The remarkable spread of the Internet has generated new opportunities for companies to promote themselves and communicate with their customers. The most used Internet service of finding information today is search engines (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo) were almost three million searches are preformed every minute worldwide. This trend has led to an importance for companies having their websites visible on these search engines. In addition, people tend to be more and more on the go and are searching with their smartphones instead of traditional personal computer (PC). Meaning that companies’ websites can be available for customers 24 hour a day, 7 days a week, independent on customers location. Consequently, companies have the possibilities to reach the attention of customers when they actually search for a product/service and are therefore most likely to purchase.   In this thesis a marketing strategy has been developed for managers regarding how to master this new communication tool, in order to reach success and competitive advantage. This strategy was developed by investigate in what characteristics and functions users desire when searching with their smartphone. Together with three hypotheses tested if the perceived user-friendliness, relative advantage and compatibility within mobile search have a positive affect on the intention of use this new technology.   In this bachelor thesis a survey was conducted among people in generation C living in Sweden, which resulted in 397 completed responses. The hypotheses were tested with use of a regression analysis and the findings were that the relative advantage and compatibility in mobile search has a positive affect on the intention of use. Therefore, this thesis suggests companies to develop their mobile search engine marketing strategy with the aim of delivering value and satisfying the customer. Moreover, this thesis recommend managers to keep their mobile website quick, relevant and making sure having valuable and informative information about their business in the description text visible to users in the search engine hit list.   Finally, the majority of the population does already act on this new market and it is therefore of great importance for companies satisfying these users in order to stay competitive.

<p>In this project-collaboration between Växjö University and Sideum company- a matchmakingportal is designed. This portal’s purpose is to ease the communication betweenVäxjö university’s students who are interested in doing their final thesis/project in anenvironment outside the university and companies which have some appropriatethesis/projects for these students and would like their projects to be done by them.There are different kinds of users that have different roles on this portal. The majorusers are students and companies which take the most advantage of this website.Once a student registers her name and completes her profile, she will receive emailscontaining information about uploaded projects on the portal by companies, which aresuitable according to what she already has mentioned in her profile. She can also searchherself to find her desired project as soon as companies upload their projects on the portal.On the other hand companies can search to find students who meet their requirements.Administrators of the portal are able to do match-making between students andcompanies. They access to every part of the portal and have right to edit, delete, change,upload, making reports and supervise the system.Other groups are guests of system. Guests are users of the system who are not registeredyet, they will not receive any email about uploaded thesis/projects on the portal but theycan search for them, themselves.</p>

Using data drawn from in-depth interviews collected in three Chinese cities and the countrywide China General Social Survey, this dissertation examined how people found jobs during the historic period of China’s employment system change. This dissertation is written in the format of three publishable papers. The first paper revisited China’s employment system change, by focusing on individual reactions towards the changing employment policies. Perceiving the persistent political authority, individuals pursued higher education, accumulated political advantages, and mobilized network resources, to get state-assigned jobs. Individual job-seeking strategies, in turn, boosted the state’s hiring criteria, as well as facilitated the growth of the market principle. Consequently, state power and market strength have been co-developed in this process. Following my analysis of institutional constraints, in the second paper, I addressed the question of how individual job seekers and job positions are matched together. I examined how contact use matches individual qualifications to the employer’s hiring expectations, from an innovative perspective of the certifiability of job requirements. I demonstrated that informal methods facilitate job-person matching success when used in combination with formal methods, rather than being used alone. My third dissertation paper provides strong empirical evidence of the advantages of the joint use of formal and informal methods. I found that individuals who used formal and informal job search methods jointly tend to obtain more job information and thus apply for more positions. They are also more likely to exit job search successfully within a three-month time period. Using the Endogenous Switching Regression (ESR) model, I found that the joint channel itself is more likely to lead one to late-stage career success, as indicated by one’s recent income. Above all, my dissertation systematically investigated the use of contacts in the labor market of post-socialist China, regarding its institutional constraints, working mechanisms, and advantages.

