• Title/Summary/Keyword: end-to-end performance

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A Study on the Design of Case-based Reasoning Office Knowledge Recommender System for Office Professionals (사례기반추론을 이용한 사무지식 추천시스템)

  • Kim, Myong-Ok;Na, Jung-Ah
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.17 no.3
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    • pp.131-146
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    • 2011
  • It is becoming more essential than ever for office professionals to become competent in information collection/gathering and problem solving in today's global business society. In particular, office professionals do not only assist simple chores but are also forced to make decisions as quickly and efficiently as possible in problematic situations that can end in either profit or loss to their company. Since office professionals rely heavily on their tacit knowledge to solve problems that arise in everyday business situations, it is truly helpful and efficient to refer to similar business cases from the past and share or reuse such previous business knowledge for better performance results. Case-based reasoning(CBR) is a problem-solving method which utilizes previous similar cases to solve problems. Through CBR, the closest case to the current business situation can be searched and retrieved from the case or knowledge base and can be referred to for a new solution. This reduces the time and resources needed and increase success probability. The main purpose of this study is to design a system called COKRS(Case-based reasoning Office Knowledge Recommender System) and develop a prototype for it. COKRS manages cases and their meta data, accepts key words from the user and searches the casebase for the most similar past case to the input keyword, and communicates with users to collect information about the quality of the case provided and continuously apply the information to update values on the similarity table. Core concepts like system architecture, definition of a case, meta database, similarity table have been introduced, and also an algorithm to retrieve all similar cases from past work history has also been proposed. In this research, a case is best defined as a work experience in office administration. However, defining a case in office administration was not an easy task in reality. We surveyed 10 office professionals in order to get an idea of how to define a case in office administration and found out that in most cases any type of office work is to be recorded digitally and/or non-digitally. Therefore, we have defined a record or document case as for COKRS. Similarity table was composed of items of the result of job analysis for office professionals conducted in a previous research. Values between items of the similarity table were initially set to those from researchers' experiences and literature review. The results of this study could also be utilized in other areas of business for knowledge sharing wherever it is necessary and beneficial to share and learn from past experiences. We expect this research to be a reference for researchers and developers who are in this area or interested in office knowledge recommendation system based on CBR. Focus group interview(FGI) was conducted with ten administrative assistants carefully selected from various areas of business. They were given a chance to try out COKRS in an actual work setting and make some suggestions for future improvement. FGI has identified the user-interface for saving and searching cases for keywords as the most positive aspect of COKRS, and has identified the most urgently needed improvement as transforming tacit knowledge and knowhow into recorded documents more efficiently. Also, the focus group has mentioned that it is essential to secure enough support, encouragement, and reward from the company and promote positive attitude and atmosphere for knowledge sharing for everybody's benefit in the company.

Annotation Method based on Face Area for Efficient Interactive Video Authoring (효과적인 인터랙티브 비디오 저작을 위한 얼굴영역 기반의 어노테이션 방법)

