Researchers in welfare services of local government in Korea have rather been on isolated issues as disables, childcare, aging phenomenon, etc. (Kang, 2004; Jung et al., 2009). Lately, local officials, yet, realize that they need more comprehensive welfare services for all residents, not just for above-mentioned focused groups. Still cases dealt with focused group approach have been a main research stream due to various reason(Jung et al., 2009; Lee, 2009; Jang, 2011). Social Security Information System is an information system that comprehensively manages 292 welfare benefits provided by 17 ministries and 40 thousand welfare services provided by 230 local authorities in Korea. The purpose of the system is to improve efficiency of social welfare delivery process. The study of local government expenditure has been on the rise over the last few decades after the restarting the local autonomy, but these studies have limitations on data collection. Measurement of a local government's welfare efforts(spending) has been primarily on expenditures or budget for an individual, set aside for welfare. This practice of using monetary value for an individual as a "proxy value" for welfare effort(spending) is based on the assumption that expenditure is directly linked to welfare efforts(Lee et al., 2007). This expenditure/budget approach commonly uses total welfare amount or percentage figure as dependent variables (Wildavsky, 1985; Lee et al., 2007; Kang, 2000). However, current practice of using actual amount being used or percentage figure as a dependent variable may have some limitation; since budget or expenditure is greatly influenced by the total budget of a local government, relying on such monetary value may create inflate or deflate the true "welfare effort" (Jang, 2012). In addition, government budget usually contain a large amount of administrative cost, i.e., salary, for local officials, which is highly unrelated to the actual welfare expenditure (Jang, 2011). This paper used local government welfare service data from the detailed data sets linked to the Social Security Information System. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the factors that affect social welfare spending of 230 local authorities in 2012. The paper applied multiple regression based model to analyze the pooled financial data from the system. Based on the regression analysis, the following factors affecting self-funded welfare spending were identified. In our research model, we use the welfare budget/total budget(%) of a local government as a true measurement for a local government's welfare effort(spending). Doing so, we exclude central government subsidies or support being used for local welfare service. It is because central government welfare support does not truly reflect the welfare efforts(spending) of a local. The dependent variable of this paper is the volume of the welfare spending and the independent variables of the model are comprised of three categories, in terms of socio-demographic perspectives, the local economy and the financial capacity of local government. This paper categorized local authorities into 3 groups, districts, and cities and suburb areas. The model used a dummy variable as the control variable (local political factor). This paper demonstrated that the volume of the welfare spending for the welfare services is commonly influenced by the ratio of welfare budget to total local budget, the population of infants, self-reliance ratio and the level of unemployment factor. Interestingly, the influential factors are different by the size of local government. Analysis of determinants of local government self-welfare spending, we found a significant effect of local Gov. Finance characteristic in degree of the local government's financial independence, financial independence rate, rate of social welfare budget, and regional economic in opening-to-application ratio, and sociology of population in rate of infants. The result means that local authorities should have differentiated welfare strategies according to their conditions and circumstances. There is a meaning that this paper has successfully proven the significant factors influencing welfare spending of local government in Korea.
Continuous research efforts are being devoted to unmanned mobile platforms for lunar exploration. There is an ongoing demand for real-time information processing to accurately determine the positioning and mapping of areas of interest on the lunar surface. To apply deep learning processing and analysis techniques to practical rovers, research on software integration and optimization is imperative. In this study, a foundational investigation has been conducted on real-time analysis of virtual lunar base construction site images, aimed at automatically quantifying spatial information of key objects. This study involved transitioning from an existing region-based object recognition algorithm to a boundary box-based algorithm, thus enhancing object recognition accuracy and inference speed. To facilitate extensive data-based object matching training, the Batch Hard Triplet Mining technique was introduced, and research was conducted to optimize both training and inference processes. Furthermore, an improved software system for object recognition and identical object matching was integrated, accompanied by the development of visualization software for the automatic matching of identical objects within input images. Leveraging satellite simulative captured video data for training objects and moving object-captured video data for inference, training and inference for identical object matching were successfully executed. The outcomes of this research suggest the feasibility of implementing 3D spatial information based on continuous-capture video data of mobile platforms and utilizing it for positioning objects within regions of interest. As a result, these findings are expected to contribute to the integration of an automated on-site system for video-based construction monitoring and control of significant target objects within future lunar base construction sites.
