• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.17-32
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• 2023

The entrepreneurial activities of college students play a significant role in modern economic and social development, particularly as a solution to the changing economic landscape and youth unemployment issues. Introducing innovative ideas and technologies into the market through entrepreneurship can contribute to sustainable economic growth and social value. Additionally, the entrepreneurial intentions of college students are shaped by various factors, making it crucial to deeply understand and appropriately support these elements. To this end, this study systematically explores the importance and impact of role models through a multiple serial mediation analysis. Through a survey of 300 college students, the study analyzed how two psychological variables, growth mindset and entrepreneurial self-efficacy, mediate the influence of role models on entrepreneurial intentions. The presence and success stories of role models were found to enhance the growth mindset of college students, which in turn boosts their entrepreneurial self-efficacy and ultimately strengthens their entrepreneurial intentions. The analysis revealed that exposure to role models significantly influences the formation of a growth mindset among college students. This mindset fosters a positive attitude towards viewing challenges and failures in entrepreneurship as learning opportunities. Such a mindset further enhances entrepreneurial self-efficacy, thereby strengthening the intention to engage in entrepreneurial activities. This research offers insights by integrating various theories, such as mindset theory and social learning theory, to deeply understand the complex process of forming entrepreneurial intentions. Practically, this study provides important guidelines for the design and implementation of college entrepreneurship education. Utilizing role models can significantly enhance students' entrepreneurial intentions, and educational programs can strengthen students' growth mindset and entrepreneurial self-efficacy by sharing entrepreneurial experiences and knowledge through role models. In conclusion, this study provides a systematic and empirical analysis of the various factors and their complex interactions that impact the entrepreneurial intentions of college students. It confirms that psychological factors like growth mindset and entrepreneurial self-efficacy play a significant role in shaping entrepreneurial intentions, beyond mere information or technical education. This research emphasizes that these psychological factors should be comprehensively considered when developing and implementing policies and programs related to college entrepreneurship education.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.111-126
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• 2020

Most industries have recently become aware of the importance of customer lifetime value as they are exposed to a competitive environment. As a result, preventing customers from churn is becoming a more important business issue than securing new customers. This is because maintaining churn customers is far more economical than securing new customers, and in fact, the acquisition cost of new customers is known to be five to six times higher than the maintenance cost of churn customers. Also, Companies that effectively prevent customer churn and improve customer retention rates are known to have a positive effect on not only increasing the company's profitability but also improving its brand image by improving customer satisfaction. Predicting customer churn, which had been conducted as a sub-research area for CRM, has recently become more important as a big data-based performance marketing theme due to the development of business machine learning technology. Until now, research on customer churn prediction has been carried out actively in such sectors as the mobile telecommunication industry, the financial industry, the distribution industry, and the game industry, which are highly competitive and urgent to manage churn. In addition, These churn prediction studies were focused on improving the performance of the churn prediction model itself, such as simply comparing the performance of various models, exploring features that are effective in forecasting departures, or developing new ensemble techniques, and were limited in terms of practical utilization because most studies considered the entire customer group as a group and developed a predictive model. As such, the main purpose of the existing related research was to improve the performance of the predictive model itself, and there was a relatively lack of research to improve the overall customer churn prediction process. In fact, customers in the business have different behavior characteristics due to heterogeneous transaction patterns, and the resulting churn rate is different, so it is unreasonable to assume the entire customer as a single customer group. Therefore, it is desirable to segment customers according to customer classification criteria, such as loyalty, and to operate an appropriate churn prediction model individually, in order to carry out effective customer churn predictions in heterogeneous industries. Of course, in some studies, there are studies in which customers are subdivided using clustering techniques and applied a churn prediction model for individual customer groups. Although this process of predicting churn can