Managing Trust in Online Social Networks

In recent years, there is a dramatic growth in number and popularity of online social networks. There are many networks available with more than 100 million registered users such as Facebook, MySpace, QZone, Windows Live Spaces etc. People may connect, discover and share by using these online social networks. The exponential growth of online communities in the area of social networks attracts the attention of the researchers about the importance of managing trust in online environment. Users of the online social networks may share their experiences and opinions within the networks about an item which may be a product or service. The user faces the problem of evaluating trust in a service or service provider before making a choice. Recommendations may be received through a chain of friends network, so the problem for the user is to be able to evaluate various types of trust opinions and recommendations. This opinion or recommendation has a great influence to choose to use or enjoy the item by the other user of the community. Collaborative filtering system is the most popular method in recommender system. The task in collaborative filtering is to predict the utility of items to a particular user based on a database of user rates from a sample or population of other users. Because of the different taste of different people, they rate differently according to their subjective taste. If two people rate a set of items similarly, they share similar tastes. In the recommender system, this information is used to recommend items that one participant likes, to other persons in the same cluster. But the collaborative filtering system performs poor when there is insufficient previous common rating available between users; commonly known as cost start problem. To overcome the cold start problem and with the dramatic growth of online social networks, trust based approach to recommendation has emerged. This approach assumes a trust network among users and makes recommendations based on the ratings of the users that are directly or indirectly trusted by the target user.

The social context of motorcycle riding and the key determinants influencing rider behaviour : a qualitative investigation

Objective: Given the increasing popularity of motorcycle riding and heightened risk of injury or death associated with being a rider, this study explored rider behaviour as a determinant of rider safety and, in particular, key beliefs and motivations which influence such behaviour. To enhance the effectiveness of future education and training interventions, it is important to understand riders’ own views about what influences how they ride. Specifically, this study sought to identify key determinants of riders’ behaviour in relation to the social context of riding including social and identity-related influences relating to the group (group norms and group identity) as well as the self (moral/personal norm and self-identity). ----- ----- Method: Qualitative research was undertaken via group discussions with motorcycle riders (n = 41). Results: The findings revealed that those in the group with which one rides represent an important source of social influence. Also, the motorcyclist (group) identity was associated with a range of beliefs, expectations, and behaviours considered to be normative. Exploration of the construct of personal norm revealed that riders were most cognizant of the “wrong things to do” when riding; among those issues raised was the importance of protective clothing (albeit for the protection of others and, in particular, pillion passengers). Finally, self-identity as a motorcyclist appeared to be important to a rider’s self-concept and was likely to influence their on-road behaviour. ----- ----- Conclusion: Overall, the insight provided by the current study may facilitate the development of interventions including rider training as well as public education and mass media messages. The findings suggest that these interventions should incorporate factors associated with the social nature of riding in order to best align it with some of the key beliefs and motivations underpinning riders’ on-road behaviours.

Knowledge-based urban development of multimedia super corridor, Malaysia : an overview

In recent years, with the impact of the global knowledge economy, a more comprehensive urban development approach, so called 'knowledge-based urban development', has gained significant popularity. This paper discusses the critical connections among knowledge-based urban development strategies, knowledge-intensive industries and information and communication technology infrastructures. In particular, the research focuses on investigating the application of the knowledge-based urban development concept by discussing one of the South East Asia's large scale knowledge-based urban development manifestations of Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor. The paper scrutinises Malaysia's experience in the development and evolution of the Multimedia Super Corridor from the angle of knowledge-based urban development policy implementation, infrastructural implications, and actors involved in its development and management. This paper provides a number of lessons learned from the Multimedia Super Corridor on the orchestration of knowledge-based development that is a necessity for cities seeking successful knowledge city and knowledge economy transformations.

