bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Critical Realism as an Underlying Philosophy for IS Research
Authors: Dobson Philip J.
Published: May 2011

Many recent articles from within the information systems (IS) arena present an old-fashioned view of realism. For example, Iivari, Hirschheim, and Klein (1998) saw classical realism as seeing “data as describing objective facts, information systems as consisting of technological structures (‘hardware’), human beings as subject to causal laws (determinism), and organizations as relatively stable structures” (p. 172). Wilson (1999) saw the realist perspective as relying on “the availability of a set of formal constraints which have the characteristics of abstractness, generality, invariance across contexts.” Fitzgerald and Howcroft (1998) presented a realist ontology as one of the foundational elements of positivism in discussing the polarity between hard and soft approaches in IS. Realism is placed alongside positivist, objectivist, etic epistemologies and quantitative, confirmatory, deductive, laboratory-focussed and nomothetic methodologies. Such a traditional view of realism is perhaps justified within the IS arena, as it reflects the historical focus of its use, however, there now needs to be a greater recognition of the newer forms of realism—forms of realism that specifically address all of the positivist leanings emphasised by Fitzgerald and Howcroft (1998). A particular example of this newer form of realism is critical realism. This modern realist approach is primarily founded on the writings of the social sciences philosopher Bhaskar (1978, 1979, 1986, 1989, 1991). The usefulness of such an approach has recently been recognized in the IS arena by Dobson (2001) and Mingers (2002).
Culture and Anonymity in GSS Meetings
Authors: Limayem Moez , Hendaoui Adel
Published: May 2011

Managers spend a considerable part of their work time in meetings participating in group decision making. Group support systems (GSSs) are adopted in a variety of group settings?from within-organization team to multi-organization collaboration teams (Ackermann, Franco, Gallupe, & Parent, 2005)?to aid the decision-making process (Briggs, Nunamaker, & Sprague, 1998). A key characteristic of GSSs is anonymity, which improves various aspects of group performance, including improving group participation and communication, objectively evaluating ideas, and enhancing group productivity and the decision-making process (Nunamaker, Dennis, Valacich, Vogel, & George, 1991; Pinsonneault & Heppel, 1997; Postmes & Lea, 2000). Anonymity, as a distinct aspect of GSSs, was expected to increase productivity by reducing the level of social or production blocking, increasing the number of interpersonal exchanges, and reducing the probability of any one member dominating the meeting (Newby, Soutar, & Watson, 2003). For example, Barreto and Ellemers (2002) manipulated two aspects of anonymity separately: visibility of respondents (i.e., participants could or could not see who the other group members were) and visibility of responses (participants could or could not see the responses given by other group members). Results show that when group identification is low, anonymity manipulations affect group members’ effort. Similarly, in their experiment, Reinig and Mejias (2004) found that anonymous groups produced more critical comments than identified groups did at the group level of analysis. Numerous empirical findings have suggested that the use of anonymity and process structure in electronic brainstorming (EBS) generally promotes a positive effect on the number of ideas generated (Jessup, Connolly, & Galegher, 1990; Gallupe, Bastianutti, & Cooper, 1991) and quality of ideas achieved in decision making (Zigurs & Buckland, 1998). However, the anonymity function inherent in multiworkstation GSSs has been found to heighten conflict as members tend to communicate more aggressively because they tend to be more critical (Connolly, Jessup, & Valacich, 1990; Jessup, Connolly, & Tansik, 1990; Valacich, Jessup, Dennis, & Nunamaker, 1992), to have no effects on inhibition (Valacich, Dennis, & Connoly, 1994; Valacich et al., 1992), to increase group polarization (Sia, Tan, & Wei, 2002), and to have no effects on group performance (Valacich et al., 1994). Other studies show that, in terms of effectiveness, nominal brainstorming may be equal to (Gallupe et al., 1991; Cooper, Gallupe, Pollard, & Cadsby, 1998; Barki & Pinsonneault, 2001) or sometimes less than (Valacich et al., 1994; Dennis & Valacich, 1993) electronic brainstorming, indicating that at least as far as laboratory studies are concerned, empirical investigations have been inconclusive.
Design and Implementation of Scenario Management Systems
Authors: Ahmed M. Daud , Sundaram David
Published: May 2011

