• Title/Summary/Keyword: Focus group study

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Long-term Effects of Change in Family Structure On Achievement During Transition to Adulthood : Focusing on the effect of parental divorce/death on health condition, depression and educational attainment (가족구조의 변화가 성인이행기 발달에 미치는 영향 : 주관적 건강상태, 우울, 교육성취를 중심으로)

  • Kim, Yeonwoo
    • Korean Journal of Social Welfare Studies
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    • v.41 no.4
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    • pp.225-246
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    • 2010
  • The family environment children are exposed to growing up greatly influences their future potential and achievements. Previous findings show that changes in family structure during childhood, particularly those resulting from divorce or death, cause lasting negative consequence that affect the child physically, psychologically, economically, and socially. Unfortunately, single-parent households are becoming increasingly common in Korea, nearly doubling to more than a million cases in the last two decades. Existing domestic and international studies of this area tend to focus on the short-term effects of growing up in a single-parent household. In addition, these studies group their samples in ways that result in findings that may be too broad or are not necessarily an accurate representation of the subjects. This study attempts to address some of these shortcomings by focusing on the long-term effects of how changes in family structure early in children's lives affect achievement during their transition to adulthood. In addition, it takes into account the development cycle the child is in at the time of family restructuring, and what kind of long-term effects result from that. In this analysis, we find that there are several cases of statistically significantly differences in domain achievement depending on the developmental stage the child was in when the parental divorce or death occurred. The findings indicate that changes in family structure during the infant/toddler period influence health condition and depression, while changes in family structure during middle-childhood and adolescence do not. Meanwhile, changes in family structure during any point in the developmental stages have negative effects on educational attainment, with the severity of these negative effects depending on when the family changes occur. The negative effect on educational attainment is most prominent when a change in family structure occurs during the infant/toddler period, followed by adolescence, then middle-childhood.

Clustering Method based on Genre Interest for Cold-Start Problem in Movie Recommendation (영화 추천 시스템의 초기 사용자 문제를 위한 장르 선호 기반의 클러스터링 기법)

  • You, Tithrottanak;Rosli, Ahmad Nurzid;Ha, Inay;Jo, Geun-Sik
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.19 no.1
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    • pp.57-77
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    • 2013
  • Social media has become one of the most popular media in web and mobile application. In 2011, social networks and blogs are still the top destination of online users, according to a study from Nielsen Company. In their studies, nearly 4 in 5active users visit social network and blog. Social Networks and Blogs sites rule Americans' Internet time, accounting to 23 percent of time spent online. Facebook is the main social network that the U.S internet users spend time more than the other social network services such as Yahoo, Google, AOL Media Network, Twitter, Linked In and so on. In recent trend, most of the companies promote their products in the Facebook by creating the "Facebook Page" that refers to specific product. The "Like" option allows user to subscribed and received updates their interested on from the page. The film makers which produce a lot of films around the world also take part to market and promote their films by exploiting the advantages of using the "Facebook Page". In addition, a great number of streaming service providers allows users to subscribe their service to watch and enjoy movies and TV program. They can instantly watch movies and TV program over the internet to PCs, Macs and TVs. Netflix alone as the world's leading subscription service have more than 30 million streaming members in the United States, Latin America, the United Kingdom and the Nordics. As the matter of facts, a million of movies and TV program with different of genres are offered to the subscriber. In contrast, users need spend a lot time to find the right movies which are related to their interest genre. Recent years there are many researchers who have been propose a method to improve prediction the rating or preference that would give the most related items such as books, music or movies to the garget user or the group of users that have the same interest in the particular items. One of the most popular methods to build recommendation system is traditional Collaborative Filtering (CF). The method compute the similarity of the target user and other users, which then are cluster in the same interest on items according which items that users have been rated. The method then predicts other items from the same group of users to recommend to a group of users. Moreover, There are many items that need to study for suggesting to users such as books, music, movies, news, videos and so on. However, in this paper we only focus on movie as item to recommend to users. In addition, there are many challenges for CF task. Firstly, the "sparsity problem"; it occurs when user information preference is not enough. The recommendation accuracies result is lower compared to the neighbor who composed with a large amount of ratings. The second problem is "cold-start problem"; it occurs whenever new users or items are added into the system, which each has norating or a few rating. For instance, no personalized predictions can be made for a new user without any ratings on the record. In this research we propose a clustering method according to the users' genre interest extracted from social network service (SNS) and user's movies rating information system to solve the "cold-start problem." Our proposed method will clusters the target user together with the other users by combining the user genre interest and the rating information. It is important to realize a huge amount of interesting and useful user's information from Facebook Graph, we can extract information from the "Facebook Page" which "Like" by them. Moreover, we use the Internet Movie Database(IMDb) as the main dataset. The IMDbis online databases that consist of a large amount of information related to movies, TV programs and including actors. This dataset not only used to provide movie information in our Movie Rating Systems, but also as resources to provide movie genre information which extracted from the "Facebook Page". Formerly, the user must login with their Facebook account to login to the Movie Rating System, at the same time our system will collect the genre interest from the "Facebook Page". We conduct many experiments with other methods to see how our method performs and we also compare to the other methods. First, we compared our proposed method in the case of the normal recommendation to see how our system improves the recommendation result. Then we experiment method in case of cold-start problem. Our experiment show that our method is outperform than the other methods. In these two cases of our experimentation, we see that our proposed method produces better result in case both cases.

