Sia Ka Cheung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-91). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgement --- p.iv / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Problem Statement --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Contributions --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Thesis Organization --- p.4 / Chapter 2 --- Background --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1 --- Content-Based Image Retrieval --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Feature Extraction --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Indexing and Retrieval --- p.7 / Chapter 2.2 --- Relevance Feedback --- p.7 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Weight Updating --- p.9 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- Bayesian Formulation --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- Statistical Approaches --- p.12 / Chapter 2.2.4 --- Inter-query Feedback --- p.12 / Chapter 2.3 --- Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval --- p.14 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Distributed Hash Table Techniques --- p.16 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Routing Indices and Shortcuts --- p.17 / Chapter 2.3.3 --- Content-Based Retrieval in P2P Systems --- p.18 / Chapter 3 --- Parameter Estimation-Based Relevance Feedback --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1 --- Parameter Estimation of Target Distribution --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Motivation --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Model --- p.23 / Chapter 3.1.3 --- Relevance Feedback --- p.24 / Chapter 3.1.4 --- Maximum Entropy Display --- p.26 / Chapter 3.2 --- Self-Organizing Map Based Inter-Query Feedback --- p.27 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Motivation --- p.27 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Initialization and Replication of SOM --- p.29 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- SOM Training for Inter-query Feedback --- p.31 / Chapter 3.2.4 --- Target Estimation and Display Set Selection for Intra- query Feedback --- p.33 / Chapter 3.3 --- Experiment --- p.35 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Study of Parameter Estimation Method Using Synthetic Data --- p.35 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Performance Study in Intra- and Inter- Query Feedback . --- p.40 / Chapter 3.4 --- Conclusion --- p.42 / Chapter 4 --- Distributed COntent-based Visual Information Retrieval --- p.44 / Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.44 / Chapter 4.2 --- Peer Clustering --- p.45 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Basic Version --- p.45 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Single Cluster Version --- p.47 / Chapter 4.2.3 --- Multiple Clusters Version --- p.51 / Chapter 4.3 --- Firework Query Model --- p.53 / Chapter 4.4 --- Implementation and System Architecture --- p.57 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Gnutella Message Modification --- p.57 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- Architecture of DISCOVIR --- p.59 / Chapter 4.4.3 --- Flow of Operations --- p.60 / Chapter 4.5 --- Experiments --- p.62 / Chapter 4.5.1 --- Simulation Model of the Peer-to-Peer Network --- p.62 / Chapter 4.5.2 --- Number of Peers --- p.66 / Chapter 4.5.3 --- TTL of Query Message --- p.70 / Chapter 4.5.4 --- Effects of Data Resolution on Query Efficiency --- p.73 / Chapter 4.5.5 --- Discussion --- p.74 / Chapter 4.6 --- Conclusion --- p.77 / Chapter 5 --- Future Works and Conclusion --- p.79 / Chapter A --- Derivation of Update Equation --- p.81 / Chapter B --- An Efficient Discovery of Signatures --- p.82 / Bibliography --- p.85

