In information system (IS) acquisition, one of the major challenges is to carry out required changes in the organization. One major problem is the lack of organizational support, user participation and competence. The process of gaining organizational support has been presented as the legitimation process. The legitimation process includes the actions taken by a legitimation seeker to gain legitimation from legitimation providers. In IS acquisition, the individuals' behavioural patterns can be perceived as representing specific roles. Published studies combining these roles and actors in the legitimation process in IS acquisition are rare. Consequently, we will explore the roles in the IS acquisition legitimation process in two cases. As a result, we illustrate how legitimation appears in practice and provide a deeper understanding of how different roles act in legitimating IS acquisitions.

Interactive television provides useful services for older people. These include social networking tools, video on demand, and broadcast TV. Many of the Internet-mediated services require text entry. The usual multi-tap text entry supplied with TV remote control is not suitable to many older people. In this paper, we evaluate WeSlide, a gestural text entry technique that uses the Wiimote as the input device. We conducted a study to compare WeSlide with the multi-tap technique. WeSlide was faster and less error prone and users strongly preferred it over multi-tap.

The health of a software ecosystem is argued to be a key indicator of well-being, longevity and performance of a network of companies. In this paper, we address what scientific literature actually means with the concept of ‘ecosystem health’ by selecting relevant articles with systematic literature review. Based on the final set of 38 papers, we found that despite a common base, the term has been used to depict a wide range of hoped characteristics of a software ecosystem. However, the number of studies addressing the topic is shown to grow while empirical studies are still rare. Thus, further studies should aim to standardize the terminology and concepts in order to create a common base for future work. Further work is needed also to develop early indicators that warn and guides companies on problems with their ecosystems.

Via the recent proliferation of consumer-grade head-mounted VR technologies, the retailers as well as related scholarly areas have started to increasingly notice the possible potential of virtual reality. However, there is no coherent understanding of the state-of-the-art of the literature on VR shopping, how VR shopping has been investigated and what empirically indicated benefits VR has for a variety of marketing outcomes. Therefore, in this paper, we systematically review the published body of literature on VR shopping (N = 40). The current study contributes to the VR shopping and marketing literature by mapping the VR technologies, product types, consumer experiences and research methods in the extant literature. The review shows that the literature on VR shopping is still in its infancy and there remains ample room for progression both in breadth and depth in the literature on VR shopping in terms of methodological rigor and theoretical prowess.

A number of spatially-localised semantic parts of vehicles sensitive to pose changes are encoded their visible probabilities into a mid-level feature vector. Car pose estimation is then formulated into a regression on concatenated low-and mid-level features to continuously changing viewing angles. Each dimension of our visibility-Aware part codes separates all the training samples into two groups according to its visual existence in images, which provides additional part-specific range constraint of viewing angles. Moreover, the proposed codes can alleviate the suffering from sparse and imbalanced data distribution in the light of modelling latent dependency across angle targets. Experimental evaluation for car pose estimation on the EPFL Multi-View Car benchmark demonstrates significant improvement of our method over the state-of-The-Art regression methods, especially when only sparse and imbalanced data is available.

Startups are creating innovative new products and services while seeking fast growth with little resources. The capability to produce software products with good user experience (UX) can help the startup to gain positive attention and revenue. Practices and needs for UX design in startups are not well understood. Research can provide insight on how to design UX with little resources as well as to gaps about what kind of better practices should be developed. In this paper we describe the results of an interview study with eight startups operating in Finland. Current UX practices, challenges and needs for the future were investigated. The results show that personal networks have a significant role in helping startups gain professional UX advice as well as user feedback when designing for UX. When scaling up startups expect usage data and analytics to guide them towards better UX design.