Qualitative Research on Korean Baby-Boomer Generation Middle-Aged Women's Attitude Toward Their Lives - Based on Middle-Class Seoul Residents - (한국의 베이비부머세대 중년여성이 삶에서 추구하는 가치에 대한 질적연구 - 서울 거주 중산층을 중심으로 -)

  • Lee, Ji Hyun;Kim, Sun Woo
    • Asia Marketing Journal
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    • v.14 no.2
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    • pp.127-156
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    • 2012
  • A lot of interest in the baby-boomer generation, those who were born after World War II, has emerged since their retirement has been accelerated. The retirement of baby-boomers has caused many health, public welfare, social policy and family relationship problems. However, their increased purchasing power has made them more attractive consumers than any other generation, and they have become a fascinating niche market in the depressed economy. This research selected middle-class women of the baby-boomer generation who have had powerful effects on society and have emerged as an attractive niche market, and attempted to understand their lives intensively. Based on research activities, the purpose of this research is to identify baby-boomer generation middle-aged women's life values. Qualitative research methodology was used to achieve research objectives, and this research aimed to suggest marketing implications to connected industries based on the research results. The research objectives are as follows. 1. understanding the lives of baby-boomer middle-class women who have powerful effects on socio-economic phenomena 2. identifying the life values of baby-boomer middle-class women 3. generating marketing implications based on an understanding of baby-boomer middle-class women's lives and life values This research conducted FGIs(focus group interviews), one of the qualitative research methodologies, to figure out baby-boomer middle-class women's life values intensively and selected 10 women living in Seoul for data collection. The qualitative data of collected FGIs were analyzed with spiral data analysis methodology proposed by Creswell(2007). The most effective factors to influence these middle-class women's lives powerfully were 'time' and 'independence'. Their consciousness of the importance of using time affects their life pattern generally, and their independence also impacts greatly on the way they exploit time and on their diverse relationships. They maximized their self-realization and showed long-term partnership with their surrounding circumstances because of those effective factors. Baby-boomer middle-class women's self-realization was divided into two areas. One was their outside activities and another was perfect management of their physical appearance and home interior. Like the results of this research, their need for social entrance will be reinforced more strongly since their internal and external activities aim for the achievement of self-realization. In addition, this research suggests that baby-boomer middle-class women's activities are connected with their management of their physical appearance and home interior decorations, and that such management is caused not only by a simple interest in fashion and beauty but also a profound desire for self-realization. On account of their consciousness, which is different from other generations, Korean baby-boomer middle-class women are able to maintain positive partnerships with their surrounding circumstances; however, they also show ambivalent emotions to retain effective partnerships. To overcome those stressful situations, they make greater efforts to keep up their health and youth, and also engage in diverse activities to maintain their mental health. Finally, they generate positive attitudes toward their economic situation and extra time to develop self-realization and pursue happy, youthful and healthy lives. Based on those results, this study suggests the following implications. First, industries targeting the baby-boomer generation should develop innovative products and services which help the baby-boomer generation maximize their efficiency of time since time is one of the most important factors powerfully impacting the baby-boomer generation. They will engage in various activities to fill up their extra time and consume helpful products and services. Second, such industries should supply the baby-boomer generation with opportunities which propose new ways of self-realization since this generation shows a great desire for self-realization because of their self-efficacy. With customized strategies of satisfying their needs, the baby-boomer generation would discover opportunities to utilize their abilities, relationships and aesthetic senses, and industries would develop a niche market. Third, market segmentations which target the baby-boomer generation's desire to maintain their physical appearance and home interior should be executed since such activities are the main strategies to develop this generation's self-realization. The baby-boomer generation's desire to study those areas would be expanded, and those education systems should produce innovative products and services targeting the baby-boomer generation. This implication also offers to government officials new policies related with the baby-boomer generation. This exploratory study utilized qualitative research methodology to understand baby-boomer middle-class women's lives, and proposed propositions and limitations for further researches. As for the limitations, first, it is hard to generalize the research results so that they may apply to all areas and economic classes of the baby-boomer generation since this research selected only 10 women living in Seoul for the data collection process. To overcome this limitation, extended data collections of subjects from diverse regions and economic classes should be designed. Second, quantitative research should be conducted to supplement the findings with validities. Third, this research focused on only general ideas of the baby-boomer generation's lives since the range of this study was focused on their overall lives. Therefore, intensive research related to specific areas of their lives should be conducted.