Using data drawn from in-depth interviews collected in three Chinese cities and the countrywide China General Social Survey, this dissertation examined how people found jobs during the historic period of China’s employment system change. This dissertation is written in the format of three publishable papers. The first paper revisited China’s employment system change, by focusing on individual reactions towards the changing employment policies. Perceiving the persistent political authority, individuals pursued higher education, accumulated political advantages, and mobilized network resources, to get state-assigned jobs. Individual job-seeking strategies, in turn, boosted the state’s hiring criteria, as well as facilitated the growth of the market principle. Consequently, state power and market strength have been co-developed in this process. Following my analysis of institutional constraints, in the second paper, I addressed the question of how individual job seekers and job positions are matched together. I examined how contact use matches individual qualifications to the employer’s hiring expectations, from an innovative perspective of the certifiability of job requirements. I demonstrated that informal methods facilitate job-person matching success when used in combination with formal methods, rather than being used alone. My third dissertation paper provides strong empirical evidence of the advantages of the joint use of formal and informal methods. I found that individuals who used formal and informal job search methods jointly tend to obtain more job information and thus apply for more positions. They are also more likely to exit job search successfully within a three-month time period. Using the Endogenous Switching Regression (ESR) model, I found that the joint channel itself is more likely to lead one to late-stage career success, as indicated by one’s recent income. Above all, my dissertation systematically investigated the use of contacts in the labor market of post-socialist China, regarding its institutional constraints, working mechanisms, and advantages.

No description available.

Many organizations are trying to re-create the ‘Google experience’, to find and exploit their own corporate information. However, there is evidence that finding information in the workplace using search engine technology has remained difficult, with socio-technical elements largely neglected in the literature. Explication of the factors and generative mechanisms (ultimate causes) to effective search task outcomes (user satisfaction, search task performance and serendipitous encountering) may provide a first step in making improvements. A transdisciplinary (holistic) lens was applied to Enterprise Search and Discovery capability, combining critical realism and activity theory with complexity theories to one of the world’s largest corporations. Data collection included an in-situ exploratory search experiment with 26 participants, focus groups with 53 participants and interviews with 87 business professionals. Thousands of user feedback comments and search transactions were analysed. Transferability of findings was assessed through interviews with eight industry informants and ten organizations from a range of industries. A wide range of informational needs were identified for search filters, including a need to be intrigued. Search term word co-occurrence algorithms facilitated serendipity to a greater extent than existing methods deployed in the organization surveyed. No association was found between user satisfaction (or self assessed search expertise) with search task performance and overall performance was poor, although most participants had been satisfied with their performance. Eighteen factors were identified that influence search task outcomes ranging from user and task factors, informational and technological artefacts, through to a wide range of organizational norms. Modality Theory (Cybersearch culture, Simplicity and Loss Aversion bias) was developed to explain the study observations. This proposes that at all organizational levels there are tendencies for reductionist (unimodal) mind-sets towards search capability leading to ‘fixes that fail’. The factors and mechanisms were identified in other industry organizations suggesting some theory generalizability. This is the first socio-technical analysis of Enterprise Search and Discovery capability. The findings challenge existing orthodoxy, such as the criticality of search literacy (agency) which has been neglected in the practitioner literature in favour of structure. The resulting multifactorial causal model and strategic framework for improvement present opportunities to update existing academic models in the IR, LIS and IS literature, such as the DeLone and McLean model for information system success. There are encouraging signs that Modality Theory may enable a reconfiguration of organizational mind-sets that could transform search task outcomes and ultimately business performance.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-14T12:36:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 ArquivoTotalDaniel.pdf: 2752447 bytes, checksum: 5dbeb5dd6c935f25f004b1edb1df7d70 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-03-22 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Problems of traffic jam, lack of vacancies in garages and cars underutilized are part of the current scenario of big cities. In this work is created a module for creating efficient routes for a system using the approach Dial-a-Ride Problem. The DARP is a vehicle routing problem that belongs to NP-complete class. It aims is to minimize operating costs while maintaining quality of service to the client. It is presented an algorithm that uses the metaheuristics Iterated Local Search with the Variable Neighborhood Search to solve the DARP. Compared to related work in the area, the results were better regarding to distance traveled and average travel time of customers. / Problemas de congestionamentos, falta de vagas em garagens e carros subutilizados fazem parte do cenário atual das grandes cidades. Neste trabalho é criado um módulo para criação de rotas eficiente para sistemas de caronas utilizando a abordagem Dial-a-Ride Problem. O DARP é um problema de roteamento pertencente a classe NP-Completo. Este tem como objetivo minimizar os custos operacionais, mas mantendo uma qualidade de serviço para o usuário. É apresentado um algoritmo que utiliza as metaheurística Iterated Local Search juntamente com a Variable Neighborhood Search para solucionar o DARP. Comparados com outros trabalhos relevantes na área, os resultados encontrados foram melhores no que se refere à distância percorrida e no tempo médio de viagem dos clientes.

