The recent development of online arbitration rules in China

Online arbitration is not a newcomer in the realm of arbitration. Some arbitration institutions have developed technological innovation in arbitration but online arbitration is still not yet widely used because it simply serves as a tool to facilitate arbitration proceedings. This article discusses the recently published online arbitration rules by Guangzhou Arbitration Commission in 2015. Online arbitration provides, on the one hand, more flexibility and efficiency to the parties. On the other hand, there are concerns about the validity and fairness of online arbitral awards due to its innovative feature of arbitration rules. By studying the available online arbitration institutional rules, the author intends to find out how to weigh the balance between efficiency and fairness in online arbitration.     

A legal framework for online commercial arbitration in UAE: new fabric but old style!

Online Arbitration has increasingly become a popular method for the resolution of electronic commerce disputes due to its inexpensive, speedy, and global nature. However, this kind of arbitration may face many consumer and doctrinal problems that threaten the legal validity of its procedures in the digital world. This paper thus aims to explore whether or not there are any legal obstacles to the use of online arbitration or to the recognition and enforcement of online arbitral awards within the current legal framework in the United Arab Emirates. As such, this paper briefly discusses whether the formal requirements of validity are satisfied if the arbitration agreement is entered into electronically or if the arbitration proceedings are handled from start to finish in a computerized manner. Furthermore, this paper addresses whether or not there is any need to set up specific sets of rules for online arbitration.     

Towards semantically enhanced Web service repositories

The success of the Web services technology has brought topics as software reuse and discovery once again on the agenda of software engineers. While there are several efforts towards automating Web service discovery and composition, many developers still search for services via online Web service repositories and then combine them manually. However, from our analysis of these online repositories, it yields that, unlike traditional software libraries, they rely on little metadata to support service discovery. We believe that the major cause is the difficulty of automatically deriving metadata that would describe rapidly changing Web service collections. In this paper, we discuss the major shortcomings of state of the art Web service repositories and as a solution, we report on ongoing work and ideas on how to use techniques developed in the context of the Semantic Web (ontology learning, matching, metadata based presentation) to improve the current situation.     

Taking the Fourth Party further? Considering a shared virtual workspace for arbitration

Presently, there is a growing interest in creating global virtual teams for online arbitration, in which collaboration proceeds across time zones as well as across geographical borders. The aim in this article is to study virtual shared workspaces. While trying to operate a constant interplay with collaboration technologies, we will describe new practices totally unheard of in dispute resolution. Virtual shared workspaces are graphical interfaces that allow several actors to interact simultaneously with the same virtual object. They can be used in online arbitration not to mediate, but rather to augment discussions by facilitating pleadings in cases involving complex factual situations, by providing very sophisticated ways to make allegations, to present facts, and to explain evidence. In this article, we analyse the collaboration, implementation and legal issues that arise from the use of this technology during arbitral proceedings.     

Portfolio and investment risk analysis on global grids

The financial services industry today produces and consumes huge amounts of data and the processes involved in analysing these data have large and complex resource requirements. The need to analyse the data using such processes and get meaningful results in time, can be met only up to a certain extent by current computer systems. Most service providers attempt to increase efficiency and quality of their service offerings by stacking up more hardware and employing better algorithms for data processing. However, there is a limit to the gains achieved by using such an approach. One viable alternative would be to use emerging technologies such as the Grid. Grid computing and its application to various domains have been actively studied by many groups for more than a decade now. In this paper we explore the use of the Grid in the financial services domain; an area which we believe has not been adequately looked into.     

Australia: raising the E-commerce comfort level

On the basis of our involvement in the technology sector, we believe that Australia views e-commerce as the use of modern technologies to conduct business transactions and make online interactions easier. Transactions involve the Internet, as well as smart cards, automated phone systems, and electronic communications to solicit, service, and maintain business relationships. Overcoming trust issues is a top priority for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business e-commerce in Australia     

基于最小空闲时间优先的片上总线仲裁算法

提出一种基于抢占阈值的最小空闲时间优先服务的总线仲裁算法。主设备总线服务请求的空闲时间越短,获得总线服务就越快,引入抢占阈值降低了总线服务频繁切换造成的颠簸现象。实验结果表明,该算法的MDP比常见的算法平均减少了43.8%,满足了各主设备总线服务请求的强实时要求。     

Online arbitration in the social network world; mobile justice on iPhones

Social networks are increasingly becoming important due to many aspects of everyday life supported and being facilitated through on-line activity. Billions of individuals are enjoying the use of social networks today and, therefore, they are becoming an important innovation in the modern world. However, due to disputes and concerns that are associated with such activities, the social networking world has yet to reach its full potential. When disputes occur in the on-line world, measures need be taken to settle those disputes in the same way that they were created. Through solving these disputes, the social networking world will be assisted in reaching full potential. One way of settling user disputes in the social networking world is the use of online arbitration. There are a number of advantages to using online arbitration as the parties involved will only communicate through the Internet and do not need to travel throughout the process. This helps in lowering the litigation costs to all parties involved. Considering the advantages online, arbitration has and the power that the social networking world bares, it is possible for users' disputes to be resolved and encourage communication between masses of users to build their confidence. With confidence that their disputes can be resolved easily, more users will be willing to publicise their profile for other users to view.     