Open education and distance learning are not new pedagogical innovations. However, through the introduction of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), they have recently attracted a great deal of attention among educational establishments. MOOCs can be considered a threat to small universities, but, on the other hand, they can also be a means of providing opportunities to develop their core activities. The challenge is how universities will perceive this phenomenon and take advantage of the new chances it brings. This paper examines the utilization of MOOCs from several points of view. The focus is on degree courses and continuing education offered by universities, but in-house personnel training in companies is also discussed. The issue is how to find proper ways to utilize third-party MOOCs in these three domains. Based on our investigations, the paper introduces a preliminary model for exploiting MOOCs in the development of education and training programs.

When utilising multidimensional OLAP (On-Line Analytic Processing) analysis models in Business Intelligence analysis, it is common that the users need to add new, unanticipated dimensions to the OLAP cube. In a conventional implementation, this would imply frequent re-designs of the cube's dimensions. We present an alternative method for the addition of new dimensions. Interestingly, the same design method can also be used to import EAV (Entity-Attribute-Value) tables into a cube. EAV tables have earlier been used to represent extremely sparse data in applications such as biomedical databases. Though space-efficient, EAV-representation can be awkward to query. Our EAV-to-OLAP cube methodology has an advantage of managing many-to-many relationships in a natural manner. Simple theoretical analysis shows that the methodology is efficient in space consumption. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach in terms of the speed of OLAP cube re-processing when importing EAV-style data, comparing the performance of our cube design method with the performance of the conventional cube design.

Elicitation studies allow collecting interaction methods directly from end-users by presenting the users with the end effect of an operation and then asking them to perform the action that caused it. Applying elicitation studies in the domain of collocated interaction might enable designing more intuitive and natural group interaction methods. However, in the past elicitation studies have primarily been conducted with individual users - they have rarely been applied to groups. In this paper, we report our initial experiences in using the elicitation study methodology to generate interaction methods for groups of collocated users with wearable devices.

A software defect that exposes a software system to a cyber security attack is known as a software vulnerability. A software security exploit is an engineered software solution that successfully exploits the vulnerability. Exploits are used to break into computer systems, but exploits are currently used also for security testing, security analytics, intrusion detection, consultation, and other legitimate and legal purposes. A well-established market emerged in the 2000s for software vulnerabilities. The current market segments populated by small and medium-sized companies exhibit signals that may eventually lead to a similar industrialization of software exploits. To these ends and against these industry trends, this paper observes the first online market place for trading exploits between buyers and sellers. The paper adopts three different perspectives to study the case. The paper (a) portrays the studied exploit market place against the historical background in the software security industry. A qualitative assessment is made to (b) evaluate the case against the common characteristics of traditional online market places. The qualitative observations are used in the quantitative part (c) for predicting the price of exploits with partial least squares regression. The results show that (i) the case is unique from a historical perspective, although (ii) the online market place characteristics are familiar. The regression estimates also indicate that (iii) the pricing of exploits is only partially dependent on such factors as the targeted platform, the date of disclosure of the exploited vulnerability, and the quality assurance service provided by the market place provider. The results allow to contemplate (iv) practical means for enhancing the market place.

Cloud orchestration frameworks are commonly used to deploy and operate cloud infrastructure. Their role spans both vertically (deployment on infrastructure, platform, application and microservice levels) and horizontally (deployments from many distinct cloud resource providers). However, despite the central role of orchestration, the popular orchestration frameworks lack mechanisms to provide security guarantees for cloud operators. In this work, we analyze the security landscape of cloud orchestration frameworks for multi-cloud infrastructure. We identify a set of attack scenarios, define security enforcement enablers and propose an architecture for a security-enabled cloud orchestration framework for multi-cloud application deployments.

To improve both the quality and the trustworthiness perception of Open Source Software (OSS) products, we introduce the new idea of certifying the testing process of an OSS system. While the global certification of an OSS product is an emerging research field, the idea of certifying only its testing process has never been studied, conversely to the case of Closed Source Software (CSS) products. The certification of the testing process has a twofold goal: simplify the process of testing OSS products by guiding developers in identifying the proper testing strategies and the limitations of their existing testing plans; simplify the selection of equivalent OSS and CSS products by evaluating the certificates released by the companies. Specifically, in this paper we discuss 1) a set of issues, inherent to OSS, that must be taken into account when testing the OSS product; 2) a preliminary methodology that suggests how to certificate the testing process of OSS products; 3) the BusyBox case study that shows how our idea can be applied to real-life OSS.

