• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.117-143
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• 2019

Advances in information technology (IT) bring about technological innovation in financial businesses, referred to as financial technology (fintech), beyond the traditional financial industry. While fintech implies more convenient and various financial services to customers, it leads to more complexity in the financial sector, as different industry players (e.g., IT firms) can participate in financial businesses. The complexity of fintech causes controversial issues related to policies and the appropriate development direction. In order to provide insight into the current state of fintech, this study explores the fundamental understanding of the fintech phenomenon from the perspective of the major stakeholders (i.e., financial authorities, financial companies, IT firms) in South Korea. This study analyzed news articles, where those stakeholders expressed their arguments, by using a content analysis. The study also conducted an intensive examination of their arguments by using a core-periphery approach of social representations. This study found that while the three beholders had a common opinion on deregulation of the fintech industry, each of them had different knowledge of the phenomenon. By revealing each beholder's structure of representations of fintech, this study not only provides common knowledge regarding fintech but also explicates the perceptual gaps among stakeholders. Findings of the study offer a big picture of current fintech initiatives, which can be useful knowledge for future research on fintech.

• International Journal of Human Ecology
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.117-128
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• 2012

This study compares the net effect of wearing different shoulder/arm armor systems on garment impediment perception and wearer acceptability. Two independent variables in this study were armor systems and shoulder/ arm movements. There were four armor systems of control garment and arm armor systems A, B, and C as well as five types of arm/shoulder movements, (shoulder flexion, should extension, shoulder abduction, shoulder horizontal flexion, and shoulder horizontal extension). Ten male volunteers wearing size medium battle dress uniform (BDU) with recent relevant military experience participated in this study. The volunteers performed shoulder/arm movements (while wearing each armor treatments) and completed the garment impediment perception as well as wearer acceptability scales. The body areas of neck side, shoulder top, and armscye front showed the highest frequency of reported impediments. Resistance to movement and localized pressure were the most frequently mentioned types of impediment. The armor system B had the most areas of impediment, and was rated as more restrictive than the control garment and armor system A for each movement. For wearer acceptability, no significant differences were found between the control garment and armor system A for all eight items; this indicated that subjects did not perceive a difference between wearing the control garment and armor system A. There was a trend for wearer acceptability to decrease from wearing the control garment to armor systems A to C to B.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.41-57
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• 2008

U-Publication, the Tag-Embedded publication, is one of U-Media. U-Media is defined as a media where human creates and consumes content through not only human cognitive and perceptual processes but also through the interactions between surrounding digital systems. U-Media provides information by generating, collecting, and attaching the content itself and the related information based on the interaction of the bio-systems incorporating digital information and devices embedded in humans, and surrounding objects including external digital devices. Using U-Publication, readers consume its content not only in offline but also online through a mobile RFID reader which touches and connects the URLs embedded in the RFID tags attached to it. Readers can consume the additional content though the hyperlinks attached to U-Publication and perform commercial activity as well as consumer the printed content. This paper defines the RFID-Tagged publication, proposes its related business models, and evaluates the alternative business models through a simulation study.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.772-782
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• 2014

Two-microphone binary mask speech enhancement (2mBMSE) has been of particular interest in recent literature and has shown promising results. Current 2mBMSE systems rely on spatial cues of speech and noise sources. Although these cues are helpful for directional noise sources, they lose their efficiency in diffuse noise fields. We propose a new system that is effective in both directional and diffuse noise conditions. The system exploits two features. The first determines whether a given time-frequency (T-F) unit of the input spectrum is dominated by a diffuse or directional source. A diffuse signal is certainly a noise signal, but a directional signal could correspond to a noise or speech source. The second feature discriminates between T-F units dominated by speech or directional noise signals. Speech enhancement is performed using a binary mask, calculated based on the proposed features. In both directional and diffuse noise fields, the proposed system segregates speech T-F units with hit rates above 85%. It outperforms previous solutions in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and perceptual evaluation of speech quality improvement, especially in diffuse noise conditions.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.434-437
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• 1996

Symmetry is one of the important structural properties of shapes both in perceptual psychology and in computer vision. Recently, a number of automatic symmetry finding algorithms have been reported. Among them, the algorithm based on the use of principal axes of objects is the most general and practical. It is, however, of no use when shapes concerned have some asymmetry. Asymmetric shapes which make us associate with certain kinds of symmetry are practically important and they are called shapes with potential symmetry in this paper. The algorithm we have already proposed can cope with those shapes having potential axial symmetry. The algorithm employs a reflected image of the original and a certain evaluation function. In the former paper, areal minimization was employed for the evaluation function and it yielded satisfactory experimental results. However, it could not cope with those shapes which have larger asymmetry. In this paper, we propose the employment of variance as an alternative evaluation index with respect to the difference image between the reflected and the original shape. The technique is examined its performance by real video images as well as synthetic data. Experimental results are shown and discussion is given.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.448-463
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• 2017