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The Environmental and Ecological Meaning of Bibo Landscape in Otgol Village (옻골마을 비보경관의 환경생태적 의미)

  • Jang, Byoung-Kwan;Whang, Bo-Chul
    • Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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    • v.36 no.2
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    • pp.32-41
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    • 2008
  • An empirical study and environmental and ecological analysis were conducted on Otgol Village(a village of the Gyeongju Choi's clan in Daegu) where an enclosed pond and groves are still observed. In particular, the enclosed pond and groves and village water system were investigated from an ecological perspective. The enclosed landscape is described based on feng shui principles and the environmental and ecological significance were examined. In general, the environmental and ecological significance is very broad; however, they were analyzed in terms of the quality of life as an empirical study as follows: First, water quality was measured to investigate the improvement of continuous water system functions. In other words, water quality was measured at East Valley(resting space), West Valley(living space), the enclosed pond where the two valleys merge, and the stream that flows out of the pond. Second, the climate functions of the enclosed groves that border the village were examined. In other words, temperature was measured in two places(200m distance from the center of the groves). Third, whether or not a sound ecosystem can be sustained was investigated. In other words, landscape ecological indicators were chosen and measured. The results are as follows: First, the enclosed pond played the role of purifying water quality. While the East Valley has been popular with men for its rock walls and torrents, the West Valley has been popular with women as a living space(ex: doing the laundry). Therefore, the difference of water quality can be explained. Second, since enclosed groves are in a small village forest, they are very weak in terms of being wind proof and temperature reduction effects. Instead, they play the role of the village boundary. Third, the groves are ecologically sound considering the landscape ecological indicators and are similar to ordinary traditional rural villages. In terms of the connection of the green zone, the village groves are well connected to the village boundary wood. If the village groves are restored, in particular, they would offer a decent habitat for grove creatures. According to this study, the traditional village space was formed upon the influence of Feng Shui theories that are based on environmental and ecological principles that focus on the harmony between humans and nature. From the environmental and ecological perspective, the enclosed pond and groves are important factors in building a sustainable village. The diverse water space would help to improve water quality and increase water volume by promoting the water circulation system. In addition, the village woods would surround the village and decrease the temperature and humidity difference between winter and summer. If the groves are small and badly damaged, however, they are meaningful only in dividing the region. The overall improvement of a forestation system and botanical composition may increase the biological diversity and promote the migration of species. Otgol Village has developed an enclosed landscape to improve the village environment. In other words, a sound and refreshing living environment can be developed when the natural ecological system is well understood and properly preserved. Additionally, this traditional village planning will be the environmental and ecological method. From the perspective of environmental ecology, therefore, a traditional village is recommended.

Essay on Form and Function Design (디자인의 형태와 기능에 관한 연구)