In recent years, the most popular web search engines have excelled in their ability to answer short queries that require clear, localized and personalized answers. When it comes to complex exploratory search tasks however, the main challenge for the searcher remains the same as back in the 1990s: Trying to formulate a single query that contains all the right keywords to produce at least some relevant results. In this work we want to investigate new ways to facilitate exploratory search by making use of context information from the user's entire search process. Therefore we present the concept of session-based semantic search, with an optional extension to collaborative search scenarios. To improve the relevance of search results we expand queries with terms from the user's recent query history in the same search context (session-based search). We introduce a novel method for query classification based on statistical topic models which allows us to track the most important topics in a search session so that we can suggest relevant documents that could not be found through keyword matching. To demonstrate the potential of these concepts, we have built the prototype of a session-based semantic search engine which we release as free and open source software. In a qualitative user study that we have conducted, this prototype has shown promising results and was well-received by the participants. / Die führenden Web-Suchmaschinen haben sich in den letzten Jahren gegenseitig darin übertroffen, möglichst leicht verständliche, lokalisierte und personalisierte Antworten auf kurze Suchanfragen anzubieten. Bei komplexen explorativen Rechercheaufgaben hingegen ist die größte Herausforderung für den Nutzer immer noch die gleiche wie in den 1990er Jahren: Eine einzige Suchanfrage so zu formulieren, dass alle notwendigen Schlüsselwörter enthalten sind, um zumindest ein paar relevante Ergebnisse zu erhalten. In der vorliegenden Arbeit sollen neue Methoden entwickelt werden, um die explorative Suche zu erleichtern, indem Kontextinformationen aus dem gesamten Suchprozess des Nutzers einbezogen werden. Daher stellen wir das Konzept der sitzungsbasierten semantischen Suche vor, mit einer optionalen Erweiterung auf kollaborative Suchszenarien. Um die Relevanz von Suchergebnissen zu steigern, werden Suchanfragen mit Begriffen aus den letzten Anfragen des Nutzers angereichert, die im selben Suchkontext gestellt wurden (sitzungsbasierte Suche). Außerdem wird ein neuartiger Ansatz zur Klassifizierung von Suchanfragen eingeführt, der auf statistischen Themenmodellen basiert und es uns ermöglicht, die wichtigsten Themen in einer Suchsitzung zu erkennen, um damit weitere relevante Dokumente vorzuschlagen, die nicht durch Keyword-Matching gefunden werden konnten. Um das Potential dieser Konzepte zu demonstrieren, wurde im Rahmen dieser Arbeit der Prototyp einer sitzungsbasierten semantischen Suchmaschine entwickelt, den wir als freie Software veröffentlichen. In einer qualitativen Nutzerstudie hat dieser Prototyp vielversprechende Ergebnisse hervorgebracht und wurde von den Teilnehmern positiv aufgenommen.

The thesis is focused on solving the Sokoban game using artificial intelligence algorithms. The first part of the thesis describes the Sokoban game, state space and selected state space search methods. In the second part selected methods were implemented and graphic user interface was created in the Python environment. Comparative experiments were executed in the final part.

Detta arbete syftar till att undersöka om det är möjligt att med en heuristisk metod skapa giltiga lösningar till ett problem vid planering av stränggjutningsproduktion på SSAB. Planeringsproblemet uppstår när stål av olika sorter ska gjutas under samma dag. Beroende på i vilken ordning olika kundordrar av stål gjuts uppstår spill av olika storlek. Detta spill ska minimeras och tidigare arbete har genomförts på detta problem och resulterat i en matematisk modell för att skapa lösningar till problemet. Det tar i praktiken lång tid att hitta bra lösningar med modellen och frågeställningen är om det går att göra detta med en heuristisk metod för att kunna generera bra lösningar snabbare. Med inspiration från Variable Neighbourhood Search, Simulated Annealing och tabusökning har heuristiker skapats, implementerats och utvärderats mot den matematiska modellen. En av heuristikerna presterar bättre än den matematiska modellen gör på 10 minuter. Matematiska modellens resultat efter 60 minuter körtid är bättre än den utvecklade heuristiken, men resultaten är nära varandra. Körtiden för heuristiken tar signifikant mindre tid än 10 minuter. / This study aims to investigate if it is possible to use a heuristic method to create feasible solution in a Cast Batching Problem at SSAB. The problem occurs when different kinds of steel should be cast during the same day. Depending on which order the groups of different steel is placed different amounts of waste is produced, the goal is to minimize this waste. Earlier work has been done on this problem and resulted in a mathematical model to create feasible solutions to this problem. In practice the time it takes to create good solutions are long and the question is if it is possible to use a heuristic method to generate good solutions in a shorter amount of time. Drawing upon inspiration from metaheuristics such as Variable Neighbourhood Search, Simualted Annealing and Tabu Search multiple heuristics have been created, implemented and evaluated against the mathematical model. One of the heuristics perform better than the mathematical model does in 10 minutes. The result from the mathematical model after 60 minutes is slightly better than the heuristic, but the results are similar. With regards to running time the heuristic takes considerably less time than 10 minutes.