Scenarios have been defined in many ways, for example, a management tool for identifying a plausible future (Porter, 1985; Schwartz, 1991; Ringland, 1998; Tucker, 1999; Alter, 1983) and a process for forward-looking analysis. A scenario is a kind of story that is a focused description of a fundamentally different future (Schoemaker, 1993), that is plausibly based on analysis of the interaction of a number of environmental variables (Kloss, 1999), that improves cognition by organizing many different bits of information (De Geus, 1997; Wack, 1985; van der Heijden, 1996), and that is analogous to a “what if” story (Tucker, 1999). It can be a series of events that could lead the current situation to a possible or desirable future state. Scenarios are not forecasts (Schwartz, 1991), future plans (Epstein, 1998), trend analyses, or analyses of the past. Schoemaker (1993) also explains that scenarios are for strategy identification rather than strategy development. Fordham and Malafant (1997) observe that decision scenarios allow the policymaker to anticipate and understand risk, and to discover new options for action. Ritson (1997) agrees with Schoemaker (1995) and explains that scenario planning scenarios are situations planned against known facts and trends, but deliberately structured to enable a wide range of options and to track the key triggers that would precede a given situation or event within the scenario. In this article we propose an operational definition of scenarios that enables us to manage and support scenarios in a coherent fashion. This is then followed by an in-depth analysis of the management of scenarios at the conceptual level as well as at the framework level. The article goes on to discuss the realization of such a framework through a component-based layered architecture that is suitable for implementation as an n-tiered system. We end with a discussion on current and future trends.
Distributed Systems for Virtual Museums
Authors: Antón-Rodríguez Míriam , Díez-Higuera José-Fernando , Díaz-Pernas Francisco-Javier
Published: May 2011

The Internet has meant a social revolution, changing forever the way we communicate and how we access to the information. The growing expansion of technology and the development of easier applications have given as a result the high level of popularity achieved by Internet related services, especially the World Wide Web. Using a hypertext system, Web users can select and read in their computers information from all around the world, with no other requirement than an Internet connection and a browser. For a long time, the information available on the Internet has been a series of written texts and 2D pictures (i.e., static information). This sort of information suited many publications, but it was highly unsatisfactory for others, like those related to objects of art, where real volume and interactivity with the user, are of great importance. Here, the possibility of including 3D information in Web pages makes real sense. As we become an increasingly visual society, a way to maintain heritage is to adapt museums to new times. The possibility of not only visiting and knowing the museums nearby but also enabling anybody to visit the building from their homes could be enabled. This would imply the incorporation of the virtual reality (Kim, 2005; Vince, 2004), although today only a few museums allow this kind of visit via Internet. In virtual reality, human actions and experiences that interact with the real world are emulated although, obviously, with some limitations. With virtual reality, the user could walk, examine, and interact with the environment, in contrast to traditional media like television that present excellent graphics but lack interactivity. Although this is not a new idea, it is achieving a wider expression due to the availability of software standards like VRML and X3D. VRML, virtual reality modeling language (Carey, Bell, & Marrin, 1997) is a widespread language for the description of 3D scenes and WWW hyperlinks (an analogy of the HTML for virtual reality). X3D, Extensible 3D (Web3D Consortium, 2004) is the successor of VRML, it is intended to be the universal interchange format for integrated 3D graphics and multimedia. VRML/X3D are, perhaps, most interesting to Internet users eager to discover new interesting sites on the Internet, and for the people that use it like a hobby, but those could also allow us to see a 3D artifact from any angle and perspective, to turn it in any way, manipulate it (Lepouras & Vassilakis, 2005; Petridis et al., 2005)—something totally forbidden in a real museum. This work deals with the design of a system, which allows this interactive Web access to works of art in 3D, as a step in a research project dealing with the design and implementation of a virtual and interactive museum in 3D on the Web. Also, all the associated information like history, architectural data, archaeological data, and culture will be available at the click of a mouse.
From E-Governance Towards E-Societal Management
Authors: Costake Nicolae
Published: May 2011