  • 이재국
    • Archives of design research
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    • v.2 no.1
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    • pp.63-97
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    • 1989
  • There is nothing more important than the form and function in design, because every design product can be done on the basis of them. Form and Function are already existed before the word of design has been appeared and all the natural and man-made things' basic organization is based on their organic relations. The organic relations is the source of vitality which identifies the subsistance of all the objects and the evolution of living creatures has been changed their appearances by the natural law and order. Design is no exception. Design is a man-made organic thing which is developed its own way according to the purposed aim and given situations. If so, what is the ultimate goal of design. It is without saying that the goal is to make every effort to contribute to the -human beings most desirable life by the designer who is devoting himself to their convenience and well-being. Therefore, the designer can be called the man of rich life practitioner. This word implies a lot of meanings since the essence of design is improving the guality of life by the man-made things which are created by the designer. Also, the things are existed through the relations between form and function, and the things can keep their value when they are answered to the right purpose. In design, thus, it is to be a main concern how to create valuable things and to use them in the right way, and the subject of study is focused on the designer's outlook of value and uk relations between form and function. Christopher Alexander mentioned the importance of form as follows. The ultimate object of design is form. Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fittness between the form and its context. The form is the solution to the problem: the context defmes the problem. In other words, when we speak of design, the real object of discussion is not form alone, but the ensemble comprising the form and its context. Good fit is a desirable property of this ensemble which relates to some particular division of the ensemble into form and context. Max Bill mainatined how important form is in design. Form represents a self-contained concept, and its embodiment in an object results in that object becoming a work of art. Futhermore, this explains why we use form so freguently in a comparative sense for determining whether one thing is less or more beautiful than another, and why the ideal of absolute beauty is always the standard by which we appraise form, and through form, art itself. Hence form has became synonymous with beauty. On the other hand, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy stated the importance of function as follows. Function means the task an object is designed to fulfill the task instrument is shaping the form. Unfortunately, this principle was not appreciated at the same time but through the endeavors of Frank Lloyd Wright and of the Bauhaus group and its many collegues in Europe, the idea of functionalism became the keynote of the twenites. Functionalism soon became a cheap slogan, however, and its original meaning blurred. It is neccessary to reexamine it in the light of present circumstances. Charles William Eliot expressed his idea on the relations between function and beauty. Beauty often results chiefly from fittness: indeed it is easy to manitain that nothing is fair except what is fit its uses or functions. If the function of the product of a machine be useful and valuable, an the machine be eminently fit for its function, it conspicuously has the beauty of fittness. A locomotive or a steamship has the same sort of beauty, derived from the supreme fittness for its function. As functions vary, so will those beauty..vary. However, it is impossible to study form and function in separate beings. Function can't be existed without form, and without function, form is nothing. In other words, form is a function's container, and function is content in form. It can be said that, therefore, the form and function are indispensable and commensal individuals which have coetemal relations. From the different point of view, sometimes, one is more emphasized than the other, but in this case, the logic is only accepted on the assumption of recognizing the importance of the other's entity. The fact can be proved what Frank Hoyd wright said that form and function are one. In spite of that, the form and function should be considered as independent indivisuals, because they are too important to be treated just as the simple single one. Form and function have flexible properties to the context. In other words, the context plays a role as the barometer to define the form and function, also which implies every meaning of surroun'||'&'||'not;dings. Thus, design is formed under the influence of situations. Situations are dynamic, like the design process itself, in which fixed focus can be cripping. Moreover, situations control over making the good design. Judging from the respect, I defined the good design in my thesis An Analytic Research on Desigh Ethic, "good design is to solve the problem by the most proper way in the situations." Situations are changeable, and so is design. There is no progress without change, but change is not neccessarily progress. It is highly desirable that there changes be beneficial to mankind. Our main problem is to be able to discriminate between that which should be discarded and that which should be kept, built upon, and improved. Form and Function are no exception. The practical function gives birth to the inevitable form and the $$\mu$ti-classified function is delivered to the varieties of form. All of these are depended upon changeable situations. That is precisely the situations of "situation de'||'&'||'not;sign", the concept of moving from the design of things to the design of the circumstances in which things are used. From this point of view, the core of form and function is depended upon how the designer can manage it efficiently in given situations. That is to say that the creativity designer plays an important role to fulfill the purpose. Generally speaking, creativity is the organization of a concept in response to a human need-a solution that is both satisfying and innovative. In order to meet human needs, creative design activities require a special intuitive insight which is set into motion by purposeful imagination. Therefore, creativity is the most essential quality of every designer. In addition, designers share with other creative people a compulsive ingenuity and a passion for imaginative solutions which will meet their criteria for excellence. Ultimately, it is said that the form and function is the matter which belongs to the desire of creative designers who constantly try to bring new thing into being to create new things. In accordance with that the main puppose of this thesis is to catch every meaning of the form and function and to close analyze their relations for the promotion of understanding and devising practical application to gradual progression in design. The thesis is composed of four parts: Introduction, Form, Function and Conclusion. Introduction, the purpose and background of the research are presented. In Chapter I, orgin of form, perception of form, and classification of form are studied. In Chapter II, generation of function, development of function, and diversification of function are considered. Conclusion, some concluding words are mentioned.ioned.

