E-government services refer to services offered by governments using information technology (IT).... more E-government services refer to services offered by governments using information technology (IT). Many governments around the globe are investing heavily in IT to enhance service delivery to their citizens. However, citizens do not always use these services so that they often forgo their potential benefits because of key interconnected considerations that are perceived to transpire from their use. Over the years several studies examined IT adoption in e-government services contexts, building a rich albeit fragmented body of knowledge in the process. Indeed, the diversity found in these studies and the fast and continuous change that characterizes IT in general, make the identification and the synthesis of the main factors influencing citizens’ adoption of E-government services a relevant and timely endeavor. For this reason, this study builds on the findings of a systematic literature review to provide a high-level framework that conceptually structures the state of knowledge on the...
Governments can use social media platforms such as Twitter to disseminate health information to t... more Governments can use social media platforms such as Twitter to disseminate health information to the public, as evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic [Pershad (2018)]. The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of Canadian government and public health officials’ use of Twitter as a dissemination platform during the pandemic and to explore the public’s engagement with and sentiment towards these messages. We examined the account data of 93 Canadian public health and government officials during the first wave of the pandemic in Canada (December 31, 2019 August 31, 2020). Our objectives were to: 1) determine the engagement rates of the public with Canadian federal and provincial/territorial governments and public health officials’ Twitter posts; 2) conduct a hashtag trend analysis to explore the Canadian public’s discourse related to the pandemic during this period; 3) provide insights on the public’s reaction to Canadian authorities’ tweets through sentiment analysis....
Public Administration and Information Technology, 2017
Different frameworks related to policy-making analysis and policy modelling have been developed i... more Different frameworks related to policy-making analysis and policy modelling have been developed in the literature. These frameworks are generally spread across multidiscipline sciences like public policy; political science, computer science and social sciences. Policy Frameworks address general forms of theoretical analysis, by identifying the elements and their relationships. These elements can include for example: governance structure; policy process; stakeholders; and institutions structure. However, there is no standard categorization or classification for these frameworks. And with the growing development in the policy analytics and policy modelling, there is a rising need to review existing policy frameworks and develop categorization criteria able to classify frameworks concerned by policy-making analysis and policy modelling. This chapter will go through the main frameworks used in understanding the policy making process, in order to make a general overview frameworks for Policy analytics.
Citizens' participation is a form of democracy in which citizens are part of the decision-mak... more Citizens' participation is a form of democracy in which citizens are part of the decision-making process with regard to the development of their society. In today's emergence of Information and Communication Technologies, citizens can participate in these processes by submitting inputs through digital media such as social media platforms or dedicated websites. From these different means, a high quantity of data, of different forms (text, image, video), can be generated. This data needs to be processed in order to extract valuable data that can be used by a city's decision-makers. This paper presents natural language processing techniques to extract valuable information from comments posted by citizens. It applies the Latent Semantic Analysis on a corpus of citizens' comments to automatically identify the subjects that were raised by citizens.
People are more and more using social media to express themselves about the different services th... more People are more and more using social media to express themselves about the different services that their governments are delivering. They can either provide positive or negative comments on government services. Hence, it becomes important for policy-makers to have the necessary tools to extract this valuable knowledge in a comprehensive way and that they may consider in their decision-making processes. This paper provides a generic framework, based on semantic analysis of text, to extract valuable data from social media in order to provide new information for government policy-makers. The proposed framework is based on a text semantic analysis tool that collects data from social networks and extracts valuable data to be presented to government policy-makers. The proposed framework is applied to analyze Facebook posts from a page that is managed by citizens in Tunisia. This page aims to report various problems and issues occurring in Tunisian cities.
International Journal of E-Planning Research, 2018
Citizens' participation is a form of democracy in which citizens are part of the decision-mak... more Citizens' participation is a form of democracy in which citizens are part of the decision-making process with regard to the development of their society. In today's emergence of Information and Communication Technologies, citizens can participate in these processes by submitting inputs through digital media such as social media platforms or dedicated websites. From these different means, a high quantity of data, of different forms (text, image, video), can be generated. This data needs to be processed in order to extract valuable data that can be used by a city's decision-makers. This paper presents natural language processing techniques to extract valuable information from comments posted by citizens. It applies the Latent Semantic Analysis on a corpus of citizens' comments to automatically identify the subjects that were raised by citizens.