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the definition of the still emerging strategic concept of e-societal management (e-SM) as a key component of the information society (IS). It is a continuation of articles published in the Encyclopedia of Digital Government (Antiroikko, 2006; see also, Costake, 2008a, 2008b) which describe the concepts of: (1) e-government (e-Gvt) as a set of e-services provided by the public administration (i.e., executive authority) to citizens and organizations, and (2) e-governance (e-G) as including also the set of e-services provided by the judicial and legislative authorities of the state. The two quoted chapters contain the historical perspectives mainly between the mid-1990s (e.g., G7 Conference on Information Society, 1995) and the mid 2000s (e.g., the EU’s i2010 Program, 2006). The above definition of e-G may be interpreted also as equivalent to the e-SM at the country level and below, provided that the actions of the three authorities converge to assure continuous and sustainable socio-economic development. On the other hand, the new century started with increased global threats and also opportunities (e.g., the development of the IS). Both suggest the importance of the societal management, as well as the difference between enterprise management, which aims to achieve performance within a given national and international societal environment, and societal management, which aims to assure the societal environment best supporting developments of the economy and civilization. It follows that the historical development of e-SM is connected to the rather slow evolution of SM and the rapidly developing IS, including e-Gvt and e-G. Its start can be considered the UN General Assembly’s Declaration on Computer and Development (UN, 1968), followed by the UN’s World Summit for the IS (e.g., WSIS, 2005), which adopted requirements for national and international e-SM (implicitly addressed). E-procurement for public acquisitions, the “Trans-European Administration Network” recommended for the EU by Bangemann et al. (1994), and the start of the Single Euro Payment Area project in 2002 (see SEPA, 2007, which contains complete chronology and content) are examples of other relevant milestones. E-SM is a concept built on those of socio-economic system (SES) and societal management. Many opinions were expressed. This article begins by sketching a model of the socioeconomic system as a foundation; selects, with the risk of being subjective, a number of relevant positions taken by individual institutional and authors; describes e-SM and its associated issues and trends; and proposes conclusions.
E-Learning Adaptability and Social Responsibility
Authors: Remtulla Karim A.
Published: May 2011

The global, knowledge-based economy is causing rapid change when it comes to workforce composition and the nature and character of work itself. At the same time, ‘e-learning’ is increasingly positioned as the panacea for workplace learning needs for a transforming workplace and the global, knowledge-based economy (Industry Canada, 2005; Rohrbach, 2007). In this information age of intense political, social, technological, and environmental upheaval, do organizations bear any social responsibility towards their employees when mandating workplace learning from their employees through e-learning? The International Organization for Standardization (ISO, 2007a) specifies four key areas that all organizations need to pay heed to for ‘social responsibility’ to be accomplished: “environment; human rights and labor practices; organizational governance and fair operating practices; and, consumer issues and community involvement/society development” (para. 6). Accordingly, given the criteria of “organizational governance and fair operating practices,” this article argues for e-learning adaptability as a burgeoning social responsibility in the workplace, when thinking about workplace learning, by discussing: (a) the workforce diversity, and other workplace changes, that increasingly challenge the current approaches to e-learning at work; and then, (b) highlights the e-learning adaptability framework (Remtulla, 2007) as one methodology to assess and enable e-learning adaptability to meet this social responsibility for the benefit of a global workforce.
Envisaging Business Integration in the Insurance Sector
Authors: Santana Silvina , Amorim Vítor
Published: May 2011

Data, information and knowledge are the heart of the insurance business. Each policy is composed of a set of data that can vary substantially. Risk management is a complex process that implies the availability of rich and accurate information and knowledge. In our fast moving world, connectivity and articulation between insurance industry players is therefore mandatory. Information and communication systems and technology (ICST) can provide this connectivity, allowing insurance partners to become closer and able to reach better negotiation, reducing response time and costs and probably creating new business opportunities (Strazewski, 2001). Insurance intermediaries (brokers and agents) are important players in this scenario. They act as consultants operating independently from insurance companies, being specialists in providing services to their clients, gathering the best solutions thanks to their vast knowledge of insurance companies’ products. Consequently, they achieve the best insurance contracts at the least cost (APROSE, 2005a, 2005b). Being a great value-adding activity, insurance mediation is also very complex. To operate in an effective and efficient way, intermediaries need to establish a good connection with all entities in the industry and electronic business can help insurance intermediaries’ business model in both business- to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) dimensions. In B2B, intermediaries establish relations with insurance companies, agents, banks and official entities. In B2C, intermediaries establish relations with their clients, giving them all the necessary assistance in a customized and fast way, since the first contact and during the policy’s whole life cycle, offering the best solutions according to their needs. However, in spite of all the apparent and potential benefits, intermediaries are not grasping all the advantages that electronic business can provide. This definitely relates to a very important issue, the integration level between the different players’ information systems. Analysing the situation from the intermediary perspective, this article exposes the problems faced by intermediaries and insurance companies all over the world when trying to integrate their business electronically and how these can be overcome so that partners can fully benefit from the opportunities here identified. The methodology used includes a deep case study involving a Portuguese intermediary having a significant level of integration with an insurance company. Results are compared with situations reported in other countries, leading to the conclusion that most of the problems and barriers here identified are being experienced worldwide. Conclusions bring significant implications for information science and technology (IS&T) and add important contribution and knowledge to research in this area.
Executive Judgement in E-Business Strategy
Authors: Baker Valerie , Coltman Tim
Published: May 2011