  • Yoon, Ui Nyoung;Ga, Myeong Hyeon;Jo, Geun-Sik
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.21 no.1
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    • pp.83-98
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    • 2015
  • Many TV viewers use mainly portal sites in order to retrieve information related to broadcast while watching TV. However retrieving information that people wanted needs a lot of time to retrieve the information because current internet presents too much information which is not required. Consequentially, this process can't satisfy users who want to consume information immediately. Interactive video is being actively investigated to solve this problem. An interactive video provides clickable objects, areas or hotspots to interact with users. When users click object on the interactive video, they can see additional information, related to video, instantly. The following shows the three basic procedures to make an interactive video using interactive video authoring tool: (1) Create an augmented object; (2) Set an object's area and time to be displayed on the video; (3) Set an interactive action which is related to pages or hyperlink; However users who use existing authoring tools such as Popcorn Maker and Zentrick spend a lot of time in step (2). If users use wireWAX then they can save sufficient time to set object's location and time to be displayed because wireWAX uses vision based annotation method. But they need to wait for time to detect and track object. Therefore, it is required to reduce the process time in step (2) using benefits of manual annotation method and vision-based annotation method effectively. This paper proposes a novel annotation method allows annotator to easily annotate based on face area. For proposing new annotation method, this paper presents two steps: pre-processing step and annotation step. The pre-processing is necessary because system detects shots for users who want to find contents of video easily. Pre-processing step is as follow: 1) Extract shots using color histogram based shot boundary detection method from frames of video; 2) Make shot clusters using similarities of shots and aligns as shot sequences; and 3) Detect and track faces from all shots of shot sequence metadata and save into the shot sequence metadata with each shot. After pre-processing, user can annotates object as follow: 1) Annotator selects a shot sequence, and then selects keyframe of shot in the shot sequence; 2) Annotator annotates objects on the relative position of the actor's face on the selected keyframe. Then same objects will be annotated automatically until the end of shot sequence which has detected face area; and 3) User assigns additional information to the annotated object. In addition, this paper designs the feedback model in order to compensate the defects which are wrong aligned shots, wrong detected faces problem and inaccurate location problem might occur after object annotation. Furthermore, users can use interpolation method to interpolate position of objects which is deleted by feedback. After feedback user can save annotated object data to the interactive object metadata. Finally, this paper shows interactive video authoring system implemented for verifying performance of proposed annotation method which uses presented models. In the experiment presents analysis of object annotation time, and user evaluation. First, result of object annotation average time shows our proposed tool is 2 times faster than existing authoring tools for object annotation. Sometimes, annotation time of proposed tool took longer than existing authoring tools, because wrong shots are detected in the pre-processing. The usefulness and convenience of the system were measured through the user evaluation which was aimed at users who have experienced in interactive video authoring system. Recruited 19 experts evaluates of 11 questions which is out of CSUQ(Computer System Usability Questionnaire). CSUQ is designed by IBM for evaluating system. Through the user evaluation, showed that proposed tool is useful for authoring interactive video than about 10% of the other interactive video authoring systems.

Ontology-based User Customized Search Service Considering User Intention (온톨로지 기반의 사용자 의도를 고려한 맞춤형 검색 서비스)

  • Kim, Sukyoung;Kim, Gunwoo
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.18 no.4
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    • pp.129-143
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    • 2012
  • Recently, the rapid progress of a number of standardized web technologies and the proliferation of web users in the world bring an explosive increase of producing and consuming information documents on the web. In addition, most companies have produced, shared, and managed a huge number of information documents that are needed to perform their businesses. They also have discretionally raked, stored and managed a number of web documents published on the web for their business. Along with this increase of information documents that should be managed in the companies, the need of a solution to locate information documents more accurately among a huge number of information sources have increased. In order to satisfy the need of accurate search, the market size of search engine solution market is becoming increasingly expended. The most important functionality among much functionality provided by search engine is to locate accurate information documents from a huge information sources. The major metric to evaluate the accuracy of search engine is relevance that consists of two measures, precision and recall. Precision is thought of as a measure of exactness, that is, what percentage of information considered as true answer are actually such, whereas recall is a measure of completeness, that is, what percentage of true answer are retrieved as such. These two measures can be used differently according to the applied domain. If we need to exhaustively search information such as patent documents and research papers, it is better to increase the recall. On the other hand, when the amount of information is small scale, it is better to increase precision. Most of existing web search engines typically uses a keyword search method that returns web documents including keywords which correspond to search words entered by a user. This method has a virtue of locating all web documents quickly, even though many search words are inputted. However, this method has a fundamental imitation of not considering search intention of a user, thereby retrieving irrelevant results as well as relevant ones. Thus, it takes additional time and effort to set relevant ones out from all results returned by a search engine. That is, keyword search method can increase recall, while it is difficult to locate web documents which a user actually want to find because it does not provide a means of understanding the intention of a user and reflecting it to a progress of searching information. Thus, this research suggests a new method of combining ontology-based search solution with core search functionalities provided by existing search engine solutions. The method enables a search engine to provide optimal search results by inferenceing the search intention of a user. To that end, we build an ontology which contains concepts and relationships among them in a specific domain. The ontology is used to inference synonyms of a set of search keywords inputted by a user, thereby making the search intention of the user reflected into the progress of searching information more actively compared to existing search engines. Based on the proposed method we implement a prototype search system and test the system in the patent domain where we experiment on searching relevant documents associated with a patent. The experiment shows that our system increases the both recall and precision in accuracy and augments the search productivity by using improved user interface that enables a user to interact with our search system effectively. In the future research, we will study a means of validating the better performance of our prototype system by comparing other search engine solution and will extend the applied domain into other domains for searching information such as portal.