In Korea, a resident registration card has various personal information such as a present address, a resident registration number, a face picture and a fingerprint. A plastic-type resident card currently used is easy to forge or alter and tricks of forgery grow to be high-degree as time goes on. So, whether a resident card is forged or not is difficult to judge by only an examination with the naked eye. This paper proposed an automatic recognition method of a resident card which recognizes a resident registration number by using a refined ART2-based RBF network newly proposed and authenticates a face picture by a template image matching method. The proposed method, first, extracts areas including a resident registration number and the date of issue from a resident card image by applying Sobel masking, median filtering and horizontal smearing operations to the image in turn. To improve the extraction of individual codes from extracted areas, the original image is binarized by using a high-frequency passing filter and CDM masking is applied to the binaried image fur making image information of individual codes better. Lastly, individual codes, which are targets of recognition, are extracted by applying 4-directional contour tracking algorithm to extracted areas in the binarized image. And this paper proposed a refined ART2-based RBF network to recognize individual codes, which applies ART2 as the loaming structure of the middle layer and dynamicaly adjusts a teaming rate in the teaming of the middle and the output layers by using a fuzzy control method to improve the performance of teaming. Also, for the precise judgement of forgey of a resident card, the proposed method supports a face authentication by using a face template database and a template image matching method. For performance evaluation of the proposed method, this paper maked metamorphoses of an original image of resident card such as a forgey of face picture, an addition of noise, variations of contrast variations of intensity and image blurring, and applied these images with original images to experiments. The results of experiment showed that the proposed method is excellent in the recognition of individual codes and the face authentication fur the automatic recognition of a resident card.
To support business decision making, interests and efforts to analyze and use transaction data in different perspectives are increasing. Such efforts are not only limited to customer management or marketing, but also used for monitoring and detecting fraud transactions. Fraud transactions are evolving into various patterns by taking advantage of information technology. To reflect the evolution of fraud transactions, there are many efforts on fraud detection methods and advanced application systems in order to improve the accuracy and ease of fraud detection. As a case of fraud detection, this study aims to provide effective fraud detection methods for auction exception agricultural products in the largest Korean agricultural wholesale market. Auction exception products policy exists to complement auction-based trades in agricultural wholesale market. That is, most trades on agricultural products are performed by auction; however, specific products are assigned as auction exception products when total volumes of products are relatively small, the number of wholesalers is small, or there are difficulties for wholesalers to purchase the products. However, auction exception products policy makes several problems on fairness and transparency of transaction, which requires help of fraud detection. In this study, to generate fraud detection rules, real huge agricultural products trade transaction data from 2008 to 2010 in the market are analyzed, which increase more than 1 million transactions and 1 billion US dollar in transaction volume. Agricultural transaction data has unique characteristics such as frequent changes in supply volumes and turbulent time-dependent changes in price. Since this was the first trial to identify fraud transactions in this domain, there was no training data set for supervised learning. So, fraud detection rules are generated using outlier detection approach. We assume that outlier transactions have more possibility of fraud transactions than normal transactions. The outlier transactions are identified to compare daily average unit price, weekly average unit price, and quarterly average unit price of product items. Also quarterly averages unit price of product items of the specific wholesalers are used to identify outlier transactions. The reliability of generated fraud detection rules are confirmed by domain experts. To determine whether a transaction is fraudulent or not, normal distribution and normalized Z-value concept are applied. That is, a unit price of a transaction is transformed to Z-value to calculate the occurrence probability when we approximate the distribution of unit prices to normal distribution. The modified Z-value of the unit price in the transaction is used rather than using the original Z-value of it. The reason is that in the case of auction exception agricultural products, Z-values are influenced by outlier fraud transactions themselves because the number of wholesalers is small. The modified Z-values are called Self-Eliminated Z-scores because they are calculated excluding the unit price of the specific transaction which is subject to check whether it is fraud transaction or not. To show the usefulness of the proposed approach, a prototype of fraud transaction detection system is developed using Delphi. The system consists of five main menus and related submenus. First functionalities of the system is to import transaction databases. Next important functions are to set up fraud detection parameters. By changing fraud detection parameters, system users can control the number of potential fraud transactions. Execution functions provide fraud detection results which are found based on fraud detection parameters. The potential fraud transactions can be viewed on screen or exported as files. The study is an initial trial to identify fraud transactions in Auction Exception Agricultural Products. There are still many remained research topics of the issue. First, the scope of analysis data was limited due to the availability of data. It is necessary to include more data on transactions, wholesalers, and producers to detect fraud transactions more accurately. Next, we need to extend the scope of fraud transaction detection to fishery products. Also there are many possibilities to apply different data mining techniques for fraud detection. For example, time series approach is a potential technique to apply the problem. Even though outlier transactions are detected based on unit prices of transactions, however it is possible to derive fraud detection rules based on transaction volumes.