Software Quality Assurance is a complex and time-expensive task. In this study we want to observe how agile developers react to just-in-time metrics about the code smells they introduce, and how the metrics influence the quality of the output.

The purpose of this paper is to study the role of networking in the development and present situation of Finnish software companies. Although the target of interest of this study is Finland, the conclusions can also to some extent be applied to other countries with mature software industries. In Finland there is uniquely wide longitudinal material on the software business available; the software industry survey is an annual study targeted for the branch, which has already been repeated for 18 consecutive years. The study shows that networking has been a key trend in the industry and also a driver for internationalization, but as it has not been identified very well in networking literature concerning the software industry, there is a clear need for further examination of software industry networks.

In the educational context, understanding the future is important for two reasons. First, we are educating people for future tasks, which need skills that are useful in the future. Secondly, educators have to be able to select the most promising tools and technologies to apply in their work. The problem is that there is no clear way to weigh the importance of the alternatives - what the real importance of a certain technology will be in the near future and especially in the long term. In our paper, we focus on analyzing selected technologies. Our approach applies the framework developed by the authors. The promising technologies are reviewed by a systematic literature study, focusing on and restricted to the information and communication technology (ICT) sector. The findings are classified according to their importance and the time span of their effectiveness. The question we answer is What should every educator know about changes in technology?

In business intelligence, reporting is perceived by users as the most important area. Here, we present a case study of data integration for reporting within the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO produces Communicable Disease Epidemiological Profiles for emergency affected countries. Given the nature of emergencies, the production of these reports should be timely. In order to automate the production of the reports, we have introduced a method of integrating data from multiple sources by using the RDF (Resource Description Framework) format. The model of the data is described using an RDF ontology, making validation of the data from multiple sources possible. However, since RDF is highly technical, we have designed a graphical tool for the end user. The tool can be used to configure the data sources of a given report. After this, data for the report is generated from the sources. Finally, templates are used to generate the reports.

In the past ten years, the Web has become a dominant deployment environment for new software systems and applications. In view of its current popularity, it is easy to forget that only 10-15 years ago hardly any developer would write serious software applications for the Web. Today, the use of the web browser as a software platform is commonplace, and JavaScript has become one of the most popular programming languages in the world. In this paper we revisit some predictions that were made over ten years ago when the Lively Kernel project was started back in 2006. Ten years later, most of the elements of the original vision have been fulfilled, although not entirely in the fashion we originally envisioned. We look back at the Lively Kernel vision, reflecting our original goals to the state of the art in web programming today.

We live in a world of accelerating changes, where technology plays an important role as an enabler. Looking ahead means being prepared for these changes. Preparedness may be reactive - reacting to the situation at the moment something happens; proactive - being prepared in advance for a situation that may happen; or preactive - being able in advance to affect something that may happen in the future and how it happens. Forecasting the future helps us to be prepared for new situations. It is based on making predictions that are derived from understanding past and present data. Known data is organized in the form of trends and further extrapolated to cover the future. From the technical point of view, there are a variety of approaches for forecasting: algorithmic, simulation, statistical analysis etc. The methods used may be quantitative (future data is seen as a function of past data) or qualitative (subjective, based on the opinion or judgment of the target group used in the analysis). Technology is an essential part of education, both in supporting effective learning and as a content of teaching itself. As a result, every educator needs skills to analyze the future of relevant technologies. In this paper, we introduce a framework that can be used in analysis of the importance of technological changes in education and as a part of curricula. The approach is based on trend analysis and classification of the relevant technologies to take into account the time span of their effects in society. The question we answer in this paper is How can an educator analyze the consequences of technological changes in their work?.

