• Title/Summary/Keyword: Factors of technology adoption

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Acceptability & Acceptance Intention of Younger Children's Parents for Smart Animal Toy (동물형 스마트 토이에 대한 영유아 부모의 수용성 및 수용의도)

  • Hyun, Eunja;Yoon, Hyunmin
    • The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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    • v.15 no.5
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    • pp.639-650
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    • 2015
  • The purpose of this study was firstly, to explore the acceptability and acceptance intention of parents for smart animal toys and secondly, investigate whether there is a difference by sex and age. For this purpose, the questionnaire survey was conducted with 344 parents of younger children in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province. As a result, there were significant positive correlations among the relative advantage, aesthetics, social image of smart animal toys, the attitude of the new technology and the parents' acceptability. Whereas there were significant negative correlations among the acceptance risk and the parents' acceptability. The parents' acceptability showed differences in the relative advantages and social image according to the age of the parents and no significant difference according to purchasing experience of smart animal toys. These results indicated that the parents' acceptability and acceptance intention of smart animal toys were similar with the adoption process of innovative products or smart devices. And it was also informed that the most impact factors on parents' acceptance for smart toy were the relative advantage, social image, and the attitude of the new technology. This research will be useful in understanding parents purchasing intention of smart toys and provide valuable implication for smart toy companies, manufacturers, and developers.

Analyzing the Affinity Influence of AI Learning Robots (AI 학습 로봇의 친밀도 영향요인 분석)

  • Moo-Hyeon Yoon;Da-Young Ju
    • Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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    • v.27 no.2
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    • pp.69-80
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    • 2024
  • The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of remote education, yet the adoption rate of AI in the educational sector remains relatively low, and studies into learners' familiarity with using AI learning robots are scarce. In response, this study analyzes the factors influencing users' familiarity with AI learning robots in a smart learning environment tailored to the untact era. To this end, social big data analysis was used to examine changes in public perception and the frequency of mentions of smart learning and AI learning robots. The results showed that positive perceptions of smart learning significantly outweigh negative ones, reflecting the convenience and improved accessibility that technology brings to education. However, there is also a considerable negative perception attached to smartphone use, which is interpreted as reflecting concerns that smartphones may disrupt learning and bring other negative aspects of technology dependence. These results indicate mixed social concerns and expectations regarding the educational use of smart learning and AI technologies. The effective introduction and use of AI learning robots, especially in smart learning environments, necessitate considering these social perceptions. This study provides foundational data for the effective implementation and use of AI learning robots in smart learning environments and suggests the need for approaches that primarily consider users' familiarity and social perceptions in the development of educational technologies.

Importance of End User's Feedback Seeking Behavior for Faithful Appropriation of Information Systems in Small and Medium Enterprises (중소기업 환경에서의 합목적적 정보시스템 활용을 위한 최종사용자 피드백 탐색행위의 중요성)