produce better predictions than a single predict model for the entire customer population, there is still room for improvement in that clustering is a mechanical, exploratory grouping technique that calculates distances based on inputs and does not reflect the strategic intent of an entity such as loyalties. This study proposes a segment-based customer departure prediction process (CCP/2DL: Customer Churn Prediction based on Two-Dimensional Loyalty segmentation) based on two-dimensional customer loyalty, assuming that successful customer churn management can be better done through improvements in the overall process than through the performance of the model itself. CCP/2DL is a series of churn prediction processes that segment two-way, quantitative and qualitative loyalty-based customer, conduct secondary grouping of customer segments according to churn patterns, and then independently apply heterogeneous churn prediction models for each churn pattern group. Performance comparisons were performed with the most commonly applied the General churn prediction process and the Clustering-based churn prediction process to assess the relative excellence of the proposed churn prediction process. The General churn prediction process used in this study refers to the process of predicting a single group of customers simply intended to be predicted as a machine learning model, using the most commonly used churn predicting method. And the Clustering-based churn prediction process is a method of first using clustering techniques to segment customers and implement a churn prediction model for each individual group. In cooperation with a global NGO, the proposed CCP/2DL performance showed better performance than other methodologies for predicting churn. This churn prediction process is not only effective in predicting churn, but can also be a strategic basis for obtaining a variety of customer observations and carrying out other related performance marketing activities.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.71-84
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• 2013

Log data, which record the multitude of information created when operating computer systems, are utilized in many processes, from carrying out computer system inspection and process optimization to providing customized user optimization. In this paper, we propose a MongoDB-based unstructured log processing system in a cloud environment for processing the massive amount of log data of banks. Most of the log data generated during banking operations come from handling a client's business. Therefore, in order to gather, store, categorize, and analyze the log data generated while processing the client's business, a separate log data processing system needs to be established. However, the realization of flexible storage expansion functions for processing a massive amount of unstructured log data and executing a considerable number of functions to categorize and analyze the stored unstructured log data is difficult in existing computer environments. Thus, in this study, we use cloud computing technology to realize a cloud-based log data processing system for processing unstructured log data that are difficult to process using the existing computing infrastructure's analysis tools and management system. The proposed system uses the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud environment to provide a flexible expansion of computing resources and includes the ability to flexibly expand resources such as storage space and memory under conditions such as extended storage or rapid increase in log data. Moreover, to overcome the processing limits of the existing analysis tool when a real-time analysis of the aggregated unstructured log data is required, the proposed system includes a Hadoop-based analysis module for quick and reliable parallel-distributed processing of the massive amount of log data. Furthermore, because the HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) stores data by generating copies of the block units of the aggregated log data, the proposed system offers automatic restore functions for the system to continually operate after it recovers from a malfunction. Finally, by establishing a distributed database using the NoSQL-based Mongo DB, the proposed system provides methods of effectively processing unstructured log data. Relational databases such as the MySQL databases have complex schemas that are inappropriate for processing unstructured log data. Further, strict schemas like those of relational databases cannot expand nodes in the case wherein the stored data are distributed to various nodes when the amount of data rapidly increases. NoSQL does not provide the complex computations that relational databases may provide but can easily expand the database through node dispersion when the amount of data increases rapidly; it is a non-relational database with an appropriate structure for processing unstructured data. The data models of the NoSQL are usually classified as Key-Value, column-oriented, and document-oriented types. Of these, the representative document-oriented data model, MongoDB, which has a free schema structure, is used in the proposed system. MongoDB is introduced to the proposed system because it makes it easy to process unstructured log data through a flexible schema structure, facilitates flexible node expansion when the amount of data is rapidly increasing, and provides an Auto-Sharding function that automatically expands storage. The proposed system is