• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.1-17
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• 2012

Personalized smart devices such as smartphones and smart pads are widely used. Unlike traditional feature phones, theses smart devices allow users to choose a variety of functions, which support not only daily experiences but also business operations. Actually, there exist a huge number of applications accessible by smart device users in online and mobile application markets. Users can choose apps that fit their own tastes and needs, which is impossible for conventional phone users. With the increase in app demand, the tastes and needs of app users are becoming more diverse. To meet these requirements, numerous apps with diverse functions are being released on the market, which leads to fierce competition. Unlike offline markets, online markets have a limitation in that purchasing decisions should be made without experiencing the items. Therefore, online customers rely more on item-related information that can be seen on the item page in which online markets commonly provide details about each item. Customers can feel confident about the quality of an item through the online information and decide whether to purchase it. The same is true of online app markets. To win the sales competition against other apps that perform similar functions, app developers need to focus on writing app descriptions to attract the attention of customers. If we can measure the effect of app descriptions on sales without regard to the app's price and quality, app descriptions that facilitate the sale of apps can be identified. This study intends to provide such a quantitative result for app developers who want to promote the sales of their apps. For this purpose, we collected app details including the descriptions written in Korean from one of the largest app markets in Korea, and then extracted keywords from the descriptions. Next, the impact of the keywords on sales performance was measured through our econometric model. Through this analysis, we were able to analyze the impact of each keyword itself, apart from that of the design or quality. The keywords, comprised of the attribute and evaluation of each app, are extracted by a morpheme analyzer. Our model with the keywords as its input variables was established to analyze their impact on sales performance. A regression analysis was conducted for each category in which apps are included. This analysis was required because we found the keywords, which are emphasized in app descriptions, different category-by-category. The analysis conducted not only for free apps but also for paid apps showed which keywords have more impact on sales performance for each type of app. In the analysis of paid apps in the education category, keywords such as 'search+easy' and 'words+abundant' showed higher effectiveness. In the same category, free apps whose keywords emphasize the quality of apps showed higher sales performance. One interesting fact is that keywords describing not only the app but also the need for the app have asignificant impact. Language learning apps, regardless of whether they are sold free or paid, showed higher sales performance by including the keywords 'foreign language study+important'. This result shows that motivation for the purchase affected sales. While item reviews are widely researched in online markets, item descriptions are not very actively studied. In the case of the mobile app markets, newly introduced apps may not have many item reviews because of the low quantity sold. In such cases, item descriptions can be regarded more important when customers make a decision about purchasing items. This study is the first trial to quantitatively analyze the relationship between an item description and its impact on sales performance. The results show that our research framework successfully provides a list of the most effective sales key terms with the estimates of their effectiveness. Although this study is performed for a specified type of item (i.e., mobile apps), our model can be applied to almost all of the items traded in online markets.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.129-149
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• 2021

Recently, interest in social robots that can socially interact with humans is increasing. Thanks to the development of ICT technology, social robots have become easier to provide personalized services and emotional connection to individuals, and the role of social robots is drawing attention as a means to solve modern social problems and the resulting decline in the quality of individual lives. Along with the interest in social robots, the spread of social robots is also increasing significantly. Many companies are introducing robot products to the market to target various target markets, but so far there is no clear trend leading the market. Accordingly, there are more and more attempts to differentiate robots through the design of social robots. In particular, anthropomorphism has been studied importantly in social robot design, and many approaches have been attempted to anthropomorphize social robots to produce positive effects. However, there is a lack of research that systematically describes the mechanism by which anthropomorphism for social robots is formed. Most of the existing studies have focused on verifying the positive effects of the anthropomorphism of social robots on consumers. In addition, the formation of anthropomorphism of social robots may vary depending on the individual's motivation or temperament, but there are not many studies examining this. A vague understanding of anthropomorphism makes it difficult to derive design optimal points for shaping the anthropomorphism of social robots. The purpose of this study is to verify the mechanism by which the anthropomorphism of social robots is formed. This study confirmed the effect of the human-likeness of social robots(Within-subjects) and the construal level of consumers(Between-subjects) on the formation of