The global rise in interest towards robotics and artificial intelligence is increasing the technology acceptance among companies. This further encourages manufacturing companies to invest more in robotics on their factory floor. A robot manipulator can be sufficiently mobile and dexterous to operate alongside a human as would any other colleague. However, a human-centric viewpoint is needed in the design of the work cell to provide optimal working conditions for humans and thereby enhance employee performance. We identified a set of factors required for human comfort during cooperation with robots. These factors were divided into two main groups: mental and physical. Both mental and physical factors were based on scientific work reviews, robotics standards, and recognized human factors via a case study. These factors together are the basis for a comfort zone concept in human-robot collaboration. This concept forms design principles for developing the physical work environment of the future.

Numerous users of social networking sites and services (SNS) suffer from technostress and its various strains that hinder well-being. Despite a growing research interest on technostress, the extant studies have not explained what kinds of various strains can SNS use create and how can these strains be traced back to different stressors. To address this gap in research, we employed a qualitative approach by narrative interviews. As a contribution, our findings introduce four SNS strains (concentration problems, sleep problems, identity problems, and social relation problems) and explain how they link with different underlying SNS stressors. As practical implications, the findings of this study can help technostressed users to identify their SNS strains, understand how they are created, and increase their possibilities to avoid the strains in the future.

Universities are still mainly preparing students for the world, where 'do something useful', i.e. 'do something with your hands' was the main principle and work was done during strictly regulated time. But world has changed and traditional areas of human activity (what also are the main target in University courses) are rapidly diminishing. More important have become virtual products - computer programs, mobile apps, social networks, new types of digital currencies, IOT (voice in your bathroom suggesting to buy the next model of Alexa), video games, interactive TV, virtual reality etc. Most of these new areas are not present in current curricula and there are problems with involving them in curricula - (working) students know (some aspects of) these areas better than many of university teachers, since corresponding knowledge is not yet present in textbooks - it is present only on Internet. The Internet strongly influences both what we teach and how we teach.

In task-based information searching, the task at hand is a central factor affecting information search. Task complexity, in particular, has been discovered to affect searching. In the present study, we shadowed the tasks of seven people working in city administration. The data consist of shadowing field notes, voice recordings, photographs and forms. We study, how task complexity affects information searching and information resource use. Task complexity was defined through the task performer's own experience (perceived task complexity) and her estimates of her a priori knowledge concerning the task. We analyzed the data both qualitatively and quantitatively, focusing on the links between task complexity and the use of information resources, information searching and problems encountered. We found that task complexity has a central but ambiguous relationship to task performance. The clearest differences were found between simple and complex tasks. In addition, perceived task complexity seems to affect the ways of performing the task more than a priori knowledge. The more complex a task is perceived, the more searches are performed and the more they concentrate on networked resources instead of information systems provided by the organization (SPOs). The use of resources on the task performer's PC and the SPOs decreases when complexity increases. In proportion, the use of networked resources and communication resources increases. The total number of information resources used is somewhat greater in complex and semi-complex tasks than in simple tasks; and each resource is used for a longer time on average. Our study shows that task context and especially task complexity seems to affect information searching and the selection of sources.

The military applications of interference mitigation are numerous, with the most obvious application being suppressing the effects of adversarial jamming. However, jamming mitigation also becomes essential in scenarios where the host force's jammer and signal intelligence receiver are in close proximity to each other and the jammer inadvertently introduces interference in the receiver. In this paper, through experiments carried out in a laboratory environment, we demonstrate the feasibility of digitally mitigating non-stationary narrowband interference caused by a sweep jammer, while simultaneously retaining the ability to receive and detect signals from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote control systems that use frequency hopping in the jammed frequency band.

Count data arises for example in bioinformatics or analysis of text documents represented as word count vectors. With several data sets available from related sources, exploiting their similarities by transfer learning can improve models compared to modeling sources independently. We introduce a Bayesian generative transfer learning model which represents similarity across document collections by sparse sharing of latent topics controlled by an Indian Buffet Process. Unlike Hierarchical Dirichlet Process based multi-task learning, our model decouples topic sharing probability from topic strength, making sharing of low-strength topics easier, and outperforms the HDP approach in experiments.

