Gender differences in the pursuit of technology careers are a current issue of concern. We report on two studies that use surveys, drawings and interviews to examine sixthand eighthgrade students’ perceptions of knowledgeable computer users and their self-perception as a computer-type person. In Study 1, participants were asked to generate representations of computer users in pictures or words....

Similarity method is the key of the user-based collaborative filtering recommend algorithm. The traditional similarity measures, which cosine similarity, adjusted cosine similarity and Pearson correlation similarity are included, have some advantages such as simple, easy and fast, but with the sparse dataset they may lead to bad recommendation quality. In this article, we first research how the...

Privacy protection may be defined as replacing the original content in an image region with a (less intrusive) content having modified target appearance information to make it less recognizable by applying a privacy protection technique. Indeed, the development of privacy protection techniques also needs to be complemented with an established objective evaluation method to facilitate their asse...

It is quite common these days for experts, casual analysts, executives or data enthusiasts, to analyze large datasets using userfriendly interfaces on top of Business Intelligence (BI) systems. However, current BI systems do not adequately detect and characterize user interests, which may lead to tedious and unproductive interactions. In this paper, we propose to identify such user interests by...

We present in this paper SEMILAR, the SEMantic simILARity toolkit. SEMILAR implements a number of algorithms for assessing the semantic similarity between two texts. It is available as a Java library and as a Java standalone ap-plication offering GUI-based access to the implemented semantic similarity methods. Furthermore, it offers facilities for manual se-mantic similarity annotation by exper...

With the tremendous growth of published news articles, a key issue is how to help users find diverse and interesting news stories. To this end, it is crucial to understand and build accurate profiles for both users and news articles. In this paper, we define a user profile based on (1) the set of entities she/he talked about it in her/his comments and (2) the set of key-concepts related to thos...

With the emergence of applications that require content-based similarity retrieval, techniques to support such a retrieval paradigm over database systems have emerged as a critical area of research. User subjectivity is an important aspect of such queries, i.e., which objects are relevant to the user and which are not depends on the perception of the user. Query refinement is used to handle use...

With the development of personalized services, collaborative filtering techniques have been successfully applied to the network recommendation system. But sparse data seriously affect the performance of collaborative filtering algorithms. To alleviate the impact of data sparseness, using user interest information, an improved user-based clustering Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithm is propo...

Collaborative filtering (CF) is the most widely used and successful approach for personalized service recommendations. Among the collaborative recommendation approaches, neighborhood based approaches enjoy a huge amount of popularity, due to their simplicity, justifiability, efficiency and stability. Neighborhood based collaborative filtering approach finds K nearest neighbors to an active user...

Specifying event sequence queries is challenging even for skilled computer professionals familiar with SQL. Most graphical user interfaces for database search use an exact match approach, which is often effective, but near misses may also be of interest. We describe a new similarity search interface, in which users specify a query by simply placing events on a blank timeline and retrieve a simi...