anthropomorphism through an experimental study of 3×2 mixed design. Research hypotheses on the mechanism by which anthropomorphism is formed were presented, and the hypotheses were verified by analyzing data from a sample of 206 people. The first hypothesis in this study is that the higher the human-likeness of the robot, the higher the level of anthropomorphism for the robot. Hypothesis 1 was supported by a one-way repeated measures ANOVA and a post hoc test. The second hypothesis in this study is that depending on the construal level of consumers, the effect of human-likeness on the level of anthropomorphism will be different. First, this study predicts that the difference in the level of anthropomorphism as human-likeness increases will be greater under high construal condition than under low construal condition.Second, If the robot has no human-likeness, there will be no difference in the level of anthropomorphism according to the construal level. Thirdly,If the robot has low human-likeness, the low construal level condition will make the robot more anthropomorphic than the high construal level condition. Finally, If the robot has high human-likeness, the high construal levelcondition will make the robot more anthropomorphic than the low construal level condition. We performed two-way repeated measures ANOVA to test these hypotheses, and confirmed that the interaction effect of human-likeness and construal level was significant. Further analysis to specifically confirm interaction effect has also provided results in support of our hypotheses. The analysis shows that the human-likeness of the robot increases the level of anthropomorphism of social robots, and the effect of human-likeness on anthropomorphism varies depending on the construal level of consumers. This study has implications in that it explains the mechanism by which anthropomorphism is formed by considering the human-likeness, which is the design attribute of social robots, and the construal level of consumers, which is the way of thinking of individuals. We expect to use the findings of this study as the basis for design optimization for the formation of anthropomorphism in social robots.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.123-145
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• 2008

Recently, as the information communication technology develops, the discussion regarding the ubiquitous environment is occurring in diverse perspectives. Ubiquitous environment is an environment that could transfer data through networks regardless of the physical space, virtual space, time or location. In order to realize the ubiquitous environment, the Pervasive Sensing technology that enables the recognition of users' data without the border between physical and virtual space is required. In addition, the latest and diversified technologies such as Context-Awareness technology are necessary to construct the context around the user by sharing the data accessed through the Pervasive Sensing technology and linkage technology that is to prevent information loss through the wired, wireless networking and database. Especially, Pervasive Sensing technology is taken as an essential technology that enables user oriented services by recognizing the needs of the users even before the users inquire. There are lots of characteristics of ubiquitous environment through the technologies mentioned above such as ubiquity, abundance of data, mutuality, high information density, individualization and customization. Among them, information density directs the accessible amount and quality of the information and it is stored in bulk with ensured quality through Pervasive Sensing technology. Using this, in the companies, the personalized contents(or information) providing became possible for a target customer. Most of all, there are an increasing number of researches with respect to recommender systems that provide what customers need even when the customers do not explicitly ask something for their needs. Recommender systems are well renowned for its affirmative effect that enlarges the selling opportunities and reduces the searching cost of customers since it finds and provides information according to the customers' traits and preference in advance, in a commerce environment. Recommender systems have proved its usability through several methodologies and experiments conducted upon many different fields from the mid-1990s. Most of the researches related with the recommender systems until now take the products or information of internet or mobile context as its object, but there is not enough research concerned with recommending adequate store to customers in a ubiquitous environment. It is possible to track customers' behaviors in a ubiquitous environment, the same way it is implemented in an online market space even when customers are purchasing in an offline marketplace. Unlike existing internet space, in ubiquitous environment, the interest toward the stores is increasing that provides information according to the traffic line of the customers. In other words, the same product can be purchased in several different stores and the preferred store can be different from the customers by personal preference such as traffic line between stores, location, atmosphere, quality, and price. Krulwich(1997) has developed Lifestyle Finder which recommends a product and a store by using the demographical information and purchasing information generated in the internet commerce. Also, Fano(1998) has created a Shopper's Eye which is an information proving system. The information regarding the closest store from the customers' present location is shown when the customer has sent a to-buy list, Sadeh(2003) developed MyCampus that recommends appropriate information and a store in accordance with the schedule saved in a customers' mobile. Moreover, Keegan and O'Hare(2004) came up with EasiShop that provides the suitable tore information including price, after service, and accessibility after analyzing the to-buy list and the current location of