Emerging privacy issues

Because of the essential nature of information in the affairs of society, governments, and institutions, computer- and communications-based systems are creating new aspects of personal privacy threats. Because people and organizations will tend to carry forward established expectations derived from old systems and their characteristics to new systems and their procedures, it can be expected that new privacy threats will frequently not be perceived, (e.g. the transition from physical mail to electronic mail). Moreover, things which are not a privacy threat in the small (e.g. a single telephone number) can pose threats in the large (e.g. a year's worth of telephone billings). The networking of information systems will tend to aggregate information invisibly and create privacy threats (e.g. automatic check verification information blended with financial transaction information). Matching of computer files and the diversification of established industries (e.g. banks providing general accounting services to small business) also will create new dimensions of privacy.The future world will be so tightly stitched together by its information threads that a combination of approaches to protecting privacy will be essential. Technical security safeguards can contribute; privacy laws will surely afford protections. But for some situations, perhaps many, the individual will have to take care of himself. To do so, he will have to be well-informed about information systems and their impact on himself; and he must have a legal standing to recover damages and compel remedial actions by offending organizations.     

Presupposition failure — A comedy of errors

Presuppositions of utterances are the pieces of information you convey with an utterance no matter whether your utterance is true or not. We first study presupposition in a very simple framework of updating propositional information, with examples of how presuppositions of complex propositional updates can be calculated. Next we move on to presuppositions and quantification, in the context of a dynamic version of predicate logic, suitably modified to allow for presupposition failure. In both the propositional and the quantificational case, presupposition failure can be viewed as error abortion of procedures. Thus, a dynamic assertion logic which describes the preconditions for error abortion is the suitable tool for analysing presupposition.     

Presupposition failure — A comedy of errors

Presuppositions of utterances are the pieces of information you convey with an utterance no matter whether your utterance is true or not. We first study presupposition in a very simple framework of updating propositional information, with examples of how presuppositions of complex propositional updates can be calculated. Next we move on to presuppositions and quantification, in the context of a dynamic version of predicate logic, suitably modified to allow for presupposition failure. In both the propositional and the quantificational case, presupposition failure can be viewed as error abortion of procedures. Thus, a dynamic assertion logic which describes the preconditions for error abortion is the suitable tool for analysing presupposition.     

The impact of computer-mediated communication systems on biased group discussion

One advantage of groups is that they have access to a larger pool of expertise and knowledge than individual group members. However, groups are sometimes inefficient at sharing information and tend to focus on only a portion of the available information. This tendency has been called biased discussion. The present study examines the effects of communication mode (face-to-face vs. remote), information load, and distribution of information on biased discussion. Biased discussion was found to occur to a greater degree when (1) communication mode was remote (i.e., computer mediated), (2) information load was high, and (3) the majority of the available information was known by all group members. The difference in the size of information pool accommodated by the types of communication media was found to affect the extent of information sharing in the groups.     

Pre-argumentative reasoning

Intelligent agents configure a new generation of virtual entities that perform various autonomous tasks on behalf of others, namely the humans. On the other hand, the information society requires the development of new and more intelligent methods, tools and theories to analyse, define, model and specify agent-based systems. It is under this presupposition that in this work are introduced a pre-argumentative reasoning scheme, which need to be able to take into account, in a negotiation, factors such as temporality, priority, delegation, gratitude and agreement, enabling the agents to react and pro-act accordingly. This argument-based negotiation among agents has much to gain from the use of Extended Logic Programming and Incomplete Information, in terms of the argument's evaluation. Indeed, it is based on this substratum that are presented the bases for a pre-contract negotiation via argumentation, where pre-contract negotiation will be defined as a protocol which, once enforced, will allow the exchange of messages containing proposals, counter-proposals, critiques, justifications or even explanations. The terms of a negotiation are also set, adjusting the contract according to the agent's knowledge base. In fact, an important contribution of this work relies on the presentation of the basic definitions and the general model of pre-contract-based negotiations via argumentation.     

多任务学习在不良言论与个体特征检测中的应用

多任务学习在自然语言处理领域有广泛应用, 但多任务模型往往对任务间的相关性比较敏感. 如果任务相关性较低或信息传递不合理, 可能会严重影响任务性能. 本文提出了一种新的共享-私有结构的多任务学习模型BB-MTL (BERT-BiLSTM multi-task learning model), 并借助元学习的思想为其设计了一种特殊的参数优化方式MLL-TM (meta-learning-like train methods). 进一步引入一个新的信息融合门SoWLG (Softmax weighted linear gate), 用于选择性地融合每项任务的共享特征与私有特征. 实验验证所提出的多任务学习方法, 考虑到用户在网络上的行为与其个体特征密切相关, 文中结合了不良言论检测、人格检测和情绪检测任务进行了一系列实验. 实验结果表明, BB-MTL能够有效学习相关任务中的特征信息, 在3项任务上的准确率分别达到了81.56%、77.09%和70.82%.     