composed of a log collector module, a log graph generator module, a MongoDB module, a Hadoop-based analysis module, and a MySQL module. When the log data generated over the entire client business process of each bank are sent to the cloud server, the log collector module collects and classifies data according to the type of log data and distributes it to the MongoDB module and the MySQL module. The log graph generator module generates the results of the log analysis of the MongoDB module, Hadoop-based analysis module, and the MySQL module per analysis time and type of the aggregated log data, and provides them to the user through a web interface. Log data that require a real-time log data analysis are stored in the MySQL module and provided real-time by the log graph generator module. The aggregated log data per unit time are stored in the MongoDB module and plotted in a graph according to the user's various analysis conditions. The aggregated log data in the MongoDB module are parallel-distributed and processed by the Hadoop-based analysis module. A comparative evaluation is carried out against a log data processing system that uses only MySQL for inserting log data and estimating query performance; this evaluation proves the proposed system's superiority. Moreover, an optimal chunk size is confirmed through the log data insert performance evaluation of MongoDB for various chunk sizes.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.89-111
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• 2008

Due to the development of digital technology, studies regarding smart wear integrating daily life have rapidly increased. However, consumer research about perception and attitude toward smart clothing hardly could find. The purpose of this study was to identify innovative characteristics and perceived risk of smart clothing and to analyze the influences of theses factors on product attitudes and intention to adopt. Specifically, five hypotheses were established. H1: Perceived attributes of smart clothing except for complexity would have positive relations to product attitude or purchase intention, while complexity would be opposite. H2: Product attitude would have positive relation to purchase intention. H3: Product attitude would have a mediating effect between perceived attributes and purchase intention. H4: Perceived risks of smart clothing would have negative relations to perceived attributes except for complexity, and positive relations to complexity. H5: Product attitude would have a mediating effect between perceived risks and purchase intention. A self-administered questionnaire was developed based on previous studies. After pretest, the data were collected during September, 2006, from university students in Korea who were relatively sensitive to innovative products. A total of 300 final useful questionnaire were analyzed by SPSS 13.0 program. About 60.3% were male with the mean age of 21.3 years old. About 59.3% reported that they were aware of smart clothing, but only 9 respondents purchased it. The mean of attitudes toward smart clothing and purchase intention was 2.96 (SD=.56) and 2.63 (SD=.65) respectively. Factor analysis using principal components with varimax rotation was conducted to identify perceived attribute and perceived risk dimensions. Perceived attributes of smart wear were categorized into relative advantage (including compatibility), observability (including triability), and complexity. Perceived risks were identified into physical/performance risk, social psychological risk, time loss risk, and economic risk. Regression analysis was conducted to test five hypotheses. Relative advantage and observability were significant predictors of product attitude (adj $R^2$=.223) and purchase intention (adj $R^2$=.221). Complexity showed negative influence on product attitude. Product attitude presented significant relation to purchase intention (adj $R^2$=.692) and partial mediating effect between perceived attributes and purchase intention (adj $R^2$=.698). Therefore hypothesis one to three were accepted. In order to test hypothesis four, four dimensions of perceived risk and demographic variables (age, gender, monthly household income, awareness of smart clothing, and purchase experience) were entered as independent variables in the regression models. Social psychological risk, economic risk, and gender (female) were significant to predict relative advantage (adj $R^2$=.276). When perceived observability was a dependent variable, social psychological risk, time loss risk, physical/performance risk, and age (younger) were significant in order (adj $R^2$=.144). However, physical/performance risk was positively related to observability. The more Koreans seemed to be observable of smart clothing, the more increased the probability of physical harm or performance problems received. Complexity was predicted by product awareness, social psychological risk, economic risk, and purchase experience in order (adj $R^2$=.114). Product awareness was negatively related to complexity, meaning high level of product awareness would reduce complexity of smart clothing. However, purchase experience presented positive relation with complexity. It appears that consumers can perceive high level of complexity when they are actually consuming smart clothing in real life. Risk variables were positively related with complexity. That is, in order to decrease complexity, it is also necessary to consider minimizing anxiety factors about social psychological wound or loss of