Dissertation (partially) Online

Part of my PhD dissertation is now online. I still keep Chapter 2 and 3 offline because a large part of their content is under review for publication in journals. The final chapter was certainly the most rewarding to write as I could finally sense the amount of work produced and discuss the perspectives of the overall contributions.

Rather than following a traditional PhD thesis format, my advisor and I decided to present my work with a multi-paper format. First because this format facilitates explaining the interplay of methodologies (conceptual, exploratory, qualitative, design science) I employed in my work. Indeed, I believe relying on several journal papers rather than on a very integrated monolith helps in disseminating the knowledge that links several research communities. Second, the recommendation and comments from the article reviewers helped me increase the maturity of my work during the PhD. Therefore, the thesis defense ended up being just a formality, since a good part of my work had been peer-reviewed and published. Finally, it spared me an extra 6 months of building an “artificial” theoretical model, potentially generating a 300 pages document, that I do not believe would have added any value to my contributions. One might argue that the dissertation needs a more comprehensive litterature review. In fact my Master’s thesis Towards reducing the social-technical gap in location-aware computing plays that role and I found wiser to reference it rather than remastering it.

Now, all of my published work is available for download (some papers are in pre-editing version) and I have uploaded the bibtex file storing the 409 references I collected along the path to the PhD degree.

Paper versions of the dissertation, submitted in May.