Ph. D. thesis in Computer Science written by Montse Cuadros under the supervision of Dr. Llúıs Padró and Dr. German Rigau. The thesis defense was done on 22th November 2011 at the Computer Science Faculty of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. The Doctoral Examination Committee was composed by Dr. Horacio Rodŕıguez (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya), Prof. Dr. Piek Vossen (Vrije Unive...

1 Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettrica e dell’Informazione, Università degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale, Via G. Di Biasio 43, 03043 Cassino (FR), Italy; E-Mail: [email protected] 2 Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto (FEUP) Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, s/n 4200-465 Porto, Portugal; E-Mail: [email protected] 3 Laboratory of Robotics and Systems in Engineering and Science (LA...

To those who help others. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisor Prof. Nick Feamster, for all his support, enthusiasm, and optimism, which have been an invaluable source of inspiration for me. Nick has been a great mentor, who has had an incredible impact on my path. Also, I would like to thank Prof. Roberto Perdisci, for all his support, boundless positive energy, and persistenc...

With millions of people traveling to unfamiliar cities to spend holidays, travel recommendation becomes necessary to assist tourists in planning their trips more efficiently. Serving as a prerequisite to travel recommender systems, understanding tourist behavior patterns is therefore of great importance. Recently, geo-tagged photos on social media platforms like Flickr have provided a rich data...

We are developing a recommender system for tourist spots. The challenge ismainly to characterize tourist spotswhose features change dynamicallywith trends, events, season, and time of day. Our method uses a one-class support vector machine (OC-SVM) to detect the regions of substantial activity near target spots on the basis of tweets and photographs that have been explicitly geotagged. A tweet ...

Following an experiential framework, this research aims to disentangle the factors influencing tourist experiences in wetland parks in the context of an emerging economy. Specifically, this study tests the causal relationships among service quality, tourist experience, and revisit intention in relation to three popular wetland parks in Zhejiang, China. Consequently a series of on-site visitor s...

The Internet has disrupted traditional tourism in which a promising landscape of intelligent service provision has erupted by applying a new lattice of cutting-edge technologies. Thus, the different actors of the tourist services are in a new environment and they should operate in a coordinated manner to increase the value of tourism, to keep current tourists and attract new ones. One of the ma...

Seeking to shift the discussion of the concept of authenticity in tourism scholarship from the dominant concern with tourist experiences to the more sociological problem of the processes of authentication of tourist attractions, we conceptualize two analytically distinct, but practically often intersecting, modes of authentication of attractions, ‘‘cool’’ and ‘‘hot’’. Through a range of example...

The aims of the paper are two-fold, namely to analyse the seasonal patterns of tourist arrivals from South Korea to Australia, and to use econometric time series modelling to quantify the factors affecting the flow of international tourists between Australia and Korea. Estimates of the effects of changes in income, relative prices, exchange rates, seasonality and other factors are provided, and...

This paper introduces an approach of enhancing tourism web sites, giving the ability for such sites to be used as a tool to allow tourists to tag content of choice for downloading and viewing on their own mobile device whilst on visit. Tourists, upon installation to their mobile device, can view content material and a map of Mytilene (Lesvos, Greece) without the need to “connect” to any mobile ...