• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.125-136
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• 2017

This study focuses on a relative efficiency of 109 operating food companies out of 22 regions in Jeollanam-do. The relative efficiency has been analyzed by 5 input factors(capital, number of employees, annual labor costs, raw material purchase, and site area) and 2 output factors(annual exports and annual production of the companies in Jeollanam-do). This study suggests efficient companies which inefficient companies can benchmark to improve their system in short-mid-long term in phases. The main result of empirical analysis are as follows: Firstly, according to the Traditioanl DEA analysis, 7 companies out of 109 DMU indicate the optimal production scale in score 1 of CCR efficiency value, BCC efficiency value, and scale efficiency value. Secondly, a result from the Tier 1 step of inefficient companies by Post-DEA suggests that it would be better to apply each Tier step to the proper stage of the worst 5 inefficient companies such as Tier 3 step(short-term benchmark)${\rightarrow}$Tier 2 step(mid-term benchmark)${\rightarrow}$Tier 1 step(long-term benchmark) in step. This study expects that the result of the study can reduce the trial and error in inefficient part, lead to improvement, and have a big help in food exporting industry in the end.

• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.155-166
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• 2009

Road design safety assessment by existing tools and methods have normally been examined by expert judgements using design documents and on-site inspections. The existing methods, however, have two main problems such as insufficiency of objectiveness and inability to measure effects of accident countermeasures. This paper studies ways to develop a road safety assessment system through reviewing the IHSDM developed in USA. The crash prediction module of IHSDM calculate accident frequency and rate of roadway segments using accident prediction models and accident modification factors for safety evaluation. The methodology of evaluation and development of accident modification factors somewhat overcome the problems of the existing methods. In spite of these advantages, IHSDM could not relevantly reflect characteristics of domestic rural roadways since it overestimate the number of accidents and rate of korean rural roadways. Especially, IHSDM may not evaluate or consider land use patterns of Korean roadways, and futhermore, original environment on base conditions used to develop IHSDM may not be different from ours. The user requirements being developed for a road safety assessment system for Korean roadways include enhanced flexibility and diversity of data input-output processes.

• Journal of Bio-Environment Control
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.277-284
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• 2020

To increase the utilization of the intelligent methodology of smart farm management, estimation modeling techniques are required to assess prior examination of crops and environment changes in realtime. A mandatory environmental factor such as CO₂ is challenging to establish a reliable estimation model in time domain accounted for indoor agricultural facilities where various correlated variables are highly coupled. Thus, this study was conducted to develop an artificial neural network for reducing time complexity by using environmental information distributed in adjacent areas from a time perspective as input and output variables as CO₂. The environmental factors in the smart farm were continuously measured using measuring devices that integrated sensors through experiments. Modeling 1 predicted by the mean data of the experiment period and modeling 2 predicted by the day-to-day data were constructed to predict the correlation of CO₂. Modeling 2 predicted by the previous day's data learning performed better than Modeling 1 predicted by the 60-day average value. Until 30 days, most of them showed a coefficient of determination between 0.70 and 0.88, and Model 2 was about 0.05 higher. However, after 30 days, the modeling coefficients of both models showed low values below 0.50. According to the modeling approach, comparing and analyzing the values of the determinants showed that data from adjacent time zones were relatively high performance at points requiring prediction rather than a fixed neural network model.

• Journal of the Korean BIBLIA Society for library and Information Science
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.291-312
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• 2014

The purpose of this national study is to identify the factors affecting the public library use among the Korean adult population. The study constructed a model of three types of factors to explain the frequency of public library visits: an individual's socio-demographic characteristics, input and output measures of the local library, and the community size and library investment of the local government. The data were collected from both a national representative sample of 1,000 adults of 18 years old or above who participated in a web survey and the 2013 National Library Statistics of Korea. It was found that a more frequent public library visit occurred when a person who read more and lived closer to the library, which was newly established in a small to medium-sized scale, who lives in a city with a greater population and with more library staff members serving a fewer patrons. Implications for future public library constructions and for public services were suggested based on the study findings.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.29-35
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• 1976

In order to estimate sawmill productivities, rates of technical change and optimum combination of production factors, Cobb-Douglas production functions have been derived using data obtained from 96 sample mills in Busan-Incheon, southwestern and northeastern areas. The results may be summarized as follows: 1. There is a tendency of expanding average sawmill size in the areas. The horse-power holdings per mill have been increased at the rates of 91 percent in Busan-Incheon, 7.7 percent in southwestern and 16.9 percent in northeastern areas. This implies that the mills around log-importing ports have made rapid development, compared with those in forest regions. 2. The regression coefficients (production elasticities) of the functions for the year of 1967 in the above three areas are much similar each other, but significant differencies are found in the production functions of 1975. In other words, sawmill productivity was mainly restricted by capital deficiencies in all areas in 1967, but this situation was succeeded only by N-E area in 1975. The range of sum of regression coefficients is 1.0437-1.4214, this indicates increasing rates of return to scale. 3. The annual rates of technical changes in B-I, S-W and N-E areas for the observed period are 17.6, 7.6 and 2.2 percents respectively. Busan-Incheon is the only area where labor productivity is higher than that of capital. 4. The best combination of production factors for maximizing firm's profit is subject to the changes of input and output prices. With some assumptions of prices and costs, the optimum levels of power and labor input in B-I, S-W and N-E areas are 57:17, 427:94 and 192:27.