Multimedia is a ubiquitous and indispensable part of our daily life and learning such as audio, image, and video. Objective and subjective quality evaluations play an important role in various multimedia applications. Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) is used to indicate the perceptual quality of a distorted image, while its reference image is not considered and used. Blur is one of the common image distortions. In this paper, we propose a novel BIQA index for Gaussian blur distortion based on the fact that images with different blur degree will have different changes through the same blur. We describe this discrimination from three aspects: color, edge, and structure. For color, we adopt color histogram; for edge, we use edge intensity map, and saliency map is used as the weighting function to be consistent with human visual system (HVS); for structure, we use structure tensor and structural similarity (SSIM) index. Numerous experiments based on four benchmark databases show that our proposed index is highly consistent with the subjective quality assessment.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.9
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• pp.4386-4404
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• 2016

Most existing salient object detection algorithms commonly employed segmentation techniques to eliminate background noise and reduce computation by treating each segment as a processing unit. However, individual small segments provide little information about global contents. Such schemes have limited capability on modeling global perceptual phenomena. In this paper, a novel salient object detection algorithm is proposed based on region merging. An adaptive-based merging scheme is developed to reassemble regions based on their color dissimilarities. The merging strategy can be described as that a region R is merged with its adjacent region Q if Q has the lowest dissimilarity with Q among all Q's adjacent regions. To guide the merging process, superpixels that located at the boundary of the image are treated as the seeds. However, it is possible for a boundary in the input image to be occupied by the foreground object. To avoid this case, we optimize the boundary influences by locating and eliminating erroneous boundaries before the region merging. We show that even though three simple region saliency measurements are adopted for each region, encouraging performance can be obtained. Experiments on four benchmark datasets including MSRA-B, SOD, SED and iCoSeg show the proposed method results in uniform object enhancement and achieve state-of-the-art performance by comparing with nine existing methods.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.338-345
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• 2004

Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) have become ubiquitous and continued to gain popularity. Since PDAs have some special contexts such as mobility and limited screen size, icons are utilized frequently because icons allow us to do tasks more rapidly and effectively on PDAs like another information appliances. The study presents a cognitive approach to study human factors affecting icon design with multidimensional Scaling (MDS) analysis. In the experiment, a real PDA was used to investigate 29 attributes and2 preference ratings for 22 PDA icons by 20 Korean subjects. As a result, cognitive positioning about icons, attributes, and preference data were arranged on the two dimensional perceptual map. Attributes were grouped by simplicity, universality, activity, complexity, abstraction, static, and alphanumeric time. Subjects preferences were highly related with simplicity attributes group and positive to universality and activity attributes groups. It was also confirmed that there are some icons unfitted to the mental model of Korean. However, when icons are designed for PDAs or similar information appliances to Korean, it should be designed simply and actively with universal image fitted on target users mental model.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.257-271
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• 2016

The Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) index is one of the most widely-used methods for perceptual image quality assessment (IQA). It is based on the principle that the human visual system (HVS) is sensitive to the overall structure of an image. However, it has been reported that indices predicted by SSIM tend to be biased depending on the type of distortion, which increases the deviation from the main regression curve. Consequently, SSIM can result in serious performance degradation. In this study, we investigate the aforementioned phenomenon from a new perspective and review a constant that plays a big role within the SSIM metric but has been overlooked thus far. Through an experimental study on the influence of this constant in evaluating images with SSIM, we are able to propose a new solution that resolves this issue. In the proposed IQA method, we first design a system to classify different types of distortion, and then match an optimal constant to each type. In addition, we supplement the proposed method by adding color perception-based structural information. For a comprehensive assessment, we compare the proposed method with 15 existing IQA methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method is more consistent with the HVS than the other methods.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.287-301
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• 2003

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the same vowel sounds are perceived differently by the two local dialect speakers, Seoul dialect speakers (SDS) and Kyungnam dialect speakers (KDS), whose vowel systems differ each other. In the first experiment SDS and KDS heard vowels synthesized in vowel space with F1 by F2 and categorized them into one of 10 Korean monophthongs. The results showed that SDS and KDS perceived the synthesized vowels differently. For example, /$\varepsilon$ versus /e/ contrast, ${\o}$/, and /y/ are differentiated by SDS, whereas they are perceptually confused by KDS. We also observed that /i/ could not be perceived unless the vowel synthesis included F3 or higher formants. In the second experiment SDS and KDS performed the similarity rating task of 10 synthesized Korean monophthongs. Two-dimensional MDS solution based on the similarity rating scores was obtained for each dialect group. The first dimension can be named 'vowel advancement' and the second 'vowel height'. The comparison of the two MDS solutions showed that the overall psychological distances among the vowels are shorter in KDS than SDS and that especially the distance between /$\Lambda$/ and /i/ is shorter in KDS than SDS. The result suggested that perception or mental representation of vowels depends on the vowel system of the listener's dialect or language. Further research problems were discussed in the final section.