Abstract
Recommender systems position themselves as powerful tools in the support of relevance and personalization, presenting remarkable potential in the area of marketing. The cold-start customer problematic presents a challenge within this topic, leading to the need of distinguishing user features and preferences based on a restricted set of transactional information. This paper proposes a hybrid recommender system that aims to leverage transactional and portfolio information as indicating characteristics of customer behaviour. Four independent systems are combined through a parallelised weighted hybrid design. The first individual system utilises the price, target age, and brand of each product to develop a content-based recommender system, identifying item similarities. Secondly, a keyword-based content system uses product titles and descriptions to identify related groups of items. The third system utilises transactional data, defining similarity between products based on purchasing patterns, categorised as a collaborative model. The fourth system distinguishes itself from the previous approaches by leveraging association rules, using transactional information to establish antecedent and precedence relationships between items through a market basket analysis. Two datasets were analysed: product portfolio and transactional datasets. The product portfolio had 17,118 unique products and the included 4,408,825 instances from 2 June 2021 until 2 June 2022. Although the collaborative system demonstrated the best evaluation metrics when comparing all systems individually, the hybridisation of the four systems surpassed each of the individual systems in performance, with a 8.9% hit rate, 6.6% portfolio coverage, and with closer targeting of customer preferences and smaller bias.

Abstract
Current technological and market challenges increase the need for development of intelligent systems to support decision making, allowing managers to concentrate on high-level tasks while improving decision response and effectiveness. A Racing based learning module is proposed to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of a Multi-Agent System used to model the decision-making process on scheduling problems. A computational study is put forward showing that the proposed Racing learning module is an important enhancement to the developed Multi-Agent Scheduling System since it can provide more effective and efficient recommendations in most cases.

Abstract
Real world optimization problems like Scheduling are generally complex, large scaled, and constrained in nature. Thereby, classical operational research methods are often inadequate to efficiently solve them. Metaheuristics (MH) are used to obtain near-optimal solutions in an efficient way, but have different numerical and/or categorical parameters which make the tuning process a very time-consuming and tedious task. Learning methods can be used to aid with the parameter tuning process. Racing techniques have been used to evaluate, in a refined and efficient way, a set of candidates and discard those that appear to be less promising during the evaluation process. Case-based Reasoning (CBR) aims to solve new problems by using information about solutions to previous similar problems. A novel Racing+CBR approach is proposed and brings together the better of the two techniques. A computational study for the resolution of the scheduling problem is presented, concluding about the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Abstract
This paper presents the specification of an architecture for self-organizing scheduling systems. The proposed architecture uses learning by observing the experts and interpretation of scheduling experience. The design of intelligent systems that learn with experts is a very hard and challenging domain because current systems are becoming more and more complex and subject to rapid changes. In this work, different areas as Intelligent and Adaptive Human-Machine Interfaces, Metacognition and Learning from Observation, Self-managed Systems, amongst others, are joint together resulting in a global fully integrated architecture for self-organizing scheduling systems.

Abstract
In this paper a Cooperation Mechanism for Distributed Scheduling based on Bees based Computing is proposed. Where multiple self-interested agents can reach agreement over the exchange of operations on cooperative resources. Agents must collaborate to improve their local solutions and the global schedule. The proposed cooperation mechanism is able to analyze the scheduling plan generated by the Resource Agents and refine it by idle times reducing taking advantage from cooperative and the self-organized behavior of Artificial Bee Colony technique. The computational study allows concluding about statistical evidence that the cooperation mechanism influences significantly the overall system performance.

Abstract
This paper aims to provide a solution to a problem shared by online marketing platforms. Many of these platforms are exploited by spammers to ease their job of distributing spam. This can lead to platforms domains being black-listed by ISP’s, which translates to lower deliverability rates and consequently lower profits. Normally, platforms try to counter the problem by using rule-based systems, which require high-maintenance and are not easily editable. Additionally, since analysis occurs when a contact database is imported, the regular approach of judging messages’ contents directly is not an effective solution, as those do not yet exist. The proposed solution, a machine-learning based system for the classification of contact database’s importations, tries to surpass these aforementioned systems by making use of the capabilities introduced by machine-learning technologies, namely, reliability in regards to classification and ease of maintenance. Preliminary results show the legitimacy of this approach, since various algorithms can be successfully applied to it. The most proficient of the ones applied being Ada-boost and Random-forest. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.