Un système multi-agent (SMA) est un système dans lequel plusieurs agents opèrent et interagissent... more Un système multi-agent (SMA) est un système dans lequel plusieurs agents opèrent et interagissent. Chaque agent a la responsabilité d'exécuter des tâches. Cependant, chaque agent, pour diverses raisons, peut rencontrer des problèmes pendant l'exécution de ses tâches ; ce qui peut induire un disfonctionnement du SMA. Cependant, le SMA doit être en mesure de détecter les sources de problèms (d'erreurs) afin de les contrôler et ainsi continuer son exécution correctement. Un tel SMA est appelé un SMA tolérant aux fautes. Il existe deux types de sources d'erreurs pour un agent : les erreurs causées par son environnment et les erreurs dûes à sa programmation. Dans la littérature, il existe plusieurs techniques qui traitent des erreurs de programmation au niveau des agents. Cependant, ces techniques ne traitent pas des erreurs causées par l'environnement de l'agent. Tout d'abord, nous distinguons entre l'environnment d'un agent et l'environnement du ...
MAS failures are not only due to programming exceptions; they may originate from other sources su... more MAS failures are not only due to programming exceptions; they may originate from other sources such as the environment of the MAS which may influence the MAS' behavior. Furthermore, MAS faulttolerant techniques based on agent replication cannot always be applied to a MAS. For example, it is not always possible to replicate a costly robot in a robotic MAS application. In this paper, we propose a reorganization strategy, based on both task and agent replication, to enable a MAS to detect and recover from its failures. Our strategy is different from those presented in the literature, which are based on agent replication, since it does not deal with programming faults but with failures originating from the MAS environment, and it is based on task and agent replication and not only on agent replication. Our strategy is scalable and is robust in detecting agents failure.
This research project aims to explore the socio-cognitive determinants of the organizational adop... more This research project aims to explore the socio-cognitive determinants of the organizational adoption of artificial intelligence based chatbot by insurance companies. Technological frame and reception of organizing vision are used as conceptual foundations. A mixed method approach consisting of qualitative interviews and a quantitative questionnaire will serve as input to a Fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Main expected contribution is an understanding of the combined effect of technological frame and reception of organizing vision on organizational adoption of information technology.
Stakeholders’ Participation (SP) aims to involve stakeholders in decision-making processes about ... more Stakeholders’ Participation (SP) aims to involve stakeholders in decision-making processes about significant choices affecting their organizations, cities, or communities. Stakeholders’ participation is maintained through SP processes (SPPs) that may be traditional (e.g., physical assemblies) or online (e.g., online forums). Whether traditional or online, the purpose of SPPs is to collect and analyze data in a way that it would bring a benefit to a given decision-making process. In SPPs, stakeholders try to communicate (a part of) their living contexts, i.e., to present their objectives, daily problems, intentions, and issues they are facing within their environment. A major challenge of decision-makers is then to ensure that the living contexts of stakeholders are considered in SPPs for an effective implementation of project and policies. This paper focuses on the specific issue of the “stakeholders’ living context identification” and attempts to account for how stakeholders implic...
One of the main issues that have to be considered before the conception of context-aware recommen... more One of the main issues that have to be considered before the conception of context-aware recommender systems is the estimation of the relevance of contextual information. Indeed, not all user interests are the same in all contextual situations, especially for the case of a mobile environment. In this paper, we introduces a multi-dimensional context model for music recommender systems that solicits users' perceptions to define the relationship between their judgment of items relevance and contextual dimensions. We have started by the acquisition of explicit items rating from a population in various possible contextual situations. Next, we have applied the Multi Linear Regression technique on users' perceived ratings, to define an order of importance between contextual dimensions and generate the multi-dimensional context model. We summarized key results and discussed findings that can be used to build an effective mobile context-aware music recommender system.
Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data Age, 2018
The concept of smart city is considered as the new engine for economic and social growths since i... more The concept of smart city is considered as the new engine for economic and social growths since it is supported by the rapid development of information and communication technologies. However, each technology not only brings its advantages, but also the challenges that cities have to face in order to implement it. So, this paper addresses two research questions : « What are the most important technologies that drive the development of smart cities ?» and « what are the challenges that cities will face when adopting these technologies ? » Relying on a literature review of studies published between 1990 and 2017, the ensuing results show that Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things represent the most used technologies for smart cities. So, the focus of this paper will be on these two technologies by showing their advantages and their challenges.
This paper considers a centralized procurement auction in which shippers simultaneously submit th... more This paper considers a centralized procurement auction in which shippers simultaneously submit their transportation requests to a set of carriers. The latter compete by submitting combinatorial bids on shippers' requests. Winning bids are determined based not only on ask prices, but also on carriers' reputation that may differ from one shipper to another. Three approaches are proposed to solve the problem. Our results show that considering carriers' reputation in centralized auctions leads to considerable savings in total costs. Also, choosing the appropriate approach closely depends on the shippers' past experience with the participating carriers, their weight in the auction and their perception of centralization.