Yip King-Fung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-89). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / 論文摘要 --- p.iii / Table of Contents --- p.iv / List of Abbreviations --- p.vi / Acknowledgements --- p.vii / Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1. --- Background --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2. --- Motivation --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3. --- Thesis Organization --- p.4 / Chapter 2. --- A Survey of Content-based Image Retrieval --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1. --- Text-based Image Retrieval --- p.5 / Chapter 2.2. --- Content-Based Image Retrieval --- p.7 / Chapter 2.2.1. --- Content-Based Image Retrieval Systems --- p.7 / Chapter 2.2.2. --- Query Methods --- p.9 / Chapter 2.2.3. --- Image Features --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2.4. --- Summary --- p.16 / Chapter 3. --- Visual Thesaurus using SOM --- p.17 / Chapter 3.1. --- Algorithm --- p.17 / Chapter 3.1.1. --- Image Representation --- p.17 / Chapter 3.1.2. --- Self-Organizing Map --- p.21 / Chapter 3.2. --- Preliminary Experiment --- p.27 / Chapter 3.2.1. --- Feature differences --- p.27 / Chapter 3.2.2. --- Labeling differences --- p.30 / Chapter 4. --- Experiment --- p.33 / Chapter 4.1. --- Subjects --- p.33 / Chapter 4.2. --- Apparatus --- p.33 / Chapter 4.2.1. --- Systems --- p.33 / Chapter 4.2.2. --- Test Databases --- p.33 / Chapter 4.3. --- Procedure --- p.34 / Chapter 4.3.1. --- Description --- p.35 / Chapter 4.3.2. --- SOM (text) --- p.36 / Chapter 4.3.3. --- SOM (image) --- p.38 / Chapter 4.3.4. --- QBE (text) --- p.40 / Chapter 4.3.5. --- QBE (image) --- p.42 / Chapter 4.3.6. --- Questionnaire --- p.44 / Chapter 4.3.7. --- Experiment Flow --- p.45 / Chapter 4.4. --- Results --- p.46 / Chapter 4.5. --- Discussion --- p.51 / Chapter 5. --- Quantizing Color Histogram --- p.55 / Chapter 5.1. --- Algorithm --- p.56 / Chapter 5.1.1. --- Codebook Generation Phrase --- p.57 / Chapter 5.1.2. --- Histogram Generation Phrase --- p.66 / Chapter 5.2. --- Experiment --- p.67 / Chapter 5.2.1. --- Test Database --- p.67 / Chapter 5.2.2. --- Evaluation Methods --- p.67 / Chapter 5.2.3. --- Results and Discussion --- p.69 / Chapter 5.2.4. --- Summary --- p.74 / Chapter 6. --- Relevance Feedback --- p.75 / Chapter 6.1. --- Relevance Feedback in Text Information Retrieval --- p.75 / Chapter 6.2. --- Relevance Feedback in Multimedia Information Retrieval --- p.76 / Chapter 6.3. --- Relevance Feedback in Visual Thesaurus --- p.76 / Chapter 7. --- Conclusions --- p.80 / Chapter 7.1. --- Applications --- p.81 / Chapter 7.2. --- Future Directions --- p.81 / Chapter 7.2.1. --- SOM Generation --- p.81 / Chapter 7.2.2. --- Hybrid Architecture --- p.82 / References --- p.84

Szeto, Wai Man. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-86). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.ii / Acknowledgements --- p.vi / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Motivations and Aims --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Thesis Organization --- p.6 / Chapter 2 --- Preliminaries --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1 --- Fundamentals of Music and Terminology --- p.7 / Chapter 2.2 --- Findings in Auditory Psychology --- p.8 / Chapter 3 --- Literature Review --- p.12 / Chapter 3.1 --- Pattern Matching Techniques for Music Information Retrieval --- p.12 / Chapter 3.2 --- Stream Segregation --- p.14 / Chapter 3.3 --- Post-tonal Music Analysis --- p.15 / Chapter 4 --- Proposed Method for Stream Segregation --- p.17 / Chapter 4.1 --- Music Representation --- p.17 / Chapter 4.2 --- Proposed Method --- p.19 / Chapter 4.3 --- Application of Stream Segregation to Polyphonic Databases --- p.27 / Chapter 4.4 --- Experimental Results --- p.30 / Chapter 4.5 --- Summary --- p.36 / Chapter 5 --- Proposed Approaches for Post-tonal Music Analysis --- p.38 / Chapter 5.1 --- Pitch-Class Set Theory --- p.39 / Chapter 5.2 --- Sequence-Based Approach --- p.43 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- Music Representation --- p.43 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- Matching Conditions --- p.44 / Chapter 5.2.3 --- Algorithm --- p.46 / Chapter 5.3 --- Graph-Based Approach --- p.47 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- Graph Theory and Its Notations --- p.48 / Chapter 5.3.2 --- Music Representation --- p.50 / Chapter 5.3.3 --- Matching Conditions --- p.53 / Chapter 5.3.4 --- Algorithm --- p.57 / Chapter 5.4 --- Experiments --- p.67 / Chapter 5.4.1 --- Experiment 1 --- p.67 / Chapter 5.4.2 --- Experiment 2 --- p.68 / Chapter 5.4.3 --- Experiment 3 --- p.70 / Chapter 5.4.4 --- Experiment 4 --- p.75 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusion --- p.79 / Bibliography --- p.81 / A Publications --- p.87

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 454-459. / by Alan Francis Dowling, Jr. / Ph.D.

