Cooperative spectrum sensing increases the detection performance in a cognitive radio network, based on the number of sensing nodes. However, as the number of sensing nodes increases, the reporting overhead linearly increases. This paper proposes two kinds of cooperative spectrum sensing with limited reporting in a centralized cognitive radio network, a soft combination with threshold-based reporting (SC-TR) and a soft combination with contention-based reporting (SC-CR). In the proposed SC-TR scheme, each sensing node reports its sensing result to the fusion center through its own reporting channel only if the observed energy value is higher than a decision threshold. In the proposed SC-CR scheme, sensing nodes compete to report their sensing results via shared reporting channels. The simulation results show that the proposed schemes significantly reduce the reporting overhead without sacrificing the detection performance too much.

Quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning for a cognitive mesh network (CMN) with heterogeneous services has become a challenging area of research in recent days. Considering both real-time (RT) and non-real-time (NRT) traffic in a multihop CMN, [1] studied cross-layer resource management, including joint access control, route selection, and resource allocation. Due to the complexity of the formulated resource allocation problems, which are mixed-integer non-linear programming, a low-complexity yet efficient algorithm was proposed there to approximately solve the formulated optimization problems. In contrast, in this work, we present an application of genetic algorithm (GA) to re-address the hard resource allocation problems studied in [1]. Novel initialization, selection, crossover, and mutation operations are designed such that solutions with enough randomness can be generated and converge with as less number of attempts as possible, thus improving the efficiency of the algorithm effectively. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the newly proposed GA-based algorithm. Furthermore, by comparing the performance of the newly proposed algorithm with the one proposed in [1], more insights have been obtained in terms of the tradeoff among QoS provisioning for RT traffic, throughput maximization for NRT traffic, and time complexity of an algorithm for resource allocation in a multihop network such as CMN.

In order to accommodate huge number of antennas in a limited antenna size, a large scale antenna array is expected to have a three dimensional (3D) array structure. By using the Active Antenna Systems (AAS), the weights of the antenna elements arranged vertically could be configured adaptively. Then, a degree of freedom (DOF) in the vertical plane is provided for system design. So the three-dimension MIMO (3D MIMO) could be realized to solve the actual implementation problem of the massive MIMO. However, in 3D massive MIMO systems, the pilot contamination problem studied in 2D massive MIMO systems and the inter-cell interference as well as inter-vertical sector interference in 3D MIMO systems with vertical sectorization exist simultaneously, when the number of antenna is not large enough. This paper investigates the interference management towards the above challenges in 3D massive MIMO systems. Here, vertical sectorization based on vertical beamforming is included in the concerned systems. Firstly, a cooperative joint vertical beams adjustment and pilot assignment scheme is developed to improve the channel estimation precision of the uplink with pilots being reused across the vertical sectors. Secondly, a downlink interference coordination scheme by jointly controlling weight vectors and power of vertical beams is proposed, where the estimated channel state information is used in the optimization modelling, and the performance loss induced by pilot contamination could be compensated in some degree. Simulation results show that the proposed joint optimization algorithm with controllable vertical beams' weight vectors outperforms the method combining downtilts adjustment and power allocation.

Energy consumption by large computing systems has become an important research theme not only because the sources of energy are depleting fast but also due to the environmental concern. Computational grid is a huge distributed computing platform for the applications that require high end computing resources and consume enormous energy to facilitate execution of jobs. The organizations which are offering services for high end computation, are more cautious about energy consumption and taking utmost steps for saving energy. Therefore, this paper proposes a scheduling technique for Minimizing Energy consumption using Adapted Genetic Algorithm (MiE-AGA) for dependent tasks in Computational Grid (CG). In MiE-AGA, fitness function formulation for energy consumption has been mathematically formulated. An adapted genetic algorithm has been developed for minimizing energy consumption with appropriate modifications in each components of original genetic algorithm such as representation of chromosome, crossover, mutation and inversion operations. Pseudo code for MiE-AGA and its components has been developed with appropriate examples. MiE-AGA is simulated using Java based programs integrated with GridSim. Analysis of simulation results in terms of energy consumption, makespan and average utilization of resources clearly reveals that MiE-AGA effectively optimizes energy, makespan and average utilization of resources in CG. Comparative analysis of the optimization performance between MiE-AGA and the state-of-the-arts algorithms: EAMM, HEFT, Min-Min and Max-Min shows the effectiveness of the model.

