Purpose The performance of behavioral targeting (BT) mainly relies on the effectiveness of user classification since advertisers always want to target their advertisements to the most relevant users. In this paper, the authors frame the BT as a user classification problem and describe a machine...

In concept, online communities allow people to access the wide range of knowledge and abilities of a heterogeneous group of users. In reality, current implementations of various online communities suffer from a lack of participation by the most qualified users. The participation of qualified...

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace thrive on the exchange of personal content such as pictures and activities. These sites are discovering that people's privacy preferences are very rich and diverse. In theory, providing users with more expressive settings to spec- ify their...

The search for an online product that matches e-shoppers’ needs and preferences can be frustrating andtime-consuming. Browsing large lists arranged in tree-like structures demands focused attention from eshoppers.Keyword search often results in either too many useless items (low precision) or...