Fengyi Lin

Fault tolerant Web service

Zwass (1996) suggested that middleware and message service is one of the five fundamental technologies used to realize electronic commerce (EC). The simple object access protocol (SOAP) is recognized as a more promising middleware for EC applications among other leading candidates such as CORBA. Many recent polls reveal however that security and reliability issues are major concerns that discourage people from engaging in EC transactions. We notice that the fault-tolerance issue is somewhat neglected in the current standard, i.e., SOAP 1.1. We therefore propose a fault tolerant Web service called fault-tolerant SOAP or FT-SOAP through which Web services can be built with higher resilience to failure. FT-SOAP is based on our previous experience with an object fault tolerant service (OFS) [Liang, D. et al., (1999)] and OMGs fault tolerant CORBA (FT-CORBA). There are many architectural differences between SOAP and CORBA. One of the major contributions of this work is to discuss the impact on FT-SOAP design due to these architectural differences. Our experience shows that Web services built on a SOAP framework enjoy higher flexibility as opposed to those built on CORBA. We also point out the limitations of the current feature sets of SOAP 1.1. We believe our experience is valuable not only to the fault-tolerance community, but also to other communities as well, in particular, to those who are familiar with the CORBA platform.

Capability and efficiency of intellectual capital: The case of fabless companies in Taiwan

It is important to increase their value by managing intellectual capital (IC), since fabless firms face an intensely competitive environment. The aim of this paper is develops a two-stage production process including IC capability and IC efficiency to characterize the IC performance of the fabless firms using a non-parametric frontier method - data envelopment analysis (DEA). The IC performance rating should be considered as a key element for achieving greater innovation and competitive advantages. The results show that IC efficiency is better than IC capability for these fabless firms; 15.8% of fabless firms perform well in both models and these firms can be treated as benchmarks for others; most firms operate at decreasing returns to scale, indicating that firms are facing a highly competitive environment; further mergers and acquisitions among firms should be considered so as to achieve economies of scale; the critical input/output measures will also help firms improve their performance and identify the key factors that impact a firms performance.

Goal-Oriented Earnings Management: Evidence from Taiwanese Firms

Using Benfords (1938) law, this study documents pervasive evidence that managers of publicly listed Taiwanese firms tend to engage in earnings manipulative activities, rounding earnings numbers to achieve key reference points. Consistent with prior studies on rounding behavior in other countries and regions, we find that the management of Taiwanese firms often emphasizes the first digit of earnings numbers. We also find that key reference points are not limited to the first digit; the second, third, or even fourth digits are sometimes used as the reference points of rounding earnings behavior. Finally, our empirical results show that the incentives to round earnings numbers are negatively associated with the distance of prerounded earnings to the next reference point. In other words, the closer the prerounded earnings are to the reference point, the more likely managers are to round earnings. The findings of the study have important implications for banks in implementing lending policies and for external auditors in designing audit procedures.

Critical Factors Affecting the Evaluation of Information Control Systems with the COBIT Framework

This paper empirically investigates the factors affecting auditors in evaluating information technology (IT) control structures by employing the COBIT framework, a popular IT internal control with integrated platform, and examines the relationship between monitoring function and other COBIT dimensions. The results of our empirical analysis indicate that key factors of IT governance endorsed by certified public accountants (CPAs) in Taiwan match fairly well with those prescribed in the COBIT framework. CPAs can utilize COBIT as a guideline for developing their approach to internal control structure and further limiting their audit liabilities.

An Analysis of Using State of the Art Technologies to Implement Real-Time Continuous Assurance

With the integrity of the information in financial reports being questioned and the shift towards more rapid financial reporting, the auditing profession has found that Continuous Assurance is an effective means of facilitating early detection of fraudulent financial reports. However, according to recent surveys, Continuous Assurance has not been widely applied to date. This fact motivates us to investigate if state-of-the-art IT technologies are capable of supporting Continuous Assurance. The contribution of this study is threefold. First, we develop an ISO/IEC 9126-based Continuous Assurance evaluation framework with six technical criteria. Second, based on the proposed framework, we review two (real-time) IT technologies, namely the Embedded Audit Module (EAM) and the Interceptor mechanism, and explore the feasibility of using them to implement real-time Continuous Assurance (CA). Overall, the interceptor approach outperforms the EAM approach, although neither approach satisfies all of the framework’s technical criteria. Third, we find that using the interceptor mechanism in the middleware layer, rather than in other layers, improves the implementation of a real-time auditing interceptor. In light of the proposed evaluation framework, we consider the future development of a middleware interceptor technology that can be used to firmly establish a real-time Continuous Assurance framework.