E-government services refer to services offered by governments using information technology (IT).... more E-government services refer to services offered by governments using information technology (IT). Many governments around the globe are investing heavily in IT to enhance service delivery to their citizens. However, citizens do not always use these services so that they often forgo their potential benefits because of key interconnected considerations that are perceived to transpire from their use. Over the years several studies examined IT adoption in e-government services contexts, building a rich albeit fragmented body of knowledge in the process. Indeed, the diversity found in these studies and the fast and continuous change that characterizes IT in general, make the identification and the synthesis of the main factors influencing citizens’ adoption of E-government services a relevant and timely endeavor. For this reason, this study builds on the findings of a systematic literature review to provide a high-level framework that conceptually structures the state of knowledge on the...
Governments can use social media platforms such as Twitter to disseminate health information to t... more Governments can use social media platforms such as Twitter to disseminate health information to the public, as evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic [Pershad (2018)]. The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of Canadian government and public health officials’ use of Twitter as a dissemination platform during the pandemic and to explore the public’s engagement with and sentiment towards these messages. We examined the account data of 93 Canadian public health and government officials during the first wave of the pandemic in Canada (December 31, 2019 August 31, 2020). Our objectives were to: 1) determine the engagement rates of the public with Canadian federal and provincial/territorial governments and public health officials’ Twitter posts; 2) conduct a hashtag trend analysis to explore the Canadian public’s discourse related to the pandemic during this period; 3) provide insights on the public’s reaction to Canadian authorities’ tweets through sentiment analysis....
Public Administration and Information Technology, 2017
Different frameworks related to policy-making analysis and policy modelling have been developed i... more Different frameworks related to policy-making analysis and policy modelling have been developed in the literature. These frameworks are generally spread across multidiscipline sciences like public policy; political science, computer science and social sciences. Policy Frameworks address general forms of theoretical analysis, by identifying the elements and their relationships. These elements can include for example: governance structure; policy process; stakeholders; and institutions structure. However, there is no standard categorization or classification for these frameworks. And with the growing development in the policy analytics and policy modelling, there is a rising need to review existing policy frameworks and develop categorization criteria able to classify frameworks concerned by policy-making analysis and policy modelling. This chapter will go through the main frameworks used in understanding the policy making process, in order to make a general overview frameworks for Policy analytics.
Citizens' participation is a form of democracy in which citizens are part of the decision-mak... more Citizens' participation is a form of democracy in which citizens are part of the decision-making process with regard to the development of their society. In today's emergence of Information and Communication Technologies, citizens can participate in these processes by submitting inputs through digital media such as social media platforms or dedicated websites. From these different means, a high quantity of data, of different forms (text, image, video), can be generated. This data needs to be processed in order to extract valuable data that can be used by a city's decision-makers. This paper presents natural language processing techniques to extract valuable information from comments posted by citizens. It applies the Latent Semantic Analysis on a corpus of citizens' comments to automatically identify the subjects that were raised by citizens.
People are more and more using social media to express themselves about the different services th... more People are more and more using social media to express themselves about the different services that their governments are delivering. They can either provide positive or negative comments on government services. Hence, it becomes important for policy-makers to have the necessary tools to extract this valuable knowledge in a comprehensive way and that they may consider in their decision-making processes. This paper provides a generic framework, based on semantic analysis of text, to extract valuable data from social media in order to provide new information for government policy-makers. The proposed framework is based on a text semantic analysis tool that collects data from social networks and extracts valuable data to be presented to government policy-makers. The proposed framework is applied to analyze Facebook posts from a page that is managed by citizens in Tunisia. This page aims to report various problems and issues occurring in Tunisian cities.
International Journal of E-Planning Research, 2018
Citizens' participation is a form of democracy in which citizens are part of the decision-mak... more Citizens' participation is a form of democracy in which citizens are part of the decision-making process with regard to the development of their society. In today's emergence of Information and Communication Technologies, citizens can participate in these processes by submitting inputs through digital media such as social media platforms or dedicated websites. From these different means, a high quantity of data, of different forms (text, image, video), can be generated. This data needs to be processed in order to extract valuable data that can be used by a city's decision-makers. This paper presents natural language processing techniques to extract valuable information from comments posted by citizens. It applies the Latent Semantic Analysis on a corpus of citizens' comments to automatically identify the subjects that were raised by citizens.
