• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.97-117
• /
• 2012

Nowadays, Internet users tend to do a variety of actions at the same time such as web browsing, social networking and multimedia consumption. While watching a video, once a user is interested in any product, the user has to do information searches to get to know more about the product. With a conventional approach, user has to search it separately with search engines like Bing or Google, which might be inconvenient and time-consuming. For this reason, a video annotation platform has been developed in order to provide users more convenient and more interactive ways with video content. In the future of smart TV environment, users can follow annotated information, for example, a link to a vendor to buy the product of interest. It is even better to enable users to search for information by directly discussing with friends. Users can effectively get useful and relevant information about the product from friends who share common interests or might have experienced it before, which is more reliable than the results from search engines. Social networking services provide an appropriate environment for people to share products so that they can show new things to their friends and to share their personal experiences on any specific product. Meanwhile, they can also absorb the most relevant information about the product that they are interested in by either comments or discussion amongst friends. However, within a very huge graph of friends, determining the most appropriate persons to ask for information about a specific product has still a limitation within the existing conventional approach. Once users want to share or discuss a product, they simply share it to all friends as new feeds. This means a newly posted article is blindly spread to all friends without considering their background interests or knowledge. In this way, the number of responses back will be huge. Users cannot easily absorb the relevant and useful responses from friends, since they are from various fields of interest and knowledge. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose a method to filter a user's friends for information search, which leverages semantic video annotation and social networking services. Our method filters and brings out who can give user useful information about a specific product. By examining the existing Facebook information regarding users and their social graph, we construct a user profile of product interest. With user's permission and authentication, user's particular activities are enriched with the domain-specific ontology such as GoodRelations and BestBuy Data sources. Besides, we assume that the object in the video is already annotated using Linked Data. Thus, the detail information of the product that user would like to ask for more information is retrieved via product URI. Our system calculates the similarities among them in order to identify the most suitable friends for seeking information about the mentioned product. The system filters a user's friends according to their score which tells the order of whom can highly likely give the user useful information about a specific product of interest. We have conducted an experiment with a group of respondents in order to verify and evaluate our system. First, the user profile accuracy evaluation is conducted to demonstrate how much our system constructed user profile of product interest represents user's interest correctly. Then, the evaluation on filtering method is made by inspecting the ranked results with human judgment. The results show that our method works effectively and efficiently in filtering. Our system fulfills user needs by supporting user to select appropriate friends for seeking useful information about a specific product that user is curious about. As a result, it helps to influence and convince user in purchase decisions.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
• /
• v.43 no.1
• /
• pp.108-119
• /
• 2015

Recently, the ways in which individual communities own and manage parks have been both discussed and realized in America and England. Some benefits of these asset transfers are that local governments can reduce the financial cost of management as well as improve the service of the parks. In addition, communities can develop these parks as unique assets. Ultimately, this is a new understanding of parks as community commons. This study examines the policy of park asset transfers to communities in England. These transfers, which involve reallocating land and building management and/or ownership from the public sector to a community group, are part of a policy agenda known as "Big Society", which aims to create a "small government" within a "big society". The agenda is pursued by both the English Conservative and Unionist Party governments. Eight case studies of community park asset transfers in England were examined in this study, under three categories-transfer process, partnership among stakeholders, and financial structure-and synthesized along three issues-financial contribution, level of public transparency, and closeness of the relationship between park and community. In some cases, new community groups were created specifically to receive park assets, while in other communities, existing groups became the park trustees. For most parks, community groups raise park maintenance funding through diverse methods; however, these groups are often not entirely financially independent from local government. Thus, many park trustees have already created, or are planning to create, other assets from which parks can benefit. Second, some efforts for public transparency include trusts that are registered as charities, of which their public nature is admitted officially. These trusts resolve important decisions through boards of trustees, in an effort to promote income-generating business while not excluding users. Ultimately, a close relationship between park and community empowers the community to participate in managing and maintaining the park; in turn, the park's capacities are improved. Current struggles include the many limits involved in communities accepting ownership and management of a park, and a lack of local government experience regarding public-private management and maintenance of a public asset. This study, however, details interesting policy implications for Korean community involvement as well as diverse financial methods to facilitate park management.