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Information Privacy Concern in Context-Aware Personalized Services: Results of a Delphi Study

  • Lee, Yon-Nim;Kwon, Oh-Byung
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.20 no.2
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    • pp.63-86
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    • 2010
  • Personalized services directly and indirectly acquire personal data, in part, to provide customers with higher-value services that are specifically context-relevant (such as place and time). Information technologies continue to mature and develop, providing greatly improved performance. Sensory networks and intelligent software can now obtain context data, and that is the cornerstone for providing personalized, context-specific services. Yet, the danger of overflowing personal information is increasing because the data retrieved by the sensors usually contains privacy information. Various technical characteristics of context-aware applications have more troubling implications for information privacy. In parallel with increasing use of context for service personalization, information privacy concerns have also increased such as an unrestricted availability of context information. Those privacy concerns are consistently regarded as a critical issue facing context-aware personalized service success. The entire field of information privacy is growing as an important area of research, with many new definitions and terminologies, because of a need for a better understanding of information privacy concepts. Especially, it requires that the factors of information privacy should be revised according to the characteristics of new technologies. However, previous information privacy factors of context-aware applications have at least two shortcomings. First, there has been little overview of the technology characteristics of context-aware computing. Existing studies have only focused on a small subset of the technical characteristics of context-aware computing. Therefore, there has not been a mutually exclusive set of factors that uniquely and completely describe information privacy on context-aware applications. Second, user survey has been widely used to identify factors of information privacy in most studies despite the limitation of users' knowledge and experiences about context-aware computing technology. To date, since context-aware services have not been widely deployed on a commercial scale yet, only very few people have prior experiences with context-aware personalized services. It is difficult to build users' knowledge about context-aware technology even by increasing their understanding in various ways: scenarios, pictures, flash animation, etc. Nevertheless, conducting a survey, assuming that the participants have sufficient experience or understanding about the technologies shown in the survey, may not be absolutely valid. Moreover, some surveys are based solely on simplifying and hence unrealistic assumptions (e.g., they only consider location information as a context data). A better understanding of information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services is highly needed. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to identify a generic set of factors for elemental information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services and to develop a rank-order list of information privacy concern factors. We consider overall technology characteristics to establish a mutually exclusive set of factors. A Delphi survey, a rigorous data collection method, was deployed to obtain a reliable opinion from the experts and to produce a rank-order list. It, therefore, lends itself well to obtaining a set of universal factors of information privacy concern and its priority. An international panel of researchers and practitioners who have the expertise in privacy and context-aware system fields were involved in our research. Delphi rounds formatting will faithfully follow the procedure for the Delphi study proposed by Okoli and Pawlowski. This will involve three general rounds: (1) brainstorming for important factors; (2) narrowing down the original list to the most important ones; and (3) ranking the list of important factors. For this round only, experts were treated as individuals, not panels. Adapted from Okoli and Pawlowski, we outlined the process of administrating the study. We performed three rounds. In the first and second rounds of the Delphi questionnaire, we gathered a set of exclusive factors for information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services. The respondents were asked to provide at least five main factors for the most appropriate understanding of the information privacy concern in the first round. To do so, some of the main factors found in the literature were presented to the participants. The second round of the questionnaire discussed the main factor provided in the first round, fleshed out with relevant sub-factors. Respondents were then requested to evaluate each sub factor's suitability against the corresponding main factors to determine the final sub-factors from the candidate factors. The sub-factors were found from the literature survey. Final factors selected by over 50% of experts. In the third round, a list of factors with corresponding questions was provided, and the respondents were requested to assess the importance of each main factor and its corresponding sub factors. Finally, we calculated the mean rank of each item to make a final result. While analyzing the data, we focused on group consensus rather than individual insistence. To do so, a concordance analysis, which measures the consistency of the experts' responses over successive rounds of the Delphi, was adopted during the survey process. As a result, experts reported that context data collection and high identifiable level of identical data are the most important factor in the main factors and sub factors, respectively. Additional important sub-factors included diverse types of context data collected, tracking and recording functionalities, and embedded and disappeared sensor devices. The average score of each factor is very useful for future context-aware personalized service development in the view of the information privacy. The final factors have the following differences comparing to those proposed in other studies. First, the concern factors differ from existing studies, which are based on privacy issues that may occur during the lifecycle of acquired user information. However, our study helped to clarify these sometimes vague issues by determining which privacy concern issues are viable based on specific technical characteristics in context-aware personalized services. Since a context-aware service differs in its technical characteristics compared to other services, we selected specific characteristics that had a higher potential to increase user's privacy concerns. Secondly, this study considered privacy issues in terms of service delivery and display that were almost overlooked in existing studies by introducing IPOS as the factor division. Lastly, in each factor, it correlated the level of importance with professionals' opinions as to what extent users have privacy concerns. The reason that it did not select the traditional method questionnaire at that time is that context-aware personalized service considered the absolute lack in understanding and experience of users with new technology. For understanding users' privacy concerns, professionals in the Delphi questionnaire process selected context data collection, tracking and recording, and sensory network as the most important factors among technological characteristics of context-aware personalized services. In the creation of a context-aware personalized services, this study demonstrates the importance and relevance of determining an optimal methodology, and which technologies and in what sequence are needed, to acquire what types of users' context information. Most studies focus on which services and systems should be provided and developed by utilizing context information on the supposition, along with the development of context-aware technology. However, the results in this study show that, in terms of users' privacy, it is necessary to pay greater attention to the activities that acquire context information. To inspect the results in the evaluation of sub factor, additional studies would be necessary for approaches on reducing users' privacy concerns toward technological characteristics such as highly identifiable level of identical data, diverse types of context data collected, tracking and recording functionality, embedded and disappearing sensor devices. The factor ranked the next highest level of importance after input is a context-aware service delivery that is related to output. The results show that delivery and display showing services to users in a context-aware personalized services toward the anywhere-anytime-any device concept have been regarded as even more important than in previous computing environment. Considering the concern factors to develop context aware personalized services will help to increase service success rate and hopefully user acceptance for those services. Our future work will be to adopt these factors for qualifying context aware service development projects such as u-city development projects in terms of service quality and hence user acceptance.