As one of the social relations, "distrust" also performs an important role in online Web sites. We also observe that distrust information can also be incorporated to improve recommendation quality. Hence, the last part of this thesis studies the problem on how to improve recommender system by considering explicit distrust information among users. We make the assumption that users' distrust relations can be interpreted as the "dissimilar" relations since user ui distrusts user ud indicates that user ui disagrees with most of the opinions issued by user ud. Based on this intuition, the distrust relations between users can be easily modeled by adding the regularization term into the objective functions of the user-item matrix factorization. The experiments on the Epinions dataset indicate that distrust information is at least as important as trust information. / However, the data sparsity problem of the involved user-item matrix seriously affects the recommendation quality. Many existing approaches to recommender systems cannot easily deal with users who have made very few ratings. The objective of this thesis is to study how to build effective and efficient approaches to improve the recommendation performance. / In this thesis, we first propose two collaborative filtering methods which only utilize the user-item matrix for recommendations. The first method is a neighborhood-based collaborative filtering method which designs an effective missing data prediction algorithm to improve recommendation quality, while the second one is a model-based collaborative filtering method which employs matrix factorization technique to make the recommendation more accurate. / In view of the exponential growth of information generated by online users, social contextual information analysis is becoming important for many Web applications. Hence, based on the assumption that users can be easily influenced by the friends they trust and prefer their friends' recommendations, we propose two recommendation algorithms by incorporating users' social trust information. These two methods are based on probabilistic matrix factorization. The complexity analysis indicates that our approaches can be applied to very large datasets since they scale linearly with the number of observations, while the experimental results show that our methods perform better than the state-of-the-art approaches. / Recommender Systems are becoming increasingly indispensable nowadays since they focus on solving the information overload problem, by providing users with more proactive and personalized information services. Typically, recommender systems are based on Collaborative Filtering, which is a technique that automatically predicts the interest of an active user by collecting rating information from other similar users or items. Due to their potential commercial values and the associated great research challenges, Recommender systems have been extensively studied by both academia and industry recently. / Ma, Hao. / "December 2009." / Advisers: Irwin King; Michael R. Lyu. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 72-01, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-154). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

It is now well accepted by gynecologists that a woman can conceive from an act of intercourse for a maximum of seven days of her menstrual cycle [l]. The reliability of natural family planning methods depends on identifying this window of fertility without ambiguity. Several natural family planning (NFP) methods have been used extensively and with some success. For decades, cycle length and BBT history have been used to forecast the most likely days of ovulation. When greater precision is needed, serum LH assays or ultrasound techniques are used. With the recent development of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, various kits have become commercially available to provide a simple, self-administered, and rapid test for detection of the midcycle urinary LH surge [2]. Some of these methods are fairly reliable and accurate. However, failures in these methods still occur, and some other problems concerning accuracy, simplicity, cost, and comfort have not been solved yet [3]. In addition, other factors in NFP methods, such as the user, the procedure, and others, have been demonstrated to be important sources of errors.

The controlled experiment is a highly regarded form of scientific inquiry because its properties permit conclusions with the most scientific rigor. Controlled experimentation is important for the scientific foundation of disciplines that claim to be scientific. It is also important to conduct them properly: they come at a high cost in time, effort and participation; there is an associated esteem that confers credibility; there is often an ethical responsibility to human participants. However, the quality of controlled experiments performed in health informatics and computer science is often poor. One way to address quality issues is to measure quality. This follows the example of the creation of instruments (scales or scores) to measure quality of controlled medical trials, which have also had problems with experimental quality. The rationale for this research was that no satisfactory scales had been developed for informatics. There is also no empirical research into the construct of experimental quality in informatics, which this research addresses. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Abstract not available

As more and more of information systems develop into large scale web applications, the complexity of multiple possible stakeholders and users multiplies. Web engineering methodologies although developing, are still primarily addressing the technical and functional issues in these large systems. The thesis addresses the web information system development from a social-psychological viewpoint to find ways to better match the user with system development. This thesis proposes a methodology to apply adoption theory into web application development. The hypothesis being that this is another way to enhance the utilisation of the system by the users. A thorough review of both adoption theory and adoption models showed that existing models are more descriptive of the process than applicational. From a wide range of adoption models, the thesis synthesised a composite adoption model, based on an accepted descriptive framework by Rogers. This was done by mapping to this foundation framework relevant criteria and procedures from significant adoption models. Along with this composite adoption model was also developed a development procedure that mapped the adoption model to common activities found in all the web and software engineering processes, giving a formal mechanism to apply the adoption theory to a wide range of web development methodologies. In doing so the composite model introduces a new dimension into the domain analysis by identifying a new class of stakeholders, namely “adoption change agents”, and also broadens the requirements process. The adoption model and development process was then applied to the development of a substantive web information system called Platform Web. Platform Web over a three year period evolved to provide many integrated online functions, including a fully developed teaching package only available on one member, to a university wide online tutorial system that integrated to the student administrative systems, the timetabling and teaching module. As the university at that time consisted of three basically independent network members, each promoting the use of web based teaching, it was possible to run a series of statistical tests across the three members on the uptake of their respective web application teaching modules. The significant statistical results endorsing the thesis hypothesis that “Adoption modelling will enhance the effective use of web applications and the resulting web information systems if applied at the web application design level and also in the formulation of system implementation strategies, management models and system evolution methodologies.” / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)