This empirical paper examines whether the age of software products can explain the turnaround between the release of security advisories and the publication vulnerability information. Building on the theoretical rationale of vulnerability life cycle modeling, this assertion is examined with an empirical sample that covers operating system releases from Microsoft and two Linux vendors. Estimation is carried out with a linear regression model. The results indicate that the age of the observed Microsoft products does not affect the turnaround times, and only feeble statistical relationships are present for the examined Linux releases. With this negative result, the paper contributes to the vulnerability life cycle modeling research by presenting and rejecting one theoretically motivated and previously unexplored question. The rejection is also a positive result; there is no reason for users to fear that the turnaround times would significantly lengthen as operating system releases age.

Understanding and structuring the use of social software by scientists is of high importance in modern research and education - new ways of cooperation and knowledge sharing leads to new ways of work for researchers in both, higher education and enterprises. The possibilities of social networking services provides means for open discourse and offers easier ways to make scientific and educational resources available to the knowledge community. Within this paper, we create a research model and study knowledge sharing and technology acceptance related influence factors to share knowledge in the form of artefacts. These artefacts consist of open science and open educational resources. With our study we will validate the model of sharing influences and understand which factors are most relevant for scientists in IS discipline to share scientific and educational information through social networking services. Through the research, an improved understanding for the use of social software for globally distributed and open scientific communication is obtained.

The prospects of the inband full-duplex (IBFD) technology are praised in non-military communications as it allows each radio to simultaneously transmit and receive (STAR) on the same frequencies enabling, e.g., enhanced spectral efficiency. Likewise, future defense forces may significantly benefit from the concept, because a military full-duplex radio (MFDR) would be capable of simultaneous integrated tactical communication and electronic warfare operations as opposed to the ordinary time- or frequency-division half-duplex radios currently used in all military applications. This study considers one particular application, where the MFDR performs jamming against an opponent's radio control (RC) system while simultaneously monitoring RC transmissions and/or receiving data over the air from an allied communication transmitter. The generic RC system can represent particularly, e.g., one pertaining to multicopter drones or roadside bombs. Specifically, this paper presents outcomes from recent experiments that are carried out outdoors while earlier indoor results are also revisited for reference. In conclusion, the results demonstrate that MFDRs can be viably utilized for RC signal detection purposes despite the residual self-interference due to jamming and imperfect cancellation.

The SiMPE workshop series started in 2006 [2] with the goal of enabling speech processing on mobile and embedded devices to meet the challenges of pervasive environments (such as noise) and leveraging the context they offer (such as location). SiMPE 2010 and 2011 brought together researchers from the speech and the HCI communities. Multimodality got more attention in SiMPE 2008 than it had received in the previous years. In SiMPE 2007, the focus was on developing regions. Speech User interaction in cars was a focus area in 2009. With SiMPE 2012, the 7th in the series, we hope to explore the area of speech along with sound. When using the mobile in an eyes-free manner, it is natural and convenient to hear about notifications and events. The arrival of an SMS has used a very simple sound based notification for a long time now. The technologies underlying speech processing and sound processing are quite different and these communities have been working mostly independent of each other. And yet, for multimodal interactions on the mobile, it is perhaps natural to ask whether and how speech and sound can be mixed and used more effectively and naturally.

Current search engines offer limited assistance for exploration and information discovery in complex search tasks. Instead, users are distracted by the need to focus their cognitive efforts on finding navigation cues, rather than selecting relevant information. Interactive intent modeling enhances the human information exploration capacity through computational modeling, visualized for interaction. Interactive intent modeling has been shown to increase task-level information seeking performance by up to 100%. In this demonstration, we showcase SciNet, a system implementing interactive intent modeling on top of a scientific article database of over 60 million documents.

