• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.21-40
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• 2000

The retail trades in many countries have changed recently according to the high quality, diversification, and marked individuality of consumer needs. Under the continually competing system of the WTO agreement, corporations based in the USA and the EU try to raise their market share in other countries so it is inevitable for Korean retail enterprises to compete with them. This paper is aimed at contributing to the efficient growth for Korean retail trade from the analysis of the development process in retail trade and its changing locations comparing Korea and the USA. Retailers in the USA have practiced diversified marketing strategies considerably in order to survive in a rapidly changing retailing environment. American retailing, which has the most advanced marketing system in the world, has been of growing concern to marketing strategies in Korea. The following is a brief summary of this study. 1. Speedy and higher quality consumption is needed in accordance with the great increase in the single-family household and the female labor force participation both in Korea and in the USA. Senior citizens have become a new consumer group due to the aging population. In the future the retail trade will switch over to diversified retail formats and internet shopping as countries are transformed into information and communication societies. 2. In Korea, the former retail system characterized by markets and department stores has been greatly changed since the late 1980s with emphasis on high quality and convenience in consumption behaviors, with large domestic enterprises and foreign distribution corporations participating in Korean retailing. In the USA, retailing mergers and takeovers by major retails, bankruptcies, and extra-large shopping centers have emerged since the late 1980s. Recently, the USA retailing formats have been changed from the lower price-oriented discount types to the large scale theme parks. Much emphasis was put on entertainment, resorts, and convention centers. On the other hand, non-store types, such as the internet shopping, the CATV shopping, as well as catalog and mail-order sales are drastically increasing, although the proportion of their sales is low up to now. 3. In Korea, most of the retail facilities are concentrated in Seoul and the Metropolitan Region, and the distribution ratio of facilities came to 52% in 1997. The periodic markets, traditional markets which open on a periodic basis, are located mainly in Chollanam-do and Kyungsangbuk-do. The large-sized discount stores have expanded their locations to the over-crowded apartment complexes in new towns, located in the Metropolitan Region, and the large provincial cities, unlike the suburban locations in the USA. Therefore we needed to give attention to the locational relations in retail facilities between Seoul & the Metropolitan Region and rural settlement areas. In the USA, urban areas grew quickly with the development of the automobile in the 1920s, and the location of stores changed from a dispersed style centering around rural areas to a centralized one in urban areas. There is an accelerated growth for suburban areas, which have grown rapidly since 1950. As the membership warehouse clubs were introduced in the 1970s, the decentralization of location was more intensified. On the other hand, inner cities were revitalized by rearranging existing facilities to cope with suburban areas. And the location-free virtual retailing & TV shopping are also growing every year. 4. In view of the above, the continuous and desirable development devices in Korean retail trade are summarized as follows: First, the countermeasures against economies of scale, increase in retailing sales, and rise of a employment percentage in retailing are in need. Second, a scheme of lowering the proportion of food retail sales, and increasing a ratio of durable goods sales need to be worked out. Third, the original ideas are needed to apply positively information, communication and technology to retailing, to graft the traditional types on modem ones based on the social culture. Fourth, strategies are needed to strengthen the competitiveness of our retail trade through cooperation and chains of smaller retailers, the large enterprises participating in the distribution industry. Fifth, in order to realize the above, the retail industry, the administration, and the academic world should support the retail segment with concern and a practical strategy plan.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.157-175
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• 2012