Customer reviews help potential customers make purchasing decisions. However, the prevalence of reviews on websites push the customer to sift through them and change the focus from a mere search to identifying which of the available reviews are valuable and useful for the purchasing decision at hand. To identify useful reviews, websites have developed different mechanisms to give customers options when evaluating existing reviews. Websites allow users to rate the usefulness of a customer review as helpful or not. Amazon.com uses a ratio-type helpfulness, while Yelp.com uses a count-type usefulness index. This usefulness index provides helpful reviews to future potential purchasers. This study investigated the effects of sentiment and readability on useful votes for customer reviews. Similar studies on the relationship between sentiment and readability have focused on the ratio-type usefulness index utilized by websites such as Amazon.com. In this study, Yelp.com's count-type usefulness index for restaurant reviews was used to investigate the relationship between sentiment/readability and usefulness votes. Yelp.com's online customer reviews for stores in the beverage and food categories were used for the analysis. In total, 170,294 reviews containing information on a store's reputation and popularity were used. The control variables were the review length, store reputation, and popularity; the independent variables were the sentiment and readability, while the dependent variable was the number of helpful votes. The review rating is the moderating variable for the review sentiment and readability. The length is the number of characters in a review. The popularity is the number of reviews for a store, and the reputation is the general average rating of all reviews for a store. The readability of a review was calculated with the Coleman-Liau index. The sentiment is a positivity score for the review as calculated by SentiWordNet. The review rating is a preference score selected from 1 to 5 (stars) by the review author. The dependent variable (i.e., usefulness votes) used in this study is a count variable. Therefore, the Poisson regression model, which is commonly used to account for the discrete and nonnegative nature of count data, was applied in the analyses. The increase in helpful votes was assumed to follow a Poisson distribution. Because the Poisson model assumes an equal mean and variance and the data were over-dispersed, a negative binomial distribution model that allows for over-dispersion of the count variable was used for the estimation. Zero-inflated negative binomial regression was used to model count variables with excessive zeros and over-dispersed count outcome variables. With this model, the excess zeros were assumed to be generated through a separate process from the count values and therefore should be modeled as independently as possible. The results showed that positive sentiment had a negative effect on gaining useful votes for positive reviews but no significant effect on negative reviews. Poor readability had a negative effect on gaining useful votes and was not moderated by the review star ratings. These findings yield considerable managerial implications. The results are helpful for online websites when analyzing their review guidelines and identifying useful reviews for their business. Based on this study, positive reviews are not necessarily helpful; therefore, restaurants should consider which type of positive review is helpful for their business. Second, this study is beneficial for businesses and website designers in creating review mechanisms to know which type of reviews to highlight on their websites and which type of reviews can be beneficial to the business. Moreover, this study highlights the review systems employed by websites to allow their customers to post rating reviews.
In this paper, passport recognition and face verification methods which can automatically recognize passport codes and discriminate forgery passports to improve efficiency and systematic control of immigration management are proposed. Adjusting the slant is very important for recognition of characters and face verification since slanted passport images can bring various unwanted effects to the recognition of individual codes and faces. Therefore, after smearing the passport image, the longest extracted string of characters is selected. The angle adjustment can be conducted by using the slant of the straight and horizontal line that connects the center of thickness between left and right parts of the string. Extracting passport codes is done by Sobel operator, horizontal smearing, and 8-neighborhood contour tracking algorithm. The string of codes can be transformed into binary format by applying repeating binary method to the area of the extracted passport code strings. The string codes are restored by applying CDM mask to the binary string area and individual codes are extracted by 8-neighborhood contour tracking algerian. The proposed RBF network is applied to the middle layer of RBF network by using the fuzzy logic connection operator and proposing the enhanced fuzzy ART algorithm that dynamically controls the vigilance parameter. The face is authenticated by measuring the similarity between the feature vector of the facial image from the passport and feature vector of the facial image from the database that is constructed with PCA algorithm. After several tests using a forged passport and the passport with slanted images, the proposed method was proven to be effective in recognizing passport codes and verifying facial images.