customers. However, Krulwich(1997) does not indicate the characteristics of physical space based on the online commerce context and Keegan and O'Hare(2004) only provides information about store related to a product, while Fano(1998) does not fully consider the relationship between the preference toward the stores and the store itself. The most recent research by Sedah(2003), experimented on campus by suggesting recommender systems that reflect situation and preference information besides the characteristics of the physical space. Yet, there is a potential problem since the researches are based on location and preference information of customers which is connected to the invasion of privacy. The primary beginning point of controversy is an invasion of privacy and individual information in a ubiquitous environment according to researches conducted by Al-Muhtadi(2002), Beresford and Stajano(2003), and Ren(2006). Additionally, individuals want to be left anonymous to protect their own personal information, mentioned in Srivastava(2000). Therefore, in this paper, we suggest a methodology to recommend stores in U-market on the basis of ubiquitous environment not using personal information in order to protect individual information and privacy. The main idea behind our suggested methodology is based on Feature Matrices model (FM model, Shahabi and Banaei-Kashani, 2003) that uses clusters of customers' similar transaction data, which is similar to the Collaborative Filtering. However unlike Collaborative Filtering, this methodology overcomes the problems of personal information and privacy since it is not aware of the customer, exactly who they are, The methodology is compared with single trait model(vector model) such as visitor logs, while looking at the actual improvements of the recommendation when the context information is used. It is not easy to find real U-market data, so we experimented with factual data from a real department store with context information. The recommendation procedure of U-market proposed in this paper is divided into four major phases. First phase is collecting and preprocessing data for analysis of shopping patterns of customers. The traits of shopping patterns are expressed as feature matrices of N dimension. On second phase, the similar shopping patterns are grouped into clusters and the representative pattern of each cluster is derived. The distance between shopping patterns is calculated by Projected Pure Euclidean Distance (Shahabi and Banaei-Kashani, 2003). Third phase finds a representative pattern that is similar to a target customer, and at the same time, the shopping information of the customer is traced and saved dynamically. Fourth, the next store is recommended based on the physical distance between stores of representative patterns and the present location of target customer. In this research, we have evaluated the accuracy of recommendation method based on a factual data derived from a department store. There are technological difficulties of tracking on a real-time basis so we extracted purchasing related information and we added on context information on each transaction. As a result, recommendation based on FM model that applies purchasing and context information is more stable and accurate compared to that of vector model. Additionally, we could find more precise recommendation result as more shopping information is accumulated. Realistically, because of the limitation of ubiquitous environment realization, we were not able to reflect on all different kinds of context but more explicit analysis is expected to be attainable in the future after practical system is embodied.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.143-163
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• 2016

The demographics of Internet users are the most basic and important sources for target marketing or personalized advertisements on the digital marketing channels which include email, mobile, and social media. However, it gradually has become difficult to collect the demographics of Internet users because their activities are anonymous in many cases. Although the marketing department is able to get the demographics using online or offline surveys, these approaches are very expensive, long processes, and likely to include false statements. Clickstream data is the recording an Internet user leaves behind while visiting websites. As the user clicks anywhere in the webpage, the activity is logged in semi-structured website log files. Such data allows us to see what pages users visited, how long they stayed there, how often they visited, when they usually visited, which site they prefer, what keywords they used to find the site, whether they purchased any, and so forth. For such a reason, some researchers tried to guess the demographics of Internet users by using their clickstream data. They derived various independent variables likely to be correlated to the demographics. The variables include search keyword, frequency and intensity for time, day and month, variety of websites visited, text information for web pages visited, etc. The demographic attributes to predict are also diverse according to the paper, and cover gender, age, job, location, income, education, marital status, presence of children. A variety of data mining methods, such as LSA, SVM, decision tree, neural network, logistic regression, and k-nearest neighbors, were used for prediction model building. However, this research has not yet identified which data mining method is appropriate to predict each demographic variable. Moreover, it is required to review independent variables studied so far and combine them as needed, and evaluate them for building the best prediction model. The objective of this study is to choose clickstream attributes mostly likely to be correlated to the demographics from the results of previous research, and then to identify which data mining method is fitting to predict each demographic attribute. Among the demographic attributes, this paper focus on predicting gender, age, marital