QoS in InfiniBand subnetworks

The InfiniBand architecture (IBA) has been proposed as an industry standard both for communication between processing nodes and I/O devices and for interprocessor communication. It replaces the traditional bus-based interconnect with a switch-based network for connecting processing nodes and I/O devices. It is being developed by the InfiniBand/sup SM/ Trade Association (IBTA) in the aim to provide the levels of reliability, availability, performance, scalability, and quality of service (QoS) required by present and future server systems. For this purpose, IBA provides a series of mechanisms that are able to guarantee QoS to the applications. In previous papers, we have proposed a strategy to compute the InfiniBand arbitration tables. In one of these, we presented and evaluated our proposal to treat traffic with bandwidth requirements. In another, we evaluated our strategy to compute the InfiniBand arbitration tables for traffic with delay requirements, which is a more complex task. In this paper, we evaluate both these proposals together. Furthermore, we also adapt these proposals in order to treat VBR traffic without QoS guarantees, but achieving very good results. Performance results show that, with a correct treatment of each traffic class in the arbitration of the output port, all traffic classes reach their QoS requirements.     

Getting closer and experiencing together: Antecedents and consequences of psychological distance in social media-enhanced real-time streaming video

Social media services such as YouTube and Flickr have become online necessities for millions of users worldwide. Social media are online services that enable users to share contents, opinions, and perspectives that support communication with other users. Social media places an emphasis on the shared experience between users, which we call co-experience. However, the online characteristics of social media increase psychological distance between users, which, in turn, results in a decrease in the quality of co-experience. Hence, as the goal of this study, we theoretically modeled and empirically verified the antecedents and user experience-based consequences of psychological distance in a social media-enhanced real-time streaming video service. In order to reduce psychological distance, we introduced two system elements: inhabited space (the degree of being situated in context and in a meaningful place) and isomorph effects (the degree of preserving the structure of a user’s actions). We constructed a social media-enhanced real-time streaming video service prototype and conducted a field experiment with actual social media users. The prototype, which streamed a live baseball game, enabled users to simultaneously view the game from remote locations and to interact with each other through cheering tools. The results indicate that inhabited space and isomorph effects reduce psychological distance between users, and this, in turn, enhances co-experience. This paper ends with theoretical as well as practical implications of the study.     

基于概念层次树的用户特征挖掘技术

将面向属性的归纳方法应用到网上书店中,通过概念层次技术从用户的注册信息中归纳出用户的访问需求,从而实时主动地为用户提供个性化服务。实验证明该方法对研究用户的兴趣爱好有意义。     

A low-cost strategy to provide full QoS support in Advanced Switching networks

Advanced Switching (AS) is an open-standard fabric-interconnect technology that is built over the same physical and link layers as PCI Express technology. Moreover, it includes an optimized transaction layer to enable essential communication capabilities, including protocol encapsulation, peer-to-peer communications, mechanisms to provide quality of service (QoS), enhanced fail-over, high availability, multicast communications, and congestion and system management.In this paper, we propose a strategy to use the AS resources that provides a good performance and QoS support at a low cost. When the system is considered as a whole rather than each element being taken separately, it is possible to use only two virtual channels (VCs) at the switches to provide a service like that with many more VCs. As a result, we obtain a noticeable reduction of silicon area and arbitration time. Our proposal is fully compatible with the AS specification and permits us to provide an adequate performance both for typical multimedia applications and for best-effort traffic.     

Empirical investigation of customers’ channel extension behavior: Perceptions shift toward the online channel

An increasing number of traditional (offline) firms are opening up their online sales channels. However, a number of them are finding it difficult to increase the utilization of their online channels from their existing customers. The purpose of the current study is to identify factors that influence customers channel extension from the offline to online channel and to understand how these factors influence customers’ behavior towards online channel extension. Drawing on the theory of entitativity formulated by Campbell, we propose a research model of customers channel extension by focusing on the shift of perception from offline to the online channel. The data for the study is collected from a large bank in China. The structural equation modeling analysis results indicate that perceived offline service quality influences perceived online service quality both directly as well as indirectly through perceived entitativity. Perceived online service quality, in turn influences customers’ behavior towards the online channel extension. The results also demonstrate that self-efficacy for change directly influences behavior towards the online channel extension, and it also has an important moderating influence on relationship between perceived offline service quality and perceived online service quality. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Understanding the role of an IT artifact in online service continuance: An extended perspective of user satisfaction

Given increasing investment in an IT (information technology) artifact (i.e., online service website), it is becoming important to retain existing customers. In order to help link website design and investment decisions to the strategy for retaining customers, we propose a model by extending the user satisfaction perspective into research on online service continuance. We empirically tested the model within the context of a social network service. The analysis results found that website information satisfaction and system satisfaction play key roles in forming continuance intention through perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment. It is also noted that computer anxiety serves as an important moderator toward continuance intention. Theoretical and practical implications are offered for better understanding of the role of the IT artifact in online service post-adoption phenomena.     

