Huaiqing Wang

The adoption of virtual banking: an empirical study

Virtual banking is broadly defined in this paper as the provision of banking services via means other than traditional physical branches. Currently, virtual banking exists in the forms of ATM, phone banking, home banking and Internet banking. Understanding peoples adoption intention of virtual banking can help financial institutions to formulate appropriate marketing strategies for new forms of banking. Theory of planned behavior (TPB) and innovation diffusion were used to study the adoption intention of virtual banking in a well-developed international financial city. The study finds that the relationships were found only partially explained by the TPB. Other results are interesting and useful for the strategic planning of IT in banking.

Consumer privacy concerns about Internet marketing

The Internet is quickly becoming the world’s largest public electronic marketplace. It is estimated to reach 50 million people worldwide, with growth estimates averaging approximately 10% per month. Innovative business professionals have discovered that the Internet can A BUYER’S-EYE VIEW OF ONLINE PURCHASING WORRIES. • H U A I Q I N G W A N G , M A T T H E W K . O . L E E , A N D C H E N W A N G •

Cyber warfare: steganography vs. steganalysis

For every clever method and tool being developed to hide information in multimedia data, an equal number of clever methods and tools are being developed to detect and reveal its secrets.

Exploring alternatives during requirements analysis

Goal-oriented requirements analysis techniques provide ways to refine organizational and technical objectives, to more effectively explore alternatives during requirements definition. After selecting a set of alternatives to achieve these objectives, you can elaborate on them during subsequent phases to make them more precise and complete. The authors argue that goal-oriented analysis complements and strengthens traditional requirements analysis techniques by offering a means for capturing and evaluating alternative ways of meeting business goals. They detail the five main steps that comprise goal-oriented analysis. These steps include goal analysis, softgoal analysis, softgoal correlation analysis, goal correlation analysis, and evaluation of alternatives. To illustrate the main elements of the proposed analysis technique, they explore a typical scenario that involves defining requirements for a meeting scheduling system.

A discretization algorithm based on a heterogeneity criterion

Discretization, as a preprocessing step for data mining, is a process of converting the continuous attributes of a data set into discrete ones so that they can be treated as the nominal features by machine learning algorithms. Those various discretization methods, that use entropy-based criteria, form a large class of algorithm. However, as a measure of class homogeneity, entropy cannot always accurately reflect the degree of class homogeneity of an interval. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new measure of class heterogeneity of intervals from the viewpoint of class probability itself. Based on the definition of heterogeneity, we present a new criterion to evaluate a discretization scheme and analyze its property theoretically. Also, a heuristic method is proposed to find the approximate optimal discretization scheme. Finally, our method is compared, in terms of predictive error rate and tree size, with Ent-MDLC, a representative entropy-based discretization method well-known for its good performance. Our method is shown to produce better results than those of Ent-MDLC, although the improvement is not significant. It can be a good alternative to entropy-based discretization methods.

An improved algorithm for the packing of unequal circles within a larger containing circle

Abstract This paper describes an approved algorithm for the problems of unequal circle packing – the quasi-physical quasi-human algorithm. First, the quasi-physical approach for the general packing problems is described in solving the pure problems of unequal circle packing. The method is an analogy to the physical model in which a number of smooth cylinders are packed inside a container. A quasi-human strategy is then proposed to trigger a jump for a stuck object in order to get out of local minima. Our method has been tested in numerical experiments. The computational results are presented, showing the merits of the proposed method. Our algorithm can be thought as an adoptive algorithm of the Tabu search.

On-demand e-supply chain integration: A multi-agent constraint-based approach

With e-business emerging as a key enabler to drive supply chains, the focus of supply chain management has been shifted from production efficiency to customer-driven and partnership synchronization approaches. This strategic shift depends on the match between the demands and offerings that deliver the services. To achieve this, we need to coordinate the flow of information among the services, and link their business processes under various constraints. Existing approaches to this problem have relied on complete information of services and resources, and have failed to adequately address the dynamics and uncertainties of the operating environments. The real-world situation is complicated as a result of undetermined requirements of services involved in the chain, unpredictable solutions contributed by service providers, and dynamic selection and aggregation of solutions to services. This paper examines an agent-mediated approach to on-demand e-business supply chain integration. Each agent works as a service broker, exploring individual service decisions as well as interacting with each other for achieving compatibility and coherence among the decisions of all services. Based on the framework, a prototype has been implemented with simulated experiments highlighting the effectiveness of the approach.

From process logic to business logic: a cognitive approach to business process management

The unpredictability of business activities means that business process management should provide a way to adapt to change. The traditional workflow approach, based on predefined process logic, offers little support for todays complex and dynamic business environment. Therefore, a cognitive approach is proposed to help manage complex business activities, based on continuous awareness of situations and real-time decisions on activities. In this approach, the business environment is seen as capturing events that occurred and the state of tasks and resources; business logic involving process routing, operational constraints, exception handling and business strategy is used to determine which actions are appropriate for the current situation. By extending process management from process logic to business logic, the methodology offers flexibility, agility and adaptability in complex business process management.

Intelligent agent-assisted decision support systems: Integration of knowledge discovery, knowledge analysis, and group decision support

Abstract The integration of data mining techniques with decision support systems to assist in dealing with information overload has received increased attention and importance over recent years. However, challenges remain regarding practical deployment and implementation of such integration, due to the increased complexity of decision making, system co-ordination and knowledge communication. It is the purpose of this paper to outline the issues necessary to be addressed in a practical decision support system that integrates data mining techniques. The paper will describe a novel architecture to support the co-operative decision process by utilizing event-driven and task-driven data mining agents, along with user assistant agents and a knowledge manager agent. An internet-based prototype for supporting marketing planning decisions is also presented to demonstrate the practicality and feasibility of the proposed intelligent agent-based decision support system architecture.

Taxonomy of security considerations and software quality

Addressing security threats and risks through software quality design factors.