money. Thus, hypothesis 4 was partially accepted. Finally, in testing hypothesis 5, social psychological risk and economic risk were significant predictors for product attitude (adj $R^2$=.122) and purchase intention (adj $R^2$=.099) respectively. When attitude variable was included with risk variables as independent variables in the regression model to predict purchase intention, only attitude variable was significant (adj $R^2$=.691). Thus attitude variable presented full mediating effect between perceived risks and purchase intention, and hypothesis 5 was accepted. Findings would provide guidelines for fashion and electronic businesses who aim to create and strengthen positive attitude toward smart clothing. Marketers need to consider not only functional feature of smart clothing, but also practical and aesthetic attributes, since appropriateness for social norm or self image would reduce uncertainty of psychological or social risk, which increase relative advantage of smart clothing. Actually social psychological risk was significantly associated to relative advantage. Economic risk is negatively associated with product attitudes as well as purchase intention, suggesting that smart-wear developers have to reflect on price ranges of potential adopters. It will be effective to utilize the findings associated with complexity when marketers in US plan communication strategy.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.166-182
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• 1994

Kyonggi Province in the late Chosun dynasty was a center of superior government offices including 'Han' River water-road transportation and was located in the middle of an 'X'-shaped arterial road network. Because of these reasons, Kyonggi Province had a faster inflow of commodities, informations and technics compared with the other province. At this period of time, every local 'Eup' (name of administrative district) had not been affected by their above administrative districts and had their own autonomy. For this reason, every 'Eup' could be developed as a town, even if its size was small when it had sufficient internal growing conditions. Moreover, the markets ('Si-Jon') in big towns and periodical markets which were spread over the Kyonggi Province played role of commercial functions of town. And because military bases for the defence of the royal capital in Kyonggi Province also took parts of a non-agricultural city role, Xyonggi Provinc had much more possibilities of growing as a town rather than the other provinces. The towns of the late Chosun Dynasty were, except the capital and superior administrative districts which were governed by the 'You-Su', small towns which had only about 3, 000-5, 000 people. Most of the town dewellers were local officials, nobles, merchants, craftmen and slaves. And the farmers who lived near town became a pseudo-towner through suburb agriculture. Among these people, the merchants were leaders of townization. The downtowns were affected by the landform and traffic roads. The most fundamental function of towns were administrative. The opcial's grade, which was dispatched to the local administrative district ('Kun' or 'Hyun'), was decided by the size of population and agricultural land of each county. Large county which was governed by a high ranking opcial had more possibilities to develop as a large town. Because they supervised other opcials of lower rank and obtained more land and population for the town. The phonomena of farm abandonment after the Japanese Invasion of Korea in 1592-1598 stimulated the development of towns for commercial function. The commercial functions of towns were evident in the Si-Jon or Nan-Jon (names of markets) in the big cities such as Hansung and Kaesung, meanffwhile in the local areas it was emerged in the shape of periodical market networks as allied with near markets (which were called as Jang-Si) or permanent markets which were grown up from periodical markets. These facts of commercial development induced the birth of commercial town. Kyonggi Province showed the weak points of its defense system during both wars (Japanese Invasion in 1592 and Manchu's Invasion in 1636). The government reinforced its defense system by adding 4 'You-Su-Bus' and several military bases. Each local districts ('Eup'), where Geo-Jins were established, were stimulated to be a town while Jin-Kwan system were, adjusted and enforced. Among Dok-Jins(name of solitary military bases), Youngjongjin was grown up as a large garrison town which only played a role of defense. The number of towns that took roles of non-agricultural functions in Kyonggi Province was 52. Among these towns, 29 were developed as big towns which had above 3, 000 people and most of these towns were located on the northwest-southeast axes of 'X'-shaped arterial trafic network in the Chosn Dynasty, This fact points out that the traffic road is one of the important causes of the development of towns. When we make hierarchy of the towns of Kyonggi Province according to its population and how many functions it had, we can make it as 6 grades. The virst grade town 'Hansung' was the biggest central town of administration, commerce and defdnse. The 2nd grade town includes 'Kaesung' which had historical inertia that it had been the capital of the Koryo Dynesty. The 3rd grade towns include some 'You- Su-Bus' such as Soowon, Kanghwa, Kwangju and also include Mapo, Yongsan and from this we can imagine that the commercial development in the late Chosun Dynasty extremely affected the townization. The 4th-6th grade towns had smiliar population but it can be discriminated by how many town functions it had. So the 4th grade towns were the core of administration, commerce and defense function. 5th grade towns had administrative functions and one of commercial and defense functions. 6th grade towns had only one of these functions. When we research and town conditions of each grades as the ratio of non-agricultural population, we can find out that the towns from the 1st grade to 4th grade show difference by degree of townization but from the 4th grade to 6th grade towns do not show big difference in general.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.79-111
