• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.19 no.11
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• pp.37-48
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• 2021

Purpose: The importance of sustainability in the supply chain has steadily risen in recent decades as a result of the growing awareness on the social issues. The purpose of this research is to examine the relationship between social sustainability practices and performance outcomes, as well as explore the mediating role of supply chain integration on that relationship. Research design, data and methodology: PLS-SEM model is developed to identify the impacts of sustainability on performance outcomes and the mediating role of supply chain integration. We received 285 responses from medium and large companies located in Vietnam, and after filtering, 206 responses were used for further analysis. Results: Our findings showed that sustainability impacts significantly on integration and performance in the supply chain. Moreover, the result indicates that supplier integration and internal integration mediate the relationship between social sustainability practices and supply chain performance, while customer integration mediation role was not found significant at all. Conclusions: Our results prove that social sustainability practices can link all the stakeholders and enhance collaboration. To maintain sustainable development, firms should embrace values of sustainability to improve the well-being, working condition, and healthcare of their employees as well as the advancement of local society.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.19-38
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• 2017

Collaborative filtering (CF) algorithm has been popularly used for implementing recommender systems. Until now, there have been many prior studies to improve the accuracy of CF. Among them, some recent studies adopt 'hybrid recommendation approach', which enhances the performance of conventional CF by using additional information. In this research, we propose a new hybrid recommender system which fuses CF and the results from the social network analysis on trust and distrust relationship networks among users to enhance prediction accuracy. The proposed algorithm of our study is based on memory-based CF. But, when calculating the similarity between users in CF, our proposed algorithm considers not only the correlation of the users' numeric rating patterns, but also the users' in-degree centrality values derived from trust and distrust relationship networks. In specific, it is designed to amplify the similarity between a target user and his or her neighbor when the neighbor has higher in-degree centrality in the trust relationship network. Also, it attenuates the similarity between a target user and his or her neighbor when the neighbor has higher in-degree centrality in the distrust relationship network. Our proposed algorithm considers four (4) types of user relationships - direct trust, indirect trust, direct distrust, and indirect distrust - in total. And, it uses four adjusting coefficients, which adjusts the level of amplification / attenuation for in-degree centrality values derived from direct / indirect trust and distrust relationship networks. To determine optimal adjusting coefficients, genetic algorithms (GA) has been adopted. Under this background, we named our proposed algorithm as SNACF-GA (Social Network Analysis - based CF using GA). To validate the performance of the SNACF-GA, we used a real-world data set which is called 'Extended Epinions dataset' provided by 'trustlet.org'. It is the data set contains user responses (rating scores and reviews) after purchasing specific items (e.g. car, movie, music, book) as well as trust / distrust relationship information indicating whom to trust or distrust between users. The experimental system was basically developed using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), but we also used UCINET 6 for calculating the in-degree centrality of trust / distrust relationship networks. In addition, we used Palisade Software's Evolver, which is a commercial software implements genetic algorithm. To examine the effectiveness of our proposed system more precisely, we adopted two comparison models. The first comparison model is conventional CF. It only uses users' explicit numeric ratings when calculating the similarities between users. That is, it does not consider trust / distrust relationship between users at all. The second comparison model is SNACF (Social Network Analysis - based CF). SNACF differs from the proposed algorithm SNACF-GA in that it considers only direct trust / distrust relationships. It also does not use GA optimization. The performances of the proposed algorithm and comparison models were evaluated by using average MAE (mean absolute error). Experimental result showed that the optimal adjusting coefficients for direct trust, indirect trust, direct distrust, indirect distrust were 0, 1.4287, 1.5, 0.4615 each. This implies that distrust relationships between users are more important than trust ones in recommender systems. From the perspective of recommendation accuracy, SNACF-GA (Avg. MAE = 0.111943), the proposed algorithm which reflects both direct and indirect trust / distrust relationships information, was found to greatly outperform a conventional CF (Avg. MAE = 0.112638). Also, the algorithm showed better recommendation accuracy than the SNACF (Avg. MAE = 0.112209). To confirm whether these differences are statistically significant or not, we applied paired samples t-test. The results from the paired samples t-test presented that the difference between SNACF-GA and conventional CF was statistical significant at the 1% significance level, and the difference between SNACF-GA and SNACF was statistical significant at the 5%. Our study found that the trust/distrust relationship can be important information for improving performance of recommendation algorithms. Especially, distrust relationship information was found to have a greater impact on the performance improvement of CF. This implies that we need to have more attention on distrust (negative) relationships rather than trust (positive) ones when tracking and managing social relationships between users.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.47-57
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• 2009