A Study on the Improvement of the Employee Stock Ownership Plans (우리사주제의 개선에 대한 연구)

  • Kwon, Yong-man;Shin, Won-chul
    • Journal of Venture Innovation
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    • v.3 no.2
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    • pp.95-109
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    • 2020
  • The source of value-added creation in modern times has been transformed from material to man's value-added generating power, and ownership of the means of production has been converted from a particular landlord, capitalist to a person with value-added capacity, and a system of capital participation is needed beyond the profit-sharing system or performance incentive system in which workers of an enterprise participate in simple profits if they significantly increase the added value of the company. It is also necessary to introduce our private stock system as a means of addressing the problem of capital bias and for the stable development of capitalism. The purpose of Employee Stock Ownership Plans is to improve the economic and social status of workers and promote labor-management cooperation by allowing workers to acquire and hold shares of the stock company in which the employee ownership association is established through the employee ownership association, but the reality is that our stock ownership system has failed to achieve its purpose due to insufficient protection against the employee. In terms of welfare, the acquisition of our company shares should include active government support for the welfare of workers' ownership on a social welfare level rather than on the logic of the capital market, and in terms of investment, it would not be appropriate to apply the regulation for investor protection to see workers' acquisition of our company shares as 'investment' in the view of workers' willingness to own shares on the stock market. Therefore, as a way to support and deregulate employee's stock acquisition, 1. Expanding direct support, such as tax support, 2. As employee's stock ownership association is being discussed as a division's nature, it is less effective in terms of various management, not investment, and 3. Those who own stocks with 1% of the company's shares and 300 million won in face value will be classified as major shareholders. As a way to reduce the risk of management of our company owners and cooperative funds, As a measure to reduce the risk of management of our company owners and cooperative funds, only our employee shareholders' association shall manage the fund in a long-term deposit, and even though our employee's stock is managed by the association or company after the end of the deposit period, the management of each employee shall be allowed and In terms of improving the utilization of our company's stock and fund, 1. Employee's stockholders are prohibited from lending during the deposit period, but it is necessary to improve profitability by allowing them to borrow under strict restrictions, 2. It is necessary to make the use of the employee's welfare funds available for the preservation of losses, and to stipulate the redemption obligations of unlisted companies in order to improve the redemption system of our company.

Implications of Shared Growth of Public Enterprises: Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Case (공공기관의 동반성장 현황과 시사점: 한국수력원자력(주) 사례를 중심으로)

  • Jeon, Young-tae;Hwang, Seung-ho;Kim, Young-woo
    • Journal of Venture Innovation
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    • v.4 no.2
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    • pp.57-75
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    • 2021
  • KHNP's shared growth activities are based on such public good. Reflecting the characteristics of a comprehensive energy company, a high-tech plant company, and a leading company for shared growth, it presents strategies to link performance indicators with its partners and implements various measures. Key tasks include maintaining the nuclear power plant ecosystem, improving management conditions for partner companies, strengthening future capabilities of the nuclear power plant industry, and supporting a virtuous cycle of regional development. This is made by reflecting the specificity of nuclear power generation as much as possible, and is designed to reflect the spirit of shared growth through win-win and cooperation in order to solve the challenges of the times while considering the characteristics as much as possible as possible. KHNP's shared growth activities can be said to be the practice of the spirit of the times(Zeitgeist). The spirit of the times given to us now is that companies should strive for sustainable growth as social air. KHNP has been striving to establish a creative and leading shared growth ecosystem. In particular, considering the positions of partners, it has been promoting continuous system improvement to establish a fair trade culture and deregulation. In addition, it has continuously discovered and implemented new customized support projects that are effective for partner companies and local communities. To this end, efforts have been made for shared growth through organic collaboration with partners and stakeholders. As detailed tasks, it also presents fostering new markets and new industries, maintaining supply chains, and emergency support for COVID-19 to maintain the nuclear power plant ecosystem. This reflects the social public good after the recent COVID-19 incident. In order to improve the management conditions of partner companies, productivity improvement, human resources enhancement, and customized funding are being implemented as detailed tasks. This is a plan to practice win-win growth with partner companies emphasized by corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ISO 26000 while being faithful to the main job. Until now, ESG management has focused on the environmental field to cope with the catastrophe of climate change. According to KHNP is presenting a public enterprise-type model in the environmental field. In order to strengthen the future capabilities of the nuclear power plant industry as a state-of-the-art energy company, it has set tasks to attract investment from partner companies, localization and new technologies R&D, and commercialization of innovative technologies. This is an effort to develop advanced nuclear power plant technology as a concrete practical measure of eco-friendly development. Meanwhile, the EU is preparing a social taxonomy to focus on the social sector, another important axis in ESG management, following the Green Taxonomy, a classification system in the environmental sector. KHNP includes enhancing local vitality, increasing income for the underprivileged, and overcoming the COVID-19 crisis as part of its shared growth activities, which is a representative social taxonomy field. The draft social taxonomy being promoted by the EU was announced in July, and the contents promoted by KHNP are consistent with this, leading the practice of social taxonomy