A major challenge in network service providers is to provide adequate resources in service level agreements based on forecasts of future demands. In this paper, we address the problem of capacity provisioning in a network subject to demand uncertainty such that a network coded multicast is applied as the data delivery mechanism with limited budget to purchase extra capacity. We address some particular type of uncertainty sets that obtain a tractable constrained capacity provisioning problem. For this reason, we first formulate a mathematical model for the problem under uncertain demand. Then, a robust optimization model is proposed for the problem to optimize the worst-case system performance. The robustness and effectiveness of the developed model are demonstrated by numerical results. The robust solution achieves more than 10% reduction and is better than the deterministic solution in the worst case.

This paper presents a game theoretic approach to analyze the public goods (PGs) allocation in peer-to-peer (p2p) networks. In order to reduce the free-riders and promote the cooperation among peers, we propose an incentive mechanism with cooperation-based game theory. In this paper, we regarded the contributed resources by cooperators as public goods (PGs). We also build the PGs allocation in P2P networks to be the optimization problem, and the optimal solution of PGs allocation satisfies the Bowen-Lindahl-Samuelson equilibrium. Firstly, based on the subscriber mechanism, we analyze the feasibility and prove the validity, which can achieve Nash equilibrium. However, this strategy cannot meet to Bowen-Lindahl-Samuelson equilibrium as the free-riders do not pay with their private goods for consuming the PGs. Secondly, based on the Walker mechanism, we analyze the feasibility and prove the validity for the same allocation problem, which meets to Bowen-Lindahl-Samuelson equilibrium and achieves Pareto efficiency within cooperative game. Simulations show that the proposed walker mechanism can significantly improve the network performance of throughout, and effectively alleviate free-riding problem in P2P networks.

Existing coding aware routing algorithms focused on novel routing metric design that captures the characteristics of network coding. However, in packet coding algorithm, they use opportunistic coding scheme which didn't consider the queue state of the coding node and are equivalent to the conventional store-and-forward method in light traffic load condition because they never delay packets and there are no packets in the output queue of coding node, which results in no coding opportunity. In addition, most of the existing algorithms assume that all flows participating in the network have equal rate. This is unrealistic since multi-rate environments are often appeared. To overcome above problem and expand network coding to light traffic load scenarios, we present an enhanced coding-aware routing algorithm based on queue state and local topology (OQMCAR), which consider the queue state of coding node in packet coding algorithm where the control policy is of threshold-type. OQMCAR is a unified framework to merge single rate case and multiple rate case, including the light traffic load scenarios. Simulations results show that our scheme can achieve higher throughput and lower end-to-end delay than the current mechanisms using COPE-type opportunistic coding policy in different cases.

As the number of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets explodes, the need for new services or applications is also rapidly increasing. Smart class application is one of the emerging applications, in which most of contents are distributed to all members of a class simultaneously. It is highly required to select relay nodes to cover shadow area of radio as well as extend coverage, but existing algorithms in a smart class environment suffer from high control packet overhead and delay for exchanging topology information among all pairs of nodes to select relay nodes. In addition, the relay selection procedure should be repeated in order to adapt to the dynamic topology changes caused by link status changes or device's movement. This paper proposes the learning based relay selection algorithm to overcome aforementioned problems. The key idea is that every node keeps track of its relay quality in a fully distributed manner, where RQI (Relay Quality Indicator) is newly defined to measure both the ability of receiving packets from content source and the ability of successfully relaying them to successors. The RQI of each node is updated whenever it receives or relays broadcast packet, and the node having the higher RQI is selected as a relay node in a distributed and run-time manner. Thus, the proposed algorithm not only removes the overhead for obtaining prior knowledge to select relay nodes, but also provides the adaptability to the dynamic topology changes. The network simulation and experimental results prove that the proposed algorithm provides efficient and reliable content distribution to all members in a smart class as well adaptability against network dynamics.