One of the main strategic challenges for organizations today is to effectively manage change and stay competitive in the future. Change appears to be the only constant in contemporary business and is present in every industry and in every country (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1998). Moreover, the key area of importance, current within many organizations, is how to effectively leverage technology within such a complex and dynamic business environment (Sauer & Willcocks, 2003). The alignment or fit approach, which has its roots in contingency theory, has long been promoted as the way to get high returns from technology investment. However, the realization of advantage from the Internet and related e-business technology investment has long been a source of frustration for corporate executives. Impressive performance returns by companies such as Dell Computers, Cisco Systems and General Electric illustrate that returns can be achieved by linking the Internet and related e-business technologies to firm strategy. These companies have shown that successful management of their IT investments can generate returns as much as 40% higher than those of their competitors (Ross & Weill, 2002). Yet, many executives view the Internet and related e-business technologies with intense frustration. They recollect investment in the great speculative bubble of the 1990s and excessive expenditure on year 2000 (Y2K) compliant systems (Keen, 2002). They recall high profile examples of botched enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that have consistently run over time and budget and report that customer-relationship management (CRM) initiatives were largely a flop (Reinartz & Chugh, 2002). Unfortunately, it is not yet clear how firms should go about capturing the potential that exists in e-business, as few normative frameworks exist to guide practitioner investment.
Exploiting Context in Mobile Applications
Authors: Poulcheria Benou
Published: May 2011

Pervasive computing is nowadays becoming a reality, exploiting the capabilities offered by both computing infrastructure and communication facilities. The pervasive computing environment encompasses a multitude of diverse devices, operating systems, protocols, and standards. It includes mobile devices such as cellular phones, smart phones, PDAs, and handheld computers for information access, smart cards, and smart labels for identification and authentication, smart sensors, and actuators that perceive the surroundings and react accordingly. Voice technologies such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), text to speech (TTS) and VoiceXML enable the construction of convenient user interfaces and Web services are a key mechanism for interoperability. Wireless wide area networking allows long distance communication through cellular radio while wireless local and personal area networking and standards such as the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and IrDA allow short distance communication through radio waves and infrared beams. In the mobile and pervasive computing environment, software engineering should not treat diversity and mobility as problems to overcome, but seek methods of which it could take advantage instead. In these environments, the selection of purpose-oriented and timely information, tailored to user preferences and media characteristics will ensure optimised information delivery. To this end, the context—the information that surrounds the human-computer interaction—plays a key role and is rapidly changing in mobile settings, and the understanding of it is indispensable for application designers in order to choose, capture and exploit it. The importance of the context is to use it to make context-aware applications, that is, those applications that are interested in who, where, when and what, in order to determine why the situation occurs and adapt their behavior accordingly.
Facilitating Roles an E-Instructor Undertakes
Authors: Chang Ni
Published: May 2011

A discussion of roles that an instructor plays in the traditional classroom does not seem to be an innovative focus in the educational field. Yet, such discussions continue because of the topic’s paramount impact on student learning. Discussions regarding the roles that an online instructor plays in a virtual learning environment are essential because teaching and learning via course management systems are completely different from that in the face-to-face setting and are still in their infancy, thereby requiring a great deal of exploration.
Financial Trading Systems Using Artificial Neural Networks
Authors: Vanstone Bruce , Finnie Gavin
Published: May 2011

Soft computing represents that area of computing adapted from the physical sciences. Artificial intelligence techniques within this realm attempt to solve problems by applying physical laws and processes. This style of computing is particularly tolerant of imprecision and uncertainty, making the approach attractive to those researching within “noisy” realms, where the signal-to-noise ratio is quite low. Soft computing is normally accepted to include the three key areas of fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks, and probabilistic reasoning (which include genetic algorithms, chaos theory, etc.). The arena of investment trading is one such field where there is an abundance of noisy data. It is in this area that traditional computing typically gives way to soft computing as the rigid conditions applied by traditional computing cannot be met. This is particularly evident where the same sets of input conditions may appear to invoke different outcomes, or there is an abundance of missing or poor quality data. Artificial neural networks (henceforth ANNs) are a particularly promising branch on the tree of soft computing, as they possess the ability to determine non-linear relationships, and are particularly adept at dealing with noisy datasets. From an investment point of view, ANNs are particularly attractive as they offer the possibility of achieving higher investment returns for two distinct reasons. Firstly, with the advent of cheaper computing power, many mathematical techniques have come to be in common use, effectively minimizing any advantage they had introduced (see Samuel & Malakkal, 1990). Secondly, in order to attempt to address the first issue, many techniques have become more complex. There is a real risk that the signal-to-noise ratio associated with such techniques may be becoming lower, particularly in the area of pattern recognition, as discussed by Blakey (2002). Investment and financial trading is normally divided into two major disciplines: fundamental analysis and technical analysis. Articles concerned with applying ANNs to these two disciplines are reviewed.
A Framework for Communicability of Software Documentation
Authors: Kamthan Pankaj
Published: May 2011

