Psychological ownership brings new perspective to understand individual behaviors in organization, team, and the information system areas. In this research we use this theory to investigate how to improve sponsor experience in the context of reward-based crowdfunding. We propose that psychological ownership is one important mental state for sponsors in crowdfunding. The research model in this s...

Due to the emergence of Internet and embedded computing, humans will be more and more faced to an increasing intrusion of computing in their day-to-day life by what it is called now smart communicating objects. Agents’ characteristics like pro-activeness, autonomy and sociability and the inherent distributed nature of multi-agent systems make them a promising tool to use in the smart devices ap...

Discovering influential bloggers will not only allow us to understand better the social activities taking place in the blogosphere, but will also provide unique opportunities for sales and advertising. In this paper, we develop an MIV (marketing influential value) model to evaluate the influential strength and identify the influential bloggers in the blogosphere. We analyze three dimensions of ...

Course Aims and Objectives This course aims to provide a broad introduction to the diverse “sexual cultures” – that is, practices, identities, and communities linked to sexuality – which have inhabited 20-century Brazil. Drawing from anthropological and historical texts, we will cover a range of sexual cultures (including Brazil’s emergent lesbian and gay communities, transgendered travestí, se...

In this report, we propose a novel framework to explore the activity interactions and temporal dependencies between activities in complex video surveillance scenes. Under our framework, a low-level codebook is generated by an adaptive quantization with respect to the activeness criterion. The Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes (HDP) model is then applied to automatically cluster low-level feature...

This thesis investigates how KoShik, otherwise known as the talking elephant, can have a human-like voice articulation. The mechanism of articulating a human sound by an elephant can be described as a unique excitation process in which the elephant first places its nose in its mouth, blows air into the mouth, produces the basic frequency by pressing the nose with its mouth and teeth, and then a...

The crowdfunding market size has increased exponentially, reaching tens of billions of dollars and showing the popularity of crowdfunding. However, according to Kickstarter, 35% backers did not receive rewards on time. To maintain the trust between creators and backers, and sustain the crowdfunding business growth, it is crucial to understand how on-time and late reward delivery projects are di...

Systems development methodologies continue to be a central area of research in software engineering. As the nature of applications and systems usage move increasingly towards open networked environments, not only are new methodologies required, but new ways for evaluating methodologies for these new environments are also required. The agent-oriented approach to software engineering introduces c...

The study examined religiousity, perception and attitude towards condom use among Christian youths in Ile Ife, Nigeria with the aim of examining the implications on HIV/AIDs. A structured questionnaire based on Likert-type scales was employed to rate respondents’ attitudes. A total of 260 youths were interviewed, but 210 (80.8%) were found to be sexually active as at the time of the survey. Tho...