This study demonstrates that ease of use, usefulness, and hedonic desires affect the intention to use smart signage, based on market delimitations. Smart signage is at an early phase of adoption and its market can be divided broadly into indoor and outdoor markets. In this study, an empirical study model was established in conjunction with the technology acceptance model (TAM), which was applied to the IT area of a smart signage map and to a hedonic model. Empirical results showed that the key hedonic attributes affecting the intention to use smart signage include information delivery for the indoor environment and emotional and entertainment content for the outdoor environment. In the future, specific guidelines can be presented to boost the usage of smart signage through an empirical study based on the identification of external factors that affect usage intention.

Adaptive Gaussian filter (AGF) is a recently developed switching filter to remove salt and pepper noise. AGF first directly identifies pixels of gray levels 0 and 255 as noise pixels, and then only restored noise pixels using a Gaussian filter with adaptive variance based on the estimated noise density. AGF usually achieves better denoising effect in comparison with other filters. However, AGF still fails to obtain good denoising effect on images with noise-free pixels of gray levels 0 and 255, due to its severe false alarm in its noise detection stage. To alleviate this issue, a modified version of AGF is proposed in this paper. Specifically, the proposed filter first performs noise detection via an image block based noise density estimation and sequential noise density guided rectification on the noise detection result of AGF. Then, a modified Gaussian filter with adaptive variance and window size is used to restore the detected noise pixels. The proposed filter has been extensively evaluated on two representative grayscale images and the Berkeley image dataset BSDS300 with 300 images. Experimental results showed that the proposed filter achieved better denoising effect over the state-of-the-art filters, especially on images with noise-free pixels of gray levels 0 and 255.

In the field of computer vision, visual surveillance systems have recently become an important research topic. Growth in this area is being driven by both the increase in the availability of inexpensive computing devices and image sensors as well as the general inefficiency of manual surveillance and monitoring. In particular, the ultimate goal for many visual surveillance systems is to provide automatic activity recognition for events at a given site. A higher level of understanding of these activities requires certain lower-level computer vision tasks to be performed. So in this paper, we propose an intelligent activity recognition model that uses a structure learning method and a classification method. The structure learning method is provided as a K2-learning algorithm that generates Bayesian networks of causal relationships between sensors for a given activity. The statistical characteristics of the sensor values and the topological characteristics of the generated graphs are learned for each activity, and then a neural network is designed to classify the current activity according to the features extracted from the multiple sensor values that have been collected. Finally, the proposed method is implemented and tested by using PETS2013 benchmark data.

As the Android operating system has become a key target for malware authors, Android protection has become a thriving research area. Beside the proved importance of system permissions for malware analysis, there is a lot of overlapping in permissions between malware apps and goodware apps. The exploitation of them effectively in malware detection is still an open issue. In this paper, to investigate the feasibility of neuro-fuzzy techniques to Android protection based on system permissions, we introduce a self-adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system to classify the Android apps into malware and goodware. According to the framework introduced, the most significant permissions that characterize optimally malware apps are identified using Information Gain Ratio method and encapsulated into patterns of features. The patterns of features data is used to train and test the system using stratified cross-validation methodologies. The experiments conducted conclude that the proposed classifier can be effective in Android protection. The results also underline that the neuro-fuzzy techniques are feasible to employ in the field.

Designing a new reversible data hiding technique with a high embedding rate and a low compression rate for vector quantization (VQ) compressed images is encouraged. This paper proposes a novel lossless data hiding scheme for VQ-compressed images based on the joint neighboring coding technique. The proposed method uses the difference values between a current VQ index and its left and upper neighboring VQ indexes to embed n secret bits into one VQ index, where n = 1, 2, 3, or 4. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves the embedding rates of 1, 2, 3, and 4 bits per index (bpi) with the corresponding average compression rates of 0.420, 0.483, 0.545, and 0.608 bit per pixel (bpp) for a 256 sized codebook. These results confirm that our scheme performs better than other selected reversible data hiding schemes.