The role of communication is central to any software development. The documentation forms the message carrier within the communication infrastructure of a software project. As software development processes shift from predictive to adaptive environments and serve an ever more hardware diverse demographic, new communication challenges arise. For example, an engineer may want to be able to remotely author a document in a shell environment without the need of any special purpose software, port it to different computer architectures, and provide different views of it to users without making modifications to the original. However, the current state of affairs of software documentation is inadequate to respond to such expectations. In this article, we take the position that the ability of documents to be able to communicate at all levels intrinsically depends upon their representation. The rest of the article proceeds as follows. We first outline the background necessary for later discussion. This is followed by a proposal for a quality-based framework for representing software documentation in descriptive markup and application to agile software documentation. Next, challenges and avenues for future research are outlined. Finally, concluding remarks are given.
Framing Political, Personal Expression on the Web
Authors: Wilson Matthew W.
Published: May 2011

The World Wide Web, as a collection of Web sites, Web services, and Web-enabled technologies, is a space of expression and contestation—a social construction of sorts. Additionally, the Web, as a locus of investigation, is gaining attention from scholars in the social sciences, feminist and critical theorists, as well as more recent poststructural reconceptualizations across many disciplines. One unifying interest is precisely the topic of this article: How might we recognize what is considered political and personal in a virtual space? To what sense can we distinguish political and personal expression online? This article frames the diverse perspectives for interrogating political and personal expression on the Web, while offering considerations for why these sorts of projects are at all necessary or useful. The determinacy of virtual, Web-based locations as political and/or personal is a complex endeavor. Does a prochoice posting to an anti-abortion online discussion group constitute a political act? What is potentially meant by “political”? Several discussion forums or news groups contain categories like “politics” or “government and politics” (see Yahoo! Groups for example); and yet, such groups may or may not be perceived as “political”. This perception of “being political” is dependent on certain philosophical tensions about what can be considered political in certain spaces and times. Other Web sites seek to build politics through the Web, via such movements as e-democracy, online deliberation, or public participation geographic information systems (Davies & Novack, forthcoming; Dragicevic & Balram, 2006). However, while building politics is certainly political, surficial analysis of such online-coalition building endeavors may resist or gloss the multiple political implications for constructing a politics. Therefore this entry contains a discussion of politics and “the political”; each as a perspective has certain methodological and empirical contingencies. Namely, how do we study online interactions? What sorts of data might we collect? Furthermore, how are we, as researchers, already implicated in our studies of online interactions? This entry proposes a diversity of approaches in studying interactions within the Web as informed by both the information sciences and the humanities and is organized into four sections: first, a background section which contemplates more traditional debate in political theory made relevant to studies of the Web; a second section which proposes (post)modernist and poststructuralist framings for researching personal and political expression; third, a section offering future research questions in this research area; and finally, conclusions that reflect upon research on the Web.
Fundamentals of Multirate Systems
Authors: Dolecek Gordana Jovanovic
Published: May 2011

Digital signal processing (DSP) is an area of science and engineering that has been rapidly developed over the past years. This rapid development is a result of significant advances in digital computers technology and integrated circuits fabrication (Mitra, 2005; Smith, 2002). Classical digital signal processing structures belong to the class of single-rate systems since the sampling rates at all points of the system are the same. The process of converting a signal from a given rate to a different rate is called sampling rate conversion. Systems that employ multiple sampling rates in the processing of digital signals are called multirate digital signal processing systems. Sample rate conversion is one of the main operations in a multirate system (Harris, 2004; Stearns, 2002).
Graph Encoding and Transitive Closure Representation
Authors: Chen Yangjun
Published: May 2011