A Study on Singapore Startup Ecosystem using Regional Transformation of Isenberg(2010) (싱가포르 창업생태계 연구: Isenberg(2010) 프레임워크의 지역적 변용을 통한 질적 연구를 중심으로)

  • Kim, Soyeon;Cho, Minhyung;Rhee, Mooweon
    • Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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    • v.15 no.2
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    • pp.47-65
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    • 2020
  • With the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in sight, innovative business models utilizing new technologies are emerging, and startups are enjoying an abundance of opportunities based on the agility to respond to disruptive innovations and the opening to new technologies. However, what is most important in creating a sustainable start-up ecosystem is not the start-up itself, but the process of research-start-investment-investment-the leap to listing and big business-in order to build a virtuous circle of startups that leads to re-investment. To this end, the environment created in the hub area where start-ups were conducted is important, and these material and non-material environmental factors are described as being inclusive by the word "entrepreneurial ecosystem." This study aims to provide implications for Korea's entrepreneurial ecosystem through the study of the interaction of the elements that make up the start-up ecosystem and the relationship of ecosystem participants in Singapore. Singapore has been consistently mentioned as the top two Asian countries in assessing the start-up environment and business environment. In this process, six elements of the entrepreneurial ecosystem presented by Isenberg(2010)-policies, finance, culture, support, human resources, and market-are the best frameworks for analyzing entrepreneurial ecosystems in terms of well encompassing prior studies related to entrepreneurial ecosystem elements, and a model of regional transformation is formed focusing on some elements to suit Singapore, the target area of study. By considering that Singapore's political nature would inevitably have a huge impact on finance, Smart Nation policy was having an impact on university education related to entrepreneurship, and that the entrepreneurial networks and global connectivity formed within Singapore's start-up infrastructure had a significant impact on Singapore's start-up's performance, researches needed to look more at the factors of policy, culture and market. In addition, qualitative research of participants in the entrepreneurial ecosystem was essential to understand the internal interaction of the elements of the start-up ecosystem, so the semi-structured survey was conducted by visiting the site. As such, this study examined the status of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem based on qualitative research focused on policies, culture and market elements of Singapore's start-up ecosystem, and intended to provide implications for regulations related to start-ups, the role of universities and start-up infrastructure through comparison with Korea. This could contribute not only to the future research of the start-up ecosystem, but also to the creation of a start-up infrastructure, boosting the start-up ecosystem, and the establishment of the orientation of the start-up education in universities.