• Journal of Veterinary Clinics
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.105-110
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• 2006

A three-layer, feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN) with sixteen input neurons, three hidden neurons, and one output neuron was developed to identify the presence of infectious bronchitis (IB) infection as early as possible in laying hen flocks. Retrospective data from flocks that enrolled IB surveillance program between May 2003 and November 2005 were used to build the ANN. Data set of 86 flocks was divided randomly into two sets: 77 cases for training set and 9 cases for testing set. Input factors were 16 epidemiological findings including characteristics of the layer house, management practice, flock size, and the output was either presence or absence of IB. ANN was trained using training set with a back-propagation algorithm and test set was used to determine the network's capability to predict outcomes that it has never seen. Diagnostic performance of the trained network was evaluated by constructing receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve with the area under the curve (AUC), which were also used to determine the best positivity criterion for the model. Several different ANNs with different structures were created. The best-fitted trained network, IBV_D1, was able to predict IB in 73 cases out of 77 (diagnostic accuracy 94.8%) in the training set. Sensitivity and specificity of the trained neural network was 95.5% (42/44, 95% CI, 84.5-99.4) and 93.9% (31/33, 95% CI, 79.8-99.3), respectively. For testing set, AVC of the ROC curve for the IBV_D1 network was 0.948 (SE=0.086, 95% CI 0.592-0.961) in recognizing IB infection status accurately. At a criterion of 0.7149, the diagnostic accuracy was the highest with a 88.9% with the highest sensitivity of 100%. With this value of sensitivity and specificity together with assumed 44% of IB prevalence, IBV_D1 network showed a PPV of 80% and an NPV of 100%. Based on these findings, the authors conclude that neural network can be successfully applied to the development of a screening model for identifying IB infection in laying hen flocks.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.63-86
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• 2010