Spam has become one of the top threats of micro-blogging networks as the representations of rumor spreading, advertisement abusing and malware distribution. With the increasing popularity of micro-blogging, the problems will exacerbate. Prior detection tools are either designed for specific types of spams or not robust enough. Spammers may escape easily from being detected by adjusting their behaviors. In this paper, we present a novel model to quantitatively evaluate information diffusion in micro-blogging networks. Under this model, we found that spam posts differ wildly from the non-spam ones. First, the propagations of non-spam posts mostly result from their followers, but those of spam posts are mainly from strangers. Second, the non-spam posts relatively last longer than the spam posts. Besides, the non-spam posts always get their first reposts/comments much sooner than the spam posts. With the features defined in our model, we propose an RBF-based approach to detect spams. Different from the previous works, in which the features are extracted from individual profiles or contents, the diffusion features are not determined by any single user but the crowd. Thus, our method is more robust because any single user's behavior changes will not affect the effectiveness. Besides, although the spams vary in types and forms, they're propagated in the same way, so our method is effective for all types of spams. With the real data crawled from the leading micro-blogging services of China, we are able to evaluate the effectiveness of our model. The experiment results show that our model can achieve high accuracy both in precision and recall.

Recently, the web index of Korea peaked at the top 10 among the eighty six countries, and Korea became the only Asian country ranked at the top level. Korea also has been on the top in the field of Internet penetration rate, in terms of both high-speed broadband and wireless Internet. However, such achievements did not guarantee the national level for the effective use of information utilizing Internet. According to OECD, the national informatization index of Korea has not been free from the middle of the OECD countries. Despite of the heightened pressure in practically enhancing effective information use utilizing Internet, the previous research interests and efforts to develop the Internet-related framework or to identify Internet capabilities rarely existed. The study aims to propose the framework, named "Internet Information Orientation" that illustrates the relationship between Internet capabilities and national competitiveness on Internet. The research identified the specific Internet capabilities, reclassified the capabilities based on the research issues provided at the 6^th international conference on Internet held in December 2014, and finally described the rigorous research endeavors on the issues. As a result, 16 papers presented and selected as the outstanding papers at the conference handle issues to be brought together, which include: Wireless Network, Internet of Things, Green Computing, Multimedia Processing, Big Data and Text Mining, Database in Cloud Environment, Business Intelligence, Software Engineering, IT Strategy & Policy, and Social Network Services.

Wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA), high speed packet access (HSPA) and HSPA+ are third generation partnership project (3GPP) standards. These systems are the major wireless communication standards. In order to test the performance of WCDMA/HSPA/HSPA+ signal in a base station, the measurement hardware is required to the evaluation of the transmitted signals. In this paper, the algorithm for the performance measurement of the WCDMA/HSPA/HSPA+ is proposed. Also, the performance of the measurement algorithm is used to evaluate the generated signal by the WCDMA/HSPA/HSPA+ signal generator. Generally, the algorithm of normal modems cannot be applied to the measurement system because the signal measurement equipment needs to guarantee the high accuracy. So, the WCDMA/HSPA/HSPA+ signal measurement algorithm for the accurate measurement is proposed. By the simulation, it is confirmed that the proposed measurement algorithm has good performance compared with the specification. Therefore, the proposed algorithm can be usefully applied to verify the performance of the measurement using the simulation.