How “OPTIMUS” is a city in terms of energy optimization? e-SCEAF: A web based decision support tool for local authorities

Nowadays cities tend to become “Smarter”, usually disregarding the issues of energy efficiency and sustainability. Therefore, optimizing energy use in a city remains a challenge and respective decision support systems are important to guide local authorities toward that direction. This paper provides a holistic approach presenting a Smart City Energy Assessment Framework (SCEAF) along with a specific web based decision support tool, the so-called e-SCEAF, which can provide local authorities with fruitful results for assessing the energy behavior and performance of their city. The tool merges heterogeneous information, such as clearly quantifiable energy related indicators, the related city policy context performance and the integration of smart infrastructure. This multi-source information fusion is based on the 2-tuple linguistic representation model of Herrera and Martínez. This particular model has been widely used in decision problems and was mainly selected due to the fact that it provides linguistic results that are accurate and easy to understand by the cities’ local authorities. The performance, usefulness and effectiveness of the SCEAF framework and the e-SCEAF tool are tested on a real life application in three different cities, Savona (Italy), Sant Cugat del Vallès (Spain) and Zaanstad (The Netherlands). In this respect, the role of fusion methods and algorithms for merging multiple information will be evaluated in a “real life environment”.     

An introduction to vague complemented ordered sets

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a theory of fuzzily defined complement operations on nonempty sets equipped with fuzzily defined ordering relations. Many-valued equivalence relation-based fuzzy ordering relations (also called vague ordering relations) provide a powerful and a comprehensive mathematical modelling of fuzzily defined partial ordering relations. For this reason, starting with a nonempty set X equipped with a many-valued equivalence relation and a vague ordering relation, a fuzzily defined complement operation (called a vague complement operation) on X will be formulated by means of the underling many-valued equivalence relation and vague ordering relation. Because of the fact that the practical implementations of vague complement operations basically depend on their representation properties, a considerable part of this paper is devoted to the representations of vague complement operations. In addition to this, the present paper provides various nontrivial examples for vague complements, and introduces a many-valued logical interpretation of quantum logic as a real application of vague complements.     

Applying a smoothing filter to improve IR-based traceability recovery processes: An empirical investigation

ContextTraceability relations among software artifacts often tend to be missing, outdated, or lost. For this reason, various traceability recovery approaches—based on Information Retrieval (IR) techniques—have been proposed. The performances of such approaches are often influenced by “noise” contained in software artifacts (e.g., recurring words in document templates or other words that do not contribute to the retrieval itself).AimAs a complement and alternative to stop word removal approaches, this paper proposes the use of a smoothing filter to remove “noise” from the textual corpus of artifacts to be traced.MethodWe evaluate the effect of a smoothing filter in traceability recovery tasks involving different kinds of artifacts from five software projects, and applying three different IR methods, namely Vector Space Models, Latent Semantic Indexing, and Jensen–Shannon similarity model.ResultsOur study indicates that, with the exception of some specific kinds of artifacts (i.e., tracing test cases to source code) the proposed approach is able to significantly improve the performances of traceability recovery, and to remove “noise” that simple stop word filters cannot remove.ConclusionsThe obtained results not only help to develop traceability recovery approaches able to work in presence of noisy artifacts, but also suggest that smoothing filters can be used to improve performances of other software engineering approaches based on textual analysis.     

Design of a multimedia object-oriented DBMS

The emerging multimedia information (such as video, image, voice, graphics) services have imposed many new requirements and research considerations on the design of database management systems (DBMSs). Conventionally, a multimedia DBMS is designed by developing a multimedia presentation layer on top of a pre-existing object-oriented DBMS (which can be truly object-oriented or relational-based), such that the core of the DBMS was developed earlier independent of the design of the multimedia presentation layer. Due to the fact that multimedia capabilities are not actually embedded in the DBMSs, such systems tend to provide only a rather limited set of functionalities in multimedia and are not satisfactory in supporting multimedia applications. This paper describes some key features of a multimedia object-oriented DBMS that is currently being developed. In this system the DBMS is carefully redesigned to provide special multimedia capabilities, such that the mismatch between the DBMS and the multimedia application layer can be eliminated. In particular, this paper will focus on unique multimedia capabilities including multimedia object modeling, video data management, and distributed collaboration. This project was supported in part by Rome Laboratory, U.S. Air Force under the contract no. F30602-94-C-0090     