Collaborative tagging systems allow users to attach tags to diverse sharable contents in social networks. These tags provide usefulness in reusing the contents for all community members as well as their creators. Three-dimensional data composed of users, items, and tags are used in the collaborative tag-based recommendation. They are generally more voluminous and sparse than two-dimensional data composed of users and items. Therefore, there are many difficulties in applying existing collaborative filtering methods directly to them. Latent factor models, which are also successful in the area of collaborative filtering recently, discover latent features(factors) for explaining observed values and solve problems based on the features. However, establishing the models require much time and efforts. In order to apply the latent factor models to three-dimensional collaborative filtering data, we have to overcome the difficulty of establishing them. This paper proposes various methods for determining preferences of users to items via establishing an intuitive model by assuming tags used for items as latent factors to users and items respectively. They are compared using real data for concluding desirable directions.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.10 no.1 s.18
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• pp.49-54
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• 2006

Recently, e-mail has become an important way of communications in IT societies, but it creates various social problems due to increase of spam mails. Even though many organizations and cooperation have been trying researches to develop spam mail blocking technologies, a lot of cost and system complexities are required because of varieties of spam blocking technologies. In this paper, we designed of the SMBC(Spam Mail Blocking Center) using the Fit FA(Filtering Algorithm) Finder. Fit-FA Finder that search and applises spam mail filtering algorithm of the most suitable confrontation according to type of spam mail. The system of spam mail filtering is decided performance of the system by procedure that spam filter is used. Go through designed Fit-FA Finder and reduced unnecessary filtering process and processing time and load than appointment order filter application way of existent spam mail interception system.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.173-178
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• 2022

Recently, a recommendation system using deep learning in social network services has been actively studied. However, in the case of a recommendation system using deep learning, the cold start problem and the increased learning time due to the complex computation exist as the disadvantage. In this paper, the user-tailored exercise routine recommendation algorithm is proposed using the user's metadata. Metadata (the user's height, weight, sex, etc.) set as the input of the model is applied to the designed model in the proposed algorithms. The exercise recommendation system model proposed in this paper is designed based on the neural collaborative filtering (NCF) algorithm using multi-layer perceptron and matrix factorization algorithm. The learning proceeds with proposed model by receiving user metadata and exercise information. The model where learning is completed provides recommendation score to the user when a specific exercise is set as the input of the model. As a result of the experiment, the proposed exercise recommendation system model showed 10% improvement in recommended performance and 50% reduction in learning time compared to the existing NCF model.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.139-152
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• 2011