The phenomena of higher channel cross polarization discrimination (XPD) is mainly observed for future wireless technologies such as small cell network and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. Therefore, utilization of high XPD is very important and space-polarization division multiple access (SPDMA) with dual-polarized MIMO system could be a suitable solution to high-speed transmission in high XPD environment as well as reduction of array size at base station (BS). By SPDMA with dual-polarized MIMO system, two parallel data signals can be transmitted by both vertically and horizontally polarized antennas to serve different mobile stations (MSs) simultaneously compare to conventional space division multiple access (SDMA) with single-polarized MIMO system. This paper analyzes the performance of SPDMA for maximum ratio transmission (MRT) in time division duplexing (TDD) system by proposed dual-polarized MIMO spatial channel model (SCM) compare to conventional SDMA. Simulation results indicate that how SPDMA utilizes the high XPD as the number of MS increases and SPDMA performs very close to conventional SDMA for same number of antenna elements but half size of the array at BS.

Although the massive MIMO system supports a high throughput, it requires a lot of channel information for channel compensation. For the reduction of overhead, the massive MIMO system generally uses TDD as duplexing scheme. Therefore, the massive MIMO system is sensitive to rapidly changing fast fading in according to time. For the improvement of reduced SINR by fast fading, the adaptive power control is proposed. Unlike the conventional scheme, the proposed scheme considers mobility of device for adaptive power control. The simulation of the proposed scheme is performed with consideration for mobility of device. The result of the simulation shows that the proposed scheme improves SINR. Since SINR is decreased in according to the number of device in the network by unit of cell, each base station can accommodate more devices by the proposed scheme. Also, because the massive MIMO system with high SINR can use high order modulation scheme, it can support higher throughput.

In this paper, a smart constrained application protocol (CoAP)-based gateway with a border router is proposed for home safety services to remotely monitor the trespass, fire, and indoor air quality. The smart CoAP gateway controls a home safety sensor node with a pyroelectric infrared motion sensor, a fire sensor, a humidity and temperature sensor, and a non-dispersive infrared CO2 sensor and gathers sensing data from them. In addition, it can convert physical sensing data into understandable information and perform packet conversion as a border router for seamless connection between a low-power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN) and the Internet (IPv6). Implementation and laboratory test results verify the feasibility of the smart CoAP gateway which especially can provide about 97.20% data throughput.

The accuracy of an augmented reality (AR) application is highly dependent on the resolution of the object's image and the device's computational processing capability. Naturally, a mobile smart device equipped with a high-resolution camera becomes the best platform for portable AR services. AR applications require significant energy consumption and very fast response time, which are big burdens to the smart device. However, there are very few ways to overcome these burdens. Computation offloading via mobile cloud computing has the potential to provide energy savings and enhance the performance of applications executed on smart devices. Therefore, in this paper, adaptive mobile computation offloading of mobile AR applications is considered in order to determine optimal offloading points that satisfy the required quality of experience (QoE) while consuming minimum energy of the smart device. AR feature extraction based on SURF algorithm is partitioned into sub-stages in order to determine the optimal AR cloud computational offloading point based on conditions of the smart device, wireless and wired networks, and AR service cloud servers. Tradeoffs in energy savings and processing time are explored also taking network congestion and server load conditions into account.

This paper presents a single-phase energy metering chip with built-in calibration function to measure electric power quantities. The entire chip consists of an analog front end, a filter block, a computation engine, a calibration engine, and an external interface block. The key design issues are how to reduce the implementation costs of the computation engine from repeatedly used arithmetic operations and how to simplify calibration procedure and reduce calibration time. The proposed energy metering chip simplifies the computation engine using time-division multiplexed arithmetic units. It also provides a simple and fast calibration scheme by using integrated digital calibration functionality. The chip is fabricated with 0.18-μm six-layer metal CMOS process and housed in a 32-pin quad-flat no-leads (QFN) package. It operates at a clock speed of 4096 kHz and consumes 9.84 mW in 3.3 V supply.

