Modeling supernovae: braving a bold new frontier

The death of a massive star, called a core collapse supernova, is among the most energetic events in the universe, exploding with so much force it can be compared to 10/sup 28/ individual megaton bombs exploding at once. Researchers need powerful supercomputers capable of generating and storing terabytes and petabytes of data to simulate complex models. The US Department of Energy created the TeraScale Supernova Initiative (TSI) to do just that. The $9 million program - made up of the ORNL and eight US universities - aims to discover exactly how a supernova occurs. The scientists' charge is to perform 3D simulations of the radiation of the enormous amounts of neutrino energy and the resulting turbulent fluid flow that propels elements into space. So far, the team has generated 2D simulations, made possible because of terascale computers. They have created some 3D models, but not to the realistic detail the team needs. The team is using some of the most powerful types of computers available, capable of handling many terabytes of data. With these computers, 4,000 to 5,000 processor hours take just days - as opposed to months with a one-processor supercomputer. The team's computers include Seaborg, located at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Cheetah, located at the Center for Computational Science at ORNL, and Eagle, also located at ORNL. Use of these three computers and others like it have led to new discoveries by enabling multidimensional simulations.     

Mobile commerce and device specific perceived risk

This study examines the role of perceived risk and access device type on consumers’ on-line purchase decisions. We use a two-step hurdle approach to estimate consumer behavior. In the first step, the decision of whether to engage in eCommerce is estimated and in the second step, how many orders to place is estimated. We use a large multi-year survey sample of households from Canada’s national statistical agency—Statistics Canada. The sample size is such that we are able to conduct sub-sample analysis of PC-only users, mobile-only users, and other-users. We show that online security and price significantly influence mobile eCommerce. We also show that there is a statistically significant difference in the intensity of eCommerce engagement across device type and consumer risk type (high/low). One of our main findings is that perceived risk affects purchase decisions for mobile users more than PC users, however additional comparisons are carried out with our analysis.     

Mobile Web services: a new agent-based framework

Mobile devices and server applications often run on different platforms, which can make integration problematic. Web services might offer a solution, but they typically include XML protocols that are too "heavy" for mobile devices. In this article, we describe agent-based mobile services framework. It uses wireless portal networks and eliminates XML processing on mobile clients. It also offers dynamic service selection and rapid application development and deployment for Web service providers.     

XPECT: a framework for electronic commerce

Electronic commerce is emerging as one of the most important applications on the Internet, with the potential to revolutionize the whole structure of retail merchandising and shopping. There is already a need for an information technology infrastructure that goes well beyond the simple capabilities offered by the current development environments for Internet applications. For electronic commerce to really take off, however, it will have to give shoppers options not available through traditional commercial channels. This implies the further need for an infrastructure that can support complex and flexible services to manage customer tailored requests in the context of highly dynamic networks and federations of providers. To achieve this level of support will mean using the functionalities now considered to be whole applications as the elementary building blocks of e-commerce applications. Among these functionalities are: transactional payment; workflow; and multiparty agreement. To address these issues, we developed XPect, a generic framework for electronic commerce. The XPect framework supports the integration of multiple component functionalities. It is implemented in the Coordination Language Facility, an object based distributed application development tool. CLF assumes an object model of autonomous agents that can engage in interactions, more sophisticated than those in the traditional object paradigm. In addition, CLF allows for dynamically adding new services and for coordinating the access to multiple services     

基于XML的移动电子商务数据交换模式的设计

为了在移动电子商务中实现标准的数据交换,利用XM L的数据处理能力,提出一种移动电子商务数据交换模式的设计方案,使得移动客户端和服务器能更好的交互,给系统带来灵活性。     

Decision support systems (DSS) a new frontier for industrial engineering

A Decision Support System is an interactive computerized system that is designed for eady use by both the practicing manager and the industrial engineer/management scientist. It enables the user to express complex decision problems by permitting him or her to conduct a dialogue with the computer without the assistance of staff support. An industrial engineer can act as the “change agent” in introducing DSS in organizations as well as user it to perform his or her own functions.     

Mobile video literacy: negotiating the use of a new visual technology

In this article, we examine the practice of learning to produce video using a new visual technology. Drawing upon a design intervention at a science centre, where a group of teenagers tried a new prototype technology for live mobile video editing, we show how the participants struggle with both the content and the form of producing videos, i.e., what to display and how to do it in a comprehensible manner. We investigate the ways in which video literacy practices are negotiated as ongoing accomplishments and explore the communicative and material resources relied upon by participants as they create videos. Our results show that the technology is instrumental in this achievement and that as participants begin to master the prototype, they start to focus more on the narrative aspects of communicating the storyline of a science centre exhibit. The participants are explicitly concerned with such issues as how to create a comprehensible storyline for an assumed audience, what camera angles to use, how to cut and other aspects of the production of a video. We consider these observed activities to be candidate steps in an emerging mobile video literacy trajectory that involves developing a capacity to document and argue by means of this specific medium.     

Alambic: a privacy-preserving recommender system for electronic commerce

Recommender systems enable merchants to assist customers in finding products that best satisfy their needs. Unfortunately, current recommender systems suffer from various privacy-protection vulnerabilities. Customers should be able to keep private their personal information, including their buying preferences, and they should not be tracked against their will. The commercial interests of merchants should also be protected by allowing them to make accurate recommendations without revealing legitimately compiled valuable information to third parties. We introduce a theoretical approach for a system called Alambic, which achieves the above privacy-protection objectives in a hybrid recommender system that combines content-based, demographic and collaborative filtering techniques. Our system splits customer data between the merchant and a semi-trusted third party, so that neither can derive sensitive information from their share alone. Therefore, the system could only be subverted by a coalition between these two parties.