A nested invocation suppression mechanism for active replication fault-tolerant CORBA

Active replication is a common approach to building highly available and reliable distributed software applications. The redundant nested invocation (RNI) problem arises when servers in a replicated group issues nested invocations to other server groups in response to a client invocation. Automatic suppression of RNI is always a desirable solution, yet it is usually a difficult design issue. If the system has multithreading (MT) support, the difficulties of implementation increase dramatically. Intuitively, to design a deterministic thread execution control mechanism is a possible approach. Unfortunately, some modern operating systems implement threads on the kernel level for execution fairness. For the kernel thread case, modification on thread control implies modifying the operating system kernel. This approach loses system portability which is one of the important requirements of CORBA or middleware. In this work, we propose a mechanism to perform the auto-suppression of redundant nested invocation in an active replication fault-tolerant (FT) CORBA system. Besides the mechanism design, we discuss the design correctness semantic and the correctness proof of our design.

The Application of Corporate Governance Indicators With XBRL Technology to Financial Crisis Prediction

ABSTRACT The widespread adoption of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) suggests that intelligent software agents can now use financial information disseminated on the Web with high accuracy. Financial data have been widely used by researchers to predict financial crises; however, few studies have considered corporate governance indicators in building prediction models. This article presents a financial crisis prediction model that involves using a genetic algorithm for determining the optimal feature set and support vector machines (SVMs) to be used with XBRL. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms models based on only one type of information, either financial or corporate governance. Compared with conventional statistical methods, the proposed SVM model forecasts financial crises more accurately.

The Study of a Financial Crisis Prediction Model based on XBRL

Recent outbreak of corporate financial crises worldwide has brought attention to the need for a new international financial architecture which rests on crisis prediction and crisis management. Financial data have been widely used by researchers to predict financial crisis, but few studies exploit the use of non-financial indicators in corporate governance to construct financial crisis prediction model. This article introduces a prediction model based on a relatively new machine learning technique, support vector machines (SVM) with XBRL financial reporting. This study indicates that the prediction model considering both financial and non-financial information outperforms those models based on only one type of information. Two well-known prediction models, regression model and genetic algorithm, are compared with SVM. The experiment results show that the combined use of both financial and non-financial features with SVM model leads to a more accurate prediction of financial distress.

A nested invocation suppression mechanism for active replicated SOAP systems

The simple object access protocol (SOAP) is recognized as a more promising middleware for electronic commerce applications among other leading candidates such as CORBA. Many recent polls reveal however that security and reliability issues are major concerns that discourage people from engaging in electronic commerce transactions. We note that these issues are not adequately addressed in the current standard, i.e., SOAP 1.2. Active replication is a common approach to building readily available and highly reliable distributed software applications. The redundant nested invocation (RNI) problem arises when servers in a replicated group issues nested invocations to other server groups in response to a client invocation. Automatic suppression of RNI from active group is always a desirable function, yet this function usually requires careful if not complex design. The design complexity increases if the system involves multithreading implementation. Existing solutions either solve RNI problem for single-threading cases or solve multithreading cases at the expense of portability. In this work, we propose a mechanism to perform auto-suppression of redundant nested invocation on an active replication fault tolerant Web service. Our approach is portable so that the Web service running on our platform is able to interact with any other SOAP applications. Our preliminary experiments show that the proposed auto-suppression mechanism is efficient in most cases.

A Preliminary Study on Portable Interceptor Mechanism to SOAP

Web Services have become increasingly popular in distributed applications, and the SOAP technology is currently the most widely used Web Service. Recently, middleware researchers have applied the interception approach to problems in various domains. Instead of providing a portable interceptor like that used in the CORBA protocol, SOAP 1.2 provides an intermediary mechanism, which has to solve the backward compatible issue to be used as an interceptor. In this paper, we evaluate the interception requirements for CA, CF, FT, and LB. Our findings suggest that the run-time administration features of the current CORBA Portable Interceptor are not appropriate for some application domains. This motivates us to develop a new Portable Interceptor Mechanism (PIM) for SOAP so that the protocol meets the interception requirements of all Web Services. The proposed PIM includes portable interceptor management in the SOAP engine and portable interceptor interface definitions.