  • Shin, Young-Mee;Lee, Joo-Ryang;Lee, Ho-Geun
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.17 no.4
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    • pp.61-95
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    • 2007
  • Small-and-medium sized enterprises(SMEs) represent quite a large proportion of the industry as a whole in terms of the number of enterprises or employees. However researches on information system so far have focused on large companies, probably because SMEs were not so active in introducing information systems as larger enterprises. SMEs are now increasingly bringing in information systems such as ERP(Enterprise Resource Planning Systems) and some of the companies already entered the stage of ongoing use. Accordingly, researches should deal with the use of information systems by SME s operating under different conditions from large companies. This study examined factors and mechanism inducing faithful appropriation of information systems, in particular integrative systems such as ERP, in view of individuals` active feedback-seeking behavior. There are three factors expected to affect end users` feedback-seeking behavior for faithful appropriation of information systems. They are management support, peer IT champ support, and IT staff support. The main focus of the study is on how these factors affect feedback-seeking behavior and whether the feedback-seeking behavior plays the role of mediator for realizing faithful appropriation of information systems by end users. To examine the research model and the hypotheses, this study employed an empirical method based on a field survey. The survey used measurements mostly employed and verified by previous researches, while some of the measurements had gone through minor modifications for the purpose of the study. The survey respondents are individual employees of SMEs that have been using ERP for one year or longer. To prevent common method bias, Task-Technology Fit items used as the control variable were made to be answered by different respondents. In total, 127 pairs of valid questionnaires were collected and used for the analysis. The PLS(Partial Least Squares) approach to structural equation modeling(PLS-Graph v.3.0) was used as our data analysis strategy because of its ability to model both formative and reflective latent constructs under small-and medium-size samples. The analysis shows Reliability, Construct Validity and Discriminant Validity are appropriate. The path analysis results are as follows; first, the more there is peer IT champ support, the more the end user is likely to show feedback-seeking behavior(path-coefficient=0.230, t=2.28, p<0.05). In other words, if colleagues proficient in information system use recognize the importance of their help, pass on what they have found to be an effective way of using the system or correct others' misuse, ordinary end users will be able to seek feedback on the faithfulness of their appropriation of information system without hesitation, because they know the convenience of getting help. Second, management support encourages ordinary end users to seek more feedback(path-coefficient=0.271, t=3.06, p<0.01) by affecting the end users' perceived value of feedback(path-coefficient=0.401, t=6.01, p<0.01). Management support is far more influential than other factors that when the management of an SME well understands the benefit of ERP, promotes its faithful appropriation and pays attention to employees' satisfaction with the system, employees will make deliberate efforts for faithful appropriation of the system. However, the third factor, IT staff support was found not to be conducive to feedback-seeking behavior from end users(path-coefficient=0.174, t=1.83). This is partly attributable to the fundamental reason that there is little support for end users from IT staff in SMEs. Even when IT staff provides support, end users may find it less important than that from coworkers more familiar with the end users' job. Meanwhile, the more end users seek feedback and attempt to find ways of faithful appropriation of information systems, the more likely the users will be able to deploy the system according to the purpose the system was originally meant for(path-coefficient=0.35, t=2.88, p<0.01). Finally, the mediation effect analysis confirmed the mediation effect of feedback-seeking behavior. By confirming the mediation effect of feedback-seeking behavior, this study draws attention to the importance of feedback-seeking behavior that has long been overlooked in research about information system use. This study also explores the factors that promote feedback-seeking behavior which in result could affect end user`s faithful appropriation of information systems. In addition, this study provides insight about which inducements or resources SMEs should offer to promote individual users' feedback-seeking behavior when formal and sufficient support from IT staff or an outside information system provider is hardly expected. As the study results show, under the business environment of SMEs, help from skilled colleagues and the management plays a critical role. Therefore, SMEs should seriously consider how to utilize skilled peer information system users, while the management should pay keen attention to end users and support them to make the most of information systems.

An Empirical Study on the Determinants of Supply Chain Management Systems Success from Vendor's Perspective (참여자관점에서 공급사슬관리 시스템의 성공에 영향을 미치는 요인에 관한 실증연구)