Recommender systems have become an important research field since the emergence of the first paper on collaborative filtering in the mid-1990s. In general, recommender systems are defined as the supporting systems which help users to find information, products, or services (such as books, movies, music, digital products, web sites, and TV programs) by aggregating and analyzing suggestions from other users, which mean reviews from various authorities, and user attributes. However, as academic researches on recommender systems have increased significantly over the last ten years, more researches are required to be applicable in the real world situation. Because research field on recommender systems is still wide and less mature than other research fields. Accordingly, the existing articles on recommender systems need to be reviewed toward the next generation of recommender systems. However, it would be not easy to confine the recommender system researches to specific disciplines, considering the nature of the recommender system researches. So, we reviewed all articles on recommender systems from 37 journals which were published from 2001 to 2010. The 37 journals are selected from top 125 journals of the MIS Journal Rankings. Also, the literature search was based on the descriptors "Recommender system", "Recommendation system", "Personalization system", "Collaborative filtering" and "Contents filtering". The full text of each article was reviewed to eliminate the article that was not actually related to recommender systems. Many of articles were excluded because the articles such as Conference papers, master's and doctoral dissertations, textbook, unpublished working papers, non-English publication papers and news were unfit for our research. We classified articles by year of publication, journals, recommendation fields, and data mining techniques. The recommendation fields and data mining techniques of 187 articles are reviewed and classified into eight recommendation fields (book, document, image, movie, music, shopping, TV program, and others) and eight data mining techniques (association rule, clustering, decision tree, k-nearest neighbor, link analysis, neural network, regression, and other heuristic methods). The results represented in this paper have several significant implications. First, based on previous publication rates, the interest in the recommender system related research will grow significantly in the future. Second, 49 articles are related to movie recommendation whereas image and TV program recommendation are identified in only 6 articles. This result has been caused by the easy use of MovieLens data set. So, it is necessary to prepare data set of other fields. Third, recently social network analysis has been used in the various applications. However studies on recommender systems using social network analysis are deficient. Henceforth, we expect that new recommendation approaches using social network analysis will be developed in the recommender systems. So, it will be an interesting and further research area to evaluate the recommendation system researches using social method analysis. This result provides trend of recommender system researches by examining the published literature, and provides practitioners and researchers with insight and future direction on recommender systems. We hope that this research helps anyone who is interested in recommender systems research to gain insight for future research.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.305-316
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• 2011

Recommender system is the system which, by using automated information filtering technology, recommends products or services to the customers who are likely to be interested in. Those systems are widely used in many different Web retailers such as Amazon.com, Netfix.com, and CDNow.com. Various recommender systems have been developed. Among them, Collaborative Filtering (CF) has been known as the most successful and commonly used approach. CF identifies customers whose tastes are similar to those of a given customer, and recommends items those customers have liked in the past. Numerous CF algorithms have been developed to increase the performance of recommender systems. However, the relative performances of CF algorithms are known to be domain and data dependent. It is very time-consuming and expensive to implement and launce a CF recommender system, and also the system unsuited for the given domain provides customers with poor quality recommendations that make them easily annoyed. Therefore, predicting in advance whether the performance of CF recommender system is acceptable or not is practically important and needed. In this study, we propose a decision making guideline which helps decide whether CF is adoptable for a given application with certain transaction data characteristics. Several previous studies reported that sparsity, gray sheep, cold-start, coverage, and serendipity could affect the performance of CF, but the theoretical and empirical justification of such factors is lacking. Recently there are many studies paying attention to Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a method to analyze social relationships among people. SNA is a method to measure and visualize the linkage structure and status focusing on interaction among objects within communication group. CF analyzes the similarity among previous ratings or purchases of each customer, finds the relationships among the customers who have similarities, and then uses the relationships for recommendations. Thus CF can be modeled as a social network in which customers are nodes and purchase relationships between customers are links. Under the assumption that SNA could facilitate an exploration of the topological properties of the network structure that are implicit in transaction data for CF recommendations, we focus on density, clustering coefficient, and centralization which are ones of the most commonly used measures to capture topological properties of the social network structure. While network density, expressed as a proportion of the maximum possible number of links, captures the density of the whole network, the clustering coefficient captures the degree to which the overall network contains localized pockets of dense connectivity. Centralization reflects the extent to which connections are concentrated in a small number of nodes rather than distributed equally among all nodes. We explore how these SNA measures affect the performance of CF performance and how they interact to each other. Our experiments used sales transaction data from H department store, one of the well?known department stores in Korea. Total 396 data set were sampled to construct various types of social networks. The dependant variable measuring process consists of three steps; analysis of customer similarities, construction of a social network, and analysis of social network patterns. We used UCINET 6.0 for SNA. The experiments conducted the 3-way ANOVA which employs three SNA measures as dependant variables, and the recommendation accuracy measured by F1-measure as an independent variable. The experiments report that 1) each of three SNA measures affects the recommendation accuracy, 2) the density's effect to the performance overrides those of clustering coefficient and centralization (i.e., CF adoption is not a good decision if the density is low), and 3) however though the density is low, the performance of CF is comparatively good when the clustering coefficient is low. We expect that these experiment results help firms decide whether CF recommender system is adoptable for their business domain with certain transaction data characteristics.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.129-134
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• 2015