Learning and education: a continuing frontier for AI

Learning is the most important part of artificial intelligence. A basic research effort can explore how to build software that can learn and be educated very broadly.     

CellTrust: a reputation model for C2C commerce

The improvement of wireless technologies and the increasing spread of mobile phones open new possibilities to perform mobile Customer-to-Customer commercial activities. In this new scenario, where users cannot rely on stable connections, it assumes a great relevance how to trust the counterpart in a transaction and how to avoid that a disconnection, possible in wireless connections, can encourage users to cheat. To tackle these issues we propose a feedback-based reputation mechanism able to detect malicious users better than other state-of-the-art techniques, as shown by the large number of experiments run to measure the accuracy of the compared methods in the most common situations.

移动LTE新建拉远基站配套传输方案新思路

目前拉远基站配套传输建设为直接从信源基站放一条光缆到拉远基站,中间不设分纤点,该建设模式已不适应长期大量拉远基站的建设需求,如何优化光缆网建设结构,在满足业务接入需求的前提下,如何减少对管孔和杆路资源的占用及节约成本显得尤为重要。     

A dynamic model of electric vehicle adoption: The role of social commerce in new transportation

This research explores the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) as a substitute for internal combustion engine vehicles (ICVs) and examines its emergence as a mobile intelligent terminal of social commerce. We present a system dynamics (SD) model incorporating fuzzy logic to simulate the adoption process. The results suggest that consumers’ vague perceptions and the dispersion of pilot EV projects have caused EV adoption to be delayed; nevertheless, the introduction of social commerce to EVs can help relieve this problem and promote EV adoption. However, the timing of introducing social commerce is critical for enhancing its positive effect on EV adoption.     

Eco System: an Internet commerce architecture

Robust electronic commerce will require several proprietary systems to interoperate. CommerceNet is proposing Eco System, a cross industry effort to build a framework of frameworks, involving both e-commerce vendors and end users. Eco System will consist of an extensible object oriented framework (class libraries, application programming interfaces and shared services) from which developers can assemble applications quickly from existing components. These applications could subsequently be reused in other applications. We are also developing a Common Business Language (CBL) that lets application agents communicate using messages and objects that model communications in the real business world. A network services architecture (protocols, APIs, and data formats) will insulate application agents from each other and from platform dependencies, while facilitating their interoperation. Functionally, Eco System fills three distinct roles. It is: a layer of middleware that facilitates agent interoperation through services such as authentication, billing, payment, and directories; an object oriented development environment that encourages the reuse of e-commerce modules (even modules that represent the product line of an entire company); and an industry roadmap and interoperability example that promotes open standards and helps technology vendors communicate with end users about product features     

Agent and data mining based decision support system and its adaptation to a new customer-centric electronic commerce

Recently, as the Internet has become more widely used, Electronic Commerce (EC) has emerged and has developed a high-level business environment. The customer-centric EC model is important for the success of EC and this study presents a new customer-centric EC model in make-to-order (MTO) semiconductor manufacturing environment. In this study we proposed the EC model providing the process transparency of process sampling method that can provide online semiconductor customers with the performance information of available process sampling methods which can be used at all manufacturing process steps for their own products in MTO manufacturing environment, and then the capability to select a desirable one among them based on their purchase situations on EC web site. In the proposed EC model the customer can select a process sampling method that is most suitable to him/her according to the customer's purchase situation. In this model the use of intelligent decision support system called customized sampling decision support system (CSDSS) that can autonomously generate available customized sampling methods and provide the performance information of those methods to EC system is requisite. We implemented an Internet-based prototype of CSDSS which had an architecture based on intelligent agent technology and also the successful integration of data mining process for the generation of optimal sampling method into DSS framework by means of applying that technology.     

Social commerce research: An integrated view

Social commerce has quickly emerged as a new area of inquiry for both practitioners and researchers, suggesting the potential impacts of social media and social networking technologies and services in shaping commercial channels on and off the Internet. This essay starts by providing a brief overview of social commerce research and practice in light of the wide attention it has drawn in the industry. Then, we propose a research framework with an integrated view of social commerce that consists of four key components: business, technology, people, and information. The framework helps us understand the development of social commerce research and practice to date. Subsequently, we report some preliminary findings from a bibliometric study of academic and industry publications in social commerce to reveal recent trends and research topics, as well as some verification of the research framework. Finally, we discuss five articles in this special issue and categorize them in terms of the proposed social commerce research framework.     

Website features that gave rise to social commerce: a historical analysis

Social commerce is a form of commerce mediated by social media and social network services (SNS). As a multifaceted phenomenon, social commerce can be studied from different angles and analyzed through the lens of various disciplines. This article examines website technical features to depict the transformation of e-commerce into social commerce. We first develop a conceptual framework to capture three emphases of e-commerce: transactional, relational and social. Then, we use the framework to conduct an historical analysis of the actual website screen captures for five top e-commerce companies since their websites were established. We were able to identify and classify a total of 174 emerging technical features. Our results show that: (1) all three emphases were expressed in the websites and have been reshaping their business and marketing strategies over the years; (2) there was a clear blooming of social features in 2007; and (3) there has been a significant effort to strengthen customer and merchant ties through relational features. Our findings signal that there still is room for further exploration of the social emphasis.