  • Kang, Sung-Bae;Moon, Tae-Soo;Chung, Yoon
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.20 no.3
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    • pp.139-166
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    • 2010
  • The supply chain management (SCM) systems have emerged as strong managerial tools for manufacturing firms in enhancing competitive strength. Despite of large investments in the SCM systems, many companies are not fully realizing the promised benefits from the systems. A review of literature on adoption, implementation and success factor of IOS (inter-organization systems), EDI (electronic data interchange) systems, shows that this issue has been examined from multiple theoretic perspectives. And many researchers have attempted to identify the factors which influence the success of system implementation. However, the existing studies have two drawbacks in revealing the determinants of systems implementation success. First, previous researches raise questions as to the appropriateness of research subjects selected. Most SCM systems are operating in the form of private industrial networks, where the participants of the systems consist of two distinct groups: focus companies and vendors. The focus companies are the primary actors in developing and operating the systems, while vendors are passive participants which are connected to the system in order to supply raw materials and parts to the focus companies. Under the circumstance, there are three ways in selecting the research subjects; focus companies only, vendors only, or two parties grouped together. It is hard to find researches that use the focus companies exclusively as the subjects probably due to the insufficient sample size for statistic analysis. Most researches have been conducted using the data collected from both groups. We argue that the SCM success factors cannot be correctly indentified in this case. The focus companies and the vendors are in different positions in many areas regarding the system implementation: firm size, managerial resources, bargaining power, organizational maturity, and etc. There are no obvious reasons to believe that the success factors of the two groups are identical. Grouping the two groups also raises questions on measuring the system success. The benefits from utilizing the systems may not be commonly distributed to the two groups. One group's benefits might be realized at the expenses of the other group considering the situation where vendors participating in SCM systems are under continuous pressures from the focus companies with respect to prices, quality, and delivery time. Therefore, by combining the system outcomes of both groups we cannot measure the system benefits obtained by each group correctly. Second, the measures of system success adopted in the previous researches have shortcoming in measuring the SCM success. User satisfaction, system utilization, and user attitudes toward the systems are most commonly used success measures in the existing studies. These measures have been developed as proxy variables in the studies of decision support systems (DSS) where the contribution of the systems to the organization performance is very difficult to measure. Unlike the DSS, the SCM systems have more specific goals, such as cost saving, inventory reduction, quality improvement, rapid time, and higher customer service. We maintain that more specific measures can be developed instead of proxy variables in order to measure the system benefits correctly. The purpose of this study is to find the determinants of SCM systems success in the perspective of vendor companies. In developing the research model, we have focused on selecting the success factors appropriate for the vendors through reviewing past researches and on developing more accurate success measures. The variables can be classified into following: technological, organizational, and environmental factors on the basis of TOE (Technology-Organization-Environment) framework. The model consists of three independent variables (competition intensity, top management support, and information system maturity), one mediating variable (collaboration), one moderating variable (government support), and a dependent variable (system success). The systems success measures have been developed to reflect the operational benefits of the SCM systems; improvement in planning and analysis capabilities, faster throughput, cost reduction, task integration, and improved product and customer service. The model has been validated using the survey data collected from 122 vendors participating in the SCM systems in Korea. To test for mediation, one should estimate the hierarchical regression analysis on the collaboration. And moderating effect analysis should estimate the moderated multiple regression, examines the effect of the government support. The result shows that information system maturity and top management support are the most important determinants of SCM system success. Supply chain technologies that standardize data formats and enhance information sharing may be adopted by supply chain leader organization because of the influence of focal company in the private industrial networks in order to streamline transactions and improve inter-organization communication. Specially, the need to develop and sustain an information system maturity will provide the focus and purpose to successfully overcome information system obstacles and resistance to innovation diffusion within the supply chain network organization. The support of top management will help focus efforts toward the realization of inter-organizational benefits and lend credibility to functional managers responsible for its implementation. The active involvement, vision, and direction of high level executives provide the impetus needed to sustain the implementation of SCM. The quality of collaboration relationships also is positively related to outcome variable. Collaboration variable is found to have a mediation effect between on influencing factors and implementation success. Higher levels of inter-organizational collaboration behaviors such as shared planning and flexibility in coordinating activities were found to be strongly linked to the vendors trust in the supply chain network. Government support moderates the effect of the IS maturity, competitive intensity, top management support on collaboration and implementation success of SCM. In general, the vendor companies face substantially greater risks in SCM implementation than the larger companies do because of severe constraints on financial and human resources and limited education on SCM systems. Besides resources, Vendors generally lack computer experience and do not have sufficient internal SCM expertise. For these reasons, government supports may establish requirements for firms doing business with the government or provide incentives to adopt, implementation SCM or practices. Government support provides significant improvements in implementation success of SCM when IS maturity, competitive intensity, top management support and collaboration are low. The environmental characteristic of competition intensity has no direct effect on vendor perspective of SCM system success. But, vendors facing above average competition intensity will have a greater need for changing technology. This suggests that companies trying to implement SCM systems should set up compatible supply chain networks and a high-quality collaboration relationship for implementation and performance.

Effects on the continuous use intention of AI-based voice assistant services: Focusing on the interaction between trust in AI and privacy concerns (인공지능 기반 음성비서 서비스의 지속이용 의도에 미치는 영향: 인공지능에 대한 신뢰와 프라이버시 염려의 상호작용을 중심으로)

