• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.396-402
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• 2014

The spring season in Korea features a dynamic landscape with a variety of flowers such as magnolias, azaleas, forsythias, cherry blossoms and royal azaleas flowering sequentially one after another. However, the narrowing of south-north differences in flowering dates and those among the flower species was observed in 2014, taking a toll on economic and shared communal values of seasonal landscape. This study was carried out to determine whether the 2014 incidence is an outlier or a mega trend in spring phenology. Data on flowering dates of forsythias and cherry blossoms, two typical spring flower species, as observed for the recent 60 years in 6 weather stations of Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) indicate that the difference spanning the flowering date of forsythias, the flower blooming earlier in spring, and that of cherry blossoms that flower later than forsythias was 30 days at the longest and 14 days on an average in the climatological normal year for the period 1951-1980, comparing with the period 1981-2010 when the difference narrowed to 21 days at the longest and 11 days on an average. The year 2014 in particular saw the gap further narrowing down to 7 days, making it possible to see forsythias and cherry blossoms blooming at the same time in the same location. 'Cherry blossom front' took 20 days in traveling from Busan, the earliest flowering station, to Incheon, the latest flowering station, in the case of the 1951-1980 normal year, while 16 days for the 1981-2010 and 6 days for 2014 were observed. The delay in flowering date of forsythias for each time period was 20, 17, and 12 days, respectively. It is presumed that the recent climate change pattern in the Korean Peninsula as indicated by rapid temperature hikes in late spring contrastive to slow temperature rise in early spring immediately after dormancy release brought forward the flowering date of cherry blossoms which comes later than forsythias which flowers early in spring. Thermal time based heating requirements for flowering of 2 species were estimated by analyzing the 60 year data at the 6 locations and used to predict flowering date in 2014. The root mean square error for the prediction was within 2 days from the observed flowering dates in both species at all 6 locations, showing a feasibility of thermal time as a prognostic tool.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.18 no.8
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• pp.1132-1139
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• 2008

A CpG island is a short stretch of DNA in which the frequency of the CG dinucleotide is higher than other regions. CpG islands are present in the promoters and exonic regions of approximately $30{\sim}60$% of mammalian genes so they are useful markers for genes in organisms containing 5-methylcytosine in their genomes. Recent evidence supports the notion that the hypermethylation of CpG island, by silencing tumor suppressor genes, plays a major causal role in cancer, which has been described in almost every tumor types. In this respect, CpG island search by computational methods is very helpful for cancer research and computational promoter and gene predictions. I therefore developed a window program (called CpGi) on the basis of CpG island criteria defined by D. Takai and P. A. Jones. The program 'CpGi' was implemented in Visual C++ 6.0 and can determine the locations of CpG islands using diverse parameters (%GC, Obs (CpG)/Exp (CpG), window size, step size, gap value, # of CpG, length) specified by user. The analysis result of CpGi provides a graphical map of CpG islands and G+C% plot, where more detailed information on CpG island can be obtained through pop-up window. Two human contigs, i.e. AP00524 (from chromosome 22) and NT_029490.3 (from chromosome 21), were used to compare the performance of CpGi and two other public programs for the accuracy of search results. The two other programs used in the performance comparison are Emboss-CpGPlot and CpG Island Searcher that are web-based public CpG island search programs. The comparison result showed that CpGi is on a level with or outperforms Emboss-CpGPlot and CpG Island Searcher. Having a simple and easy-to-use user interface, CpGi would be a very useful tool for genome analysis and CpG island research. To obtain a copy of CpGi for academic use only, contact corresponding author.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.143-159
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• 2015

Predicting IT trends has been a long and important subject for information systems research. IT trend prediction makes it possible to acknowledge emerging eras of innovation and allocate budgets to prepare against rapidly changing technological trends. Towards the end of each year, various domestic and global organizations predict and announce IT trends for the following year. For example, Gartner Predicts 10 top IT trend during the next year, and these predictions affect IT and industry leaders and organization's basic assumptions about technology and the future of IT, but the accuracy of these reports are difficult to verify. Social media data can be useful tool to verify the accuracy. As social media services have gained in popularity, it is used in a variety of ways, from posting about personal daily life to keeping up to date with news and trends. In the recent years, rates of social media activity in Korea have reached unprecedented levels. Hundreds of millions of users now participate in online social networks and communicate with colleague and friends their opinions and thoughts. In particular, Twitter is currently the major micro blog service, it has an important function named 'tweets' which is to report their current thoughts and actions, comments on news and engage in discussions. For an analysis on IT trends, we chose Tweet data because not only it produces massive unstructured textual data in real time but also it serves as an influential channel for opinion leading on technology. Previous studies found that the tweet data provides useful information and detects the trend of society effectively, these studies also identifies that Twitter can track the issue faster than the other media, newspapers. Therefore, this study investigates how frequently the predicted IT trends for the following year announced by public organizations are mentioned on social network services like Twitter. IT trend predictions for 2013, announced near the end of 2012 from two domestic organizations, the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) and the National Information Society Agency (NIA), were used as a basis for this research. The present study analyzes the Twitter data generated from Seoul (Korea) compared with the predictions of the two organizations to analyze the differences. Thus, Twitter data analysis requires various natural language processing techniques, including the removal of stop words, and noun extraction for processing various unrefined forms of unstructured data. To overcome these challenges, we used SAS IRS (Information Retrieval Studio) developed by SAS to capture the trend in real-time processing big stream datasets of Twitter. The system offers a framework for crawling, normalizing, analyzing, indexing and searching tweet data. As a result, we have crawled the entire Twitter sphere in Seoul area and obtained 21,589 tweets in 2013 to review how frequently the IT trend topics announced by the two organizations were mentioned by the people in Seoul. The results shows that most IT trend predicted by NIPA and NIA were all frequently mentioned in Twitter except some topics such as 'new types of security threat', 'green IT', 'next generation semiconductor' since these topics non generalized compound words so they can be mentioned in Twitter with other words. To answer whether the IT trend tweets from Korea is related to the following year's IT trends in real world, we compared Twitter's trending topics with those in Nara Market, Korea's online e-Procurement system which is a nationwide web-based procurement system, dealing with whole procurement process of all public organizations in Korea. The correlation analysis show that Tweet frequencies on IT trending topics predicted by NIPA and NIA are significantly correlated with frequencies on IT topics mentioned in project announcements by Nara market in 2012 and 2013. The main contribution of our research can be found in the following aspects: i) the IT topic predictions announced by NIPA and NIA can provide an effective guideline to IT professionals and researchers in Korea who are looking for verified IT topic trends in the following topic, ii) researchers can use Twitter to get some useful ideas to detect and predict dynamic trends of technological and social issues.