Case Study on Success and Innovation Activities of Women Entrepreneurs: Focusing on Startups (여성 창업가의 성공과 혁신활동에 대한 사례 연구 : 스타트업을 중심으로)

  • Hong, Jungim;Kim, Sunwoo
    • Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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    • v.16 no.1
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    • pp.55-69
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    • 2021
  • For the national economic development, the participation of women in the social and economic activities is crucial. The popularization of start-ups, digital transformation, and WEconomy trends have lowered the barriers to opportunities for women to start a business and provide an environment in which women can grow faster. This paper examines the significance and process of success of women entrepreneurs and the characteristics of innovation strategies and achievements by linking the recently changing business environment of a company, factors influencing the success of women entrepreneurship, and innovation activities. To this end, four companies' cases were analyzed in the fields of distribution/service and consumer products/services, which are areas of large investment among female startups. The result shows that women entrepreneurs recognize the meaning of success as creating and continuing to create a 'corporate value through establishing a trust relationship with customers' within the 'balance between personal life and work.' In terms of the business ecosystem, women entrepreneurs strive for 'business activities based on the win-win growth of consumers, producers and sellers' for success, and rather 'focus on the process with a problem-solving approach' rather than achieving performance-oriented goals. Also through excellent power of observation, flexibility, and execution power, women entrepreneurs conduct business by adapting to changing trends. In terms of innovation activities, the innovation strategy of women-led companies puts priority on 'creating the value customers want' and focuses on innovation in the 'customer-centric business model' rather than technological innovation. As such, women-led companies show several differentiated characteristics, which enable them to create corporate value and achieve sustainable growth. The barriers to challenges and opportunities for women to start a business have been lowered, and an ecosystem has been created for female startups to grow. But why are there still so few women entrepreneurs, and the answer to where we need to close these gaps is ultimately a close analysis and investigation of the field. We must present milestones for growth steps through the accumulation of case studies of women startups that have exited. In addition, women can stand as economic agents only when the policy targets are subdivided and specific approaches to child-rearing and childcare for women entrepreneurs must be taken. This paper expects to serve as basic data for follow-up studies and become the basis of research for women entrepreneurs to grow as economic agents.

Story-based Information Retrieval (스토리 기반의 정보 검색 연구)

  • You, Eun-Soon;Park, Seung-Bo
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.19 no.4
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    • pp.81-96
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    • 2013
  • Video information retrieval has become a very important issue because of the explosive increase in video data from Web content development. Meanwhile, content-based video analysis using visual features has been the main source for video information retrieval and browsing. Content in video can be represented with content-based analysis techniques, which can extract various features from audio-visual data such as frames, shots, colors, texture, or shape. Moreover, similarity between videos can be measured through content-based analysis. However, a movie that is one of typical types of video data is organized by story as well as audio-visual data. This causes a semantic gap between significant information recognized by people and information resulting from content-based analysis, when content-based video analysis using only audio-visual data of low level is applied to information retrieval of movie. The reason for this semantic gap is that the story line for a movie is high level information, with relationships in the content that changes as the movie progresses. Information retrieval related to the story line of a movie cannot be executed by only content-based analysis techniques. A formal model is needed, which can determine relationships among movie contents, or track meaning changes, in order to accurately retrieve the story information. Recently, story-based video analysis techniques have emerged using a social network concept for story information retrieval. These approaches represent a story by using the relationships between characters in a movie, but these approaches have problems. First, they do not express dynamic changes in relationships between characters according to story development. Second, they miss profound information, such as emotions indicating the identities and psychological states of the characters. Emotion is essential to understanding a character's motivation, conflict, and resolution. Third, they do not take account of events and background that contribute to the story. As a result, this paper reviews the importance and weaknesses of previous video analysis methods ranging from content-based approaches to story analysis based on social network. Also, we suggest necessary elements, such as character, background, and events, based on narrative structures introduced in the literature. We extract characters' emotional words from the script of the movie Pretty Woman by using the hierarchical attribute of WordNet, which is an extensive English thesaurus. WordNet offers relationships between words (e.g., synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, antonyms). We present a method to visualize the emotional pattern of a character over time. Second, a character's inner nature must be predetermined in order to model a character arc that can depict the character's growth and development. To this end, we analyze the amount of the character's dialogue in the script and track the character's inner nature using social network concepts, such as in-degree (incoming links) and out-degree (outgoing links). Additionally, we propose a method that can track a character's inner nature by tracing indices such as degree, in-degree, and out-degree of the character network in a movie through its progression. Finally, the spatial background where characters meet and where events take place is an important element in the story. We take advantage of the movie script to extracting significant spatial background and suggest a scene map describing spatial arrangements and distances in the movie. Important places where main characters first meet or where they stay during long periods of time can be extracted through this scene map. In view of the aforementioned three elements (character, event, background), we extract a variety of information related to the story and evaluate the performance of the proposed method. We can track story information extracted over time and detect a change in the character's emotion or inner nature, spatial movement, and conflicts and resolutions in the story.