status, residence, and job. And from the results of previous research, 64 clickstream attributes are applied to predict the demographic attributes. The overall process of predictive model building is compose of 4 steps. In the first step, we create user profiles which include 64 clickstream attributes and 5 demographic attributes. The second step performs the dimension reduction of clickstream variables to solve the curse of dimensionality and overfitting problem. We utilize three approaches which are based on decision tree, PCA, and cluster analysis. We build alternative predictive models for each demographic variable in the third step. SVM, neural network, and logistic regression are used for modeling. The last step evaluates the alternative models in view of model accuracy and selects the best model. For the experiments, we used clickstream data which represents 5 demographics and 16,962,705 online activities for 5,000 Internet users. IBM SPSS Modeler 17.0 was used for our prediction process, and the 5-fold cross validation was conducted to enhance the reliability of our experiments. As the experimental results, we can verify that there are a specific data mining method well-suited for each demographic variable. For example, age prediction is best performed when using the decision tree based dimension reduction and neural network whereas the prediction of gender and marital status is the most accurate by applying SVM without dimension reduction. We conclude that the online behaviors of the Internet users, captured from the clickstream data analysis, could be well used to predict their demographics, thereby being utilized to the digital marketing.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.23-46
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• 2021

Collaborative filtering, which is often used in personalization recommendations, is recognized as a very useful technique to find similar customers and recommend products to them based on their purchase history. However, the traditional collaborative filtering technique has raised the question of having difficulty calculating the similarity for new customers or products due to the method of calculating similaritiesbased on direct connections and common features among customers. For this reason, a hybrid technique was designed to use content-based filtering techniques together. On the one hand, efforts have been made to solve these problems by applying the structural characteristics of social networks. This applies a method of indirectly calculating similarities through their similar customers placed between them. This means creating a customer's network based on purchasing data and calculating the similarity between the two based on the features of the network that indirectly connects the two customers within this network. Such similarity can be used as a measure to predict whether the target customer accepts recommendations. The centrality metrics of networks can be utilized for the calculation of these similarities. Different centrality metrics have important implications in that they may have different effects on recommended performance. In this study, furthermore, the effect of these centrality metrics on the performance of recommendation may vary depending on recommender algorithms. In addition, recommendation techniques using network analysis can be expected to contribute to increasing recommendation performance even if they apply not only to new customers or products but also to entire customers or products. By considering a customer's purchase of an item as a link generated between the customer and the item on the network, the prediction of user acceptance of recommendation is solved as a prediction of whether a new link will be created between them. As the classification models fit the purpose of solving the binary problem of whether the link is engaged or not, decision tree, k-nearest neighbors (KNN), logistic regression, artificial neural network, and support vector machine (SVM) are selected in the research. The data for performance evaluation used order data collected from an online shopping mall over four years and two months. Among them, the previous three years and eight months constitute social networks composed of and the experiment was conducted by organizing the data collected into the social network. The next four months' records were used to train and evaluate recommender models. Experiments with the centrality metrics applied to each model show that the recommendation acceptance rates of the centrality metrics are different for each algorithm at a meaningful level. In this work, we analyzed only four commonly used centrality metrics: degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and eigenvector centrality. Eigenvector centrality records the lowest performance in all models except support vector machines. Closeness centrality and betweenness centrality show similar performance across all models. Degree centrality ranking moderate across overall models while betweenness centrality always ranking higher than degree centrality. Finally, closeness centrality is characterized by distinct differences in performance according to the model. It ranks first in logistic regression, artificial neural network, and decision tree withnumerically high performance. However, it only records very low rankings in support vector machine and K-neighborhood with low-performance levels. As the experiment results reveal, in a classification model, network centrality metrics over a subnetwork that connects the two nodes can effectively predict the connectivity between two nodes in a social network. Furthermore, each metric has a different performance depending on the classification model type. This result implies that choosing appropriate metrics for each algorithm can lead to achieving higher recommendation performance. In general, betweenness centrality can guarantee a high level of performance in any model. It would be possible to consider the introduction of proximity centrality to obtain higher performance for certain models.