Determinants and consequences of information sharing with key suppliers

The economic environment of today can be characterized as highly dynamic and competitive if not being in a constant flux. Globalization and the Information Technology (IT) revolution are perhaps the main contributing factors to this observation. While companies have to some extent adapted to the current business environment, new pressures such as the recent increase in environmental awareness and its likely effects on regulations are underway. Hence, in the light of market and competitive pressures, companies must constantly evaluate and if necessary update their strategies to sustain and increase the value they create for shareholders (Hunt and Morgan, 1995; Christopher and Towill, 2002). One way to create greater value is to become more efficient in producing and delivering goods and services to customers, which can lead to a strategy known as cost leadership (Porter, 1980). Even though Porter (1996) notes that in the long run cost leadership may not be a sufficient strategy for competitive advantage, operational efficiency is certainly necessary and should therefore be on the agenda of every company. ----- ----- ----- Better workflow management, technology, and resource utilization can lead to greater internal operational efficiency, which explains why, for example, many companies have recently adopted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems: integrated softwares that streamline business processes. However, as today more and more companies are approaching internal operational excellence, the focus for finding inefficiencies and cost saving opportunities is moving beyond the boundaries of the firm. Today many firms in the supply chain are engaging in collaborative relationships with customers, suppliers, and third parties (services) in an attempt to cut down on costs related to for example, inventory, production, as well as to facilitate synergies. Thus, recent years have witnessed fluidity and blurring regarding organizational boundaries (Coad and Cullen, 2006). ----- ----- ----- The Information Technology (IT) revolution of the late 1990’s has played an important role in bringing organizations closer together. In their efforts to become more efficient, companies first integrated their information systems to speed up transactions such as ordering and billing. Later collaboration on a multidimensional scale including logistics, production, and Research & Development became evident as companies expected substantial benefits from collaboration. However, one could also argue that the recent popularity of the concepts falling under Supply Chain Management (SCM) such as Vendor Managed Inventory, Collaborative Planning, Replenishment, and Forecasting owe to the marketing efforts of software vendors and consultants who provide these solutions. Nevertheless, reports from professional organizations as well as academia indicate that the trend towards interorganizational collaboration is gaining wider ground. For example, the ARC Advisory Group, a research organization on supply chain solutions, estimated that the market for SCM, which includes various kinds of collaboration tools and related services, is going to grow at an annual rate of 7.4% during the years 2004-2008, reaching to $7.4 billion in 2008 (Engineeringtalk 2004).

Multi-modal summarization of key events and top players in sports tournament videos

To detect and annotate the key events of live sports videos, we need to tackle the semantic gaps of audio-visual information. Previous work has successfully extracted semantic from the time-stamped web match reports, which are synchronized with the video contents. However, web and social media articles with no time-stamps have not been fully leveraged, despite they are increasingly used to complement the coverage of major sporting tournaments. This paper aims to address this limitation using a novel multimodal summarization framework that is based on sentiment analysis and players' popularity. It uses audiovisual contents, web articles, blogs, and commentators' speech to automatically annotate and visualize the key events and key players in a sports tournament coverage. The experimental results demonstrate that the automatically generated video summaries are aligned with the events identified from the official website match reports.

Busway platform bus capacity analysis

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), because of its operational flexibility and simplicity, is rapidly gaining popularity with urban designers and transit planners. Earlier BRTs were bus shared lane or bus only lane, which share the roadway with general and other forms of traffic. In recent time, more sophisticated designs of BRT have emerged, such as busway, which has separate carriageway for buses and provides very high physical separation of buses from general traffic. Line capacities of a busway are predominately dependent on bus capacity of its stations. Despite new developments in BRT designs, the methodology of capacity analysis is still based on traditional principles of kerbside bus stop on bus only lane operations. Consequently, the tradition methodology lacks accounting for various dimensions of busway station operation, such as passenger crowd, passenger walking and bus lost time along the long busway station platform. This research has developed a purpose made bus capacity analysis methodology for busway station analysis. Extensive observations of kerbside bus stops and busway stations in Brisbane, Australia were made and differences in their operation were studied. A large scale data collection was conducted using the video recording technique at the Mater Hill Busway Station on the South East Busway in Brisbane. This research identified new parameters concerning busway station operation, and through intricate analysis identified the elements and processes which influence the bus dwell time at a busway station platform. A new variable, Bus lost time, was defined and its quantitative descriptions were established. Based on these finding and analysis, a busway station platform bus capacity methodology was developed, comprising of new models for busway station lost time, busway station dwell time, busway station loading area bus capacity, and busway station platform bus capacity. The new methodology not only accounts for passenger boarding and alighting, but also covers platform crowd and bus lost time in station platform bus capacity estimation. The applicability of this methodology was shown through demonstrative examples. Additionally, these examples illustrated the significance of the bus lost time variable in determining station capacities.

Tea ceremony and Sukiya : negating social hierarchy

There is a widely held view that architecture is very strongly and even primarily determined by the society and culture rather than geographical, technical, economic or cli-matic factors. This is especially evident in societies where rituals, customs and tradition play a significant role in the design of built forms. One such society was that of Feudal Japan under the rule of samurai warriors. The strictly controlled hierarchical society of Feudal Japan, isolated from the rest of the world for over 250 years, was able to develop the art and architecture borrowed from neighboring older cultures of China and Korea into what is now considered uniquely Japanese. One such architecture is the Sukiya style tea houses where the ritual of tea ceremony took place. This ritual was developed by the tea masters who were Zen monks or the merchants who belonged to the lowest class in the hierarchical feudal society. The Sukiya style developed from 14th to 16th century and became an architectural space that negated all the rules imposed on commoners by the samurai rulers. The tea culture had a major influence on Japanese architecture, the concept of space and aesthetics. It extended into the design of Japanese gardens, clothes, presentation of food, and their manners in day to day life. The focus of this paper is the Japanese ritual of tea ceremony, the architecture of the tea house it inspired, the society responsible for its creation and the culture that promoted its popularity and its continuation into the 21st century.

