Social commerce—state-of-the-art and future research directions

In recent years, social commerce evolved into an emerging phenomenon of global interest for marketers, businesses, and researchers alike. In light of this development, it is not surprising that the number of publications focusing on this phenomenon at the interplay of electronic commerce and social media has been rising substantially. The goal of this paper is to provide a structured overview of social commerce research by means of a structured literature review. Based on our literature search between 2007 and 2014 resulting in 116 published papers, we carve out and assess the knowledge and the research areas that have been predominantly addressed by the Information Systems, Electronic Commerce, and Marketing research community so far. By providing a research agenda, we hope that our results will stimulate and guide future research in this exciting field.     

Semat—Three Year Vision

The purpose of writing this Three Year Vision paper is threefold. Firstly, it briefly recaps the progress Semat has made thus far; secondly, it lays out the future directions for people working actively within the Semat community; thirdly, it provides the background for seeking funding support from agencies, such as the European Community and the like. Funding support is necessary to sustain the ongoing activities of Semat and its growth into a broader community effort, as most people working within Semat are volunteers. As such, the paper may be both too much and too little for the wider supporter base. However, we intend to make our work fully transparent, hence, we publish it widely. We seek feedback and comments from supporters and signatories in order to improve the vision. In this context, other companion papers are being written to better address the specific needs for the practitioners, the industry and the academia.     

How to guarantee compliance between workflows and product lifecycles?

Product lifecycle management (PLM) systems are widely used in the manufacturing industry. A core feature of such systems is to provide support for versioning of product data. As workflow functionality is increasingly used in PLM systems, the possibility emerges that the versioning transitions for product objects as encapsulated in process models do not comply with the valid version control policies mandated in the objects’ actual lifecycles. In this paper we propose a solution to tackle the (non-)compliance issues between processes and object version control policies. We formally define the notion of compliance between these two artifacts in product lifecycle management and then develop a compliance checking method which employs a well-established workflow analysis technique. This forms the basis of a tool which offers automated support to the proposed approach. By applying the approach to a collection of real-life specifications in a main PLM system, we demonstrate the practical applicability of our solution to the field.     

Σynergos—Synergetic Vision Research

This paper reports the development of a powerful andversatile laboratory for vision research, namely ynergos,which has been developed and implemented under Delphi/Windowsin a distributed systems of microcomputers. The main paradigmunderlying the whole approach consists in integrating severalconcepts and techniques into a single computing environment,i.e. ynergos, in such a way that the requisitesand possibilities of each of the constituent components complementone another and the thus obtained result becomes greater thanthe sum of its parts. The components of ynergosinclude distributed system capabilities and a number of librariescontaining algorithms for: computer vision, modeling and simulationof biological visual systems, data and classification analysis,software validation and comparative evaluation, Internet, off-the-shelfapplication, image databases, artificial intelligence, data mining,and visualization resources. In this paper special emphasis isplaced upon the Internet, distributed implementation and biologicalvision. After outlining the principal requisites and potentialsunderlying each of such components, some specific situationsof interest arising from the integration of two or more of suchelements are described and discussed. Details concerning theintegration with Internet and the implementation of the laboratoryas a distributed system are provided, and a complete case-exampleis presented. This applications regards the implementation ofa psychophysical experiment aimed at investigating human perceptionof pictorial complexity, including the derivation of a mathematic-computationalframework modeling such a perception as well as the use of theInternet as a source of stimuli and for reporting the obtainedresults. In addition, the mathematic-computational model is derivedby using a parallel version of the genetic algorithm runningon the distributed system of PCs. The obtained encouraging resultssubstantiate the potential of this vision laboratory for multidisciplinaryvision research.     

Quantum speed limits—primer,perspectives, and potential future directions

Fundamental physical limits on the speed of state evolution in quantum systems exist in the form of the Mandelstam–Tamm and the Margolus–Levitin inequalities. We give an expository review of the development of these quantum speed limit (QSL) inequalities, including extensions to different energy statistics and generalizations to mixed system states and open and multipartite systems. The QSLs expressed by these various inequalities have implications for quantum computation, quantum metrology, and control of quantum systems. These connections are surveyed, and some important open questions are noted.     