Personalized services directly and indirectly acquire personal data, in part, to provide customers with higher-value services that are specifically context-relevant (such as place and time). Information technologies continue to mature and develop, providing greatly improved performance. Sensory networks and intelligent software can now obtain context data, and that is the cornerstone for providing personalized, context-specific services. Yet, the danger of overflowing personal information is increasing because the data retrieved by the sensors usually contains privacy information. Various technical characteristics of context-aware applications have more troubling implications for information privacy. In parallel with increasing use of context for service personalization, information privacy concerns have also increased such as an unrestricted availability of context information. Those privacy concerns are consistently regarded as a critical issue facing context-aware personalized service success. The entire field of information privacy is growing as an important area of research, with many new definitions and terminologies, because of a need for a better understanding of information privacy concepts. Especially, it requires that the factors of information privacy should be revised according to the characteristics of new technologies. However, previous information privacy factors of context-aware applications have at least two shortcomings. First, there has been little overview of the technology characteristics of context-aware computing. Existing studies have only focused on a small subset of the technical characteristics of context-aware computing. Therefore, there has not been a mutually exclusive set of factors that uniquely and completely describe information privacy on context-aware applications. Second, user survey has been widely used to identify factors of information privacy in most studies despite the limitation of users' knowledge and experiences about context-aware computing technology. To date, since context-aware services have not been widely deployed on a commercial scale yet, only very few people have prior experiences with context-aware personalized services. It is difficult to build users' knowledge about context-aware technology even by increasing their understanding in various ways: scenarios, pictures, flash animation, etc. Nevertheless, conducting a survey, assuming that the participants have sufficient experience or understanding about the technologies shown in the survey, may not be absolutely valid. Moreover, some surveys are based solely on simplifying and hence unrealistic assumptions (e.g., they only consider location information as a context data). A better understanding of information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services is highly needed. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to identify a generic set of factors for elemental information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services and to develop a rank-order list of information privacy concern factors. We consider overall technology characteristics to establish a mutually exclusive set of factors. A Delphi survey, a rigorous data collection method, was deployed to obtain a reliable opinion from the experts and to produce a rank-order list. It, therefore, lends itself well to obtaining a set of universal factors of information privacy concern and its priority. An international panel of researchers and practitioners who have the expertise in privacy and context-aware system fields were involved in our research. Delphi rounds formatting will faithfully follow the procedure for the Delphi study proposed by Okoli and Pawlowski. This will involve three general rounds: (1) brainstorming for important factors; (2) narrowing down the original list to the most important ones; and (3) ranking the list of important factors. For this round only, experts were treated as individuals, not panels. Adapted from Okoli and Pawlowski, we outlined the process of administrating the study. We performed three rounds. In the first and second rounds of the Delphi questionnaire, we gathered a set of exclusive factors for information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services. The respondents were asked to provide at least five main factors for the most appropriate understanding of the information privacy concern in the first round. To do so, some of the main factors found in the literature were presented to the participants. The second round of the questionnaire discussed the main factor provided in the first round, fleshed out with relevant sub-factors. Respondents were then requested to evaluate each sub factor's suitability against the corresponding main factors to determine the final sub-factors from the candidate factors. The sub-factors were found from the literature survey. Final factors selected by over 50% of experts. In the third round, a list of factors with corresponding questions was provided, and the respondents were requested to assess the importance of each main factor and its corresponding sub factors. Finally, we calculated the mean rank of each item to make a final result. While analyzing the data, we focused on group consensus rather than individual insistence. To do so, a concordance analysis, which measures the consistency of the experts' responses over successive rounds of the Delphi, was adopted during the survey process. As a result, experts reported that context data collection and high identifiable level of identical data are the most important factor in the main factors and sub factors, respectively. Additional important sub-factors included diverse types of context data collected, tracking and recording functionalities, and embedded and disappeared sensor devices. The average score of each factor is very useful for future context-aware personalized service development in the view of the information privacy. The final factors have the following differences comparing to those proposed in other studies. First, the concern factors differ from existing studies, which are based on privacy issues that may occur during the lifecycle of acquired user information. However, our study helped to clarify these sometimes vague issues by determining which privacy concern issues are viable based on specific technical characteristics in context-aware personalized services. Since a context-aware service differs in its technical characteristics compared to other services, we selected specific characteristics that had a higher potential to increase user's privacy concerns. Secondly, this study considered privacy issues in terms of service delivery and display that were almost overlooked in existing studies by introducing IPOS as the factor division. Lastly, in each factor, it correlated the level of importance with professionals' opinions as to what extent users have privacy concerns. The reason that it did not select the traditional method questionnaire at that time is that context-aware personalized service considered the absolute lack in understanding and experience of users with new technology. For understanding users' privacy concerns, professionals in the Delphi questionnaire process selected context data collection, tracking and recording, and sensory network as the most important factors among technological characteristics of context-aware personalized services. In the creation of a context-aware personalized services, this study demonstrates the importance and relevance of determining an optimal methodology, and which technologies and in what sequence are needed, to acquire what types of users' context information. Most studies focus on which services and systems should be provided and developed by utilizing context information on the supposition, along with the development of context-aware technology. However, the results in this study show that, in terms of users' privacy, it is necessary to pay greater attention to the activities that acquire context information. To inspect the results in the evaluation of sub factor, additional studies would be necessary for approaches on reducing users' privacy concerns toward technological characteristics such as highly identifiable level of identical data, diverse types of context data collected, tracking and recording functionality, embedded and disappearing sensor devices. The factor ranked the next highest level of importance after input is a context-aware service delivery that is related to output. The results show that delivery and display showing services to users in a context-aware personalized services toward the anywhere-anytime-any device concept have been regarded as even more important than in previous computing environment. Considering the concern factors to develop context aware personalized services will help to increase service success rate and hopefully user acceptance for those services. Our future work will be to adopt these factors for qualifying context aware service development projects such as u-city development projects in terms of service quality and hence user acceptance.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.139-155
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• 2009

