera automaticamente o código WS-BPEL. Além disso, foram realizadas avaliações de desempenho para verificar o impacto na rede das composições. Os resultados obtidos mostraram que composições podem reduzir o tráfego gerado na rede junto à estação de gerenciamento, pois permitem concentrar diversas informações em uma única requisição Web Services. O tempo de resposta também pôde ser reduzido em algumas situações devido às requisições nativamente paralelas do WS-BPEL. / In the recent years, the Web Services technology has been researched in many areas of computer science, including computers network management. Service composition, a new feature recently raised, seems to have the potentiality to solve several problems in computer science, including the network management field and its Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Through service composition, it is possible to build up more sophisticated services using simpler services as components. Therefore, this work aims at investigating Web Services composition applied to network management. Towards this goal, models and standards for composition were reviewed and a WS-BPEL-based composition architecture devoted to management was proposed. Such architecture allows starting a chain of management actions on lowerlevel Web Services-based managers through only one Web Services request. In order to define new compositions, a Web-based tool was developed to automatically generate the WS-BPEL required code. In addition, performance evaluations were carried out in order to verify the compositions’ impact on the managed network. The results showed that compositions can reduce the management traffic in the surroundings of the management station by aggregating several information in only one Web Services request. Response time could also be decreased in some situations due to the native parallel requests of WS-BPEL.

Nos últimos anos, a tecnologia de Web Services vem sendo pesquisada nas mais diversas áreas da computação, incluindo a de gerenciamento de redes de computadores. A composição de serviços, uma nova funcionalidade surgida recentemente, parece ter a potencialidade de resolver diversos problemas de diversas áreas da computação, incluindo a área de gerenciamento de redes e seu respectivo protocolo padrão de facto, o SNMP. Através da composição de serviços, é possível construir serviços mais sofisticados, usando-se serviços mais simples como componentes. Este trabalho tem por objetivo investigar a composição de Web Services aplicada ao gerenciamento de redes de computadores. Para tanto, modelos e padrões para composição foram estudados e uma arquitetura de composição, usando o padrão WS-BPEL, aplicada ao gerenciamento foi proposta. Tal arquitetura permite iniciar uma cadeia de ações de gerenciamento em gerentes de nível mais baixo baseados em Web Services através de uma única requisição Web Service. Para definir novas composições, uma ferramenta Web foi desenvolvida, a qual gera automaticamente o código WS-BPEL. Além disso, foram realizadas avaliações de desempenho para verificar o impacto na rede das composições. Os resultados obtidos mostraram que composições podem reduzir o tráfego gerado na rede junto à estação de gerenciamento, pois permitem concentrar diversas informações em uma única requisição Web Services. O tempo de resposta também pôde ser reduzido em algumas situações devido às requisições nativamente paralelas do WS-BPEL. / In the recent years, the Web Services technology has been researched in many areas of computer science, including computers network management. Service composition, a new feature recently raised, seems to have the potentiality to solve several problems in computer science, including the network management field and its Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Through service composition, it is possible to build up more sophisticated services using simpler services as components. Therefore, this work aims at investigating Web Services composition applied to network management. Towards this goal, models and standards for composition were reviewed and a WS-BPEL-based composition architecture devoted to management was proposed. Such architecture allows starting a chain of management actions on lowerlevel Web Services-based managers through only one Web Services request. In order to define new compositions, a Web-based tool was developed to automatically generate the WS-BPEL required code. In addition, performance evaluations were carried out in order to verify the compositions’ impact on the managed network. The results showed that compositions can reduce the management traffic in the surroundings of the management station by aggregating several information in only one Web Services request. Response time could also be decreased in some situations due to the native parallel requests of WS-BPEL.