Vision guided manipulation for planetary robotics — position control

Manipulation systems for planetary exploration operate under severe restrictions. They need to integrate vision and manipulation to achieve the reliability, safety, and predictability required of expensive systems operating on remote planets. They also must operate on very modest hardware that is shared with many other systems, and must operate without human intervention.Typically such systems employ calibrated stereo cameras and calibrated manipulators to achieve precision of the order of one centimeter with respect to instrument placement activities. This paper presents three complementary approaches to vision guided manipulation designed to robustly achieve high precision in manipulation. These approaches are described and compared, both in simulation and on hardware.In situ estimation and adaptation of the manipulator and/or camera models in these methods account for changes in the system configuration, thus ensuring consistent precision for the life of the mission. All the three methods provide several-fold increases in accuracy of manipulator positioning over the standard flight approach.     

Why do people share their context information on Social Network Services? A qualitative study and an experimental study on users' behavior of balancing perceived benefit and risk

Despite the rapid growth of context-aware systems and ubiquitous computing, the factors influencing users' decision to share their context information in a social setting are poorly understood. This study aims to clarify why users share their context information in social network service (SNS), even while they are concerned with the potential risk at the same time. Drawing on the diverse theories of self-disclosure, we take an approach that the consideration of benefit encourages users to endure the existence of risk, and that users actively adjust the way they share their information to optimize the level of benefit and risk. In a qualitative study, we examined what kinds of risks and benefits exist in context information sharing situations and how users control them. An experiment was conducted using stimuli that simulate the actual use of SNS to investigate the effect of various context types and control types on users' expected benefit and risk and their intention to share. The results showed that both expected benefit and expected risk influenced users' intention to share. More interestingly, the effect of expected benefit was found to be stronger than that of expected risk. Moreover, different privacy control strategies were found to have induced different effects on the expected benefit and expected risk. Implications and limitations of this study were proposed at the end of this study.     

Social media for learning: A mixed methods study on high school students’ technology affordances and perspectives

Using an explanatory sequential mixed methods design, the study investigated high school students’ affordances for social media, their attitudes and beliefs about these new technologies, and related obstacles and issues. The affordance findings indicate that students depend on social media in their daily lives for leisure and social connections. Educational uses by teachers for classroom teaching and learning are sporadic, while uses by students on their own for learning purposes seem to be abundant but also incidental and informal. Quantitative results suggest that in general, students show positive attitudes and beliefs about social media use in education. Exploratory factor analysis revealed three components that explained a total of 65.4% of the variance: (a) benefits of social media use, (b) disadvantages of social media use, and (c) current social media use in education. Three issues emerged from the interview data: Conceptual understanding of social media for learning; close-minded, acquired uses versus open-minded, innate uses of social media; and changed concepts of learning. The study results suggest that for social media to be used as effective learning tools and to adjust students’ prior affordances with these tools, complicated efforts in designing, scaffolding, and interacting with students during the process are necessary.     

Novel flavonol analogues as potential inhibitors of JMJD3 histone demethylase—A study based on molecular modelling

Epigenetic modulation of gene expression has drawn enormous attention among researchers globally in the present scenario. Since their discovery, Jmj-C histone demethylases were identified as useful markers in understanding the role of epigenetics in inflammatory conditions and in cancer as well. This has created arousal of interest in search of suitable candidates. Potential inhibitors from various other scaffolds such as hydroxyquinolines, hydroxamic acids and triazolopyridines have already been identified and reported. In this direction, our present study attempts to target one of the important members of the family- namely JMJD3 (also known as KDM6B), that plays a pivotal role in inflammatory and immune reactions. Using molecular modeling approaches, myricetin analogues were identified as promising inhibitors of JMJD3. Extensive literature review showed myricetin as the most promising flavonol inhibitor for this enzyme. It served as a prototype for our study and modification of it’s scaffold led to generation of analogues. The ZINC database was used as a repository for natural compounds and their analogues. Using similarity search options, 65 analogues of myricetin were identified and screened against JMJD3 (PDB ID: 4ASK), using the high throughput virtual screening and ligand docking tools in Maestro Molecular Modeling platform (version 10.5) from Schrödinger, LLC. 8 analogues out of 65 were identified as the most appropriate candidates which gave the best pose in ligand docking. Their binding mode and energy calculations were analysed using induced fit docking (IFD) and prime-MMGBSA tool, respectively. Thus, our findings highlight the most promising analogues of myricetin with comparable binding affinity as well as binding energy than their counterparts that could be taken for further optimisation as inhibitors of JMJD3 in both in vitro and in vivo screening studies.     

