Abstract
This paper reports the development of a B2B platform for the personalization of the publicity transmitted during the program intervals. The platform as a whole must ensure that the intervals are filled with ads compatible with the profile, context and expressed interests of the viewers. The platform acts as an electronic marketplace for advertising agencies (content producer companies) and multimedia content providers (content distribution companies). The companies, once registered at the platform, are represented by agents who negotiate automatically the price of the interval timeslots according to the specified price range and adaptation behaviour. The candidate ads for a given viewer interval are selected through a matching mechanism between ad, viewer and the current context (program being watched) profiles. The overall architecture of the platform consists of a multiagent system organized into three layers consisting of: (i) interface agents that interact with companies; (ii) enterprise agents that model the companies, and (iii) delegate agents that negotiate a specific ad or interval. The negotiation follows a variant of the Iterated Contract Net Interaction Protocol (ICNIP) and is based on the price/s offered by the advertising agencies to occupy the viewer's interval. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.

Abstract
This paper presents a platform for real and simulated autonomous sailing competitions, which can also be used as a research tool to test and assess navigation algorithms. The platform provides back-end services – competition server, boat modelling and data storage – and supports external browsers and software agents as front-end clients. The back-end adopts the Multi-Agent System (MAS) paradigm for the internal modelling of sailing boats and offers a Web Service Application Programming Interface (API) for the external software agents and a Web application for Web browsers. As a whole, the platform offers tracking (real competitions) and simulation (simulated competitions) modes. The testing and assessment of navigation algorithms and boat models correspond to private simulated competitions. In simulation mode, the back-end internal boat agent implements a simplified physical model, including the weight, sail area, angle of the sail and rudder, velocity and direction of the wind and position and velocity of the hull, whereas the front-end external boat agent implements the navigation algorithm on the team side, ensuring the privacy of strategic knowledge. The Web application allows the configuration and launching of competitions, the registration of teams and researchers, the uploading of boat physical features for simulation as well as the live or playback viewing of real and simulated competitions. The simulation mode is illustrated with the help of a case study. The proposed platform, which is open, scalable, modular and distributed, was designed for the research community to prepare, run and gather data from real and simulated autonomous sailing competitions.

Abstract

Abstract
Nowadays, not only the number of multimedia resources available is increasing exponentially, but also the crowd-sourced feedback volunteered by viewers generates huge volumes of ratings, likes, shares and posts/reviews. Since the data size involved surpasses human filtering and searching capabilities, there is the need to create and maintain the profiles of viewers and resources to develop recommendation systems to match viewers with resources. In this paper, we propose a personalised viewer profiling technique which creates individual viewer models dynamically. This technique is based on a novel incremental learning algorithm designed for stream data. The results show that our approach outperforms previous approaches, reducing substantially the prediction errors and, thus, increasing the accuracy of the recommendations. © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018.

Abstract
The scalable analysis of crowdsourced data repositories and streams has quickly become a critical experimental asset in multiple fields. It enables the systematic aggregation of otherwise disperse data sources and their efficient processing using significant amounts of computational resources. However, the considerable amount of crowdsourced social data and the numerous criteria to observe can limit analytical off-line and on-line processing due to the intrinsic computational complexity. This paper demonstrates the efficient parallelisation of profiling and recommendation algorithms using tourism crowdsourced data repositories and streams. Using the Yelp data set for restaurants, we have explored two different profiling approaches: entity-based and feature-based using ratings, comments, and location. Concerning recommendation, we use a collaborative recommendation filter employing singular value decomposition with stochastic gradient descent (SVD-SGD). To accurately compute the final recommendations, we have applied post-recommendation filters based on venue suitability, value for money, and sentiment. Additionally, we have built a social graph for enrichment. Our master-worker implementation shows super-linear scalability for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 concurrent instances.

Abstract
The widespread usage of smart devices and sensors together with the ubiquity of the Internet access is behind the exponential growth of data streams. Nowadays, there are hundreds of machine learning algorithms able to process high-speed data streams. However, these algorithms rely on human expertise to perform complex processing tasks like hyper-parameter tuning. This paper addresses the problem of data variability modelling in data streams. Specifically, we propose and evaluate a new parameter tuning algorithm called Self Parameter Tuning (SPT). SPT consists of an online adaptation of the Nelder & Mead optimisation algorithm for hyper-parameter tuning. The method explores a dynamic size sample method to evaluate the current solution, and uses the Nelder & Mead operators to update the current set of parameters. The main contribution is the adaptation of the Nelder-Mead algorithm to automatically tune regression hyper-parameters for data streams. Additionally, whenever concept drifts occur in the data stream, it re-initiates the search for new hyper-parameters. The proposed method has been evaluated on regression scenario. Experiments with well known time-evolving data streams show that the proposed SPT hyper-parameter optimisation outperforms the results of previous expert hyper-parameter tuning efforts. © 2018, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.