To enhance the competitive advantage in a constantly changing business environment, an enterprise management must make the right decision in many business activities based on both internal and external information. Thus, providing accurate information plays a prominent role in management's decision making. Intuitively, historical data can provide a feasible estimate through the forecasting models. Therefore, if the service department can estimate the service quantity for the next period, the service department can then effectively control the inventory of service related resources such as human, parts, and other facilities. In addition, the production department can make load map for improving its product quality. Therefore, obtaining an accurate service forecast most likely appears to be critical to manufacturing companies. Numerous investigations addressing this problem have generally employed statistical methods, such as regression or autoregressive and moving average simulation. However, these methods are only efficient for data with are seasonal or cyclical. If the data are influenced by the special characteristics of product, they are not feasible. In our research, we propose a forecasting framework that predicts service demand of manufacturing organization by combining Case-based reasoning (CBR) and leveraging an unsupervised artificial neural network based clustering analysis (i.e., Self-Organizing Maps; SOM). We believe that this is one of the first attempts at applying unsupervised artificial neural network-based machine-learning techniques in the service forecasting domain. Our proposed approach has several appealing features : (1) We applied CBR and SOM in a new forecasting domain such as service demand forecasting. (2) We proposed our combined approach between CBR and SOM in order to overcome limitations of traditional statistical forecasting methods and We have developed a service forecasting tool based on the proposed approach using an unsupervised artificial neural network and Case-based reasoning. In this research, we conducted an empirical study on a real digital TV manufacturer (i.e., Company A). In addition, we have empirically evaluated the proposed approach and tool using real sales and service related data from digital TV manufacturer. In our empirical experiments, we intend to explore the performance of our proposed service forecasting framework when compared to the performances predicted by other two service forecasting methods; one is traditional CBR based forecasting model and the other is the existing service forecasting model used by Company A. We ran each service forecasting 144 times; each time, input data were randomly sampled for each service forecasting framework. To evaluate accuracy of forecasting results, we used Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) as primary performance measure in our experiments. We conducted one-way ANOVA test with the 144 measurements of MAPE for three different service forecasting approaches. For example, the F-ratio of MAPE for three different service forecasting approaches is 67.25 and the p-value is 0.000. This means that the difference between the MAPE of the three different service forecasting approaches is significant at the level of 0.000. Since there is a significant difference among the different service forecasting approaches, we conducted Tukey's HSD post hoc test to determine exactly which means of MAPE are significantly different from which other ones. In terms of MAPE, Tukey's HSD post hoc test grouped the three different service forecasting approaches into three different subsets in the following order: our proposed approach > traditional CBR-based service forecasting approach > the existing forecasting approach used by Company A. Consequently, our empirical experiments show that our proposed approach outperformed the traditional CBR based forecasting model and the existing service forecasting model used by Company A. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides some research background information such as summary of CBR and SOM. Section 3 presents a hybrid service forecasting framework based on Case-based Reasoning and Self-Organizing Maps, while the empirical evaluation results are summarized in Section 4. Conclusion and future research directions are finally discussed in Section 5.