Composite objects represented as directed graphs are an important data structure that require efficient support Web and document databases (Abiteboul, Cluet, Christophides, Milo, Moerkotte, & Simon, 1997; Chen & Aberer, 1998, 1999; Mendelzon, Mihaila, & Milo, 1997; Zhang, Naughton, Dewitt, Luo, & Lohman, 2001), CAD/ CAM, CASE, office systems, and software management. It is cumbersome to handle such objects in relational database systems when they involve ancestor-descendant relations (or say, reachability relations). In this article, we present a new graph encoding based on a tree labeling method and the concept of branchings that are used in the graph theory for finding the shortest connection networks. A branching is a subgraph of a given digraph that is in fact a forest, but covers all the nodes of the graph. Concretely, for a DAG G (directed acyclic graph) of n nodes, the space needed for storing its transitive closure can be reduced to O(b·n), where b is the number of the leaf nodes of G’s branching. Such a compression is, however, at the expense of querying time. Theoretically, it takes O(logb) time to check whether a node is reachable from another. The method can also be extended to digraphs containing cycles.
Heuristics in Medical Data Mining
Authors: George Susan E.
Published: May 2011

Deriving—or discovering—information from data has come to be known as data mining. Within health care, the knowledge from medical mining has been used in tasks as diverse as patient diagnosis (Brameier et al., 2000; Mani et al., 1999; Cao et al., 1998; Henson et al., 1996), inventory stock control (Bansal et al., 2000), and intelligent interfaces for patient record systems (George at al., 2000). It has also been a tool of medical discovery itself (Steven et al., 1996). Yet, it remains true that medicine is one of the last areas of society to be “automated,” with a relatively recent increase in the volume of electronic data, many paper-based clinical record systems in use, a lack of standardisation (for example, among coding schemes), and still some reluctance among health-care providers to use computer technology. Nevertheless, the rapidly increasing volume of electronic medical data is perhaps one of the domain’s current distinguishing characteristics, as one of the last components of society to be “automated.” Data mining presents many challenges, as “knowledge” is automatically extracted from data sets, especially when data are complex in nature, with many hundreds of variables and relationships among those variables that vary in time, space, or both, often with a measure of uncertainty, as is common within medicine. Cios and Moore (2001) identified a number of unique features of medical data mining, including the use of imaging and need for visualisation techniques, the large amounts of unstructured nature of free text within records, data ownership and the distributed nature of data, the legal implications for medical providers, the privacy and security concerns of patients requiring anonymous data used, where possible, together with the difficulty in making a mathematical characterisation of the domain. Strictly speaking, many ventures within medical data mining are better described as exercises in “machine learning,” where the main issues are, for example, discovering the complexity of relationships among data items, or making predictions in light of uncertainty, rather than “data mining,” in large, possibly distributed, volumes of data that are also highly complex. Large data sets mean not only increased algorithmic complexity but also often the need to employ special-purpose methods to isolate trends and extract “knowledge” from data. However, medical data frequently provide just such a combination of vast (often distributed) complex data sets.
History of Artificial Intelligence Before Computers
Authors: MacLennan Bruce
Published: May 2011

The history of artificial intelligence (AI) is commonly supposed to begin with Turing’s (1950) discussions of machine intelligence, and to have been defined as a field at the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. However, the ideas on which AI is based, and in particular those on which symbolic AI (see below) is based, have a very long history in the Western intellectual tradition, dating back to ancient Greece (see also McCorduck, 2004). It is important for modern researchers to understand this history for it reflects problematic assumptions about the nature of knowledge and cognition: assumptions that can impede the progress of AI if accepted uncritically.
Image Segmentation Evaluation in this Century
Authors: Zhang Yu-Jin
Published: May 2011

Image segmentation consists of subdividing an image into its constituent parts and extracting those parts of interest (objects). Due to its importance in image analysis, many research works have been conducted for this process. After 40 years of development, a large number of image (and video) segmentation techniques have been proposed and utilized in various applications (Zhang, 2006). With many algorithms developed, some efforts have been spent also on their evaluation, and these efforts have resulted around 100 evaluation papers that can be found in literature for the last century. Several studies have been made in the past in attempt to characterize these existing evaluation methods (Zhang, 1993; Zhang, 1996; Zhang 2001). Segmentation evaluation methods can be classified into analytical methods and empirical methods (Zhang, 1996). The analysis methods treat the algorithms for segmentation directly by examining the principle of algorithms while the empirical methods judge the segmented image (according to predefined criteria or comparing to reference image) so as to indirectly assess the performance of algorithms. Empirical evaluation is practically more effective and usable than analysis evaluation (Zhang, 1996). Recent advancements for segmentation evaluation are mainly made by the development of empirical evaluation techniques. After providing a list of evaluation criteria and methods proposed in the last century as background, this article will provide a summary of the recent (in 21st century) research works for empirical evaluation of image segmentation. These new research works are classified into three groups: (1) those based on existing techniques, (2) those made with modifications of existing techniques, and (3) those that used dissimilar ideas than that of existing techniques. A comparison of these evaluation methods is made before going to the future trends and conclusion.
Integrative Document and Content Management Solutions
Authors: Asprey Len , Middleton Michael
Published: May 2011

