27879646
Location-Based Services for Tourism Industry: An Empirical Study
To cope with the fact of high competitiveness in tourism industry, some travel agencies are adopting the strategy of providing relatively more abundant and higher quality services to their clients. Since prior research has found that lack of information is one of the main barriers for people to travel, provide location-based information to people visiting and staying at a new location should be useful and valuable. This research attempts to find out travelers’ attitude toward location-based service (LBS). “What factors will affect the travelers’ willingness to adopt this new service” is what we tried to find out in this research. Our findings shows that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and security & privacy are associated with travelers’ attitude toward using LBS, but location information, context awareness, and device functions are not. Our findings can be referenced by tourism industry for the purpose of the design and development of successful business applications to catch the revolutionary opportunity and benefit of LBS.
33123897
Assessing users' product-specific knowledge for personalization in electronic commerce
While many electronic commerce (EC) companies are adopting one-to-one marketing approaches using various personalization technologies to make their products and services unique for the purpose of attracting and retaining customers and improving their completion edges in the EC ecosystem, which, nevertheless, has low entrance barriers for new players to join and further intensify the competition, none or few of them consider a fundamental issue-the user's product-specific knowledge. Our research proposed to add this new domain of the customer's knowledge on appropriate target products into the personalization process as a part of the overall EC strategy for businesses. In this paper, we present our initial design for assessing the user's product-specific knowledge using the proposed innovative method for detecting it directly in a non-intrusive way without asking users to answer or fill out any types of questionnaires. Our method is based on customer's on-line navigation behaviors by analyzing their navigation patterns through pre-trained artificial neural networks. An empirical study designed for a case of EC store selling digital cameras was conducted in our research to prove the concept, and a good preliminary result was derived from the study. For the purpose of comparing the performances between the conventional approach of using questionnaire and the proposed innovative approach of navigation pattern mining, a questionnaire based approach for evaluating the user's product-specific knowledge was designed and incorporated into our knowledge level assessment system (KLAS). Our study result shows that although the pure questionnaire-based KLAS is intrusive and may not be accepted by some users, for those users willing to complete the questionnaire, the proposed navigation pattern approach can be combined with the questionnaire-based approach to create a hybrid KLAS which has a significantly improved accuracy rate in detecting the customer's product knowledge level.
7920215
The design of a secure and pervasive multimodal Web system
While most users currently receive Web services from Web browser interfaces, pervasive computing is emerging and offering new ways of accessing Internet applications from any device at any location (Satyanarayanan, 2002; Estrin et al., 2002), by utilizing various modes of interfaces to interact with their end users. The PC and its back-end servers remain important in a pervasive system, and the technology could involve new ways of interfacing with a PC and/or various types of gateways to back-end servers. In this research, cellular phone was used as the pervasive device for accessing an Internet application prototype, a multimodal Web system (MWS), through voice user interface technology (Anerousis and Panagos, 2002). This paper describes how MWS was designed to provide a secure interactive voice channel using an Apache Web server, a voice server, and a Java servlet engine. It was also shown that multimodal user-interface pages can be generated by using XSLT stylesheet which transforms XML documents into various formats including XHTML, WML, and VoiceXML.
20494586
The implementation of a secure and pervasive multimodal Web system architecture
While most users currently access Web applications from Web browser interfaces, pervasive computing is emerging and offering new ways of accessing Internet applications from any device at any location, by utilizing various modes of interfaces to interact with their end users. The PC and its back-end servers remain important in a pervasive system, and the technology could involve new ways of interfacing with a PC and/or various types of gateways to back-end servers. In this research, cellular phone was used as the pervasive device for accessing an Internet application prototype, a multimodal Web system (MWS), through voice user interface technology. This paper describes how MWS was developed to provide a secure interactive voice channel using an Apache Web server, a voice server, and Java technology. Securing multimodal applications proves more challenging than securing traditional Internet applications. Various standards have been developed within a context of Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) platform to secure multimodal and wireless applications. In addition to covering these standards and their applicability to the MWS system implementation, this paper also shows that multimodal user-interface page can be generated by using XSLT stylesheet which transforms XML documents into various formats including XHTML, WML, and VoiceXML.
40241536
On the specification of dynamic visual languages
We study the dynamics of visual sentences produced during interaction between user and computer. Our approach states that the messages exchanged between the user and the computer not only should make explicit the current state of the interaction, but also the possible paths that it may take. We introduce the notion of "dynamic visual language" as a set of visual sentences characterised by the presence of a common frame which conveys the context in which users are operating. We present a formal model of derivation of dynamic visual sentences, in which each visual sentence specifies the possible actions which can be performed on it and the possible transformations it can go through. The concepts are illustrated by examples in visual navigation and visual querying.
780466
Picture information measures for similarity retrieval
Abstract A family of picture information measures based upon the concept of the minimum number of gray level changes to convert a picture into one with a desired histogram is presented. This family of picture information measures is found to satisfy a number of axions and useful inequalities. A natural extension to a Lorenz information measure is discussed. Based upon these information measures, a structural information measure can also be defined for logical pictures. Application to similarity retrieval in a pictoral information system are then suggested.
203669352
An Efficient Technique to Remove Transformations
Although the application of code transformations is critical to exploit parallelism in pro- gram code, few guidelines or tools are provided to deter- mine what transformations should be applied and where they should be applied. In this paper, we approach this problem by fist providing a taxonomy of code transfor- mations to assist the user in parallelizing programs. We then present an eficient technique to remove transforma- tionsfrom the code when it is determined that they are ineffective or prevent more beneficial transformations from being applied. The technique to remove transforma- tions employs inverse primitive actions, making it transformation independent. The technique uses the pro- gram dependence graph as the intermediate representa- tion, making it language independent.
36525017
Visual Communications
20860772
Video server retrieval scheduling for variable bit rate scalable video
In advanced multimedia networks, video servers with real time operating systems and high performance storage architectures will deliver multiple concurrent video streams to clients. The video server has a limited disk I/O bandwidth. This research presents a new framework for optimally utilizing the on board memory to alleviate the disk bandwidth bottleneck. The optimal utilization of the memory resource is achieved by using an optimal retrieval schedule for video data across the disk memory interface. The optimal retrieval schedule is directly applicable to video servers that are based on general storage architectures (e.g. RAID). Performance evaluation using real MPEG2 trace data verifies that this approach can provide large increases in the number of supported video streams.