Since September 2015 at least two major crises have emerged where major industrial companies producing consumer products have been involved. In September 2015 diesel cars manufactured by Volkswagen turned out to be equipped with cheating software that caused NO2 and other emission values to be reduced to acceptable levels while tested from the real, unacceptable values in normal use. In August 2016 reports began to appear that the battery of a new smart phone produced by Samsung, Galaxy Note7, could begin to burn, or even explode, while the device was on. In Nov. 2016 also 34 washing machine models were reported to have caused damages due to disintegration. In all cases, the companies have experienced substantial financial losses, their shares have lost value, and their reputation has suffered among consumers and other stakeholders. In this paper, we study the commonalities and differences in the crisis management strategies of the companies, mostly concentrating on the crisis communication aspects. We draw on Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT). The communication behaviour of the companies and various stakeholders during crisis is performed by investigating the official web sites of the companies and communication in Twitter and Facebook on their own accounts. We also collected streaming data from Twitter where Samsung and the troubled smart phone or washing machines were mentioned. For VW we also collected streaming data where the emission scandal or its ramifications were mentioned and performed several analyses, including sentiment analysis.

Mobile application ecosystems have growth rapidly in the past few years. Increasing number of startups and established developers are alike offering their products in different marketplaces such as Android Market and Apple App Store. In this paper, we are studying revenue models used in Android Market. For analysis, we gathered the data of 351,601 applications from their public pages at the marketplace. From these, a random sample of 100 applications was used in a qualitative study of revenue streams. The results indicate that a part of the marketplace can be explained with traditional models but free applications use complex revenue models. Basing on the qualitative analysis, we identified four general business strategy categories for further studies.

Clustering-based Discriminant Analysis (CDA) is a well-known technique for supervised feature extraction and dimensionality reduction. CDA determines an optimal discriminant subspace for linear data projection based on the assumptions of normal subclass distributions and subclass representation by using the mean subclass vector. However, in several cases, there might be other subclass representative vectors that could be more discriminative, compared to the mean subclass vectors. In this paper we propose an optimization scheme aiming at determining the optimal subclass representation for CDA-based data projection. The proposed optimization scheme has been evaluated on standard classification problems, as well as on two publicly available human action recognition databases providing enhanced class discrimination, compared to the standard CDA approach.

Insofar as our cultural heritage (CH) has become not only an economic resource but a key element in defining our identity, its accurate and flexible documentation has emerged as an essential task. The generation of 3D information with physical and functional characteristics is now possible through the connection of survey data with Historical Building Information Modeling (HBIM). However, few studies have focused on the semantic enrichment process of models based on point clouds, especially on the field of cultural heritage. These singularities make the conversion of point cloud to 'as-built' HBIM an expensive process from the mathematical and computational viewpoint. At present, there is no software that guarantees automatic and efficient data conversion in architectural or urban contexts. The ongoing research 'Documenting and Visualizing Industrial Heritage' is conducted by the School of Architecture, Tampere University of Technology, Finland based on an Open Notebook Reserarch Model. It is focused on advance the knowledge of digital operating environments for the representation and management of historical buildings and sites. On the one hand, the research is advancing in three-dimensional 'as-built' modeling based on remote sensing data, while on the other hand is aiming to incorporate more qualitative information based on concepts of production and management in the lifecycle of the built environment. The purpose of this presentation is to discuss the different approaches to date on the HBIM generation chain: from 3D point cloud data collection to semantically enriched parametric models.

Context: Unhandled code exceptions are often the cause of a drop in the number of users. In the highly competitive market of Android apps, users commonly stop using applications when they find some problem generated by unhandled exceptions. This is often reflected in a negative comment in the Google Play Store and developers are usually not able to reproduce the issue reported by the end users because of a lack of information. Objective: In this work, we present an industrial case study aimed at prioritizing the removal of bugs related to uncaught exceptions. Therefore, we (1) analyzed crash reports of an Android application developed by a public transportation company, (2) classified uncaught exceptions that caused the crashes; (3) prioritized the exceptions according to their impact on users. Results: The analysis of the exceptions showed that seven exceptions generated 70% of the overall errors and that it was possible to solve more than 50% of the exceptions-related issues by fixing just six Java classes. Moreover, as a side result, we discovered that the exceptions were highly correlated with two code smells, namely “Spaghetti Code” and “Swiss Army Knife”. The results of this study helped the company understand how to better focus their limited maintenance effort. Additionally, the adopted process can be beneficial for any Android developer in understanding how to prioritize the maintenance effort.

