Archive for the ‘Press’ category

Proposal Using Collaborative Filtering to Create a Win-Win-Win Situation and Engage People With UBS Has Been Awarded

January 24th, 2010

Amancio Bouza with the golden brain trophy

Amancio Bouza holding the golden brain trophy for his proposal using collaborative filtering to create a win-win-win, build trust for clients and engage clients with UBS

The Swiss banc UBS, one of the leading players in the global financial market, announced a contest on how Web 2.0 may help the UBS.
In particular UBS was looking for Web 2.0 concepts between 5 and 10 pages focusing on UBS client facing applications such as mobile or E-banking. In the contest description, the UBS described their daily business and main targets such as young urban people that participate already in the world Web 2.0 such as Facebook and Wikipedia, etc. . The participant were requested to hand in a proposal of how Web 2.0 can be applied to the UBS and provide explicit implementation details.

From my experience of the people interacting with the Web 2.0, I built the following user model:

  • like to share experiences and generate feedback
  • like to generate content and to contribute
  • want to be part of something bigger
  • trust other users more then experts based on the Wisdom of Crowds assumption
  • are intrinsic motivated
  • are connected everywhere and every time
  • do not honor guided help of experts or systems
  • want do discover and explore

Based on this user model, I described the challenges of client advisory in general, showed how collaborative filtering meets the user model of the Web 2.0 and how collaborative filtering faces these challenges to build trust between client and adviser, empower the client to explore new possibilities, create adequate personalized product and service bundles, etc. . In additon, I proposed an framework that extends the current advisory process with collaborative filtering.

Finally, my proposal on “Collaborative Filtering – A Driver to Enable Clients to Explore, Share Experience and Build Recommendations for Products & Services” has been announced by the UBS jury as one of the three winners.
Congratulations to the additional two winners:

In addition, it has been awarded with the golden brain trophy from Starmind, a platform where expert knowledge and solutions to specific problem are traded. My proposal has been evaluated by the UBS jury as “creates a win-win-win and trust for clients and engages client with UBS”.

Further information can be read on:

The contest has been announced on the 12th Web monday event in Zurich
On of the other winner published his proposal on “Go beyond ebanking of today

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IfI Student Enters Semi Finals in International User Interface Competition

April 9th, 2007
Knowledge graph

Knowledge graph

I’m proceeding to the next round in the Imagine Cup 2007 as 3 ranked team. Only 30 Teams with 1-2 persons had the chance to proceed to the next round. This 30 teams were elected by community voting. Only registered competitors were allowed to vote for other teams. No one could vote for his own team. The Imagine Cup consists of 7 categories and over 100′000 students from all around the world joined to compete.

Imagine the Wiki concept combined with Web 2.0 and let it become 2D. The knowledge of a Wiki or every other CMS is visualised as a topic map with nodes (e.g. article, person, knowledge entity, activity) and relations between them if they have a relation. You don’t see one article at once, you see the hole context of an article! You can directly add new articles in the topic map or knowledge browser and can directly paint relations between nodes. The topic map is rendered in hyperspace to focus on the nodes in the center of the screen. But you can use your mouse to move the hyperspace and the hole topic map (i.e. graph). The layout is calcualted in realtime with either a Spring model or a radial layout. In the spring model repulsive and attractive forces between nodes are calcualted to get a layout with minimum edge crossings etc. (graph layout heuristics). It looks really nice ; It runs on a Web browser and with Web 2.0 technologies (Ajax).

My mentor Benjamin promoted my currently successful participation in the Imagine Cup 2007 at the Department of Informatics at the University of Zurich. He published a news article about my current ranking (3rd rank) and proceeding to the semi finals:

Leaderboard of the Imagine Cup 2007. My team is called IfIface

Leaderboard of the Imagine Cup 2007. My team is called IfIface

IfI Student Enters Semi Finals in International User Interface Competition

IfI diploma student Amancio Bouza ranked 3rd in the user interface discipline to enter the semi-finals of Microsoft’s international computer science talent competition Imagine Cup. His successful contribution presents a novel AJAX powered user interface. The solution improves accessing and modifying graph based knowledge structures in an enterprise content management system. The user interface unites editing and browsing functions, and therefore will empower regular knowledge workers to view and change how knowledge is represented within their organization more easily.

The diploma thesis is currently under development with the Information Management Research Group at the IfI. Since Mr. Bouza seems to be the only Swiss participant in the competition, he hopefully will advance to the final round held this summer in Korea.

Published: 04.04.07

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The success of Students.ch is reported in CASH

December 4th, 2004

Success of the biggest online student community of Switzerland

Success of the biggest online student community of Switzerland

An article of Andi Gredig about Students.ch has been published in the 49th release of CASH, a Swiss economic newspaper. Although I’m not one of the founders, I’m on the picture (the 2nd person from right). The article is about the financial success of the biggest swiss student community Students.ch.
On the photo are from left to right: Gian Marco Laube, Adrian Bührer, Markus Okumus, Amancio Bouza (that’s me) and Frank Renold.