User disposition and extent of Web utilization: A trait hierarchy approach

As it evolves, the World Wide Web (the Web) increasingly reveals the potential to enhance new aspects of our daily lives. While some take full advantage of the Web's diverse and cutting edge offerings, others choose to limit the extent of their utilization to a small subset of the Web's available functions. Recognizing this variation, a growing body of research investigates the drivers of usage behavior on the Web. Individual differences, namely broad personality and IT-specific traits, are highlighted within this stream as important predictors of Web use. Although substantial progress has been made, an important issue still facing trait research in this area is the absence of a theory-grounded basis for inter-relating broad personality and IT-specific traits. As a result, the accumulation of extant trait research is characterized by a disjointed assortment of trait constructs lacking clear theoretical linkages with one another. Additionally, while numerous studies have investigated isolated Web usage behaviors, an important outcome that remains under-investigated is the extent of an individual's utilization of the Web overall. Addressing these issues, the current study leverages the hierarchical view of traits to develop a theory-grounded, integrative model of broad personality and IT-specific traits. After developing the hierarchical model, the integrated network of traits is positioned as a direct antecedent of Web utilization and empirically tested via a two-stage field survey of 230 Web users. The results corroborate most of the hypotheses, providing support for the hierarchical view and extending the knowledge base on Web-user behavior. Overall, this study unifies disjointed personality and IT-specific trait constructs and offers theoretical guidance for future studies, introducing a much-needed ground for cumulative tradition within this stream.     

A method to exchange procedurally represented 2D CAD model data using ISO 10303 STEP

Procedural models have the advantage of being easy to edit simply by changing the values of the parameters of their constructional operations. Such models are said to embody design intent, in the sense that modifications to them conform to the method of creation used by their original creator. They also comply with any constraints implied by the particular constructional operations used. This paper introduces the development and standardization process of the ISO 10303-112 specification and describes the concept of procedural 2D modeling, a method of representing procedural 2D CAD models in STEP in harmony with other STEP resources. The feasibility of procedural 2D modeling commands for the exchange of procedurally represented 2D CAD model data is demonstrated through an experiment where procedural 2D CAD model data in neutral form generated with an in-house 2D modeling system are translated to and modified in a commercial 3D mechanical CAD system.     

An enhanced cross-layer fast handover scheme for mobile IPv6 in the IEEE 802.16e networks

The IEEE 802.16e standard enhances the IEEE 802.16 for the mobility support. Mobile stations can move while receiving services, thus ongoing IP sessions may be maintained during a handover in the IEEE 802.16e. To reduce handover latency, the idea of cross-layer handover which incorporates layer 2 handover with IP layer has been devised. Various cross-layer handover schemes supporting fast handover in the IEEE 802.16e networks have been proposed. However, the problem of the conventional cross-layer fast handover schemes is that they are heavily influenced by the new address confirmation latency which is the most time-consuming procedure. In this paper, we propose an enhanced cross-layer fast handover scheme which is not susceptible to the new address confirmation latency. Detailed performance analysis is performed in terms of the signaling costs and the handover latencies to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme compared with the conventional ones. The results of the performance evaluation confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

Modeling and simulation of powered hip orthosis by pneumatic actuators

In this study, a simulation model for a powered hip orthosis (PHO) with air muscles to predict the gait of paraplegics is presented which can be used as a design tool for hip orthoses. Before simulation, mathematical models for a human dummy with an orthosis and a pneumatic muscle actuator were generated. For the air muscle, coefficients required were obtained by static and dynamic experiments of the air muscle and experiments for the valve controlling the air pressure. The computation was conducted on the ADAMS package together with MATLAB. Computer simulation of the flexion of hip joints by the pneumatic muscle results in similar values to those from gait analysis. With the development of a simulation model for a PHO, the gait simulation model using pneumatic muscles can be used to analyze and evaluate the characteristics and efficiency of a PHO by setting the input and boundary conditions.     