It is difficult to evaluate the performance of process innovation of e-procurement which has large scale and complex processes. The existing evaluation methods for measuring the effects of process innovation have been mainly done with statistically quantitative methods by analyzing operational data or with qualitative methods by conducting surveys and interviews. However, these methods have some limitations to evaluate the effects because the performance evaluation of e-procurement process innovation should consider the interactions among participants who are active either directly or indirectly through the processes. This study considers the e-procurement process as a complex system and develops a simulation model based on MAS(Multi-Agent System) to evaluate the effects of e-procurement process innovation. Multi-agent based simulation allows observing interaction patterns of objects in virtual world through relationship among objects and their behavioral mechanism. Agent-based simulation is suitable especially for complex business problems. In this study, we used Netlogo Version 4.1.3 as a MAS simulation tool which was developed in Northwestern University. To do this, we developed a interaction model of agents in MAS environment. We defined process agents and task agents, and assigned their behavioral characteristics. The developed simulation model was applied to G2B system (KONEPS: Korea ON-line E-Procurement System) of Public Procurement Service (PPS) in Korea and used to evaluate the innovation effects of the G2B system. KONEPS is a successfully established e-procurement system started in the year 2002. KONEPS is a representative e-Procurement system which integrates characteristics of e-commerce into government for business procurement activities. KONEPS deserves the international recognition considering the annual transaction volume of 56 billion dollars, daily exchanges of electronic documents, users consisted of 121,000 suppliers and 37,000 public organizations, and the 4.5 billion dollars of cost saving. For the simulation, we analyzed the e-procurement of process of KONEPS into eight sub processes such as 'process 1: search products and acquisition of proposal', 'process 2 : review the methods of contracts and item features', 'process 3 : a notice of bid', 'process 4 : registration and confirmation of qualification', 'process 5 : bidding', 'process 6 : a screening test', 'process 7 : contracts', and 'process 8 : invoice and payment'. For the parameter settings of the agents behavior, we collected some data from the transactional database of PPS and some information by conducting a survey. The used data for the simulation are 'participants (government organizations, local government organizations and public institutions)', 'the number of bidding per year', 'the number of total contracts', 'the number of shopping mall transactions', 'the rate of contracts between bidding and shopping mall', 'the successful bidding ratio', and the estimated time for each process. The comparison was done for the difference of time consumption between 'before the innovation (As-was)' and 'after the innovation (As-is).' The results showed that there were productivity improvements in every eight sub processes. The decrease ratio of 'average number of task processing' was 92.7% and the decrease ratio of 'average time of task processing' was 95.4% in entire processes when we use G2B system comparing to the conventional method. Also, this study found that the process innovation effect will be enhanced if the task process related to the 'contract' can be improved. This study shows the usability and possibility of using MAS in process innovation evaluation and its modeling.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.12-21
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• 2006

Recently, Very large and high resolution geological data from aerial or satellite imagery are available. Many researches and applications require to do realtime visualization of interest geological area or entire planet. Important operation of wide-spreaded terrain realtime visualization technique is the appropriate model resolution selection from pre-processed multi-resolution model hierarchy depend upon participant's view. For embodying such realtime rendering system with large geometric data, Preprocessing multi-resolution hierarchy from large scale geological information of interest area is required. In this research, recent Cubic multiresolution 4-8 tile hierarchy is selected for global planetary applications. Based upon the tile hierarchy, It constructs the selective terminal level tile mesh for original geological information area and starts to sample individual generated tiles for terminal level tiles. It completes the hierarchy by constructing intermediate tiles with low pass filtering in bottom-up direction. This research embodies series of efficient cubic 4-8 tile hierarchy construction mechanism with out-of-core storage. The planetary scale Mars' geographical altitude data and image data were selected for the experiment.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.6 no.1 s.23
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• pp.99-108
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• 2005

Interactive electronic technical manual(IETM) for construction projects means an electronic tool that regulations and specifications related to construction method or maintenance process ale described by electronic book type. It has a meaning of integrated information system that includes virtual reality(VR), 3D animation and image contents for representing real construction information so that user can easily understand the construction situation and maintenance process. The basic information and technical manuals of construction facilities are being written as paper documents in our construction industry. As the result, the information management in the maintenance phase of construction projects is inefficient, and maintenance cost is being increased. This study attempts to improve the lack of understanding about construction IETM through the analysis of necessity and unique function of construction IETM comparing with the IETMS in other industry, Finally, this study shows a scenario of construction IErM for mitigating natural disaster of construction facilities to verify applicability of IETM.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.46 no.4
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• pp.94-101
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose design of hardware based on a high speed digital signal processor (DSP) and a field programmable gate array (FPGA) for real-time suppression of fixed pattern noise (FPN) using hardware neural networks (HNN) in cooled infrared focal plane array (IRFPA) imaging system FPN appears a limited operation by temperature in observable images which applies to non-uniformity correction for infrared detector. These have very important problems because it happen serious problem for other applications as well as degradation for image quality in our system Signal processing architecture for our system operates reference gain and offset values using three tables for low, normal, and high temperatures. Proposed method creates virtual tables to separate for overlapping region in three offset tables. We also choose an optimum tenn of temperature which controls weighted values of HNN using mean values of pixels in three regions. This operates gain and offset tables for low, normal, and high temperatures from mean values of pixels and it recursively don't have to do an offset compensation in operation of our system Based on experimental results, proposed method showed improved quality of image which suppressed FPN by change of temperature distribution from an observational image in real-time system.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.48 no.4
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• pp.49-58
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• 2011