  • Jang, Changki;Heo, Deokwon;Sung, WookJoon
    • Informatization Policy
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    • v.30 no.2
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    • pp.22-45
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    • 2023
  • In research on the use of AI-based voice assistant services, problems related to the user's trust and privacy protection arising from the experience of service use are constantly being raised. The purpose of this study was to investigate empirically the effects of individual trust in AI and online privacy concerns on the continued use of AI-based voice assistants, specifically the impact of their interaction. In this study, question items were constructed based on previous studies, with an online survey conducted among 405 respondents. The effect of the user's trust in AI and privacy concerns on the adoption and continuous use intention of AI-based voice assistant services was analyzed using the Heckman selection model. As the main findings of the study, first, AI-based voice assistant service usage behavior was positively influenced by factors that promote technology acceptance, such as perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and social influence. Second, trust in AI had no statistically significant effect on AI-based voice assistant service usage behavior but had a positive effect on continuous use intention. Third, the privacy concern level was confirmed to have the effect of suppressing continuous use intention through interaction with trust in AI. These research results suggest the need to strengthen user experience through user opinion collection and action to improve trust in technology and alleviate users' concerns about privacy as governance for realizing digital government. When introducing artificial intelligence-based policy services, it is necessary to disclose transparently the scope of application of artificial intelligence technology through a public deliberation process, and the development of a system that can track and evaluate privacy issues ex-post and an algorithm that considers privacy protection is required.

Analysis of Traffic Safety Effectiveness of Vehicle Seat-belt Wearing Detection System (주행차량 안전벨트 착용 검지시스템 교통안전 효과 분석)

  • Ji won Park;Su bin Park;Sang cheol Kang;Cheol Oh
    • The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
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    • v.22 no.5
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    • pp.53-73
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    • 2023
  • Although it is mandatory to wear a seat belt that can minimize human injury when traffic accident occurs, the number of traffic accident casualties not wearing seat belts still accounts for a significant proportion.The seat belt wearing detection system for all seats is a system that identifies whether all seat passengers wear a seat belt and encourages their usage, also it can be a useful technical countermeasure. Firstly, this study established the viability of system implementation by assessing the factors influencing the severity of injuries in traffic accidents through the development of an ordered probit model. Analysis results showed that the use of seat belts has statistically significant effects on the severity of traffic accidents, reducing the probability of death or serious injury by 0.054 times in the event of a traffic accident. Secondly, a meta-analysis was conducted based on prior research related to seat belts and injuries in traffic accidents to estimate the expected reduction in accident severity upon the implementation of the system.The analysis of the effect of accident severity reduction revealed that wearing seat belts would lead to a 63.3% decrease in fatal accidents, with the front seats showing a reduction of 75.7% and the rear seats showing a reduction of 58.1% in fatal accidents. Lastly, Using the results of the meta-analysis and traffic accident statistics, the expected decrease in the number of traffic accident casualties with the implementation of the system was derived to analyze the traffic safety effects of the proposed detection system. The analysis demonstrated that with an increase in the adoption rate of the system, the number of casualties in accidents where seat belts were not worn decreased. Specifically, at a system adoption rate of 60%, it is anticipated that the number of fatalities would decrease by more than three times compared to the current scenario. Based on the analysis results, operational strategies for the system were proposed to increase seat belt usage rates and reduce accident severity.

Social Network Analysis for the Effective Adoption of Recommender Systems (추천시스템의 효과적 도입을 위한 소셜네트워크 분석)

  • Park, Jong-Hak;Cho, Yoon-Ho
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.17 no.4
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    • pp.305-316
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    • 2011
  • Recommender system is the system which, by using automated information filtering technology, recommends products or services to the customers who are likely to be interested in. Those systems are widely used in many different Web retailers such as Amazon.com, Netfix.com, and CDNow.com. Various recommender systems have been developed. Among them, Collaborative Filtering (CF) has been known as the most successful and commonly used approach. CF identifies customers whose tastes are similar to those of a given customer, and recommends items those customers have liked in the past. Numerous CF algorithms have been developed to increase the performance of recommender systems. However, the relative performances of CF algorithms are known to be domain and data dependent. It is very time-consuming and expensive to implement and launce a CF recommender system, and also the system unsuited for the given domain provides customers with poor quality recommendations that make them easily annoyed. Therefore, predicting in advance whether the performance of CF recommender system is acceptable or not is practically important and needed. In this study, we propose a decision making guideline which helps decide whether CF is adoptable for a given application with certain transaction data characteristics. Several previous studies reported that sparsity, gray sheep, cold-start, coverage, and serendipity could affect the performance of CF, but the theoretical and empirical justification of such factors is lacking. Recently there are many studies paying attention to Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a method to analyze social relationships among people. SNA is a method to measure and visualize the linkage structure and status focusing on interaction among objects within communication group. CF analyzes the similarity among previous ratings or purchases of each customer, finds the relationships among the customers who have similarities, and then uses the relationships for recommendations. Thus CF can be modeled as a social network in which customers are nodes and purchase relationships between customers are links. Under the assumption that SNA could facilitate an exploration of the topological properties of the network structure that are implicit in transaction data for CF recommendations, we focus on density, clustering coefficient, and centralization which are ones of the most commonly used measures to capture topological properties of the social network structure. While network density, expressed as a proportion of the maximum possible number of links, captures the density of the whole network, the clustering coefficient captures the degree to which the overall network contains localized pockets of dense connectivity. Centralization reflects the extent to which connections are concentrated in a small number of nodes rather than distributed equally among all nodes. We explore how these SNA measures affect the performance of CF performance and how they interact to each other. Our experiments used sales transaction data from H department store, one of the well?known department stores in Korea. Total 396 data set were sampled to construct various types of social networks. The dependant variable measuring process consists of three steps; analysis of customer similarities, construction of a social network, and analysis of social network patterns. We used UCINET 6.0 for SNA. The experiments conducted the 3-way ANOVA which employs three SNA measures as dependant variables, and the recommendation accuracy measured by F1-measure as an independent variable. The experiments report that 1) each of three SNA measures affects the recommendation accuracy, 2) the density's effect to the performance overrides those of clustering coefficient and centralization (i.e., CF adoption is not a good decision if the density is low), and 3) however though the density is low, the performance of CF is comparatively good when the clustering coefficient is low. We expect that these experiment results help firms decide whether CF recommender system is adoptable for their business domain with certain transaction data characteristics.