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• 2011

Digital economy has grown rapidly so that the new business area called 'Internet business' has been dramatically extended as time goes on. However, in the case of Internet business, market shares of individual companies seem to fluctuate very extremely. Thus marketing managers who operate the Internet sites have seriously observed the competition structure of the Internet business market and carefully analyzed the competitors' behavior in order to achieve their own business goals in the market. The newly created Internet business might differ from the offline ones in management styles, because it has totally different business circumstances when compared with the existing offline businesses. Thus, there should be a lot of researches for finding the solutions about what the features of Internet business are and how the management style of those Internet business companies should be changed. Most marketing literatures related to the Internet business have focused on individual business markets. Specifically, many researchers have studied the Internet portal sites and the Internet shopping mall sites, which are the most general forms of Internet business. On the other hand, this study focuses on the entire Internet business industry to understand the competitive circumstance of online market. This approach makes it possible not only to have a broader view to comprehend overall e-business industry, but also to understand the differences in competition structures among Internet business markets. We used time-series data of Internet connection rates by consumers as the basic data to figure out the competition patterns in the Internet business markets. Specifically, the data for this research was obtained from one of Internet ranking sites, 'Fian'. The Internet business ranking data is obtained based on web surfing record of some pre-selected sample group where the possibility of double-count for page-views is controlled by method of same IP check. The ranking site offers several data which are very useful for comparison and analysis of competitive sites. The Fian site divides the Internet business areas into 34 area and offers market shares of big 5 sites which are on high rank in each category daily. We collected the daily market share data about Internet sites on each area from April 22, 2008 to August 5, 2008, where some errors of data was found and 30 business area data were finally used for our research after the data purification. This study performed several empirical analyses in focusing on market shares of each site to understand the competition among sites in Internet business of Korea. We tried to perform more statistically precise analysis for looking into business fields with similar competitive structures by applying the cluster analysis to the data. The research results are as follows. First, the leading sites in each area were classified into three groups based on averages and standard deviations of daily market shares. The first group includes the sites with the lowest market shares, which give more increased convenience to consumers by offering the Internet sites as complimentary services for existing offline services. The second group includes sites with medium level of market shares, where the site users are limited to specific small group. The third group includes sites with the highest market shares, which usually require online registration in advance and have difficulty in switching to another site. Second, we analyzed the second place sites in each business area because it may help us understand the competitive power of the strongest competitor against the leading site. The second place sites in each business area were classified into four groups based on averages and standard deviations of daily market shares. The four groups are the sites showing consistent inferiority compared to the leading sites, the sites with relatively high volatility and medium level of shares, the sites with relatively low volatility and medium level of shares, the sites with relatively low volatility and high level of shares whose gaps are not big compared to the leading sites. Except 'web agency' area, these second place sites show relatively stable shares below 0.1 point of standard deviation. Third, we also classified the types of relative strength between leading sites and the second place sites by applying the cluster analysis to the gap values of market shares between two sites. They were also classified into four groups, the sites with the relatively lowest gaps even though the values of standard deviation are various, the sites with under the average level of gaps, the sites with over the average level of gaps, the sites with the relatively higher gaps and lower volatility. Then we also found that while the areas with