Typically, vision-based AR systems operate on the basis of prior knowledge of the environment such as a square marker. The traditional marker-based AR system has a limitation that the marker has to be located in the sensing range. Therefore, there have been considerable research efforts for the techniques known as real-time camera tracking, in which the system attempts to add unknown 3D features to its feature map, and these then provide registration even when the reference map is out of the sensing range. In this paper, we describe a real-time camera tracking framework specifically designed to track a monocular camera in a desktop workspace. Basic idea of the proposed scheme is that a real-time camera tracking is achieved on the basis of a plane tracking algorithm. Also we suggest a method for re-detecting features to maintain registration of virtual objects. The proposed method can cope with the problem that the features cannot be tracked, when they go out of the sensing range. The main advantage of the proposed system are not only low computational cost but also convenient. It can be applicable to an augmented reality system for mobile computing environment.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.45 no.6
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• pp.94-105
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• 2008

Numerous platforms have been developed for ZigBee-based network embedded systems. Also, operating systems like TinyOS have been installed to facilitate efficient implementation of wireless sensor network applications which collect data, and/or execute commands. First of all, porting an operating system on a new platform may need invention of a substitute for a required but unsupported hardware component. This paper presents a multiplexed virtual system timer for a platform without a counter comparator which we have contrived to emulate by using an extra counter. Such porting also injects unexpected faults which cause a variety of painful failures. Unfortunately, TinyOS requires to handle a lot of asynchronous hardware interrupts which are hard to trace during debugging. Besides, simulators are not available for a new platform since the models of hardware on the platform are not usually developed, yet. We propose novel instrumentation techniques which can be used to effectively trace the bugs in such lack of debugging environment. These techniques are used to identify and fix a great deal of nasty issues in porting TinyOS 2.0 on MG2400 and MG2455 platforms made by RadioPulse Inc.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartC
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• v.13C no.4 s.107
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• pp.501-510
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• 2006

Software streaming allows the execution of stream-enabled software on desktop or portable computing devices like PC, PDA, laptop, cellular phone, etc., even while the transmission/streaming from the server may still be in progress. In this paper, we present an efficient streaming system called Software On-Demand(SOD) streaming system to transmit stream-enabled applications in addition to automatic installation of program registry, environment variables, configuration files, and related components. In particular, we design and implement a SOD system in Linux to provide the user with the instant look-and-click software execution environment such that software download and installation are internally proceeded in a completely user-transparent way. Therefore, the SOD system relieves the user from the tricky, failure-prone installation business. In addition, the software developer now obtains a new, powerful means to advertise and propagate their software products since the user can use software packages via user-friendly UI window or web browser by look-and-click interactive operation. In the paper, we also make a couple of SOD streaming experiments using a spectrum of popular softwares. Based on the analysis of the experiment results, we also propose two performance improvement schemes.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.81-99
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• 2010