How Do Online Game Communities Retain Gamers? Social Presence and Social Capital Perspectives

While online game communities have been found to be useful for retaining gamers, the mechanism underlying this phenomenon is not fully understood. Knowledge about such mechanism enables managers of online games to effectively retain their customers. This study thus investigates how network convergence and interdependence—2 characteristics of online game social networks—fuel gamers' continuance intention. Social presence and social capital theories were used for developing the study hypotheses, and responses from 1,467 online gamers were used in the analysis. The findings indicate that both network convergence and interdependence are positively related to sense of community and relational switching cost (coefficients ranging from .20 to .50), which further contribute to gamer continuance intention (coefficients ranging from .13 to .72).     

Implementation and modeling of two-phase locking concurrency control—a performance study

Two-phase locking (2PL) is the concurrency control mechanism that is used in most commercial database systems. In 2PL, for a transaction to access a data item, it has to hold the appropriate lock (read or write) on the data item by issuing a lock request. While the way transactions set their lock requests and the way the requests are granted would certainly affect a system's performance, such aspects have not received much attention in the literature. In this paper, a general transaction-processing model is proposed. In this model, a transaction is comprised of a number of stages, and in each stage the transaction can request to lock one or more data items. Methods for granting transaction requests and scheduling policies for granting blocked transactions are also proposed. A comprehensive simulation model is developed from which the performance of 2PL with our proposals is evaluated. Results indicate that performance models in which transactions request locks on an item-by-item basis and use first-come-first-served (FCFS) scheduling in granting blocked transactions underestimate the performance of 2PL. The performance of 2PL can be greatly improved if locks are requested in stages as dictated by the application. A scheduling policy that uses global information and/or schedules blocked transactions dynamically shows a better performance than the default FCFS.     

Rating deviation and manipulated reviews on the Internet—A multi-method study

Manipulated reviews can mislead consumers to make inappropriate purchase decisions and reduce consumers’ dependency on online reviews, jeopardizing the platforms’ reputation. Existing studies mainly focus on the detection and the impact of manipulated reviews but are limited in examining the determinants of review legitimacy from the perspective of consumer perception. The current research introduces perceived review manipulation, defined as the extent to which an individual perceives a review as non-authentic with the goal of misleading others and influencing product sales. Using psychological reactance theory as a general framework, we investigate the impact of reviews with deviation from the average ratings on perceived review manipulation and review adoption. We future examine two boundary conditions of the above relationship—the moderating effects of review content concreteness and reviewer rating distribution. We adopt a multi-method approach to the empirical test of the research model. First, three online randomized experiments reveal that: (1) reviews with deviant ratings are more likely to be perceived as manipulated; (2) the relationship in (1) is enhanced when review content is abstract rather than concrete and when a reviewer is usually negative/positive (i.e., his/her rating distribution has positive/negative skewness) based on the deviation direction; and (3) perceived review manipulation negatively influences review adoption. Second, a field study was conducted to support the external validity of our research model. Our findings have academic and practical implications.     

Single-mode—multimode—single-mode and lossy mode resonance-based devices: a comparative study for sensing applications

In this work, a thin-film consisting of 15 bilayers (estimated thickness: 210 nm) of titanium (IV) oxide and poly(sodium 4-styrenesulfonate) is simultaneously deposited onto two optical fiber structures: a single-mode—multimode—single-mode (SMS) device and a lossy mode resonance (LMR)-based device. The performance of both structures, as refractometers and relative humidity sensors, is studied and compared. In both cases, the sensitivity of the LMR-based device (955 nm/RIU and 3.54 nm/RH %, respectively) highly improves the one of the SMS (142 nm/RIU and 0.3 nm/RH %). These facts can be taken into account when developing sensors based on either SMS or LMR technologies.     

Cyclic Flowshop Scheduling with Operators and Robots: Vyacheslav Tanaev’s Vision and Lasting Contributions

This note discusses the pioneering role and main contributions of V.S. Tanaev in the field of cyclic robotic flowshop scheduling. Open questions (either explicitly or implicitly) posed in his papers and kept unsolved up to date are exposed.