Artificial neural networks based dynamic priority arbitration for asynchronous flow control

Accesses to physical links in Networks-on-Chip need to be appropriately arbitrated to avoid collisions. In the case of asynchronous routers, this arbitration between various clients, carrying messages with different service levels, is managed by dedicated circuits called arbiters. The latter are accustomed to allocate the shared resource to each client in a round-robin fashion; however, they may be tuned to favor certain messages more frequently by means of various digital design techniques. In this work, we make use of artificial neural networks to propose a mechanism to dynamically compute priority for each message by defining a few constraints. Based on these constraints, we first build a mathematical model for the objective function, and propose two algorithms for vector selection and resource allocation to train the artificial neural networks. We carry out a detailed comparison between seven different learning algorithms, and observe their effectiveness in terms of prediction efficiency for the application of dynamic priority arbitration. The decision is based on input parameters: available tokens, service levels, and an active request from each client. The performance of the learning algorithms has been analyzed in terms of mean squared error, true acceptance rate, number of epochs and execution time, so as to ensure mutual exclusion.

     

Industry 4.0 as a Cyber-Physical System study

Advances in computation and communication are taking shape in the form of the Internet of Things, Machine-to-Machine technology, Industry 4.0, and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). The impact on engineering such systems is a new technical systems paradigm based on ensembles of collaborating embedded software systems. To successfully facilitate this paradigm, multiple needs can be identified along three axes: (i) online configuring an ensemble of systems, (ii) achieving a concerted function of collaborating systems, and (iii) providing the enabling infrastructure. This work focuses on the collaborative function dimension and presents a set of concrete examples of CPS challenges. The examples are illustrated based on a pick and place machine that solves a distributed version of the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. The system includes a physical environment, a wireless network, concurrent computing resources, and computational functionality such as, service arbitration, various forms of control, and processing of streaming video. The pick and place machine is of medium-size complexity. It is representative of issues occurring in industrial systems that are coming online. The entire study is provided at a computational model level, with the intent to contribute to the model-based research agenda in terms of design methods and implementation technologies necessary to make the next generation systems a reality.     

Attitudes, beliefs, and attendance in a hybrid course

Since online learning technology, such as streaming video, was introduced to the college distance-learning environment, there has been a need to study the attitudes of college students toward the use of this modality in hybrid courses. Understanding students’ attitudes toward using online materials and the impact on class attendance is not only essential to ascertain how effectively the online content is delivered, it also helps teaching faculty prepare online courses and education programs. This paper studies the attitudes of college students’ about online materials in a hybrid upper division communications class. Student attitudes towards combining distance-learning techniques with traditional lecture tended to be positive. Students held the belief that hybrid courses have a negative impact on attendance, but they did not self-report an actual impact. Students do believe that they benefit from this technology, but the belief is strongest in those who are most computer/Internet literate. How these attitudes/beliefs impact the student in the context of a rural culture will be discussed.     

Outsourcing, ASP und Managed Services

In this paper we provide an overview about information which can be retrieved about “outsourcing” from the Web. We show that some terms related to outsourcing should also be considered. The supply of information is dominated by service providers and consultancies and by media companies providing portals and specialized online journals.     

Meaningful posts and online learning in Blackboard across four cohorts of adult learners

In the present study, meaningful posts were tracked in Blackboard in a longitudinal study of a graduate statistics course in order to predict online learning. In previous research by the present author, digital immigrants from a baby-boomer cohort fare better than digital natives due to social reliance and meaningful posts. Meaningful posts include discussion comments that reflect meaning-based engagement with the course material. Students with optimal patterns and types of discussion participation do better than those students who just follow a point system of quantity-based engagement. Students were given three behavioral assessments and then monitored for meaningful posts and successful online behavior using the tracking features within Blackboard. Results were analyzed using a multiple regression and showed that a significant percentage of online learning is predicted by meaningful posts and homework performance while total online activity does not uniquely predict learning outcomes. Students with more meaningful posts show more engagement with the online materials and better learning than those with less meaningful posts.     

Online customer service and emotional labor: An exploratory study

The recent growth of service industries as well as the rise of e-commerce has increased the number of online customer service workers. Research on face-to-face service work has shown that these workers are expected to display certain emotions in the course of their work, a phenomenon known as emotional labor. However, little is known about emotional communication among online customer service workers. We explored emotional labor in an online context by examining the degree of emotional presence in mediated service interactions and its relationship with workers' acting strategies (i.e., surface acting, deep acting). Further, we examined if emotional presence and acting strategies predict job satisfaction as well as burnout. Data collected from 130 online customer service workers indicated that they perceive the highest emotional presence in phone conversations, followed by email and chat. Although there was little relationship between emotional presence and acting strategies, those who engage in surface acting are less satisfied with their job and more likely to experience burnout. In addition, those who feel a higher degree of emotional presence over the phone tend to experience higher job satisfaction and less burnout. These findings suggest that online customer service workers also engage in emotional labor.