Automatic generation of effective video summaries

As the popularity of video as an information medium rises, the amount of video content that we produce and archive keeps growing. This creates a demand for shorter representations of videos in order to assist the task of video retrieval. The traditional solution is to let humans watch these videos and write textual summaries based on what they saw. This summarisation process, however, is time-consuming. Moreover, a lot of useful audio-visual information contained in the original video can be lost. Video summarisation aims to turn a full-length video into a more concise version that preserves as much information as possible. The problem of video summarisation is to minimise the trade-off between how concise and how representative a summary is. There are also usability concerns that need to be addressed in a video summarisation scheme. To solve these problems, this research aims to create an automatic video summarisation framework that combines and improves on existing video summarisation techniques, with the focus on practicality and user satisfaction. We also investigate the need for different summarisation strategies in different kinds of videos, for example news, sports, or TV series. Finally, we develop a video summarisation system based on the framework, which is validated by subjective and objective evaluation. The evaluation results shows that the proposed framework is effective for creating video skims, producing high user satisfaction rate and having reasonably low computing requirement. We also demonstrate that the techniques presented in this research can be used for visualising video summaries in the form web pages showing various useful information, both from the video itself and from external sources.

Learning domain ontology for tag recommendation

Recently, user tagging systems have grown in popularity on the web. The tagging process is quite simple for ordinary users, which contributes to its popularity. However, free vocabulary has lack of standardization and semantic ambiguity. It is possible to capture the semantics from user tagging and represent those in a form of ontology, but the application of the learned ontology for recommendation making has not been that flourishing. In this paper we discuss our approach to learn domain ontology from user tagging information and apply the extracted tag ontology in a pilot tag recommendation experiment. The initial result shows that by using the tag ontology to re-rank the recommended tags, the accuracy of the tag recommendation can be improved.

Ontology learning from user tagging for recommendation making

Recently, user tagging systems have grown in popularity on the web. The tagging process is quite simple for ordinary users, which contributes to its popularity. However, free vocabulary has lack of standardization and semantic ambiguity. It is possible to capture the semantics from user tagging into some form of ontology, but the application of the resulted ontology for recommendation making has not been that flourishing. In this paper we discuss our approach to learn domain ontology from user tagging information and apply the extracted tag ontology in a pilot tag recommendation experiment. The initial result shows that by using the tag ontology to re-rank the recommended tags, the accuracy of the tag recommendation can be improved.

A review of dashboards in performance management : implications for design and research

Dashboards are expected to improve decision making by amplifying cognition and capitalizing on human perceptual capabilities. Hence, interest in dashboards has increased recently, which is also evident from the proliferation of dashboard solution providers in the market. Despite dashboards' popularity, little is known about the extent of their effectiveness, i.e. what types of dashboards work best for different users or tasks. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive multidisciplinary literature review with an aim to identify the critical issues organizations might need to consider when implementing dashboards. Dashboards are likely to succeed and solve the problems of presentation format and information load when certain visualization principles and features are present (e.g. high data-ink ratio and drill down features).Werecommend that dashboards come with some level of flexibility, i.e. allowing users to switch between alternative presentation formats. Also some theory driven guidance through popups and warnings can help users to select an appropriate presentation format. Given the dearth of research on dashboards, we conclude the paper with a research agenda that could guide future studies in this area.

A continuous time model for election timing

We consider a continuous time model for election timing in a Majoritarian Parliamentary System where the government maintains a constitutional right to call an early election. Our model is based on the two-party-preferred data that measure the popularity of the government and the opposition over time. We describe the poll process by a Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) and use a martingale approach to derive a Partial Differential Equation (PDE) for the government’s expected remaining life in office. A comparison is made between a three-year and a four-year maximum term and we also provide the exercise boundary for calling an election. Impacts on changes in parameters in the SDE, the probability of winning the election and maximum terms on the call exercise boundaries are discussed and analysed. An application of our model to the Australian Federal Election for House of Representatives is also given.

