• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.14
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• pp.5607-5609
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• 2014

Introduction: Although continuing education is necessary for practicing nurses, it is very difficult to organize traditional classes because of large numbers of nurses and working shifts. Considering the increasing development of mobile electronic learning, we carried out a study to compare effects of the traditional face to face method with mobile learning delivered as text messages by cell phone. Materials and Methods: Sixty female nurses working in our hospital were randomly divided into class and short message service (SMS) groups. Lessons concerning breast cancer screening were prepared as 54 messages and sent in 17 days for the SMS group, while the class group participated in a class held by a university lecturer of breast and cancer surgery. Pre- and post-tests were undertaken for both groups at the same time; a retention test also was performed one month later. For statistical analysis, the paired T test and the independent sample T test were used with SPSS software version 16; p<0.05 was considered significant. Results: Mean age and mean work experience of participants in class and SMS groups was $35.8{\pm}7.2$, $9.8{\pm}6.7$, $35.4{\pm}7.3$, and $11.5{\pm}8.5$, respectively. There was a significant increase in mean score post-tests (compared with pretests) in both groups (p<0.05). Although a better improvement in scores of retention tests was demonstrated in the SMS group, the mean subtraction value of the post- and pretests as well as retention- and pretests showed no significant difference between the 2 groups (p=0.3 and p =0.2, respectively). Conclusions: Our study shows that teaching via SMS may probably replace traditional face to face teaching for continuing education in working nurses. Larger studies are suggested to confirm this.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.2588-2609
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• 2019

Speech homomorphic encryption has become one of the key components in secure speech storing in the public cloud computing. The major problem of speech homomorphic encryption is the huge data expansion of speech cipher-text. To address the issue, this paper presents a speech homomorphic encryption scheme with less data expansion, which is a probabilistic statistics and addition homomorphic cryptosystem. In the proposed scheme, the original digital speech with some random numbers selected is firstly grouped to form a series of speech matrix. Then, a proposed matrix encryption method is employed to encrypt that speech matrix. After that, mutual information in sample speech cipher-texts is reduced to limit the data expansion. Performance analysis and experimental results show that the proposed scheme is addition homomorphic, and it not only resists statistical analysis attacks but also eliminates some signal characteristics of original speech. In addition, comparing with Paillier homomorphic cryptosystem, the proposed scheme has less data expansion and lower computational complexity. Furthermore, the time consumption of the proposed scheme is almost the same on the smartphone and the PC. Thus, the proposed scheme is extremely suitable for secure speech storing in public cloud computing.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.1-18
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• 2015

Collaborative filtering(CF) algorithm has been popularly used for recommender systems in both academic and practical applications. A general CF system compares users based on how similar they are, and creates recommendation results with the items favored by other people with similar tastes. Thus, it is very important for CF to measure the similarities between users because the recommendation quality depends on it. In most cases, users' explicit numeric ratings of items(i.e. quantitative information) have only been used to calculate the similarities between users in CF. However, several studies indicated that qualitative information such as user's reviews on the items may contribute to measure these similarities more accurately. Considering that a lot of people are likely to share their honest opinion on the items they purchased recently due to the advent of the Web 2.0, user's reviews can be regarded as the informative source for identifying user's preference with accuracy. Under this background, this study proposes a new hybrid recommender system that combines with users' review mining. Our proposed system is based on conventional memory-based CF, but it is designed to use both user's numeric ratings and his/her text reviews on the items when calculating similarities between users. In specific, our system creates not only user-item rating matrix, but also user-item review term matrix. Then, it calculates rating similarity and review similarity from each matrix, and calculates the final user-to-user similarity based on these two similarities(i.e. rating and review similarities). As the methods for calculating review similarity between users, we proposed two alternatives - one is to use the frequency of the commonly used terms, and the other one is to use the sum of the importance weights of the commonly used terms in users' review. In the case of the importance weights of terms, we proposed the use of average TF-IDF(Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency) weights. To validate the applicability of the proposed system, we applied it to the implementation of a recommender system for smartphone applications (hereafter, app). At present, over a million apps are offered in each app stores operated by Google and Apple. Due to this information overload, users have difficulty in selecting proper apps that they really want. Furthermore, app store operators like Google and Apple have cumulated huge amount of users' reviews on apps until now. Thus, we chose smartphone app stores as the application domain of our system. In order to collect the experimental data set, we built and operated a Web-based data collection system for about two weeks. As a result, we could obtain 1,246 valid responses(ratings and reviews) from 78 users. The experimental system was implemented using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications(VBA) and SAS Text Miner. And, to avoid distortion due to human intervention, we did not adopt any refining works by human during the user's review mining process. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system, we compared its performance to the performance of conventional CF system. The performances of recommender systems were evaluated by using average MAE(mean absolute error). The experimental results showed that our proposed system(MAE = 0.7867 ~ 0.7881) slightly outperformed a conventional CF system(MAE = 0.7939). Also, they showed that the calculation of review similarity between users based on the TF-IDF weights(MAE = 0.7867) leaded to better recommendation accuracy than the calculation based on the frequency of the commonly used terms in reviews(MAE = 0.7881). The results from paired samples t-test presented that our proposed system with review similarity calculation using the frequency of the commonly used terms outperformed conventional CF system with 10% statistical significance level. Our study sheds a light on the application of users' review information for facilitating electronic commerce by recommending proper items to users.