Proteomic analysis of sera of asymptomatic,early‐stage patients with Wilson's disease

Wilson's disease (WD) is characterized by excessive accumulation of intracellular copper in liver and extrahepatic tissues, leading to significant oxidative stress and tissue damage. To date, several diagnostic biomarkers for WD such as serum ceruloplasmin, serum or urine copper levels and copper content in liver have been identified. However, these biomarkers may not be convincing for the diagnosis in some WD patients. To identify additional novel diagnostic biomarkers, we compared the serum protein profiles of asymptomatic childhood WD patients (n=20), without neurologic manifestation or liver cirrhosis, with normal controls (n=13). Fourteen spots, five up‐regulated and nine down‐regulated (>2‐fold), were differentially expressed in WD patients in comparison to normal control on 2‐DE. Among them, three spots were down‐regulated in both male and female WD. MS/MS analysis revealed that the three spots were complement component C3, complement factor B and alpha‐2 macroglobulin. By comparative proteome analysis, complement component C3, complement factor B and alpha‐2 macroglobulin, which are related to oxidative stress and inflammation, turned out to be good candidates for novel diagnostic biomarkers for early stages of WD.     

Annotating korean text documents with linked data resources

Semantic annotation approaches link entities from a knowledge base to mentions of entities in text to provide additional content-related information. Recently increasing use of resources from the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud has been made to annotate text documents thanks to the network of machine-understandable, interlinked data. While existing approaches to semantic annotation in the LOD context have been proven to be well performing with the English language, many other languages in general and the Korean language in particular are still underrepresented. We investigate the applicability of existing semantic annotation approaches to the Korean language by adapting two popular approaches in the semantic annotation field and evaluating those approaches on an English-Korean bilingual sense-tagged corpus. Further, general challenges in internationalization of annotation approaches are summarized.     

Arm movement activity based user authentication in P2P systems

Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications - User authentication has become an essential security element that enables a wide range of applications in P2P systems for higher security and safety...     

Data depth based support vector machines for predicting corporate bankruptcy

In financial distress analysis, the diagnosis of firms at risk for bankruptcy is crucial in preparing to hedge against any financial damage the at-risk firms stand to inflict. Some pre-alarm signals that indicate a potential financial crisis exist when a firm faces a default risk. Early studies on corporate bankruptcy prediction include parametric and nonparametric approaches, such as artificial intelligence (AI), for detecting pre-alarm signals. Among nonparametric techniques, the methods involving support vector machine (SVM) have shown potential in predicting corporate bankruptcy. We propose a hybrid method that combines data depths and nonlinear SVM for the prediction of corporate bankruptcy. We employed data depth functions to condense multivariate financial data with nonlinear and non-normal characteristics into one-dimensional space. The SVM method was introduced to classify the data points on a depth versus depth plot (DD-plot). Based on data set that records failed and non-failed manufacturing firms in Korea over 10 years, the empirical results demonstrated that the proposed method offers a higher level of accuracy in corporate bankruptcy prediction than existing methods. The proposed method is expected to provide a guidance in corporate investing for investors or other interested parties.     

An integrated translation of design data of a nuclear power plant from a specification-driven plant design system to neutral model data

How to efficiently integrate and manage lifecycle data of a nuclear power plant has gradually become an important object of study. Because plants usually have a very long period of operation and maintenance, the plant design data need to be presented in a computer-interpretable form and to be independent of any commercial systems. The conversion of plant design data from various design systems into neutral model data is therefore an important technology for the effective operation and maintenance of plants. In this study, a neutral model for the efficient integration of plant design data is chosen from among the currently available options and extended in order to cover the information model requirements of nuclear power plants in Korea. After the mapping of the neutral model and the data model of a specification-driven plant design system, a plant data translator is also implemented in accordance with the schema mapping results.     

Detecting the wheel pattern of a vehicle using stereo images

This paper presents a method for detecting the wheels of a vehicle in stereo image pairs. The method consists of two steps: (i) geometrical transformation; and (ii) circle extraction. The geometrical transformation uses the disparity values obtained from a stereo image pair to calculate the parameters of the plane containing wheels of the vehicle. By using these parameters, we transform any elliptical wheels contained in the plane to circular ones which can be extracted by the circle extraction algorithm. The circle extraction algorithm consists of (1) template matching and (2) Hough transform. In order to save computation and improve the results in the Hough transform, we employ two constraints (a) the neighbor-region edge connectivity and (b) the gradient direction of each edge point, to eliminate non-circular edge points. Experimental results show that these two constraints do eliminate non-circular edge points and preserve any circle embedded in edges. From the final results, we can observe that our method can detect and locate the wheels of a vehicle successfully.