Investigation of methods for increasing the energy efficiency on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS)

In recent years, development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) has become a significant growing segment of the global aviation industry. These vehicles are developed with the intention of operating in regions where the presence of onboard human pilots is either too risky or unnecessary. Their popularity with both the military and civilian sectors have seen the use of UAVs in a diverse range of applications, from reconnaissance and surveillance tasks for the military, to civilian uses such as aid relief and monitoring tasks. Efficient energy utilisation on an UAV is essential to its functioning, often to achieve the operational goals of range, endurance and other specific mission requirements. Due to the limitations of the space available and the mass budget on the UAV, it is often a delicate balance between the onboard energy available (i.e. fuel) and achieving the operational goals. This thesis presents an investigation of methods for increasing the energy efficiency on UAVs. One method is via the development of a Mission Waypoint Optimisation (MWO) procedure for a small fixed-wing UAV, focusing on improving the onboard fuel economy. MWO deals with a pre-specified set of waypoints by modifying the given waypoints within certain limits to achieve its optimisation objectives of minimising/maximising specific parameters. A simulation model of a UAV was developed in the MATLAB Simulink environment, utilising the AeroSim Blockset and the in-built Aerosonde UAV block and its parameters. This simulation model was separately integrated with a multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA) optimiser and a Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) solver to perform single-objective and multi-objective optimisation procedures of a set of real-world waypoints in order to minimise the onboard fuel consumption. The results of both procedures show potential in reducing fuel consumption on a UAV in a ight mission. Additionally, a parallel Hybrid-Electric Propulsion System (HEPS) on a small fixedwing UAV incorporating an Ideal Operating Line (IOL) control strategy was developed. An IOL analysis of an Aerosonde engine was performed, and the most efficient (i.e. provides greatest torque output at the least fuel consumption) points of operation for this engine was determined. Simulation models of the components in a HEPS were designed and constructed in the MATLAB Simulink environment. It was demonstrated through simulation that an UAV with the current HEPS configuration was capable of achieving a fuel saving of 6.5%, compared to the ICE-only configuration. These components form the basis for the development of a complete simulation model of a Hybrid-Electric UAV (HEUAV).

Watching football in marvellous Melbourne : spectators, barrackers and working class rituals

A study of crowds drawn to Australian football matches in colonial Victoria illuminates key aspects of the code's genesis, development and popularity. Australian football was codified by a middle-class elite that, as in Britain, created forms of mass entertainment that were consistent with the kind of industrial capitalist society they were attempting to organise. But the 'lower orders' were inculcated with traditional British folkways in matters of popular amusement, and introduced a style of 'barracking' for this new code that resisted the hegemony of the elite football administrators. By the end of the colonial period Australian football was firmly entrenched as a site of contestation between plebeian and bourgeois codes of spectating that reflected the social and ethnic diversity of the clubs making up the Victorian competition. Australian football thereby offers a classic vignette in the larger history of 'resistance through ritual'.

The analysis of social capital in online social communities

Social networks have proven to be an attractive avenue of investigation for researchers since humans are social creatures. Numerous literature have explored the term “social networks” from different perspectives and in diverse research fields. With the popularity of the Internet, social networking has taken on a new dimension. Online social communities therefore have become an emerging social avenue for people to communicate in today’s information age. People use online social communities to share their interests, maintain friendships, and extend their so-called circle of “friends”. Likewise, social capital, also known as human capital, is an important theory in sociology. Researchers usually utilise social capital theory when they investigate the topic relating to social networks. However, there is little literature that can provide an explicit and strong assertion in that research area due to the complexity of social capital. This thesis therefore focuses on the issue related to providing a better understanding about the relationship between social capital and online social communities. To enhance the value within the scope of this analysis, an online survey was conducted to examine the effects of the dimensions of social capital: relational capital, structural capital, and cognitive capital, determining the intensity of using online social communities. The data were derived from a total of 350 self-selected respondents completing an online survey during the research period. The main results indicate that social capital exists in online social communities under normal circumstances. Finally, this thesis also presents three contributions for both theory and practice in Chapter 5. The main results contribute to the understanding of connectivity in the interrelationships between individual social capital exchange within online social networks. Secondly, social trust was found to have a weak effect in influencing the intensity of individuals using online social communities. Third, the perpetual role of information sharing has an indirect influence on individual users participating in online social communities. This study also benefits online marketing consultants as marketers can not only gain consumer information easier from online social communities but also this understanding assists in designing effective communication within online social communities. The cross-sectional study, the reliability of Internet survey data, and sampling issues are the major three limitations in this research. The thesis provides a new research model and recommends that the mediating effects, privacy paradox, and social trust on online social communities should be further explored in future research.