Regarding sustainable development, there is a growing need to gather more and more various kinds of measurement, space, and consumption information about property. The necessity for property condition measurement is apparent and the appropriate circumstances, such as indoor air quality and suitable temperature, have an essential influence on comfort and welfare at work and, at the same time, have significance in terms of energy efficiency. This paper presents a portable prototype system for property condition measurement. The objective was to generate a reliable system that improves the quality and also the visual presentation of the collected data. The paper presents the components of the system and the technology utilized to implement the system. The results of piloting in a real-life environment, where particular focus was placed on both controlling energy efficiency and well-being at work, are also presented.

Applications such as robot control and wireless communication require planning under uncertainty. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) plan policies for single agents under uncertainty and their decentralized versions (DEC-POMDPs) find a policy for multiple agents. The policy in infinite-horizon POMDP and DEC-POMDP problems has been represented as finite state controllers (FSCs). We introduce a novel class of periodic FSCs, composed of layers connected only to the previous and next layer. Our periodic FSC method finds a deterministic finite-horizon policy and converts it to an initial periodic infinitehorizon policy. This policy is optimized by a new infinite-horizon algorithm to yield deterministic periodic policies, and by a new expectation maximization algorithm to yield stochastic periodic policies. Our method yields better results than earlier planningmethods and can compute larger solutions than with regular FSCs.

Web performance optimization tries to minimize the time in which web pages are downloaded and displayed on the web browser. It also means that the sizes of website resources are usually minimized. By optimizing their websites, organizations can verify the quality of response times on their websites. This increases visitor loyalty and user satisfaction. A fast website is also important for search engine optimization. Minimized resources also cut the energy consumption of the Internet. In spite of the importance of optimization, there has not been so much research work to find out how much the comprehensive optimization of a website can reduce load times and the sizes of web resources. This study presents the results related to an optimization work where all the resources of the website were optimized. The results obtained were very significant. The download size of the front page was reduced by a total of about 80 percent and the downloading time about 60 percent. The server can now handle more than three times as much concurrent users as earlier.

The block-based multi-metric fusion (BMMF) is one of the state-of-the-art perceptual image quality assessment (IQA) schemes. With this scheme, image quality is analyzed in a block-by-block fashion according to the block content type (i.e. smooth, edge and texture blocks) and the distortion type. Then, a suitable IQA metric is adopted to evaluate the quality of each block. Various fusion strategies to combine the QA scores of all blocks are discussed in this work. Specifically, factors such as quality scores distribution and the spatial distribution of each block are examined using statistics methods. Finally, we compare the performance of various fusion strategies based on the popular TID database. © 2012 APSIPA.

Condition pre-enforcement is one of the known methods for rights adaptation. Related to the integration of the rights exporting process, we identify issues introduced by condition pre-enforcement and potential risks of granting unexpected rights when exporting rights back and forth. We propose a solution to these problems in a form of a new algorithm called Passive Condition Pre-enforcement (PCP), and discuss the impact of PCP to the existing process of rights exporting.

The energy requirements of cities' inhabitants have grown during the last decade. Recent studies justify the necessity of reducing the energy consumption/emissions in cities. The present paper gives an overview of the factors affecting the energy consumption of the citizens based on studies conducted in cities across the globe. The studies cover all the factors that affect citizens' mobility choice that at the end, affects in the same way their final energy consumption. The results of the review are being used to support authorities in mobility decisions in order to achieve a sustainable transport sector in smart cities.