relatively bigger gap values usually have smaller standard deviation values, the areas with very small differences between the first and the second sites have a wider range of standard deviation values. The practical and theoretical implications of this study are as follows. First, the result of this study might provide the current market participants with the useful information to understand the competitive circumstance of the market and build the effective new business strategy for the market success. Also it might be useful to help new potential companies find a new business area and set up successful competitive strategies. Second, it might help Internet marketing researchers take a macro view of the overall Internet market so that make possible to begin the new studies on overall Internet market beyond individual Internet market studies.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.31-46
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• 1977

The study was made to give some helpful information for policy-making on ornamental tree cultivation by doing a survey on general situations, management analysis, and future prospects of the ornamental tree growing. The study was carried out through literature studies related to the subject, questionaire surveys, and on-the-spot investigation. The questionaire surveys could be divided into two parts: pre-questionaire survey and main-questionaire survey. In the pre-questionaire survey, the researchers intended to identify the total number of ornamental tree growers, cultivation areas in size and their locations. The questionaires were sent to each town and county administration authorities, forest cooperatives, and related organizations through-out the nation. The main-questionaires were prepared for detailed study and the questionaires were sent to 200 tree growers selected by option by taking considerations of the number of tree growers and the size of cultivating areas in regions. The main findings and some information obtained in the survey were as follows: 1. The total land for ornamental tree growing was amounted to 1,873.02 hectares and the number of cultivators was totaled to 2,717. 2. The main occupations of the ornamental tree growers were found in horticulture (41.9%), agronomy (25.9%), officialdom (11.3%), animal husbandry (6.5%), business circle(4.8%), and forestry (3.2%) in sequence. 3. The ornamental trees were cultivated mostly upperland (54.8), forest land (19.4%), rice paddy (11.3%) and others. 4. The educational training of the tree growers seemed quite high. The results of the survey indicated that a large number of tree growers was occupied by college graduates (38.7%), and then high school graduates (34.7%), middle school graduates (12.9%) in order. 5. The tree farming was undertaken as a side-job (41.9%) rather than main-job (23.4%), but a few of respondents rated as subsidiary-job (18.6%). 6. The management status classified by the rate of hired labors used was likely to belong to three categories: independant enterprise management (41.9%); half independant management (31.5%); and self-management (32.4%). 7. The majority of the tree growers sold their products to the consumers through middle-man channel (48.4%), or directly to the house-holder and detailers (13.7%), but a few of the respondents answered that they disposed of their products by bidding (11.2%) or by direct selling to the contractors (4.8%). 8. The channel cf marketing seemed somewhat complicated. The results of the survey were as: (1) producers ${\rightarrow}$consumers (22.6%) (2) producers ${\rightarrow}$field middle-men${\rightarrow}$consumers (33.1%) (3) producers ${\rightarrow}$field middle-men${\rightarrow}$first stage brokers${\rightarrow}$consumers (15.3%) (4) producers ${\rightarrow}$field middle-men${\rightarrow}$second stage middle-men${\rightarrow}$brokers${\rightarrow}$consumers (5.7%) (5) producers${\rightarrow}$field middle-men${\rightarrow}$third stage middle-men${\rightarrow}$second stage middlemen${\rightarrow}$brokers${\rightarrow}$consumers (4.8%) 9. It was responded that the margin for each stage of middle-men or brokers was assumed to be 30-50%(33.1%), 20-30%(32.3%), 50-100%(9.7%), and 100-200%(2.4%) in sequence. 10. The difference between the delivery price of consumers and field selling price of the producers seemed quite large. Majority of producers responded that they received half a price compared to the consumer's prices. 11. About two thirds of the respondents opposed to the measure of "Law on Preservation and Utilization of Agricultural Land" in which says that all the ornamental trees grown on flat agricultural lands less than 8 degrees in slope must be transplanted within three years to other places more than 8 degrees in slope. 12. The tree growers said that they have paid rather high land taxes than they ought to pay (38.7%), but come responded that land tax seemed to be appropriate (15.3%), and half of the respondents answered "not known". 13. The measures for the standardization of ornamental trees by size were backed up by a large number of respondents (57.3%), but one third of the respondents showed negative answer (29.8%). 14. About half of the respondents favored the systematic marketing through organization such as forest cooperatives (54%), but quite a few respondents opposed to organizing the systematic marketing channel (36.3%). 15. The necessary measures for permission in ornamental tree cultivation was rejected by a large number of respondents (49.2%) than those of favored (43.6%).

