An event driven approach to customer relationship management in e-brokerage industry
Customer relationship management (CRM) is critical to the success of a business. Recent work in CRM has focused on the mining of customer-related data and the construction of customer behavior models. In this paper, we present a framework for an effective detection of business events that trigger the execution of customer-related activities based on a set of predefined business rules. An event is the occurrence of something interesting to the system itself or to user applications. Event driven execution of rules in event-condition-action (ECA) form can ensure efficiency and timeliness. This is an important aspect of CRM that few researchers have reported. In the e-brokerage industry, business events concern mainly with clients, brokerage firms and the stock market environment. Business events due to the clients include order placement, complaints filing, service exceptions, and change of personal profiles. Business events due to the brokerage firms include staff turnovers and amendment of e-brokerage services. Business events due to the environment include market news and fluctuation of stock prices. An event-driven CRM prototype implementing the proposed framework has been successfully applied to support an e-brokerage system. The prototype integrates a client portal, a call center, a managerial application, external event detectors and an analysis engine. There is little room in Hong Kong's stock brokerage industry for a brokerage firm to increase its revenue through cross- or up-sale trading. The key success factor of a brokerage is therefore its ability to retain existing clients and to increase their satisfaction through effective coordination and enactment of CRM activities.

title: Exploiting automatic analysis of e-commerce protocols
abstract: While e-commerce continuously grows prosperous, some advantages e-commerce applications claimed haven't really been gained. More seriously, the availability and reliability of these systems are particularly hard to obtain. The e-commerce protocols, as the core of e-commerce applications, ask for new development approach and techniques to be introduced for their highly reliable and safe design and implementation. This paper describes research on synthesis of extended UML formalism and formal verification techniques for automatic development of e-commerce protocols. In this paper, we refine AUML protocol diagrams for visual modeling, and develop algorithm and rules to translate visually modeled e-commerce protocols into formal models that are then validated using model checking. This approach is applied to the design of an e-commerce protocol, NetBill, as example. Our objective is to create tools that enable designers to automatically develop available and reliable e-commerce protocols.

title: Constraint-based negotiation in a multi-agent information system with multiple platform support
abstract: Agent technologies have been deployed to model and implement e-commerce activities as multi-agent information systems (MAIS). Agents provide services to one another for mutual gain on behalf of their users. This paper presents an MAIS infrastructure based on belief-desire-in tension (BDI) agent architecture, constraint technology, and contemporary Web services to facilitate negotiation support. Further, the MAIS infrastructure also supports customizable degree of agent delegation for users on different platforms, with or without agent support. We present a constraint-based negotiation protocol extended for a MAIS environment and detail the required adaptations on different platforms from a three-tier implementation architecture aspect.

title: A Multi-Agent Infrastructure for Mobile Workforce Management in a Service Oriented Enterprise
abstract: With recent advances in mobile technologies and infrastructures, there are increasing demands for the support of mobile workforce management (MWM) across multiple platforms. Mobile users can interact with the MWM system through SMS messages or Web browsers from personal computers, PDA devices, or WAP phones. MWM typically involves tight collaboration, negotiation, and sophisticated business domain knowledge. Therefore, the main challenge of MWM for a service oriented enterprise is the integration of disparate business function for its mobile professional workforce and the management with a unified infrastructure, together with the provision of personalized assistance and automation. These requirements can be facilitated with the use of intelligent software agents, but has not been adequately studied before. As mobile devices become more powerful, intelligent software agents can now be deployed on these devices and hence also subject to mobility. Thus, MWM systems have to accommodate these requirements as well as the support of heterogeneous platforms. In this paper, we formulate a scalable, flexible, and intelligent multi-agent information system (MAIS) infrastructure for MWM with agent clusters in the context of a large service oriented enterprise. Each agent cluster comprise several types of agents to achieve the goal of each phase of the workforce management process, namely, task formulation, matchmaking, brokering, commuting, and service. We evaluate our approach against different stakeholders' perspective.

title: Developing a Distributed e-Monitoring System for Enterprise Website and Web Services: An Experience Report with Free Libraries and Tools
abstract: Enterprises value monitoring as it provides dependable e-services, whether it is an interactive Web site or programmatic Web service. However, this task becomes non-trivial when enterprises begin to require support from thousands of servers across geographical areas. How can the communications between a monitoring systems and remote servers be minimized? Could the task be achieved easily based on a readily available technology such as SNMP? How can we monitor thousands of servers powered by, say, Tomcat, which lacks SNMP support? How may a poorly responsive site be identified prior to being reported as a failure by SNMP? In this paper, we propose a unified e-monitoring system that enables system administrators to remotely monitor the health of distributed e-services in both the form of Web site and Web services. We further discuss our implementation experience based on a pragmatic prototype.