A Study on the Effect of Booth Recommendation System on Exhibition Visitors Unplanned Visit Behavior (전시장 참관객의 계획되지 않은 방문행동에 있어서 부스추천시스템의 영향에 대한 연구)

  • Chung, Nam-Ho;Kim, Jae-Kyung
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.17 no.4
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    • pp.175-191
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    • 2011
  • With the MICE(Meeting, Incentive travel, Convention, Exhibition) industry coming into the spotlight, there has been a growing interest in the domestic exhibition industry. Accordingly, in Korea, various studies of the industry are being conducted to enhance exhibition performance as in the United States or Europe. Some studies are focusing particularly on analyzing visiting patterns of exhibition visitors using intelligent information technology in consideration of the variations in effects of watching exhibitions according to the exhibitory environment or technique, thereby understanding visitors and, furthermore, drawing the correlations between exhibiting businesses and improving exhibition performance. However, previous studies related to booth recommendation systems only discussed the accuracy of recommendation in the aspect of a system rather than determining changes in visitors' behavior or perception by recommendation. A booth recommendation system enables visitors to visit unplanned exhibition booths by recommending visitors suitable ones based on information about visitors' visits. Meanwhile, some visitors may be satisfied with their unplanned visits, while others may consider the recommending process to be cumbersome or obstructive to their free observation. In the latter case, the exhibition is likely to produce worse results compared to when visitors are allowed to freely observe the exhibition. Thus, in order to apply a booth recommendation system to exhibition halls, the factors affecting the performance of the system should be generally examined, and the effects of the system on visitors' unplanned visiting behavior should be carefully studied. As such, this study aims to determine the factors that affect the performance of a booth recommendation system by reviewing theories and literature and to examine the effects of visitors' perceived performance of the system on their satisfaction of unplanned behavior and intention to reuse the system. Toward this end, the unplanned behavior theory was adopted as the theoretical framework. Unplanned behavior can be defined as "behavior that is done by consumers without any prearranged plan". Thus far, consumers' unplanned behavior has been studied in various fields. The field of marketing, in particular, has focused on unplanned purchasing among various types of unplanned behavior, which has been often confused with impulsive purchasing. Nevertheless, the two are different from each other; while impulsive purchasing means strong, continuous urges to purchase things, unplanned purchasing is behavior with purchasing decisions that are made inside a store, not before going into one. In other words, all impulsive purchases are unplanned, but not all unplanned purchases are impulsive. Then why do consumers engage in unplanned behavior? Regarding this question, many scholars have made many suggestions, but there has been a consensus that it is because consumers have enough flexibility to change their plans in the middle instead of developing plans thoroughly. In other words, if unplanned behavior costs much, it will be difficult for consumers to change their prearranged plans. In the case of the exhibition hall examined in this study, visitors learn the programs of the hall and plan which booth to visit in advance. This is because it is practically impossible for visitors to visit all of the various booths that an exhibition operates due to their limited time. Therefore, if the booth recommendation system proposed in this study recommends visitors booths that they may like, they can change their plans and visit the recommended booths. Such visiting behavior can be regarded similarly to consumers' visit to a store or tourists' unplanned behavior in a tourist spot and can be understand in the same context as the recent increase in tourism consumers' unplanned behavior influenced by information devices. Thus, the following research model was established. This research model uses visitors' perceived performance of a booth recommendation system as the parameter, and the factors affecting the performance include trust in the system, exhibition visitors' knowledge levels, expected personalization of the system, and the system's threat to freedom. In addition, the causal relation between visitors' satisfaction of their perceived performance of the system and unplanned behavior and their intention to reuse the system was determined. While doing so, trust in the booth recommendation system consisted of 2nd order factors such as competence, benevolence, and integrity, while the other factors consisted of 1st order factors. In order to verify this model, a booth recommendation system was developed to be tested in 2011 DMC Culture Open, and 101 visitors were empirically studied and analyzed. The results are as follows. First, visitors' trust was the most important factor in the booth recommendation system, and the visitors who used the system perceived its performance as a success based on their trust. Second, visitors' knowledge levels also had significant effects on the performance of the system, which indicates that the performance of a recommendation system requires an advance understanding. In other words, visitors with higher levels of understanding of the exhibition hall learned better the usefulness of the booth recommendation system. Third, expected personalization did not have significant effects, which is a different result from previous studies' results. This is presumably because the booth recommendation system used in this study did not provide enough personalized services. Fourth, the recommendation information provided by the booth recommendation system was not considered to threaten or restrict one's freedom, which means it is valuable in terms of usefulness. Lastly, high performance of the booth recommendation system led to visitors' high satisfaction levels of unplanned behavior and intention to reuse the system. To sum up, in order to analyze the effects of a booth recommendation system on visitors' unplanned visits to a booth, empirical data were examined based on the unplanned behavior theory and, accordingly, useful suggestions for the establishment and design of future booth recommendation systems were made. In the future, further examination should be conducted through elaborate survey questions and survey objects.