• The Journal of Bigdata
• /
• v.8 no.1
• /
• pp.111-129
• /
• 2023

With the diffusion of digital innovation, the adoption of innovative medical technologies based on artificial intelligence is increasing in the medical field. This is driving the launch and adoption of AI-based SaMD(Software as a Medical Device), but there is a lack of research on the factors that influence the adoption of SaMD by medical institutions. The purpose of this study is to identify key factors that influence medical institutions' decisions to adopt AI-based SaMDs, and to analyze the weights and priorities of these factors. For this purpose, we conducted Delphi surveys based on the results of literature studies on technology acceptance models in healthcare industry, medical AI and SaMD, and developed a research model by combining HOTE(Human, Organization, Technology and Environment) framework and HABIO(Holistic Approach {Business, Information, Organizational}) framework. Based on the research model with 5 main criteria and 22 sub-criteria, we conducted an AHP(Analytical Hierarchy Process) analysis among the experts from domestic medical institutions and SaMD providers to empirically analyze SaMD adoption factors. The results of this study showed that the priority of the main criteria for determining the adoption of AI-based SaMD was in the order of technical factors, economic factors, human factors, organizational factors, and environmental factors. The priority of sub-criteria was in the order of reliability, cost reduction, medical staff's acceptance, safety, top management's support, security, and licensing & regulatory levels. Specifically, technical factors such as reliability, safety, and security were found to be the most important factors for SaMD adoption. In addition, the comparisons and analyses of the weights and priorities of each group showed that the weights and priorities of SaMD adoption factors varied by type of institution, type of medical institution, and type of job in the medical institution.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.19 no.2
• /
• pp.1-20
• /
• 2013

Nowadays, social network is a huge communication platform for providing people to connect with one another and to bring users together to share common interests, experiences, and their daily activities. Users spend hours per day in maintaining personal information and interacting with other people via posting, commenting, messaging, games, social events, and applications. Due to the growth of user's distributed information in social network, there is a great potential to utilize the social data to enhance the quality of recommender system. There are some researches focusing on social network analysis that investigate how social network can be used in recommendation domain. Among these researches, we are interested in taking advantages of the interaction between a user and others in social network that can be determined and known as social relationship. Furthermore, mostly user's decisions before purchasing some products depend on suggestion of people who have either the same preferences or closer relationship. For this reason, we believe that user's relationship in social network can provide an effective way to increase the quality in prediction user's interests of recommender system. Therefore, social relationship between users encountered from social network is a common factor to improve the way of predicting user's preferences in the conventional approach. Recommender system is dramatically increasing in popularity and currently being used by many e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com, Last.fm, eBay.com, etc. Collaborative filtering (CF) method is one of the essential and powerful techniques in recommender system for suggesting the appropriate items to user by learning user's preferences. CF method focuses on user data and generates automatic prediction about user's interests by gathering information from users who share similar background and preferences. Specifically, the intension of CF method is to find users who have similar preferences and to suggest target user items that were mostly preferred by those nearest neighbor users. There are two basic units that need to be considered by CF method, the user and the item. Each user needs to provide his rating value on items i.e. movies, products, books, etc to indicate their interests on those items. In addition, CF uses the user-rating matrix to find a group of users who have similar rating with target user. Then, it predicts unknown rating value for items that target user has not rated. Currently, CF has been successfully implemented in both information filtering and e-commerce applications. However, it remains some important challenges such as cold start, data sparsity, and scalability reflected on quality and accuracy of prediction. In order to overcome these challenges, many researchers have proposed various kinds of CF method such as hybrid CF, trust-based CF, social network-based CF, etc. In the purpose of improving the recommendation performance and prediction accuracy of standard CF, in this paper we propose a method which integrates traditional CF technique with social relationship between users discovered from user's behavior in social network i.e. Facebook. We identify user's relationship from behavior of user such as posts and comments interacted with friends in Facebook. We believe that social relationship implicitly inferred from user's behavior can be likely applied to compensate the limitation of conventional approach. Therefore, we extract posts and comments of each user by using Facebook Graph API and calculate feature score among each term to obtain feature vector for computing similarity of user. Then, we combine the result with similarity value computed using traditional CF technique. Finally, our system provides a list of recommended items according to neighbor users who have the biggest total similarity value to the target user. In order to verify and evaluate our proposed method we have performed an experiment on data collected from our Movies Rating System. Prediction accuracy evaluation is conducted to demonstrate how much our algorithm gives the correctness of recommendation to user in terms of MAE. Then, the evaluation of performance is made to show the effectiveness of our method in terms of precision, recall, and F1-measure. Evaluation on coverage is also included in our experiment to see the ability of generating recommendation. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperform and more accurate in suggesting items to users with better performance. The effectiveness of user's behavior in social network particularly shows the significant improvement by up to 6% on recommendation accuracy. Moreover, experiment of recommendation performance shows that incorporating social relationship observed from user's behavior into CF is beneficial and useful to generate recommendation with 7% improvement of performance compared with benchmark methods. Finally, we confirm that interaction between users in social network is able to enhance the accuracy and give better recommendation in conventional approach.

