Interface agents are computer programs that learn users’ preferences to provide them personalized assistance with their computer-based tasks. In order to personalize the interaction with users, interface agents must learn how to best interact with each user and how to provide them assistance of the right sort at the right time. Particularly, an interface agent has to discover when the user need...

Influential users play an important role in online social networks since users tend to have an impact on one other. Therefore, the proposed work analyzes users and their behavior in order to identify influential users and predict user participation. Normally, the success of a social media site is dependent on the activity level of the participating users. For both online social networking sites...

I thank Dean Martin for his very flattering introduction. I thank the College for bestowing a chair to me and the Mathematics Department for providing a wonderful atmosphere for my work. I thank Don Lewis and my current and former colleagues for their support. I take this opportunity to also thank my family, friends, and collaborators. My mathematical horizon has widened considerably after join...

We derive diierent representations of compact QED xed to Lan-dau gauge by the lattice Faddeev-Popov procedure. Our analysis nds that (A)Nielsen-Olesen vortices arising from the compactness of the gauge-xing action are quenched , that is, the Faddeev-Popov determinant cancels them out and they do not innuence correlation functions such as the photon propagator; (B)Dirac strings are responsible f...

Injecting drug users frequently use accident and emergency (A&E) departments to access emergency care for local and systemic infections. Clostridium novyi type A is a bacterium that has recently been associated with a number of fatalities among drug injecting addicts. The clinical course is described of a patient who attended an A&E department with septicaemia who was found at postmortem examin...