Conference paper assignment---the task of assigning paper submissions to reviewers---is a key step in the management and smooth functioning of conferences. We study this problem as an application of recommender systems research. Besides the traditional goal of predicting `who likes what?', a conference management system must take into account reviewer capacity constraints, adequate numbers of reviews for papers, expertise modeling, conflicts of interest, and an overall distribution of assignments that balances reviewer preferences with conference objectives. Issues of modeling preferences and tastes in reviewing have traditionally been studied separately from the optimization of assignments. In this thesis, we present an integrated study of both aspects. First, due to the sparsity of data (relative to other recommender systems applications), we integrate multiple sources of information to learn reviewer/paper preference models, using methods commonly associated with merging content-based and collaborative filtering in the study of large recommender systems. Second, our models are evaluated not just in terms of prediction accuracy, but also in terms of end-assignment quality, and considering multiple evaluation criteria. Using a linear programming-based assignment optimization formulation, we show how our approach better explores the space of potential assignments to maximize the overall affinities of papers assigned to reviewers. Finally, we demonstrate encouraging results on real reviewer preference data gathered during the IEEE ICDM 2007 conference, a premier international data mining conference. Our research demonstrates that there are significant advantages to applying recommender system concepts to the conference paper assignment problem. / Master of Science

With the outbreak of COVID-19, the number of physical conferences has decreased which impacts hotels’ revenue from conference business. In response to the decrease in conferences and conference revenue, hotels have developed strategies to manage the loss. For each hotel, they developed different strategies according to the situation they faced. This research is going to take hotels in Gotland as samples to find out the strategies that hotels have developed in response to the loss of conference business and how these strategies developed. The result of this research showed that there were two kinds of strategies hotels have developed which are proactive and inactive strategies. In addition, hotels’ perception of COVID-19 has an impact on the development of strategies.

The primary goal of this study was to identify key success factors for the management of a conference centre in South Africa. This goal was achieved by firstly portraying an overview of the conference industry in South Africa. Secondly, a literature study was conducted in order to determine the aspects in the literature that are regarded as of vital importance in managing a conference centre. Thirdly, the results of the empirical research were discussed. Lastly, conclusions were drawn from the research and recommendations were made with regard to further research. From the literature study, aspects of strategic management, financial management, marketing management, human resource management and management of operational aspects were identified as being important in the management of a conference centre. These aspects were used to compile a questionnaire. The objective of the questionnaire was to measure the importance that conference centre managers attach to the identified elements. Questionnaires were e-mailed to 250 conference centres. A total of 100 questionnaires were received back. The study population consisted of a database as compiled by the researcher from the Direct Access Conference Handbook (2004) and the Africa Conference Directory (2006/7). Questionnaires were also handed out personally to exhibitors at the INDABA Tourism Exhibition (2006). From the responses to the questionnaire it can be deduced that conference centre managers regard the aspects of strategic management, financial management, marketing management, human resource management and management of operational details as important to very important. A factor analysis was done to determine the key success factors in managing a conference centre. The following factors were identified, namely to: • Provide a conference centre with a functional layout and the correct variety of activities; • perform marketing management; • ensure that operational aspects are in place; • do proper planning; • provide an attractive venue and conduct a post-conference evaluation; and • perform human resource management. Conference centre managers have to apply the above-mentioned key success factors to ensure that the conference centre is successful over the longterm. / Thesis (M.A. (Tourism))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

Thesis (M.A. (Tourism))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

The primary goal of this study was to identify key success factors for the management of a conference centre in South Africa. This goal was achieved by firstly portraying an overview of the conference industry in South Africa. Secondly, a literature study was conducted in order to determine the aspects in the literature that are regarded as of vital importance in managing a conference centre. Thirdly, the results of the empirical research were discussed. Lastly, conclusions were drawn from the research and recommendations were made with regard to further research. From the literature study, aspects of strategic management, financial management, marketing management, human resource management and management of operational aspects were identified as being important in the management of a conference centre. These aspects were used to compile a questionnaire. The objective of the questionnaire was to measure the importance that conference centre managers attach to the identified elements. Questionnaires were e-mailed to 250 conference centres. A total of 100 questionnaires were received back. The study population consisted of a database as compiled by the researcher from the Direct Access Conference Handbook (2004) and the Africa Conference Directory (2006/7). Questionnaires were also handed out personally to exhibitors at the INDABA Tourism Exhibition (2006). From the responses to the questionnaire it can be deduced that conference centre managers regard the aspects of strategic management, financial management, marketing management, human resource management and management of operational details as important to very important. A factor analysis was done to determine the key success factors in managing a conference centre. The following factors were identified, namely to: • Provide a conference centre with a functional layout and the correct variety of activities; • perform marketing management; • ensure that operational aspects are in place; • do proper planning; • provide an attractive venue and conduct a post-conference evaluation; and • perform human resource management. Conference centre managers have to apply the above-mentioned key success factors to ensure that the conference centre is successful over the longterm. / Thesis (M.A. (Tourism))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

Materialized views are a well-known optimization strategy with the potential for massive improvements in query processing time, especially for aggregation queries over large tables. To realize this potential, the query optimizer has to know how and when to exploit materialized views. Reporting functions represent a novel technique to formulate sequence-oriented queries in SQL. They provide a column-wise ordering, partitioning, and windowing mechanism for aggregation functions and therefore extend the well-known way of grouping and applying simple aggregation functions. Up to now, current work has not considered the frequently used reporting functions in data warehouse environments. In this paper, we introduce materialized reporting function views and show how to rewrite queries with reporting functions as well as aggregation queries to this new kind of materialized views. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach with a large number of experiments.

The use of materialized views in a data warehouse installation is a common tool to speed up mostly aggregation queries. The problems coming along with materialized aggregate views have triggered a huge variety of proposals, such as picking the optimal set of aggregation combinations, transparently rewriting user queries to take advantage of the summary data, or synchronizing pre-computed summary data as soon as the base data changes. The paper focuses on the problem of view selection in the context of distributed data warehouse architectures. While much research was done with regard to the view selection problem in the central case, we are not aware to any other work discussing the problem of view selection in distributed data warehouse systems. The paper proposes an extension of the concept of an aggregation lattice to capture the distributed semantics. Moreover, we extend a greedy-based selection algorithm based on an adequate cost model for the distributed case. Within a performance study, we finally compare our findings with the approach of applying a selection algorithm locally to each node in a distributed warehouse environment.

Data marts and caching are two closely related concepts in the domain of multi-dimensional data. Both store pre-computed data to provide fast response times for complex OLAP queries, and for both it must be guaranteed that every query can be completely processed. However, they differ extremely in their update behaviour which we utilise to build a specific data mart extended by cache semantics. In this paper, we introduce a novel cache exploitation concept for data marts - coarse-grained caching - in which the containedness check for a multi-dimensional query is done through the comparison of the expected and the actual cardinalities. Therefore, we subdivide the multi-dimensional data into coarse partitions, the so called cubletets, which allow to specify the completeness criteria for incoming queries. We show that during query processing, the completeness check is done with no additional costs.