• Korean small business review
• /
• v.31 no.2
• /
• pp.85-102
• /
• 2009

With the continued globalization of world markets, transfer pricing has become one of the dominant sources of controversy in international taxation. Transfer pricing is the process by which a multinational corporation calculates a price for goods and services that are transferred to affiliated entities. Consider a Korean electronic enterprise that buys supplies from its own subsidiary located in China. How much the Korean parent company pays its subsidiary will determine how much profit the Chinese unit reports in local taxes. If the parent company pays above normal market prices, it may appear to have a poor profit, even if the group as a whole shows a respectable profit margin. In this way, transfer prices impact the taxable income reported in each country in which the multinational enterprise operates. It's importance lies in that around 60% of international trade involves transactions between two related parts of multinationals, according to the OECD. Multinational enterprises (hereafter MEs) exert much effort into utilizing organizational advantages to make global investments. MEs wish to minimize their tax burden. So MEs spend a fortune on economists and accountants to justify transfer prices that suit their tax needs. On the contrary, local governments are not prepared to cope with MEs' powerful financial instruments. Tax authorities in each country wish to ensure that the tax base of any ME is divided fairly. Thus, both tax authorities and MEs have a vested interest in the way in which a transfer price is determined, and this is why MEs' international transfer prices are at the center of disputes concerned with taxation. Transfer pricing issues and practices are sometimes difficult to control for regulators because the tax administration does not have enough staffs with the knowledge and resources necessary to understand them. The authors examine transfer pricing practices to provide relevant resources useful in designing tax incentives and regulation schemes for policy makers. This study focuses on identifying the relevant business and environmental factors that could influence the international transfer pricing of MEs. In this perspective, we empirically investigate how the management perception of related variables influences their choice of international transfer pricing methods. We believe that this research is particularly useful in the design of tax policy. Because it can concentrate on a few selected factors in consideration of the limited budget of the tax administration with assistance of this research. Data is composed of questionnaire responses from foreign firms in Korea with investment balances exceeding one million dollars in the end of 2004. We mailed questionnaires to 861 managers in charge of the accounting departments of each company, resulting in 121 valid responses. Seventy six percent of the sample firms are classified as small and medium sized enterprises with assets below 100 billion Korean won. Reviewing transfer pricing methods, cost-based transfer pricing is most popular showing that 60 firms have adopted it. The market-based method is used by 31 firms, and 13 firms have reported the resale-pricing method. Regarding the nationalities of foreign investors, the Japanese and the Americans constitute most of the sample. Logistic regressions have been performed for statistical analysis. The dependent variable is binary in that whether the method of international transfer pricing is a market-based method or a cost-based method. This type of binary classification is founded on the belief that the market-based method is evaluated as the relatively objective way of pricing compared with the cost-based methods. Cost-based pricing is assumed to give mangers flexibility in transfer pricing decisions. Therefore, local regulatory agencies are thought to prefer market-based pricing over cost-based pricing. Independent variables are composed of eight factors such as corporate tax rate, tariffs, relations with local tax authorities, tax audit, equity ratios of local investors, volume of internal trade, sales volume, and product life cycle. The first four variables are included in the model because taxation lies in the center of transfer pricing disputes. So identifying the impact of these variables in Korean business environments is much needed. Equity ratio is included to represent the interest of local partners. Volume of internal trade was sometimes employed in previous research to check the pricing behavior of managers, so we have followed these footsteps in this paper. Product life cycle is used as a surrogate of competition in local markets. Control variables are firm size and nationality of foreign investors. Firm size is controlled using dummy variables in that whether or not the specific firm is small and medium sized. This is because some researchers report that big firms show different behaviors compared with small and medium sized firms in transfer pricing. The other control variable is also expressed in dummy variable showing if the entrepreneur is the American or not. That's because some prior studies conclude that the American management style is different in that they limit branch manger's freedom of decision. Reviewing the statistical results, we have found that managers prefer the cost-based method over the market-based method as the importance of corporate taxes and tariffs increase. This result means that managers need flexibility to lessen the tax burden when they feel taxes are important. They also prefer the cost-based method as the product life cycle matures, which means that they support subsidiaries in local market competition using cost-based transfer pricing. On the contrary, as the relationship with local tax authorities becomes more important, managers prefer the market-based method. That is because market-based pricing is a better way to maintain good relations with the tax officials. Other variables like tax audit, volume of internal transactions, sales volume, and local equity ratio have shown only insignificant influence. Additionally, we have replaced two tax variables(corporate taxes and tariffs) with the data showing top marginal tax rate and mean tariff rates of each country, and have performed another regression to find if we could get different results compared with the former one. As a consequence, we have found something different on the part of mean tariffs, that shows only an insignificant influence on the dependent variable. We guess that each company in the sample pays tariffs with a specific rate applied only for one's own company, which could be located far from mean tariff rates. Therefore we have concluded we need a more detailed data that shows the tariffs of each company if we want to check the role of this variable. Considering that the present paper has heavily relied on questionnaires, an effort to build a reliable data base is needed for enhancing the research reliability.