16080551
Institutional trust and familiarity in online interorganizational relationships
Institutional trust is necessary for inter-organizational relationships in e-commerce. Two types of institutional trust are herein proposed (a) third-party institution-based trust, which deals with intermediary-driven structures, and (b) bilateral institutionalized trust, which deals with dyadic inter-organizational processes. We examine how these two types of institutional trust develop through their underlying dimensions (i) structural assurances, (ii) facilitating conditions, and (iii) situational normality. We focus on how interorganizational trust and online relationship building can be longitudinally facilitated by institutional trust, which can initially substitute and progressively complement the role of familiarity. More specifically, this study focuses on the time-dependent nature of initial trust formation, and specifically on the role of relationship phase (from exploration to maturity), by describing (a) the role of bilateral relative to third-party institutional trust on interorganizational trust, and (b) the transition of the underlying dimensions of institutional trust. This research has implications for (1) the longitudinal nature and role of institutional trust in online relationship building, (2) the literature on initial trust formation, and (3) the strategic design and use of cost-effective trust-building mechanisms.
31919378
A risk management of ASPs
Application service providers (ASPs) provide access to application software over wide area networks and have been viewed as a means of making the benefits of outsourcing available to small businesses. However, many enterprise ASPs get the majority of their revenue from very large businesses while many vertical niche ASPs get their revenue from small businesses. We analyze this seeming anomaly from a risk management perspective. ASPs present a greater risk management problem to would-be customers than traditional outsourcing. We analyze the nature of the risk differences and then propose a model of how would-be customers process those risks. In our model, prospects first assess whether they can tolerate the worst case scenario and if they are able to do due diligence on the likely outcome. They consider benefits only if one of the previous assertions is true. The worst case scenario for enterprise applications is truly dire and only technologically sophisticated businesses are better able to identify the true risk profile. For vertical niche ASPs the worst case scenario is relatively mild, but economies of scale make the benefits relatively more appealing to small businesses.
35355701
Methods and needs for transcoding MPEG-4 fine granularity scalability video
We discuss the methods and needs for transcoding MPEG-4 fine granularity scalability (FGS) video. FGS is a scalable video-coding technique recently adopted by the MPEG-4 compression standard. The main feature of FGS coding is that a part of the video bit stream, namely the enhancement layer, can be truncated at any desirable number of bits to support continuous quality/bit-rate scalability. However, not every decoder would support FGS functions and the coding efficiency of FGS video is known to be inferior to that of non-scalable video. This paper proposes methods for transcoding FGS video and restoring, as much as possible, the coding efficiency that is lost in FGS coding. In particular, it is shown that there are cases where extra gain of video quality is possible by exploiting the FGS enhancement layer in the transcoding process. To some extend, the proposed transcoding methods can support spatial scalability that is lacking in FGS coding. Experiments have been conducted and the results are reported to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed transcoding schemes for FGS video.
14496219
Optimal Processing Policies for an e-Commerce Web Server
The explosive growth in online shopping has provided online retailers impressive opportunities to extend revenue and profit. However, retailers may lose considerable online business from slow response times at electronic shopping sites. Although increasing server capacity may improve response time, the resources needed to do so are clearly not free. In this study, we propose a scheme that can improve a server's performance with no more than its current capacity. This scheme is based on priority processing, where the priority assigned to a customer depends on the potential revenue that is likely to be generated from the customer. The results for single-period analysis show that the benefit from priority processing increases as the server becomes more heavily utilized. 
 
We have also modeled a multiperiod version of the problem, where the demand in a period depends on the quality of service (QoS) that buyers receive in the previous period. In the multiperiod problem, both the server capacity and the processing policy in each period are determined optimally. Here, it may be optimal for the retailer to sacrifice profit and increase QoS in initial periods in order to increase demand (and revenue) in later periods. Thus, the processing policy of the server evolves from an emphasis on QoS in initial periods, to one on profit in subsequent periods.
27173472
Guest editorial
increasing relevance of security, safety and privacy issues 2 and of d the their perceived or subjective counterpartÈin IT and in particular on the web ; fact that trust is essential for any organization, or any human social d the relation, and thus should be maintained and created in new forms of computer supported collaboration and computer mediated communities ; fact that what is growing on the web is a new market, Electronic d the Commerce (EC), and since a market is mainly based on selÐsh interests, it is open to cheating and to competition between attractive alternatives. Hence, this new virtual market strongly requires trust in the chosen partner, trust in rules and procedures, trust in guaranties and enforcing authorities.
46672294
Guest editorial
Why model, analyze and build trust in the context of Agent-based systems? : An additional argument. One of the more interesting and relevant characteristics of the agent paradigm is the so-called autonomous behavior of the agent. We can say that almost each deÐnition of agent includes this concept of autonomy ; even if not always in the literature, this characteristic is so well deÐned and completely shared. In particular, an autonomous agent acts without the direct and complete intervention or control of any other agent (either user or software). More precisely, an autonomous agent can independently look for and acquire information, react to local contexts and events, have an evolving internal state, learn or evolve, and decide how and with whom to achieve a task that is not completely speciÐed. In general, when an agent has to collaborate with other agents to obtain its own goals (and this is in fact necessary for software agents that have limited resources and abilities, and operate in open and uncertain worlds), it should allocate (and receive allocation of) tasks to or by other agents. In sum, the characterization of an agent as autonomous and its need for collaboration with other agents to realize its own plans is one of the main reasons for introducing the notion of trust, analyzing its internal components, and adapting it to the various collaborative contexts. In this sense, to build an adequate model of trust would allow an agent (user) to evaluate
34798576
Video transcoding for fast forward/reverse video playback
Fast forward and fast reverse playbacks are two common video browsing functions provided in many analog and digital video players. They help users quickly find and access video segments of interest by scanning through the content of a video at a faster than normal playback speed. We propose a video transcoding approach to realizing fast forward and reverse video playbacks by generating a new compressed video from a pre-coded video. To reduce the computational requirements, we design and compare several fast algorithms for estimating the motion vectors required in transcoded video. To accommodate changes due to frame skipping for fast video playback, we also alter the group-of-pictures structure of transcoded video. In addition, subjective tests are conducted to assess the minimum video peak-signal-to-noise-ratio degradation that is perceptible to viewers at different fast playback speeds. To this end, we obtain an adaptive video transcoding method, which combines intra-coding and inter-coding with a fast motion vector reestimation method to strike a good balance between computational complexity and transcoded video quality. Experimental results are reported to show the efficacy of the proposed method.