A Study on Actual Usage of Information Systems: Focusing on System Quality of Mobile Service (정보시스템의 실제 이용에 대한 연구: 모바일 서비스 시스템 품질을 중심으로)

  • Cho, Woo-Chul;Kim, Kimin;Yang, Sung-Byung
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.24 no.4
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    • pp.611-635
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    • 2014
  • Information systems (IS) have become ubiquitous and changed every aspect of how people live their lives. While some IS have been successfully adopted and widely used, others have failed to be adopted and crowded out in spite of remarkable progress in technologies. Both the technology acceptance model (TAM) and the IS Success Model (ISSM), among many others, have contributed to explain the reasons of success as well as failure in IS adoption and usage. While the TAM suggests that intention to use and perceived usefulness lead to actual IS usage, the ISSM indicates that information quality, system quality, and service quality affect IS usage and user satisfaction. Upon literature review, however, we found a significant void in theoretical development and its applications that employ either of the two models, and we raise research questions. First of all, in spite of the causal relationship between intention to use and actual usage, in most previous studies, only intention to use was employed as a dependent variable without overt explaining its relationship with actual usage. Moreover, even in a few studies that employed actual IS usage as a dependent variable, the degree of actual usage was measured based on users' perceptual responses to survey questionnaires. However, the measurement of actual usage based on survey responses might not be 'actual' usage in a strict sense that responders' perception may be distorted due to their selective perceptions or stereotypes. By the same token, the degree of system quality that IS users perceive might not be 'real' quality as well. This study seeks to fill this void by measuring the variables of actual usage and system quality using 'fact' data such as system logs and specifications of users' information and communications technology (ICT) devices. More specifically, we propose an integrated research model that bring together the TAM and the ISSM. The integrated model is composed of both the variables that are to be measured using fact as well as survey data. By employing the integrated model, we expect to reveal the difference between real and perceived degree of system quality, and to investigate the relationship between the perception-based measure of intention to use and the fact-based measure of actual usage. Furthermore, we also aim to add empirical findings on the general research question: what factors influence actual IS usage and how? In order to address the research question and to examine the research model, we selected a mobile campus application (MCA). We collected both fact data and survey data. For fact data, we retrieved them from the system logs such information as menu usage counts, user's device performance, display size, and operating system revision version number. At the same time, we conducted a survey among university students who use an MCA, and collected 180 valid responses. A partial least square (PLS) method was employed to validate our research model. Among nine hypotheses developed, we found five were supported while four were not. In detail, the relationships between (1) perceived system quality and perceived usefulness, (2) perceived system quality and perceived intention to use, (3) perceived usefulness and perceived intention to use, (4) quality of device platform and actual IS usage, and (5) perceived intention to use and actual IS usage were found to be significant. In comparison, the relationships between (1) quality of device platform and perceived system quality, (2) quality of device platform and perceived usefulness, (3) quality of device platform and perceived intention to use, and (4) perceived system quality and actual IS usage were not significant. The results of the study reveal notable differences from those of previous studies. First, although perceived intention to use shows a positive effect on actual IS usage, its explanatory power is very weak ($R^2$=0.064). Second, fact-based system quality (quality of user's device platform) shows a direct impact on actual IS usage without the mediating role of intention to use. Lastly, the relationships between perceived system quality (perception-based system quality) and other constructs show completely different results from those between quality of device platform (fact-based system quality) and other constructs. In the post-hoc analysis, IS users' past behavior was additionally included in the research model to further investigate the cause of such a low explanatory power of actual IS usage. The results show that past IS usage has a strong positive effect on current IS usage while intention to use does not have, implying that IS usage has already become a habitual behavior. This study provides the following several implications. First, we verify that fact-based data (i.e., system logs of real usage records) are more likely to reflect IS users' actual usage than perception-based data. In addition, by identifying the direct impact of quality of device platform on actual IS usage (without any mediating roles of attitude or intention), this study triggers further research on other potential factors that may directly influence actual IS usage. Furthermore, the results of the study provide practical strategic implications that organizations equipped with high-quality systems may directly expect high level of system usage.