Un système multi-agent (SMA) est un système dans lequel plusieurs agents opèrent et interagissent... more Un système multi-agent (SMA) est un système dans lequel plusieurs agents opèrent et interagissent. Chaque agent a la responsabilité d'exécuter des tâches. Cependant, chaque agent, pour diverses raisons, peut rencontrer des problèmes pendant l'exécution de ses tâches ; ce qui peut induire un disfonctionnement du SMA. Cependant, le SMA doit être en mesure de détecter les sources de problèms (d'erreurs) afin de les contrôler et ainsi continuer son exécution correctement. Un tel SMA est appelé un SMA tolérant aux fautes. Il existe deux types de sources d'erreurs pour un agent : les erreurs causées par son environnment et les erreurs dûes à sa programmation. Dans la littérature, il existe plusieurs techniques qui traitent des erreurs de programmation au niveau des agents. Cependant, ces techniques ne traitent pas des erreurs causées par l'environnement de l'agent. Tout d'abord, nous distinguons entre l'environnment d'un agent et l'environnement du ...
MAS failures are not only due to programming exceptions; they may originate from other sources su... more MAS failures are not only due to programming exceptions; they may originate from other sources such as the environment of the MAS which may influence the MAS' behavior. Furthermore, MAS faulttolerant techniques based on agent replication cannot always be applied to a MAS. For example, it is not always possible to replicate a costly robot in a robotic MAS application. In this paper, we propose a reorganization strategy, based on both task and agent replication, to enable a MAS to detect and recover from its failures. Our strategy is different from those presented in the literature, which are based on agent replication, since it does not deal with programming faults but with failures originating from the MAS environment, and it is based on task and agent replication and not only on agent replication. Our strategy is scalable and is robust in detecting agents failure.
This research project aims to explore the socio-cognitive determinants of the organizational adop... more This research project aims to explore the socio-cognitive determinants of the organizational adoption of artificial intelligence based chatbot by insurance companies. Technological frame and reception of organizing vision are used as conceptual foundations. A mixed method approach consisting of qualitative interviews and a quantitative questionnaire will serve as input to a Fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Main expected contribution is an understanding of the combined effect of technological frame and reception of organizing vision on organizational adoption of information technology.
Stakeholders’ Participation (SP) aims to involve stakeholders in decision-making processes about ... more Stakeholders’ Participation (SP) aims to involve stakeholders in decision-making processes about significant choices affecting their organizations, cities, or communities. Stakeholders’ participation is maintained through SP processes (SPPs) that may be traditional (e.g., physical assemblies) or online (e.g., online forums). Whether traditional or online, the purpose of SPPs is to collect and analyze data in a way that it would bring a benefit to a given decision-making process. In SPPs, stakeholders try to communicate (a part of) their living contexts, i.e., to present their objectives, daily problems, intentions, and issues they are facing within their environment. A major challenge of decision-makers is then to ensure that the living contexts of stakeholders are considered in SPPs for an effective implementation of project and policies. This paper focuses on the specific issue of the “stakeholders’ living context identification” and attempts to account for how stakeholders implic...
One of the main issues that have to be considered before the conception of context-aware recommen... more One of the main issues that have to be considered before the conception of context-aware recommender systems is the estimation of the relevance of contextual information. Indeed, not all user interests are the same in all contextual situations, especially for the case of a mobile environment. In this paper, we introduces a multi-dimensional context model for music recommender systems that solicits users' perceptions to define the relationship between their judgment of items relevance and contextual dimensions. We have started by the acquisition of explicit items rating from a population in various possible contextual situations. Next, we have applied the Multi Linear Regression technique on users' perceived ratings, to define an order of importance between contextual dimensions and generate the multi-dimensional context model. We summarized key results and discussed findings that can be used to build an effective mobile context-aware music recommender system.
Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data Age, 2018
The concept of smart city is considered as the new engine for economic and social growths since i... more The concept of smart city is considered as the new engine for economic and social growths since it is supported by the rapid development of information and communication technologies. However, each technology not only brings its advantages, but also the challenges that cities have to face in order to implement it. So, this paper addresses two research questions : « What are the most important technologies that drive the development of smart cities ?» and « what are the challenges that cities will face when adopting these technologies ? » Relying on a literature review of studies published between 1990 and 2017, the ensuing results show that Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things represent the most used technologies for smart cities. So, the focus of this paper will be on these two technologies by showing their advantages and their challenges.
This paper considers a centralized procurement auction in which shippers simultaneously submit th... more This paper considers a centralized procurement auction in which shippers simultaneously submit their transportation requests to a set of carriers. The latter compete by submitting combinatorial bids on shippers' requests. Winning bids are determined based not only on ask prices, but also on carriers' reputation that may differ from one shipper to another. Three approaches are proposed to solve the problem. Our results show that considering carriers' reputation in centralized auctions leads to considerable savings in total costs. Also, choosing the appropriate approach closely depends on the shippers' past experience with the participating carriers, their weight in the auction and their perception of centralization.
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Papers by Sehl Mellouli