Owing to the increase in consumption of multimedia content and the improvement of device capacity, user demand for high-quality content has increased. However, it is difficult to transport such large amounts of content over the existing broadcasting network with limited bandwidth. To provide high-definition broadcasting, some studies suggest methods of transporting multimedia over heterogeneous networks after encoding content hierarchically. MPEG Media Transport (MMT), standardized by Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), is a solution that enables large-volume media transport over heterogeneous networks such as digital broadcasting networks and packet-switched networks. In the case of delivering a scalable encoded video over different networks, synchronization of each stream is an important issue. MMT defines a synchronization scheme, but does not contain sufficient functions to implement it. In this paper, we propose a synchronization scheme for media streams that are encoded hierarchically, divided into layers, and transported over heterogeneous networks. We implement our scheme using MMT and HTTP, and experimented using three encapsulated video streams with different durations. As a result, we show that the proposed scheme can reduce the waiting time to display high-quality video, relative to Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP-Scalable Video Coding (DASH-SVC) by requesting segments of enhanced layers after calculating the transmission time. Additionally, we find out that the selection of durations have a relation to the characteristics of the video.

A vision-based 3D tracking of articulated human hand is one of the major issues in the applications of human computer interactions and understanding the control of robot hand. This paper presents an improved approach for tracking and recovering the 3D position and orientation of a human hand using the Kinect sensor. The basic idea of the proposed method is to solve an optimization problem that minimizes the discrepancy in 3D shape between an actual hand observed by Kinect and a hypothesized 3D hand model. Since each of the 3D hand pose has 23 degrees of freedom, the hand articulation tracking needs computational excessive burden in minimizing the 3D shape discrepancy between an observed hand and a 3D hand model. For this, we first created a 3D hand model which represents the hand with 17 different parts. Secondly, Random Forest classifier was trained on the synthetic depth images generated by animating the developed 3D hand model, which was then used for Haar-like feature-based classification rather than performing per-pixel classification. Classification results were used for estimating the joint positions for the hand skeleton. Through the experiment, we were able to prove that the proposed method showed improvement rates in hand part recognition and a performance of 20-30 fps. The results confirmed its practical use in classifying hand area and successfully tracked and recovered the 3D hand pose in a real time fashion.

Automatic detection of estrus in cows is important in cattle management. This paper proposes a method of estrus detection by automatically checking cattle mounting. We use a side-view video camera and apply computer vision techniques to detect mounting behavior. In particular, we extract motion information to select a potential mount-up and mount-down motion and then verify the true mounting behavior by considering the direction, magnitude, and history of the mount motion. From experimental results using video data obtained from a Korean native cattle farm, we believe that the proposed method based on the abrupt change of a mounting cow's height and motion history information can be utilized for detecting mounting behavior automatically, even in the case of fence occlusion.

Nowadays, online word-of-mouth has become a powerful influencer to marketing and sales in business. Opinion mining and sentiment analysis is frequently adopted at market research and business analytics field for analyzing word-of-mouth content. However, there still remain several challengeable areas for 1) sentiment analysis aiming for Korean word-of-mouth content in film market, 2) availability of machine learning models only using linguistic features, 3) effect of the size of the feature set. This study took a sample of 10,000 movie reviews which had posted extremely negative/positive rating in a movie portal site, and conducted sentiment analysis with four machine learning algorithms: naïve Bayesian, decision tree, neural network, and support vector machines. We found neural network and support vector machine produced better accuracy than naïve Bayesian and decision tree on every size of the feature set. Besides, the performance of them was boosting with increasing of the feature set size.

Flexibly expanding the storage capacity required to process a large amount of rapidly increasing unstructured log data is difficult in a conventional computing environment. In addition, implementing a log processing system providing features that categorize and analyze unstructured log data is extremely difficult. To overcome such limitations, we propose and design a MongoDB-based unstructured log processing system (MdbULPS) for collecting, categorizing, and analyzing log data generated from banks. The proposed system includes a Hadoop-based analysis module for reliable parallel-distributed processing of massive log data. Furthermore, because the Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) stores data by generating replicas of collected log data in block units, the proposed system offers automatic system recovery against system failures and data loss. Finally, by establishing a distributed database using the NoSQL-based MongoDB, the proposed system provides methods of effectively processing unstructured log data. To evaluate the proposed system, we conducted three different performance tests on a local test bed including twelve nodes: comparing our system with a MySQL-based approach, comparing it with an Hbase-based approach, and changing the chunk size option. From the experiments, we found that our system showed better performance in processing unstructured log data.