title: Checking safety properties using compositional reachability analysis
abstract: The software architecture of a distributed program can be represented by a hierarchical composition of subsystems, with interacting processes at the leaves of the hierarchy. Compositional reachability analysis (CRA) is a promising state reduction technique which can be automated and used in stages to derive the overall behavior of a distributed program based on its architecture. CRA is particularly suitable for the analysis of programs that are subject to evolutionary change. When a program evolves, only the behaviors of those subsystems affected by the change need be reevaluated. The technique however has a limitation. The properties available for analysis are constrained by the set of actions that remain globally observable. Properties involving actions encapsulated by subsystems may therefore not be analyzed. In this article, we enhance the CRA technique to check safety properties which may contain actions that are not globally observable. To achieve this, the state machine model is augmented with a special trap state labeled as π. We propose a scheme to transform, in stages, a property that involves hidden actions to one that involves only globally observable actions. The enhanced technique also includes a mechanism aiming at reducing the debugging effort. The technique is illustrated using a gas station system example.

title: Efficient video similarity measurement and search
abstract: We consider the use of meta-data and/or video-domain methods to detect similar videos on the Web. Meta-data is extracted from the textual and hyperlink information associated with each video clip. In the video domain, we apply an efficient similarity detection algorithm called video signature. The idea is to form a signature for each clip by selecting a small number of its frames that are most similar to a set of random seed images. We then apply a statistical pruning algorithm to allow fast detection on very large databases. Using a small ground-truth set, we achieve 90% recall and 95% precision using only 8% of the total number of operations required without pruning. For a database of around 46,000 video clips crawled from the Web, the video signature technique significantly outperforms meta-data in precision and recall. We show that even better performance can be achieved by combining them together. Based on our measurements, each video clip in our database has, on average, 1.53 similar copies.

title: A Lower Bound for Permutation Routing on Two-Dimensional Bused Meshes
abstract: We prove a 0.691n lower bound for the permutation routing problem in n×n meshes with row and column buses whose propagation delay is one time unit. For meshes having non-unit-time buses, we use similar arguments to derive some simple lower bounds for the permutation routing problem.

title: Insensitive bounds for the moments of the sojourn time distribution in the M/G/1 processor-sharing queue
abstract: This paper studies the M/G/1 processor-sharing (PS) queue, in particular the sojourn time distribution conditioned on the initial job size. Although several expressions for the Laplace-Stieltjes transform (LST) are known, these expressions are not suitable for computational purposes. This paper derives readily applicable insensitive bounds for all moments of the conditional sojourn time distribution. The instantaneous sojourn time, i.e., the sojourn time of an infinitesimally small job, leads to insensitive upper bounds requiring only knowledge of the traffic intensity and the initial job size. Interestingly, the upper bounds involve polynomials with so-called Eulerian numbers as coefficients. In addition, stochastic ordering and moment ordering results for the sojourn time distribution are obtained.

title: A formal-specification based approach for protecting the domain name system
abstract: Many network applications depend on the security of the domain name system (DNS). Attacks on the DNS can cause denial of service and entity authentication to fail. In our approach, we use formal specifications to characterize DNS clients and DNS name servers, and to define a security goal. A name server should only use DNS data that is consistent with data from name servers that manage the corresponding domains (i.e. authoritative name servers). To enforce the security goal, we formally specify a DNS wrapper that examines the incoming and outgoing DNS messages of a name server to detect messages that could cause violations of the security goal, cooperates with the corresponding authoritative name servers to diagnose those messages, and drops the messages that are identified as threats. Based on the wrapper specification, we implemented a wrapper prototype and evaluated its performance. Out experiments show that the wrapper incurs reasonable overhead and is effective against DNS attacks such as cache poisoning and certain spoofing attacks.

title: Multiple forecasts with autoregressive time series models: case studies
abstract: It is indisputable that accurate forecasts of economic activities are vital to successful business and government policies. In many circumstances, instead of a single forecast, simultaneous prediction intervals for multiple forecasts are more useful to decision-makers. For example, based on previous monthly sales records, a production manager would be interested in the next 12 interval forecasts of the monthly sales using for the annual inventory and manpower planning. For Gaussian autoregressive time series processes, several procedures for constructing simultaneous prediction intervals have been proposed in the literature. These methods assume a normal error distribution and can be adversely affected by departures from normality which are commonly encountered in business and economic time series. In this article, we explore the bootstrap methods for the construction of simultaneous multiple interval forecasts. To understand the mechanisms and characteristics of the proposed bootstrap procedures, several macro-economic time series are selected for illustrative purposes. The selected series are fitted reasonably well with autoregressive models which form an important class in time series. As a matter of fact, the major ideas discussed in this paper with autoregressive processes can be extended to other more complicated time series models.