Developments in office automation, which provided multiple end-user authoring applications at the computer desktop, heralded a rapid growth in the production of digital documents and introduced the requirement to manage capture and organization of digital documents, including images. The process of capturing digital documents in managed repositories included metadata to support access and retrieval subsequent to document production (D’Alleyrand, 1989; Ricks, Swafford & Gow, 1992). The imperatives of documentary support for workflow in enterprises, along with widespread adoption of Web-oriented software on intranets and the Internet World Wide Web (WWW), has given rise to systems that manage the creation, access, routing, and storage of documents, in a more seamless manner for Web presentation. These content management systems are progressively employing document management features such as metadata creation, version control, and renditions (Megill & Schantz, 1999; Wiggins, 2000), along with features for management of content production such as authoring and authorization for internal distribution and publishing (Addey et al., 2002; Boiko, 2002; Hackos, 2002; Nakano, 2002). If business applications are designed taking into account document and Web content management as integral constructs of enterprise information architecture, then the context of these solutions may be an integrative document and content management (IDCM) model (Asprey & Middleton, 2003). As the name implies, the IDCM model aspires to combine the features of a document management system with the functionality of Web content management. An integrative business and technology framework manages designated documents and their content throughout the continuum of their existence and supports record-keeping requirements. The IDCM model supports system capabilities for managing digital and physical documents, e-mail, engineering and technical drawings, document images, multimedia, and Web content. These systems may be deployed individually to address a specific requirement. However, due to the volume and varied formats of important documents held in digital format, these systems are often deployed collectively based on a strategic IDCM approach for better managing information assets. An organizational approach to IDCM supports enterprise knowledge strategies by providing the capability to capture, search, and retrieve documented information.
Intelligent Agents and Their Applications
Authors: Heucke Alexa , Peters Georg , Tagg Roger
Published: May 2011

An agent, in the traditional use of the word, is a person that acts on behalf of another person or group of persons. In information technology, the term agent is broadly used to describe software that carries out a special range of tasks on behalf of either a human user or other pieces of software. Such a concept is not new in computing. Similar things have been said about subroutines, reusable objects, components, and Web services. So what makes agents more than just another computer technology buzzword and research fashion?
Interactive Television Context and Advertising Recall
Authors: Cauberghe Verolien , De Pelsmacker Patrick
Published: May 2011

Interactive digital television (IDTV), the merging of the Internet and television, has the potential of reaching many consumers. Introducing interactivity in television content will replace lean-backward viewing with a more active lean-forward viewing (Van den Broeck, Pierson, & Pauwels, 2004). This new way of watching TV can have implications for the way people process the advertisements embedded in programmes. We examine the impact of two dimensions of interactivity induced by a TV quiz show, that is, user control and two-way communication (McMillan & Hwang, 2002) on the ad and brand recall of an embedded commercial. User control means the possibility of accessing extra information about the quiz show, the host, and the candidates with the remote control. Two-way communication allows the viewer to play along with the quiz using the remote control.
Interface Design Issues for Mobile Commerce
Authors: Chan Susy S. , Fang Xiaowen
Published: May 2011

Effective interface design for mobile handheld devices facilitates user adoption of mobile commerce (m-commerce). Current wireless technology poses many constraints for effective interface design. These constraints include limited connectivity and bandwidth, diverse yet simplistic devices, the dominance of proprietary tools and languages, and the absence of common standards for application development. The convergence of mobile Internet and wireless communications has not yet resulted in major growth in mobile commerce. Consumer adoption of m-commerce has been slow even in countries such as Finland, which have broadly adopted wireless technology (Anckar & D’Incau, 2002). An international study of mobile handheld devices and services suggests that mobile commerce is at a crossroads (Jarvenpaa, Lang, Takeda & Tuunainen, 2003). The enterprise and business use of wireless technology holds greater promise, but it demands the transformation of business processes and infrastructure. Poor usability of mobile Internet sites and wireless applications for commerce activities stands out as a major obstacle for the adoption of mobile solutions. For example, even with the latest 3G phones in Japan, consumers still find the small screen display and small buttons on these devices difficult to use (Belson, 2002).
International Standards for Image Compression
Authors: Gil Jose Oliver , López Granado Otoniel Mario , Martínez Rach Miguel Onofre , Peral Pablo Piñol , Calafate Carlos Tavares , Malumbres Manuel Perez
Published: May 2011