The Characteristics and Performances of Manufacturing SMEs that Utilize Public Information Support Infrastructure (공공 정보지원 인프라 활용한 제조 중소기업의 특징과 성과에 관한 연구)

  • Kim, Keun-Hwan;Kwon, Taehoon;Jun, Seung-pyo
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.25 no.4
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    • pp.1-33
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    • 2019
  • The small and medium sized enterprises (hereinafter SMEs) are already at a competitive disadvantaged when compared to large companies with more abundant resources. Manufacturing SMEs not only need a lot of information needed for new product development for sustainable growth and survival, but also seek networking to overcome the limitations of resources, but they are faced with limitations due to their size limitations. In a new era in which connectivity increases the complexity and uncertainty of the business environment, SMEs are increasingly urged to find information and solve networking problems. In order to solve these problems, the government funded research institutes plays an important role and duty to solve the information asymmetry problem of SMEs. The purpose of this study is to identify the differentiating characteristics of SMEs that utilize the public information support infrastructure provided by SMEs to enhance the innovation capacity of SMEs, and how they contribute to corporate performance. We argue that we need an infrastructure for providing information support to SMEs as part of this effort to strengthen of the role of government funded institutions; in this study, we specifically identify the target of such a policy and furthermore empirically demonstrate the effects of such policy-based efforts. Our goal is to help establish the strategies for building the information supporting infrastructure. To achieve this purpose, we first classified the characteristics of SMEs that have been found to utilize the information supporting infrastructure provided by government funded institutions. This allows us to verify whether selection bias appears in the analyzed group, which helps us clarify the interpretative limits of our study results. Next, we performed mediator and moderator effect analysis for multiple variables to analyze the process through which the use of information supporting infrastructure led to an improvement in external networking capabilities and resulted in enhancing product competitiveness. This analysis helps identify the key factors we should focus on when offering indirect support to SMEs through the information supporting infrastructure, which in turn helps us more efficiently manage research related to SME supporting policies implemented by government funded institutions. The results of this study showed the following. First, SMEs that used the information supporting infrastructure were found to have a significant difference in size in comparison to domestic R&D SMEs, but on the other hand, there was no significant difference in the cluster analysis that considered various variables. Based on these findings, we confirmed that SMEs that use the information supporting infrastructure are superior in size, and had a relatively higher distribution of companies that transact to a greater degree with large companies, when compared to the SMEs composing the general group of SMEs. Also, we found that companies that already receive support from the information infrastructure have a high concentration of companies that need collaboration with government funded institution. Secondly, among the SMEs that use the information supporting infrastructure, we found that increasing external networking capabilities contributed to enhancing product competitiveness, and while this was no the effect of direct assistance, we also found that indirect contributions were made by increasing the open marketing capabilities: in other words, this was the result of an indirect-only mediator effect. Also, the number of times the company received additional support in this process through mentoring related to information utilization was found to have a mediated moderator effect on improving external networking capabilities and in turn strengthening product competitiveness. The results of this study provide several insights that will help establish policies. KISTI's information support infrastructure may lead to the conclusion that marketing is already well underway, but it intentionally supports groups that enable to achieve good performance. As a result, the government should provide clear priorities whether to support the companies in the underdevelopment or to aid better performance. Through our research, we have identified how public information infrastructure contributes to product competitiveness. Here, we can draw some policy implications. First, the public information support infrastructure should have the capability to enhance the ability to interact with or to find the expert that provides required information. Second, if the utilization of public information support (online) infrastructure is effective, it is not necessary to continuously provide informational mentoring, which is a parallel offline support. Rather, offline support such as mentoring should be used as an appropriate device for abnormal symptom monitoring. Third, it is required that SMEs should improve their ability to utilize, because the effect of enhancing networking capacity through public information support infrastructure and enhancing product competitiveness through such infrastructure appears in most types of companies rather than in specific SMEs.