Training Program to Raise Consciousness Among Adolescents for Protection Against Skin Cancer through Performance of Skin Self Examination

  • Balyaci, Ozum Erkin;Kostu, Nazan;Temel, Ayla Bayik
    • Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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    • v.13 no.10
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    • pp.5011-5017
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    • 2012
  • Background: Overexposure to sunlight in childhood and the adolescent period and associsated sunburns significantly increase the risk of skin cancer in adulthood. In Turkey, the incidence of skin cancer in the general population is 0.8%. The incidence is 0.6% and the mortality rate is 0.4% for men, while these rates are 1.0% and 0.7%, respectively, for women. If skin cancer is found early, its treatment is facilitated. Therefore, personal skin examination is important for early diagnosis. Objectives: Our aim was to determine the effects of training for raising consciousness among adolescents to protect against skin cancer by influencing skin self examination behavior. Method: This quasi experimental intervention study was conducted between February and April 2012 in Izmir. The study population consisted of students attending $6^{th}$, $7^{th}$ and $8^{th}$ classes of a primary school (n:302). No sampling was performed. Data were collected with a form developed by the researchers based on the literature. The first part of form is aimed to determine demographic characteristics of adolescents (3 questions) and their risk status of skin cancer (6 questions). The second part was prepared for skin cancer risks of adolescents (8 questions) and indications of skin cancer (12 questions). The last part was intended to determine their knowledge about skin self examination (4 questions) and behavioral stages of skin self examination (1 question). Data collection was achieved with a questionnaire form in three phases. In the 1st phase, data about demographic characteristics of students, risk status of skin cancer, knowledge level of skin cancer and behavior stages were collected. In the $2^{nd}$ phase, skin self examination training based on the transtheoretical model was performed within the same day just after obtaining preliminary data. In the $3^{rd}$ phase, adolescents were followed up three times to establish the efficacy of the training (on the $15^{th}$ day after training program and at end of the $1^{st}$ and $2^{nd}$ months). Follow-up data were evaluated by questioning skin self examination performing behavior stages through electronic mail. Results: Half of the adolescents (50.5%) are male, and 58.4% of them are 13 years old with a mean age of $12{\pm}1.15$ years. About 29.4% of adolescents had brown hair color, 37.9% had brown/hazel eye color, 29.4% had white skin, and 47.2% had fewer than 10 moles in their body. The pretest mean score on knowledge level about risks of skin cancer was found to be $4.19{\pm}1.96$, while the post-test mean score was $6.79{\pm}1.67$ (min:0, max:8).The pretest mean score about indications of skin cancer was $7.45{\pm}3.76$, while the post-test mean score was $10.7{\pm}2.60$ (min:0, max:12). The increases were statistically significant (p<0.05). The behavior "I do not perform skin self examination regularly in every month and I do not think to perform it in the next 6 months" was reduced from 52.8 to 35.5% after training. Conclusion: The training program organized to raise consciousness among adolescents for protection against skin cancer increased the knowledge level about risks and indications of skin cancer and it also improved the behavior of performing skin self examination.