Managing master data as an organization-wide function enforces changes in responsibilities and established ways of working. These changes cause tensions in the organization and can result in conflicts. Understanding these tensions and mechanisms helps the organization to manage the change more effectively. The tensions and conflicts are studied through the theory of paradox. The object of this paper is to identify paradoxes in a Master Data Management (MDM) development process and the factors that contribute to the emergence of these conflicts. Altogether thirteen MDM specific paradoxes were identified and factors leading to them were presented. Paradoxes were grouped into categories that represent the organization's core activities to understand how tensions are embedded within the organization, and how they are experienced. Five paradoxes were observed more closely to illustrate the circumstances they appear. Working through the tensions also sheds light on the question of how these paradoxes should be managed. This example illustrates how problems emerge as dilemmas and evolve into paradoxes.

Industrial information systems record and store data about the status and use of the complex underlying production systems and processes. These data can be analyzed to improve existing, and innovate new products, processes, and services. This work focuses on a relatively unexplored area of industrial data analytics - understanding of end-user behaviors and their implications to the design, implementation, training and servicing of industrial systems. We report the initial findings from a requirements gathering workshop conducted with industry participants to identify the expected opportunities and goals with logged usage data and related needs to support the aims. Our key contributions include a characterization of the types of data that need to be collected and visualized, how these data can be used to understand product usage, description of the business purposes the information can be used for, and experience goals to guide the development of a novel usage data analytics tool. Interesting future research direction could include the privacy issues related to using logged usage data when limited number of users are logged.

The social impact of games to players and developers, software quality and game labour are cornerstones of a software game production model. Openness is, naturally, a significant factor for games evolution, overall acceptance and success. The paper authors focus on exploring these issues within the proprietary (closed) and non-proprietary (free/open) source types of software development. The authors identify developmental strengths and weaknesses for the (i) game evolution; (ii) game developers and (iii) game players. The main focus of the paper is on development that is done after the first release of a game with the help of add-ons. Concluding, there are suggestions for a more open and collaborative thinking and acting process model of game evolution that could benefit both types of development and all stakeholders involved. This process can integrate quality features from open and traditional development suitable for game construction.

In recent years, several countries have placed strong emphasis on openness, especially open data, which can be shared and further processed into various applications. Based on studies, the majority of open data providers are government organizations. This study presents two cases in which the data providers are companies. The cases are analyzed using a framework for open data based business models derived from the literature and several case studies. The analysis focuses on the beginning of the data value chain. As a result, the study highlights the role of data producers in the ecosystem, which has not been the focus in current frameworks.

Open Source Software (OSS) communities do not often invest in marketing strategies to promote their products in a competitive way. Even the home pages of the web portals of well-known OSS products show technicalities and details that are not relevant for a fast and effective evaluation of the product's qualities. So, final users and even developers who are interested in evaluating and potentially adopting an OSS product are often negatively impressed by the quality perception they have from the web portal of the product and turn to proprietary software solutions or fail to adopt OSS that may be useful in their activities. In this paper, we define OP2A, an evaluation model and we derive a checklist that OSS developers and web masters can use to design (or improve) their web portals with all the contents that are expected to be of interest for OSS final users. We exemplify the use of the model by applying it to the Apache Tomcat web portal and we apply the model to 47 web sites of well-known OSS products to highlight the current deficiencies that characterize these web portals.

Open Source Software (OSS) communities do not often invest in marketing strategies to promote their products in a competitive way. Even the home pages of the web portals of well-known OSS products show technicalities and details that are not relevant for a fast and effective evaluation of the product's qualities. So, final users and even developers, who are interested in evaluating and potentially adopting an OSS product, are often negatively impressed by the quality perception they have from the web portal of the product and turn to proprietary software solutions or fail to adopt OSS that may be useful in their activities. In this paper, we define an evaluation model and we derive a checklist that OSS developers and web masters can use to design their web portals with all the contents that are expected to be of interest for OSS final users. We exemplify the use of the model by applying it to the Apache Tomcat web portal and we apply the model to 22 well-known OSS portals.