网络协议的应用及其性能研究

协议是用来描述进程之间信息交换数据时的规则术语,而网络协议顾名思义是应用于网络中的协议,一说到网络协议,人们脑海中往往浮现出来的是TCP/IP,其实TCP和IP分别是传输层和网络层的一个协议。将从应用层、运输层、网络层3个层次上对目前常用的网络协议性能进行描述。     

An Architecture for Supply Chain Integration and Automation on the Internet

Electronic commerce is happening at a very fast pace and business-to-business ecommerce is taking the lead, a very important part of which is the supply chain integration and automation. There is a high demand for well accepted interoperability standards which need to be fitted together for supply chain integration to meet the business demands such as being able to integrate catalogs from different companies. This will facilitate product comparisons and producing customized catalogs. Given an anchor product anywhere on the supply chain, it should be possible to obtain information on related products that complement or add value to this anchor product. Yet another key issue is the full automation of the supply chain processes. However since a single dominant electronic commerce standard is unlikely, the supply chain integration and automation should be able to accommodate different standards like OBI or OTP. This will make it possible for users to conform to the standards of their choice.Another important fact is that rigid supply chains can co-exist with supply chains formed on the fly where participants can transact business spontaneously since the Web is able to make the information instantly available to all trading partners. Facilitating resource discovery that is discovering information on possible partners and their catalogs on the Internet and transacting business automatically also becomes an important issue.The architecture developed within the scope of this paper addresses these issues. We have used the emerging technologies and standards as the infrastructure of the system proposed; and integrated these to meet the needs of supply chain integration and automation and demonstrated how each of the mentioned functionality can be achieved.     

A change detection model based on neighborhood correlation image analysis and decision tree classification

This study introduces a change detection model based on Neighborhood Correlation Image (NCI) logic. It is based on the fact that the same geographic area (e.g., a 3 × 3 pixel window) on two dates of imagery will tend to be highly correlated if little change has occurred, and uncorrelated when change occurs. Computing the piecewise correlation between two data sets provides valuable information regarding the location and numeric change value derived using contextual information within the specified neighborhood. Various neighborhood configurations (i.e., multi-level NCIs) were explored in the study using high spatial resolution multispectral imagery: smaller neighborhood sizes provided some detailed change information (such as a new patios added to an existing building) at the cost of introducing some noise (such as changes in shadows). Larger neighborhood sizes were useful for removing this noise but introduced some inaccurate change information (such as removing some linear feature changes). When combined with image classification using a machine learning decision tree (C5.0), classifications based on multi-level NCIs yielded superior results (e.g., using a 3-pixel circular radius neighborhood had a Kappa of 0.94), compared to the classification that did not incorporate NCIs (Kappa = 0.86).     

Solving the privacy paradox: A counter-argument experimental approach

This study investigates why ordinary online users highly concerned about the misuse of personal information do not adopt privacy-protective behaviors, or even engage in risky behaviors, on the Internet. Given that people have few chances to directly experience privacy infringement and tend to be unfamiliar with technical terms, their opinions as reflected in conventional polls tend to be instantaneous reactions to survey questionnaires, lacking thoughtfulness. By adopting a counterargument experimental technique, this study produced three important findings: (1) people’s opinions about online privacy are swayed after being presented with a message containing a counterargument; (2) this persuasion effect is pronounced among people with a low level of online knowledge or who assess the presented message’s argument as strong; and (3) the privacy paradox is found in conventional polls but disappears in counterargument conditions. These findings imply that opinions concerning online privacy should not be estimated through conventional polling. Rather, alternative polls (e.g., deliberative polls) should be adopted for online privacy policy-making.     

The impact of information and communication technology on relation-based governance systems

This study offers a new perspective to the analysis of the interface between information and communication technology (ICT) and corporate governance and how the interface differs across countries with different political and economic environments. We first introduce a theoretical framework of relation-based and rule-based governance that distinguishes economies/firms based on whether they rely on public rules or personal relations to govern business. Economically more developed countries tend to be rule-based and less developed countries (LDCs) tend to be relation-based. Based on the theoretical framework, the paper analyzes the interface between ICT and corporate governance and the barriers to adopting ICT by relation-based LDCs. We argue that economic- and legal-system-specific governance effects are more fundamental than national cultural effects on ICT adoption, and that the barriers to adopting ICT are greater for the LDCs that rely on relation-based governance. We expect that in the long run ICT will make rule-based, developed countries more competitive, thus exerting pressures on relation-based LDCs and accelerating the transition of LDCs from relation-based to rule-based governance. Increasing ICT compatibility, in turn, will facilitate LDCs transition to rule-based governance. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