For the last few decades, many studies have tried to explore and unveil venture companies' success factors and unique features in order to identify the sources of such companies' competitive advantages over their rivals. Such venture companies have shown tendency to give high returns for investors generally making the best use of information technology. For this reason, many venture companies are keen on attracting avid investors' attention. Investors generally make their investment decisions by carefully examining the evaluation criteria of the alternatives. To them, credit rating information provided by international rating agencies, such as Standard and Poor's, Moody's and Fitch is crucial source as to such pivotal concerns as companies stability, growth, and risk status. But these types of information are generated only for the companies issuing corporate bonds, not venture companies. Therefore, this study proposes a method for evaluating venture businesses by presenting our recent empirical results using financial data of Korean venture companies listed on KOSDAQ in Korea exchange. In addition, this paper used multi-class SVM for the prediction of DEA-based efficiency rating for venture businesses, which was derived from our proposed method. Our approach sheds light on ways to locate efficient companies generating high level of profits. Above all, in determining effective ways to evaluate a venture firm's efficiency, it is important to understand the major contributing factors of such efficiency. Therefore, this paper is constructed on the basis of following two ideas to classify which companies are more efficient venture companies: i) making DEA based multi-class rating for sample companies and ii) developing multi-class SVM-based efficiency prediction model for classifying all companies. First, the Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA) is a non-parametric multiple input-output efficiency technique that measures the relative efficiency of decision making units(DMUs) using a linear programming based model. It is non-parametric because it requires no assumption on the shape or parameters of the underlying production function. DEA has been already widely applied for evaluating the relative efficiency of DMUs. Recently, a number of DEA based studies have evaluated the efficiency of various types of companies, such as internet companies and venture companies. It has been also applied to corporate credit ratings. In this study we utilized DEA for sorting venture companies by efficiency based ratings. The Support Vector Machine(SVM), on the other hand, is a popular technique for solving data classification problems. In this paper, we employed SVM to classify the efficiency ratings in IT venture companies according to the results of DEA. The SVM method was first developed by Vapnik (1995). As one of many machine learning techniques, SVM is based on a statistical theory. Thus far, the method has shown good performances especially in generalizing capacity in classification tasks, resulting in numerous applications in many areas of business, SVM is basically the algorithm that finds the maximum margin hyperplane, which is the maximum separation between classes. According to this method, support vectors are the closest to the maximum margin hyperplane. If it is impossible to classify, we can use the kernel function. In the case of nonlinear class boundaries, we can transform the inputs into a high-dimensional feature space, This is the original input space and is mapped into a high-dimensional dot-product space. Many studies applied SVM to the prediction of bankruptcy, the forecast a financial time series, and the problem of estimating credit rating, In this study we employed SVM for developing data mining-based efficiency prediction model. We used the Gaussian radial function as a kernel function of SVM. In multi-class SVM, we adopted one-against-one approach between binary classification method and two all-together methods, proposed by Weston and Watkins(1999) and Crammer and Singer(2000), respectively. In this research, we used corporate information of 154 companies listed on KOSDAQ market in Korea exchange. We obtained companies' financial information of 2005 from the KIS(Korea Information Service, Inc.). Using this data, we made multi-class rating with DEA efficiency and built multi-class prediction model based data mining. Among three manners of multi-classification, the hit ratio of the Weston and Watkins method is the best in the test data set. In multi classification problems as efficiency ratings of venture business, it is very useful for investors to know the class with errors, one class difference, when it is difficult to find out the accurate class in the actual market. So we presented accuracy results within 1-class errors, and the Weston and Watkins method showed 85.7% accuracy in our test samples. We conclude that the DEA based multi-class approach in venture business generates more information than the binary classification problem, notwithstanding its efficiency level. We believe this model can help investors in decision making as it provides a reliably tool to evaluate venture companies in the financial domain. For the future research, we perceive the need to enhance such areas as the variable selection process, the parameter selection of kernel function, the generalization, and the sample size of multi-class.

• Journal of Korea Port Economic Association
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.213-234
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• 2011

The literature on efficiency of the maritime and shipping industry has typically focused on container ports and terminals. The study presented in this paper uses data envelopment analysis to evaluate ocean carriers based on financial and operational data from 2004 to 2007. A comparison is made up of the efficiency of global ocean carriers in efficiency of financial and operational performance respectively. A positive correlation is shown between the input and output data. In the static-efficiency analysis, we describe CCR, BCC and scale efficiency of Global Ocean Carriers in 2007. And we also provide about the stability and trend of their efficiency for four years (2004-2007) in the dynamic-efficiency analysis. The empirical results validate the necessity of restoring freight rates to facilitate the efficiency of the global ocean carriers supported by adjust of the supply of containership space. The study provides a basis for estimating the competitiveness of international shipping companies, for benchmarking best practice and for identifying the specific factors and causes of inefficiency.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.2455-2464
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• 2013

This study is focused on the effect of reformation of public transportation system on the efficiency of bus route system as a result of change of government subsidy scheme. Two types of government subsidy scheme has been considered and before and after analysis by Data Envelopment Analysis technique has been carried out for bus routes in Ulsan Metropolitan City. The analysis output has shown that there is no clear evidence to clarify the relationship between the change of government subsidy scheme and the efficiency of bus route system. There are two types of backgrounds may be suggested for this situation such as more longer period necessary to identify the policy effect and limitation to increase the number of passenger in a provincial city. Tobit regression analysis has also been conducted to discover the most effective variables for maximum efficiency and three variables including route length, frequency per vehicle per day, and headway are found to be influential. It is also seen that strategy to minimising input factors and service upgrade plan such as shortened route length and headway, increasing frequency per vehicle are necessary to develop the efficiency of bus routes operated in Ulsan city.