From Clicks to Conscious Choices: Investigating the Effects of Carbon Footprint Data in E-Commerce Recommender Systems

<br/>One of the contributing factors to climate change is the release of gases, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2), which is amplified by the expanding E-commerce industry. E-commerce enterprises heavily depend on recommender systems as a means to incentivize consumers towards making product purchases. This master's thesis investigates the...

An Exploration of Automatic Personality Classification Using Different Speech Styles

The field of speech-based Personality Computing classifies personality traits using speech data. There are two labelling methods for this: Automatic Personality Recognition (APR), using self-assessed personality scores, and Automatic Personality Perception (APP), using externally rated personality scores. Another aspect is whether the data is...

Nudging Towards Sustainable Choices via Recommender Systems

We all know the possible consequences of global warming, rising temperatures, flooded cities and destroyed ecosystems. One of the causes is the emission of gases, predominantly CO2, which is increased by the growing E-commerce market. E-commerce companies rely on recommender systems to stimulate users to purchase products. We are convinced that...

User/Query-wise Metric Bounding in Learning to Rank

Learning to Rank is the application of Machine Learning in order to create and optimize ranking functions. Most Learning to Rank methods follow a listwise approach and optimize a listwise loss function which closely resembles the same metric used in the evaluation. Popular listwise loss functions such as nDCG, AP and nRBP do not have consistent...

Predicting Near-Future Demand of Self-Storage Rooms

The value of data has increased enormously over the last couple of years. Many datasets contain valuable information that can, for example, be used to make forecasts. In this thesis, the dataset of a company in the self-storage industry is analyzed. The company offers customers rental storage facilities, such as lockers, rooms, containers at...

Visually grounded fine-grained speech representations learning

Visually grounded speech representation learning has shown to be useful in the field of speech representation learning. Studies of learning visually grounded speech embedding adopted speech-image cross-modal retrieval task to evaluate the models, since the cross-modal retrieval task allows to jointly learn both modalities and find their...

Link Prediction using Temporal Information in Multilayer Networks

There is an increasing attention towards link prediction in complex networks both in physical and computer science communities. Particularly Online Social Networks (OSNs) are<br/>becoming the most popular platforms for information sharing, content creation and communication between users on the Internet. However, most of the research was done...

Dealing with Ties in Rank Correlation

In the field of Information Retrieval (IR), rankings of systems evaluated under different conditions are often compared to each other. This measure of correspondence between rankings, termed as rank correlation, must accurately capture the scenario for which the correlation is computed. Very often, these rankings may have tied systems, for which...

Describing the language of the Dutch House of Representatives

Political content reaches civilians via social media more and more nowadays. This content is often biased and filtered depending on the user’s connections on social media. However, almost nobody watches actual debates or reads reports from the actual Dutch House of Representatives (DHoR), where the most influential decisions are made. With our...