Lately, in consumers' markets the number of new items is rapidly increasing at an overwhelming rate while consumers have limited access to information about those new products in making a sensible, well-informed purchase. Therefore, item providers and customers need a system which recommends right items to right customers. Also, whenever new items are released, for instance, the recommender system specializing in new items can help item providers locate and identify potential customers. Currently, new items are being added to an existing system without being specially noted to consumers, making it difficult for consumers to identify and evaluate new products introduced in the markets. Most of previous approaches for recommender systems have to rely on the usage history of customers. For new items, this content-based (CB) approach is simply not available for the system to recommend those new items to potential consumers. Although collaborative filtering (CF) approach is not directly applicable to solve the new item problem, it would be a good idea to use the basic principle of CF which identifies similar customers, i,e. neighbors, and recommend items to those customers who have liked the similar items in the past. This research aims to suggest a hybrid recommendation procedure based on the preference boundary of target customer. We suggest the hybrid recommendation procedure using the preference boundary in the feature space for recommending new items only. The basic principle is that if a new item belongs within the preference boundary of a target customer, then it is evaluated to be preferred by the customer. Customers' preferences and characteristics of items including new items are represented in a feature space, and the scope or boundary of the target customer's preference is extended to those of neighbors'. The new item recommendation procedure consists of three steps. The first step is analyzing the profile of items, which are represented as k-dimensional feature values. The second step is to determine the representative point of the target customer's preference boundary, the centroid, based on a personal information set. To determine the centroid of preference boundary of a target customer, three algorithms are developed in this research: one is using the centroid of a target customer only (TC), the other is using centroid of a (dummy) big target customer that is composed of a target customer and his/her neighbors (BC), and another is using centroids of a target customer and his/her neighbors (NC). The third step is to determine the range of the preference boundary, the radius. The suggested algorithm Is using the average distance (AD) between the centroid and all purchased items. We test whether the CF-based approach to determine the centroid of the preference boundary improves the recommendation quality or not. For this purpose, we develop two hybrid algorithms, BC and NC, which use neighbors when deciding centroid of the preference boundary. To test the validity of hybrid algorithms, BC and NC, we developed CB-algorithm, TC, which uses target customers only. We measured effectiveness scores of suggested algorithms and compared them through a series of experiments with a set of real mobile image transaction data. We spilt the period between 1st June 2004 and 31st July and the period between 1st August and 31st August 2004 as a training set and a test set, respectively. The training set Is used to make the preference boundary, and the test set is used to evaluate the performance of the suggested hybrid recommendation procedure. The main aim of this research Is to compare the hybrid recommendation algorithm with the CB algorithm. To evaluate the performance of each algorithm, we compare the purchased new item list in test period with the recommended item list which is recommended by suggested algorithms. So we employ the evaluation metric to hit the ratio for evaluating our algorithms. The hit ratio is defined as the ratio of the hit set size to the recommended set size. The hit set size means the number of success of recommendations in our experiment, and the test set size means the number of purchased items during the test period. Experimental test result shows the hit ratio of BC and NC is bigger than that of TC. This means using neighbors Is more effective to recommend new items. That is hybrid algorithm using CF is more effective when recommending to consumers new items than the algorithm using only CB. The reason of the smaller hit ratio of BC than that of NC is that BC is defined as a dummy or virtual customer who purchased all items of target customers' and neighbors'. That is centroid of BC often shifts from that of TC, so it tends to reflect skewed characters of target customer. So the recommendation algorithm using NC shows the best hit ratio, because NC has sufficient information about target customers and their neighbors without damaging the information about the target customers.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.354-362
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• 2006

This paper suggests a method for generating high qualify stereo video avatar to support visual communication in a CAVE$^{TM}$-like system. In such a system because of frequent change of light projected onto screens around user, it is not easy to extract user silhouette robustly, which is an essential step to generate a video avatar. In this study, we use an infrared reflective image acquired by a grayscale camera with a longpass filter so that the change of visible light on a screen is blocked to extract robust user silhouette. In addition, using two color cameras positioned at a distance of a binocular disparity of human eyes, we acquire two stereo images of the user for fast generation and stereoscopic display of a high quality video avatar without 3D reconstruction. We also suggest a fitting algorithm of a silhouette mask on an infrared reflective image into an acquired color image to remove background. Generated stereo images of a video avatar are texture mapped into a plane in virtual world and can be displayed in stereoscopic using frame sequential stereo method. Suggested method have advantages that it generates high quality video avatar taster than 3D approach and it gives stereoscopic feeling to a user 2D based approach can not provide.