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User decision intuition is challenging and complex, even if the user and product are known. Thus, recommending products is a management decision with high degree of incertitude. What if we are facing also the cold-start problem, like new products or visitors? This is a hot topic in recommender systems, tackled in variously, successfully or not. This perspective adds more incertitude to the existing uncertain scenario. Our philosophy is the shift from a user-centric view, hit by uncertainty, to a company-centric one taken in certainty circumstances, later to apply win–win approaches. We propose a multi-criteria algorithm -MRS OZ- for an ecommerce site RS that tackles the cold-start differently. It uses Onicescu method, being adapted according to Zipf's Law, very popular in internet marketing. The paper opted for an exploratory research based on primary and secondary methods, consisting in literature review, 2-step survey addressed to 110 managers splat in 2 groups, and statistical analyses. The algorithm may substitute the human expertise on the given sample item list and criteria set. This work reveals that Onicescu method is suitable for recommender systems field, but relative inner category rankings and more domain related weight ratios strengthen the algorithm. Onicescu method has a wide applicability, but not for recommender systems. Also, the mixture with Zipf's Law is completely experimental in research area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how people move from one location to another is important both for smart city planners and destination managers. Big-data generated on social media sites have created opportunities for developing evidence-based insights that can be useful for decision-makers. While previous studies have introduced observational data analysis methods for social media data, there remains a need for method development—specifically for capturing people's movement flows and behavioural details. This paper reports a study outlining a new analytical method, to explore people's activities, behavioural, and movement details for people monitoring and planning purposes. Our method utilises online geotagged content uploaded by users from various locations. The effectiveness of the proposed method, which combines content capturing, processing and predicting algorithms, is demonstrated through a case study of the Fiji Islands. The results show good performance compared to other relevant methods and show applicability to national decisions and policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One major service provided by cloud computing is Software as a Service (SaaS). As competition in the SaaS market intensifies, it becomes imperative for a SaaS provider to design and configure its computing system properly. This paper studies the application placement problem encountered in computer clustering in SaaS networks. This problem involves deciding which software applications to install on each computer cluster of the provider and how to assign customers to the clusters in order to minimize total cost. Given the complexity of the problem, we propose two algorithms to solve it. The first one is a probabilistic greedy algorithm which includes randomization and perturbation features to avoid getting trapped in a local optimum. The second algorithm is based on a reformulation of the problem where each cluster is to be assigned an application configuration from a properly generated subset of configurations. We conducted an extensive computational study using large data sets with up to 300 customers and 50 applications. The results show that both algorithms outperform a standard branch-and-bound procedure for problem instances with large sizes. The probabilistic greedy algorithm is shown to be the most efficient in solving the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]