Since automatic social engineering based spam attacks induce for users to click or receive the short message service (SMS), e-mail, site address and make a relationship with an unknown friend, it is very easy for them to active in online social networks. The previous spam detection schemes only apply manual filtering of the system managers or labeling classifications regardless of the features of social networks. In this paper, we propose the spam detection metric after reflecting on a couple of features of social networks followed by analysis of real social network data set, Twitter spam. In addition, we provide the online social networks based unsupervised scheme for automated social engineering spam with self organizing map (SOM). Through the performance evaluation, we show the detection accuracy up to 90% and the possibility of real time training for the spam detection without the manager.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.123-140
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• 2009

Collaborative filtering recommends products using customers' preferences, so it cannot recommend products to the new customer who has no preference information. This paper proposes a novel approach to new customer recommendations using the social network analysis which is used to search relationships among social entities such as genetics network, traffic network, organization network, etc. The proposed recommendation method identifies customers most likely to be neighbors to the new customer using the centrality theory in social network analysis and recommends products those customers have liked in the past. The procedure of our method is divided into four phases : purchase similarity analysis, social network construction, centrality-based neighborhood formation, and recommendation generation. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we have conducted several experiments using a data set from a department store in Korea. Our method was compared with the best-seller-based method that uses the best-seller list to generate recommendations for the new customer. The experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the best-seller-based method as measured by F1-measure.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.97-117
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• 2012

Nowadays, Internet users tend to do a variety of actions at the same time such as web browsing, social networking and multimedia consumption. While watching a video, once a user is interested in any product, the user has to do information searches to get to know more about the product. With a conventional approach, user has to search it separately with search engines like Bing or Google, which might be inconvenient and time-consuming. For this reason, a video annotation platform has been developed in order to provide users more convenient and more interactive ways with video content. In the future of smart TV environment, users can follow annotated information, for example, a link to a vendor to buy the product of interest. It is even better to enable users to search for information by directly discussing with friends. Users can effectively get useful and relevant information about the product from friends who share common interests or might have experienced it before, which is more reliable than the results from search engines. Social networking services provide an appropriate environment for people to share products so that they can show new things to their friends and to share their personal experiences on any specific product. Meanwhile, they can also absorb the most relevant information about the product that they are interested in by either comments or discussion amongst friends. However, within a very huge graph of friends, determining the most appropriate persons to ask for information about a specific product has still a limitation within the existing conventional approach. Once users want to share or discuss a product, they simply share it to all friends as new feeds. This means a newly posted article is blindly spread to all friends without considering their background interests or knowledge. In this way, the number of responses back will be huge. Users cannot easily absorb the relevant and useful responses from friends, since they are from various fields of interest and knowledge. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose a method to filter a user's friends for information search, which leverages semantic video annotation and social networking services. Our method filters and brings out who can give user useful information about a specific product. By examining the existing Facebook information regarding users and their social graph, we construct a user profile of product interest. With user's permission and authentication, user's particular activities are enriched with the domain-specific ontology such as GoodRelations and BestBuy Data sources. Besides, we assume that the object in the video is already annotated using Linked Data. Thus, the detail information of the product that user would like to ask for more information is retrieved via product URI. Our system calculates the similarities among them in order to identify the most suitable friends for seeking information about the mentioned product. The system filters a user's friends according to their score which tells the order of whom can highly likely give the user useful information about a specific product of interest. We have conducted an experiment with a group of respondents in order to verify and evaluate our system. First, the user profile accuracy evaluation is conducted to demonstrate how much our system constructed user profile of product interest represents user's interest correctly. Then, the evaluation on filtering method is made by inspecting the ranked results with human judgment. The results show that our method works effectively and efficiently in filtering. Our system fulfills user needs by supporting user to select appropriate friends for seeking useful information about a specific product that user is curious about. As a result, it helps to influence and convince user in purchase decisions.