Development of the Algofithm for Gaussian Mixture Models based Traffic Accident Auto-Detection in Freeway (GMM(Gaussian Mixture Model)을 적용한 영상처리기법의 연속류도로 사고 자동검지 알고리즘 개발)

  • O, Ju-Taek;Im, Jae-Geuk;Yeo, Tae-Dong
    • Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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    • v.28 no.3
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    • pp.169-183
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    • 2010
  • Image-based traffic information collection systems have entered widespread adoption and use in many countries since these systems are not only capable of replacing existing loop-based detectors which have limitations in management and administration, but are also capable of providing and managing a wide variety of traffic related information. In addition, these systems are expanding rapidly in terms of purpose and scope of use. Currently, the utilization of image processing technology in the field of traffic accident management is limited to installing surveillance cameras on locations where traffic accidents are expected to occur and digitalizing of recorded data. Accurately recording the sequence of situations around a traffic accident in a freeway and then objectively and clearly analyzing how such accident occurred is more urgent and important than anything else in resolving a traffic accident. Therefore, in this research, existing technologies, this freeway attribute, velocity changes, volume changes, occupancy changes reflect judge the primary. Furthermore, We pointed out by many past researches while presenting and implementing an active and environmentally adaptive methodology capable of effectively reducing false detection situations which frequently occur even with the Gaussian Mixture model analytical method which has been considered the best among well-known environmental obstacle reduction methods. Therefore, in this way, the accident was the final decision. Also, environmental factors occur frequently, and with the index finger situations, effectively reducing that can actively and environmentally adaptive techniques through accident final judgment. This implementation of the evaluate performance of the experiment road of 12 incidents in simulated and the jang-hang IC's real-time accident experiment. As a result, the do well detection 93.33%, false alarm 6.7% as showed high reliability.

Relationships Among Participation Motives in Virtual Community, Sense of Community, Loyalty and Purchase Intention (가상공동체 참여동기와 공동체의식, 충성도 및 구매의도간의 관계에 관한 연구)

  • Moon, Jun-Yean;Choi, Ji-Hoon
    • Information Systems Review
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    • v.5 no.2
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    • pp.71-90
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    • 2003
  • Virtual communities have been suggested to play important roles such as attracting customers, building customer loyalty, and leading to commercial transactions. Little research in marketing has focused on virtual communities in spite of its importance indicated by many practitioners and conceptual studies. More specifically, little research has empirically examined factors of customer participation and its consequences. This research investigate if customers' participation motives in virtual communities affect their sense of community and if sense of community affects customers' loyalty towards and purchase intentions from the website offering the community service. One hundred ninety six questionnaires were collected from individuals who have participated in and have been involved in online activities in various virtual communities. Major results of this research can be summarized as follows. First, participation motives employed significantly affected customers' sense of community and more specifically, perceived ease of use and perceived playfulness had a large influence on the customers' sense of community. Second, customers' sense of community positively affected their loyalty toward the community and more specifically, membership and emotional connection had a large influence on loyalty. Third, customers' sense of community did not affect directly their purchase intentions. Fourth, customers' loyalty toward virtual communities had a significant, positive, although marginal, influence on their purchase intentions.