• MISULJARYO - National Museum of Korea Art Journal
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• v.98
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• pp.226-241
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• 2020

Located on the right side of the third floor of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the "Art of Central Asia" exhibition boasts the world's finest collection of artworks and artifacts from the Silk Road. Every item in the collection has been classified by region, and many of them were collected in the early twentieth century through archaeological surveys led by Russia's Pyotr Kozlov, Mikhail Berezovsky, and Sergey Oldenburg. Some of these artifacts have been presented around the world through special exhibitions held in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Korea, Japan, and elsewhere. The fruits of Russia's Silk Road expeditions were also on full display in the 2008 exhibition The Caves of One Thousand Buddhas - Russian Expeditions on the Silk Route on the Occasion of 190 Years of the Asiatic Museum, held at the Hermitage Museum. Published in 2018 by the Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House in collaboration with the Hermitage Museum, Kuche Art Relics Collected in Russia introduces the Hermitage's collection of artifacts from the Kuche (or Kucha) region. While the book focuses exclusively on artifacts excavated from the Kuche area, it also includes valuable on-site photos and sketches from the Russian expeditions, thus helping to enhance readers' overall understanding of the characteristics of Kuche art within the Buddhist art of Central Asia. The book was compiled by Dr. Kira Samosyuk, senior curator of the Oriental Department of the Hermitage Museum, who also wrote the main article and the artifact descriptions. Dr. Samosyuk is an internationally renowned scholar of Central Asian Buddhist art, with a particular expertise in the art of Khara-Khoto and Xi-yu. In her article "The Art of the Kuche Buddhist Temples," Dr. Samosyuk provides an overview of Russia's Silk Road expeditions, before introducing the historical development of Kuche in the Buddhist era and the aspects of Buddhism transmitted to Kuche. She describes the murals and clay sculptures in the Buddhist grottoes, giving important details on their themes and issues with estimating their dates, and also explains how the temples operated as places of worship. In conclusion, Dr. Samosyuk argues that the Kuche region, while continuously engaging with various peoples in China and the nomadic world, developed its own independent Buddhist culture incorporating elements of Gandara, Hellenistic, Persian, and Chinese art and culture. Finally, she states that the culture of the Kuche region had a profound influence not only on the Tarim Basin, but also on the Buddhist grottoes of Dunhuang and the central region of China. A considerable portion of Dr. Samosyuk's article addresses efforts to estimate the date of the grottoes in the Kuche region. After citing various scholars' views on the dates of the murals, she argues that the Kizil grottoes likely began prior to the fifth century, which is at least 100 years earlier than most current estimates. This conclusion is reached by comparing the iconography of the armor depicted in the murals with related materials excavated from the surrounding area (such as items of Sogdian art). However, efforts to date the Buddhist grottoes of Kuche must take many factors into consideration, such as the geological characteristics of the caves, the themes and styles of the Buddhist paintings, the types of pigments used, and the clothing, hairstyles, and ornamentation of the depicted figures. Moreover, such interdisciplinary data must be studied within the context of Kuche's relations with nearby cultures. Scientific methods such as radiocarbon dating could also be applied for supplementary materials. The preface of Kuche Art Relics Collected in Russia reveals that the catalog is the first volume covering the Hermitage Museum's collection of Kuche art, and that the next volume in the series will cover a large collection of mural fragments that were taken from Berlin during World War II. For many years, the whereabouts of these mural fragments were unknown to both the public and academia, but after restoration, the fragments were recently re-introduced to the public as part of the museum's permanent exhibition. We look forward to the next publication that focuses on these mural fragments, and also to future catalogs introducing the artifacts of Turpan and Khotan. Currently, fragments of the murals from the Kuche grottoes are scattered among various countries, including Russia, Germany, and Korea. With the publication of this catalog, it seems like an opportune time to publish a comprehensive catalog on the murals of the Kuche region, which represent a compelling mixture of East-West culture that reflects the overall characteristics of the region. A catalog that includes both the remaining murals of the Kizil grottoes and the fragments from different parts of the world could greatly enhance our understanding of the murals' original state. Such a book would hopefully include a more detailed and interdisciplinary discussion of the artifacts and murals, including scientific analyses of the pigments and other materials from the perspective of conservation science. With the ongoing rapid development in western China, the grotto murals are facing a serious crisis related to climate change and overcrowding in the oasis city of Xinjiang. To overcome this challenge, the cultural communities of China and other countries that possess advanced technology for conservation and restoration must begin working together to protect and restore the murals of the Silk Road grottoes. Moreover, centers for conservation science should be established to foster human resources and collect information. Compiling the data of Russian expeditions related to the grottoes of Kuche (among the results of Western archaeological surveys of the Silk Road in the early twentieth century), Kuche Art Relics Collected in Russia represents an important contribution to research on Kuche's Buddhist art and the Silk Road, which will only be enhanced by a future volume introducing the mural fragments from Germany. As the new authoritative source for academic research on the artworks and artifacts of the Kuche region, the book also lays the groundwork for new directions for future studies on the Silk Road. Finally, the book is also quite significant for employing a new editing system that improves its academic clarity and convenience. In conclusion, Dr. Kira Samosyuk, who planned the publication, deserves tremendous praise for taking the research of Silk Road art to new heights.