Due to the high growth of SNS population, service scalability is one of the critical issues to be addressed. The cloud environment provides the flexible computing and storage resources for services deployment, which fits the characteristics of scalable SNS deployment. However, if the SNS related information is not properly placed, it will cause unbalance load and heavy transmission cost on the storage virtual machine (VM) and cloud data center (CDC) network. In this paper, we characterize the SNS into a graph model based on the users' associations and interest correlations. The node weight represents the degree of associations, which can be indexed by the number of friends or data sources, and the link weight denotes the correlation between users/data sources. Then, based on the SNS graph, the two-step algorithm is proposed in this paper to determine the placement of SNS related data among VMs. Two k-means based clustering schemes are proposed to allocate social data in proper VM and physical servers for pre-configured VM and dynamic VM environment, respectively. The experimental example was conducted and to illustrate and compare the performance of the proposed schemes.

A hot-issued research topic in the workflow intelligence arena is the emerging topic of "workflow-supported organizational social networks." These specialized social networks have been proposed to primarily represent the process-driven work-sharing and work-collaborating relationships among the workflow-performers fulfilling a series of workflow-related operations in a workflow-supported organization. We can discover those organizational social networks, and visualize its analysis results as organizational knowledge. In this paper, we are particularly interested in how to visualize the degrees of closeness centralities among workflow-performers by proposing a graphical representation schema based on the Graph Markup Language, which is named to ccWSSN-GraphML. Additionally, we expatiate on the functional expansion of the closeness centralization formulas so as for the visualization framework to handle a group of workflow procedures (or a workflow package) with organizational workflow-performers.

Many IT organizations aspire to improve the efficiency and general standard of their software development effort by implementing agile software development practices. Some of the popular agile development methods adopted by IT organizations are Scrum, eXtreme Programming (XP), Kanban, Featured Driven Development (FDD) and Dynamic System Development Method (DSDM). This paper intends to identify and analyze the barriers that impact on the performance of IT organizations that use such agile software development methods. The analysis will help the IT organizations to cater the needed aspects to be successful. The analysis will also help the IT organizations to select the right methodology for their organization. The contribution of this analysis is to present guideline related to avoid or overcome the barriers towards adoption of agile.

The smart convergence environment, in which all industries are converged around ICT infrastructure -- with the eventual inclusion of both industry and culture -- looms. With the emergence of new convergence industries such as smart medicine, smart cities, and smart automobiles, the ICT infrastructure is recognized as the foundation of the overall economy. As such, the importance of the next generation of information and communication construction businesses, which constructs the ICT infrastructure, is highlighted under the smart convergence paradigm environment; various multilateral policies to foster the information and communication construction business -- led by the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning -- are being implemented. Like other infrastructure industries, however, the estimation of the demand function of the information and communication construction business overall is essential for effectively establishing promotional policies for information and communication construction businesses. However, there has been no study which theoretically estimates the market demand function in the information and communication construction business thus far. The pursuit of a creative economy is a national agenda, as the significance of accelerating the ICT infrastructure is emphasized. Therefore, this paper seeks to estimate quantitatively the demand function in the information and communication construction business using empirical data and a statistical model and then to present policy implications which will aid the development of the information and communication construction business.

The rise in recent technology has changed the ways, in which people communicate with one another. Social networking services (SNSs) have become one of the most representative means. General SNSs allow users to create their own unique profiles, search for fellow members, share information, etc., while other SNSs have functions that cater to different needs of users. As a result, users of SNSs have begun to pick and choose different SNSs and concurrently use multiple SNSs in order to fulfill all their needs. This exploratory study examined which SNSs are used together and the characteristics that predict the use of multiple SNSs. In addition, it observed the differences between consumers' usage of multiple SNSs in different cultures. An online survey was administered to SNS users in the United States and Korea. The results of the study showed that the use of multiple SNSs is not yet prevalent in Korea, the country that represented a collectivistic culture. In addition, in the U.S., the highest number of users reported that they were active on at least three SNSs.