Nowadays there are a lot of issues about copyright infringement in the Internet world because the digital content on the network can be copied and delivered easily. Indeed the copied version has same quality with the original one. So, copyright owners and content provider want a powerful solution to protect their content. The popular one of the solutions was DRM (digital rights management) that is based on encryption technology and rights control. However, DRM-free service was launched after Steve Jobs who is CEO of Apple proposed a new music service paradigm without DRM, and the DRM is disappeared at the online music market. Even though the online music service decided to not equip the DRM solution, copyright owners and content providers are still searching a solution to protect their content. A solution to replace the DRM technology is digital audio watermarking technology which can embed copyright information into the music. In this paper, the author proposed a new audio watermarking algorithm with two approaches. First, the watermark information is generated by two dimensional barcode which has error correction code. So, the information can be recovered by itself if the errors fall into the range of the error tolerance. The other one is to use chirp sequence of CDMA (code division multiple access). These make the algorithm robust to the several malicious attacks. There are many 2D barcodes. Especially, QR code which is one of the matrix barcodes can express the information and the expression is freer than that of the other matrix barcodes. QR code has the square patterns with double at the three corners and these indicate the boundary of the symbol. This feature of the QR code is proper to express the watermark information. That is, because the QR code is 2D barcodes, nonlinear code and matrix code, it can be modulated to the spread spectrum and can be used for the watermarking algorithm. The proposed algorithm assigns the different spread spectrum sequences to the individual users respectively. In the case that the assigned code sequences are orthogonal, we can identify the watermark information of the individual user from an audio content. The algorithm used the Walsh code as an orthogonal code. The watermark information is rearranged to the 1D sequence from 2D barcode and modulated by the Walsh code. The modulated watermark information is embedded into the DCT (discrete cosine transform) domain of the original audio content. For the performance evaluation, I used 3 audio samples, "Amazing Grace", "Oh! Carol" and "Take me home country roads", The attacks for the robustness test were MP3 compression, echo attack, and sub woofer boost. The MP3 compression was performed by a tool of Cool Edit Pro 2.0. The specification of MP3 was CBR(Constant Bit Rate) 128kbps, 44,100Hz, and stereo. The echo attack had the echo with initial volume 70%, decay 75%, and delay 100msec. The sub woofer boost attack was a modification attack of low frequency part in the Fourier coefficients. The test results showed the proposed algorithm is robust to the attacks. In the MP3 attack, the strength of the watermark information is not affected, and then the watermark can be detected from all of the sample audios. In the sub woofer boost attack, the watermark was detected when the strength is 0.3. Also, in the case of echo attack, the watermark can be identified if the strength is greater and equal than 0.5.
The wall shear stress in the vicinity of end-to end anastomoses under steady flow conditions was measured using a flush-mounted hot-film anemometer(FMHFA) probe. The experimental measurements were in good agreement with numerical results except in flow with low Reynolds numbers. The wall shear stress increased proximal to the anastomosis in flow from the Penrose tubing (simulating an artery) to the PTFE: graft. In flow from the PTFE graft to the Penrose tubing, low wall shear stress was observed distal to the anastomosis. Abnormal distributions of wall shear stress in the vicinity of the anastomosis, resulting from the compliance mismatch between the graft and the host artery, might be an important factor of ANFH formation and the graft failure. The present study suggests a correlation between regions of the low wall shear stress and the development of anastomotic neointimal fibrous hyperplasia(ANPH) in end-to-end anastomoses. 30523 T00401030523 ^x Air pressure decay(APD) rate and ultrafiltration rate(UFR) tests were performed on new and saline rinsed dialyzers as well as those roused in patients several times. C-DAK 4000 (Cordis Dow) and CF IS-11 (Baxter Travenol) reused dialyzers obtained from the dialysis clinic were used in the present study. The new dialyzers exhibited a relatively flat APD, whereas saline rinsed and reused dialyzers showed considerable amount of decay. C-DAH dialyzers had a larger APD(11.70
The wall shear stress in the vicinity of end-to end anastomoses under steady flow conditions was measured using a flush-mounted hot-film anemometer(FMHFA) probe. The experimental measurements were in good agreement with numerical results except in flow with low Reynolds numbers. The wall shear stress increased proximal to the anastomosis in flow from the Penrose tubing (simulating an artery) to the PTFE: graft. In flow from the PTFE graft to the Penrose tubing, low wall shear stress was observed distal to the anastomosis. Abnormal distributions of wall shear stress in the vicinity of the anastomosis, resulting from the compliance mismatch between the graft and the host artery, might be an important factor of ANFH formation and the graft failure. The present study suggests a correlation between regions of the low wall shear stress and the development of anastomotic neointimal fibrous hyperplasia(ANPH) in end-to-end anastomoses. 30523 T00401030523 ^x Air pressure decay(APD) rate and ultrafiltration rate(UFR) tests were performed on new and saline rinsed dialyzers as well as those roused in patients several times. C-DAK 4000 (Cordis Dow) and CF IS-11 (Baxter Travenol) reused dialyzers obtained from the dialysis clinic were used in the present study. The new dialyzers exhibited a relatively flat APD, whereas saline rinsed and reused dialyzers showed considerable amount of decay. C-DAH dialyzers had a larger APD(11.70