A comparative assessment on the use of SAR and high-resolution optical images in ocean dynamics studies

A comparison of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images acquired by the ERS-2 and RADARSAT-1 satellites with Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images acquired close in time is presented. Similarities and differences on the kind of ocean information they provide are discussed. The images were acquired over the Brazil–Malvinas (Falkland) Confluence under different solar elevation and azimuth angles. Ocean features observed by both types of sensors are discussed. These observations show that (1) at high solar angles, sun glint prevails over upwelled water-leaving radiance resulting in optical images that tend to provide dynamical information similar to that obtained from SAR imagery and (2) at low solar zenith and azimuth angles, upwelled radiation tends to prevail over sun glint, providing typical ocean colour and water quality information that can still complement and aid in the interpretation of SAR observations.     

Tuning Users' Innovativeness During Ideation

Although there is increasing acknowledgement that consumers can contribute useful ideas during the development of innovative services, there has been little empirical examination of how such users can best be managed in order to contribute their ideas to the ‘fuzzy front end’ of new service development. The present study examines the relationship between the nature of user‐created ideas regarding new technology‐based services and the characteristics of the users supplying the ideas. In particular, the study investigates whether users' ideas become more incremental or more radical depending on the users' awareness of technological restrictions and their utilization of use experience. The results show that idea creators with high use experience who are unaware of any technological restrictions tend to produce service ideas that are more radical in nature, whereas idea creators with high use experience who are aware of technological restrictions tend to produce service ideas that are more incremental in nature. The study provides empirical support that, in order to provide innovative ideas, ordinary users involved in ideation must both have a contextual use experience and not be restricted in their ideation by ‘too much’ technology information and restrictions on potential feasibility.     

Content preparation for cross-cultural e-commerce: a review and a model

Content preparation is an important stage in e-commerce website development. It is critical to present appropriate information content to facilitate consumers' decision-making. In the international e-commerce setting, to better serve users from different countries, their different information preferences must be accommodated by taking cultural differences between countries into consideration in content preparation. After examining relevant literature, this paper proposes a conceptual model on content preparation for cross-cultural e-commerce. The model explores cultural effects on information processing of consumers by taking into account both normative effects and psychological effects. Tentative conclusions about cultural differences that need to be accommodated in content preparation are also offered.     

Wiki-supported learning and knowledge building: effects of incongruity between knowledge and information

This study describes the empirical test of a theoretical model of knowledge building with wikis that was recently introduced by Cress and Kimmerle. The underlying assumption of this model is that both learning (as an internal, individual process) and knowledge building (as the creation of public knowledge) are based on the interplay between an individual's knowledge and the information available in the wiki. Incongruity between individual knowledge and the information contained in the wiki will lead to learning (through the acquisition of factual and conceptual knowledge) and to knowledge building (through assimilation and accommodation). In three conditions, the experiment provided the participants with different levels of incongruity between their individual knowledge and information in the wiki by varying the amount of information that was contained in the wiki, while the amount of information that the participants possessed was kept constant. As predicted, the results confirmed that a medium level of incongruity between an individual's knowledge and the information that a wiki contains will best support learning. Moreover, a medium level of incongruity leads to more accommodative knowledge building despite the fact that high and medium levels of incongruity will result in similar amounts of assimilative knowledge building. The implications of these findings were discussed in the concluding remarks.     

Drivers of Web portal use

In this paper, we investigate three complementary measures of portal use: frequency of use, length of visits and repeat use. To examine these three measures of use, we first classify the services provided by portals into three categories: search, information, and personal services. We argue that these three different functions affect portal use in different ways. We primarily rely on the human computer interaction literature to develop our model of portal use. Our analysis is based on Internet navigation data of 102 demographically diverse users over a period of one year for six major portals. In total, we study 6321 distinct portal choices. Our results show strong repeat use for personal services followed by information services and search function. Our findings show that cumulative dissatisfaction with search results has a negative effect on future user choice decisions. Both information and personal services tend to extend the length of portal visits. As expected, search services tend to reduce the time spent as users move on to the search targets. But we also find that search function availability drives more traffic to portals than information or personal services. Of the three services, personal services use shows maximum (week-to-week) stability, information services use, on the other hand, shows least stability. Use of personal services leads to use of search and information services. We also find that demographic characteristics play some role in portal use.