Only a few decades ago, the human-computer interaction was based on a rudimentary text user interface, a convenient method compared to the punch card era, but too tedious and not very appealing for the nonspecialist, and thereby, not suitable for the mass market. Later on, the multimedia era arrived, with personal computers and other devices having powerful graphic capabilities, plenty of full-coloured pictures shown to the user. Although images made more pleasant the interaction with computers, their use represented a new challenge for electronic engineers; while only a few bytes are needed to represent a text (typically one byte per character in extended ASCII), lots of data must be employed for images that, in a “raw” representation (i.e., uncompressed) for colour images, need as many as three bytes per single pixel (picture element, each dot forming an image). Thus, there was a clear urge to reduce the amount of bytes required to encode an image, mainly so as to avoid an excessive increase in both memory consumption and network bandwidth required to store and transmit images, which would limit or prevent their use in practice. In general, in order to exploit the information system resources in an efficient way when dealing with images, compression is almost mandatory. Fortunately, most images are characterized by highly redundant signals (especially natural and synthetic images), since pixels composing an image present high homogeneity, and this redundancy, often called spatial redundancy, can be reduced through a compression process, achieving a more compact representation.
The Internet and Tertiary Education
Authors: Darbyshire Paul
Published: May 2011

For many years, information technology (IT) has been used to find ways to “add value” for customers to entice them to purchase the products and services of a business. This article examines the possibility of translating the benefits of “added value” to the use of the Internet by tertiary educators for subject and course delivery. Many educators use the Internet to supplement existing modes of delivery. Importantly, the Internet is providing a number of “added value” supplemental benefits for subjects and courses delivered using this new, hybrid teaching mode. There are two aspects to subject delivery to where “added value” benefits may be applied, and that is in the administrative tasks associated with a subject and the educational tasks. In both instances, IT solutions can be employed to either fully or partially process some of these tasks. Given the complex and often fluid nature of the education process, it is rare that a fully integrated solution can be found to adequately service both aspects of subject delivery. Most solutions are partial in that key components are targeted by IT solutions to assist the subject coordinator in the process. If we examine closely the underlying benefits gained in the application of IT to these tasks, there is a strong parallel to the benefits to be gained by business organizations with similar applications of IT. While the actual benefits sought by academics depend on the motivation for the IT solution, the perceived benefits can be classified using standard categories used to gauge similar commercial applications. However, from an educational viewpoint online technologies provide educators with new challenges, especially in relation to dealing with issues related to plagiarism and class attendance. These need to be considered by educators when deciding how, and if, to incorporate the Internet into their curriculum.
Investigating Internet Relationships
Authors: Whitty Monica T.
Published: May 2011

The focus on Internet relationships has escalated in recent times, with researchers investigating such areas as the development of online relationships (e.g., McCown, Fischer, Page, & Homant, 2001; Parks & Roberts, 1998; Whitty & Gavin, 2001), the formation of friends online (Parks & Floyd, 1996), representation (Bargh, McKenna, & Fitzsimons 2002), and misrepresentation of self online (Whitty, 2002). Researchers have also attempted to identify those addicted to accessing online sexual material (Cooper, Putnam, Planchon, & Boies, 1999). Moreover, others have been interested in Internet infidelity (Whitty, 2003a, 2005) and cybersex addiction (Griffiths, 2001, Young, Griffin-Shelley, Cooper, O’Mara, & Buchanan, 2000). Notwithstanding this continued growth of research in this field, few researchers have considered the new ethical implications of studying this topic area. While it is acknowledged here that some of the discussions in this article might be equally applied to the study of other Internet texts, such as religious or racial opinions, the focus in this article is on the concomitant ethical concerns of ongoing research into Internet relationships. Given that the development and maintenance of online relationships can be perceived as private and very personal (possibly more personal than other sensitive areas), there are potential ethical concerns that are unique to the study of such a topic area (Whitty, 2004; Whitty & Carr, 2006). For a broader discussion of virtual research ethics in general, refer to Ess and Jones (2004) and Whitty and Carr (2006).