Analysis of Health Functional Foods Advertisements Effects according to the Delivery Tool for Efficacy Information and Consumers' Attitudes (기능성 정보 전달 방법 및 소비자 태도에 따른 건강기능식품 광고 효과 분석)

  • Lee, Yeonkyung;Kim, Ji Yeon;Kwon, Oran;Hwang, In-Kyeong
    • The Korean Journal of Food And Nutrition
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    • v.29 no.6
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    • pp.835-848
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    • 2016
  • The purpose of this study was to find efficient and customized tools for delivering the benefit of health functional foods (HFFs). Delivery tools which could influence the impact of advertising were images, explanations of ingredients, diagrams of health benefit, patents, and comments from authority. Six advertisements were developed using these tools: "A": relevant image + explanation of ingredients + scientific diagram of efficacy; "B": relevant image + explanation of ingredients; "C": relevant image; "D": irrelevant image; "E": irrelevant image + explanation of ingredient + patent; "F": irrelevant image + explanation of ingredient + comments from authority. To analyze the consumer perceptions on HFFs and advertisement effects, 300 respondents were requested to answer a questionnaire comprising of the following questions: 5 questions of attitudes (necessity of HFFs, trust in HFFs, gathering information, watching advertisements and trust in advertisement claims) and 6 questions on the 6 developed advertisements (attention, understanding, sufficiency of information, sympathy, trust, and purchase). Scoring was done as per the 5 Likert scale. There was a higher proportion of females and the elderly, as compared to males and youngsters. The overall consumer attitudes were positive. Explanation of ingredients, scientific diagram of health benefit, patents and expert comments were helpful factors in increasing the advertisement evaluation by consumer, but the images were not. Advertisement evaluation of consumer did not differ with gender and age. However, differences were observed between some of the consumer attitudes (necessity of HFFs, trust in HFFs, gathering information and trust in advertisements claim) and advertisement evaluations (attention, understanding, sympathy and purchase). Our results indicate that for consumers utilizing the HFFs, advertisements with concrete tools such as diagrams, patent, and expert comments are more helpful. However, for consumers who do not have interest in HFFs, the scientific information was irrelevant. We believe that to maximize the effect of health information in advertisements, consumers should be segmented, and customized tools for each segment needs to be developed.

The Role of c-Jun N-terminal Kinase in the Radiation-Induced Lung Fibrosis (방사선에 의한 폐 섬유화증에서 c-Jun N-terminal Kinase(JNK)의 역할)

  • Uh, Soo-Taek;Hong, Ki-Young;Lee, Young-Mok;Kim, Ki-Up;Kim, Do-Jin;Moon, Seung-Hyuk;Kim, Yong-Hoon;Park, Choon-Sik;Yeom, Uk;Kim, Eun-Suk;Choi, Doo-Ho
    • Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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    • v.50 no.4
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    • pp.450-461
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    • 2001
  • Background : The underlying pathogenesis of radiation-induced lung fibrosis (RTLF) has not been very well defined. However, the role of TGF-$\beta$ in the generation of RTLF has been a major focus because there is an increase in the expression of both the TGF-${\beta}m$-RNA and its protein preceding RTLF lesions. The down stream signal after a TGF-$\beta$ stimulated lung fibrosis includes the activation of many mediators such as Smad and c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) through TAK1. It is we hypothesized that JNK activation may play a pivotal role in RTLF pathogenesis through increased transcription of the fibrogenic cytokines. The present study evaluates JNK activity in alveolar macrophages after irradiation and the relationship between JNK activity and the amount of collagen in the lung tissues. Methods : C57BL/6 mice(20-25 gr, males) received chlorotetracycline(2g/L) in their drinking water 1 week prior to irradiation and continuously there after. The mice were irradiated once with 1400 cGy of $60CO{\gamma}$-ray over the whole chest. The cellular composition of the whole lung bronchoalveoalr lavage fluids(BALF), elastin expression in the lung tissues, the level of hydroxyproline in lung tissues, and an in vitro JNK assay was measured before irradiation and one, four, and eight weeks after irradiation (RT). Results : The volumes of BALF retrieved from instilled 4 mL of saline with 2% heparin were 3.7-3.8 mL for each group. The cell numbers were similar before($4.1{\times}10^4{\pm}0.5{\times}10^4/mL$) and 1 week($3.1{\times}10^4{\pm}0.5{\times}10^4/mL$) after RT. At four and eight weeks after RT, the cell number reached to $14.0{\times}10^4{\pm}1.5{\times}10^4mL$ and $10.0{\times}10^4{\pm}1.3{\times}10^4/mL$, respectively. There we no changes in the lymphocytes and neutrophils population observed in the BALF after RT. The H-E stain of the lung tissues did not show any structural and fibrotic change in the lung tissues at 4 and 8 weeks after RT. In addition, the amount of elastin and collagen were not different on Verhoeff staining of the lung tissues before RT to eight weeks after RT. The hydroxyproine content was measured with the left lung dissected from the left main bronchus. The lung were homogenized and hydrolyzed with 6 N Hel for 12 hours at $110^{\circ}C$ then measured as previously described. The content of hydroxyproline, standardized with a lung protein concentration, reached a peak 4 weeks after RT, and thereafter showed a plateau. AnIn vitro JNK assay using c-$Jun_{1-79}$-GST sepharose beads were performed with the alveolar macrophages obtained from the BAL. JNK activity was not detected prior to RT, However, the JNK activity increased from one week after RT and reached a peak four weeks after RT. Conclusion : JNK may be involved in the pathogenesis because the JNK activity showed similar pattern observed with the hydroxyproine content. However, it is necessary to clarify that the JNK increases the transcription of fibrogenic cyiokines through the transcription factor.

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A Deep Learning Based Approach to Recognizing Accompanying Status of Smartphone Users Using Multimodal Data (스마트폰 다종 데이터를 활용한 딥러닝 기반의 사용자 동행 상태 인식)

  • Kim, Kilho;Choi, Sangwoo;Chae, Moon-jung;Park, Heewoong;Lee, Jaehong;Park, Jonghun
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.25 no.1
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    • pp.163-177
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    • 2019
  • As smartphones are getting widely used, human activity recognition (HAR) tasks for recognizing personal activities of smartphone users with multimodal data have been actively studied recently. The research area is expanding from the recognition of the simple body movement of an individual user to the recognition of low-level behavior and high-level behavior. However, HAR tasks for recognizing interaction behavior with other people, such as whether the user is accompanying or communicating with someone else, have gotten less attention so far. And previous research for recognizing interaction behavior has usually depended on audio, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi sensors, which are vulnerable to privacy issues and require much time to collect enough data. Whereas physical sensors including accelerometer, magnetic field and gyroscope sensors are less vulnerable to privacy issues and can collect a large amount of data within a short time. In this paper, a method for detecting accompanying status based on deep learning model by only using multimodal physical sensor data, such as an accelerometer, magnetic field and gyroscope, was proposed. The accompanying status was defined as a redefinition of a part of the user interaction behavior, including whether the user is accompanying with an acquaintance at a close distance and the user is actively communicating with the acquaintance. A framework based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent networks for classifying accompanying and conversation was proposed. First, a data preprocessing method which consists of time synchronization of multimodal data from different physical sensors, data normalization and sequence data generation was introduced. We applied the nearest interpolation to synchronize the time of collected data from different sensors. Normalization was performed for each x, y, z axis value of the sensor data, and the sequence data was generated according to the sliding window method. Then, the sequence data became the input for CNN, where feature maps representing local dependencies of the original sequence are extracted. The CNN consisted of 3 convolutional layers and did not have a pooling layer to maintain the temporal information of the sequence data. Next, LSTM recurrent networks received the feature maps, learned long-term dependencies from them and extracted features. The LSTM recurrent networks consisted of two layers, each with 128 cells. Finally, the extracted features were used for classification by softmax classifier. The loss function of the model was cross entropy function and the weights of the model were randomly initialized on a normal distribution with an average of 0 and a standard deviation of 0.1. The model was trained using adaptive moment estimation (ADAM) optimization algorithm and the mini batch size was set to 128. We applied dropout to input values of the LSTM recurrent networks to prevent overfitting. The initial learning rate was set to 0.001, and it decreased exponentially by 0.99 at the end of each epoch training. An Android smartphone application was developed and released to collect data. We collected smartphone data for a total of 18 subjects. Using the data, the model classified accompanying and conversation by 98.74% and 98.83% accuracy each. Both the F1 score and accuracy of the model were higher than the F1 score and accuracy of the majority vote classifier, support vector machine, and deep recurrent neural network. In the future research, we will focus on more rigorous multimodal sensor data synchronization methods that minimize the time stamp differences. In addition, we will further study transfer learning method that enables transfer of trained models tailored to the training data to the evaluation data that follows a different distribution. It is expected that a model capable of exhibiting robust recognition performance against changes in data that is not considered in the model learning stage will be obtained.