ABSTRACT:
Electronic mail (E-mail) is one of the most utilized application software systems in modern-day organizations. The major messaging application programs used in the enterprise are IBM Lotus Notes also known as Domino, Microsoft Exchange Servers, and Novel GroupWise. For various reasons – such as high cost of maintenance, undeliverable e-mail issue and loss of attachments, companies find it necessary to either migrate to newer versions of their messaging software or to an entirely different software. In either case, the process must be carefully planned, well designed and properly implemented to avoid disaster. In this paper, we present a cost-effective approach for migrating a particular messaging software. The approach was implemented and tested for the migration of GroupWise 5.5 to Exchange Server 2003. We present our success story and lessons learned from the case. A six-week and one-year post migration system-audits indicated that the organization derived several benefits including significant cost savings as a result of this particular approach. Chief information/technology officers and e-mail administrators will benefit immensely from the “best practice” strategy hereby presented.

ABSTRACT:
An apartment web service is a web site intended to provide online services to the residents. With the availability of global positioning systems and the development of new technologies, the access of geo-spatial information has drawn great attention for information retrieves. This research is focused on developing an online service for an apartment to provide geospatial information. In this paper, a fuzzy spatial querying model under uncertainty is used to improve spatial querying. An inexact inferring with the certainty factor is investigated. An online spatial database for an apartment is implemented by utilizing PHP with MySQL database. Demonstration shows that the system can provide visitors with the amount of significant geo-spatial information about the apartment. Moreover, fuzziness and uncertainty are mainly concerned. Querying examples are provided.

ABSTRACT:
Technological intelligence is a highly sought after commodity even in traffic-based systems. These intelligent systems do not only help in traffic monitoring but also in commuter safety, law enforcement and commercial applications. In this paper, a license plate localization and recognition system for vehicles in Malaysia is proposed. This system is developed based on digital images and can be easily applied to commercial car park systems for the use of documenting access of parking services, secure usage of parking houses and also to prevent car theft issues. The proposed license plate localization algorithm is based on a combination of morphological processes with a modified Hough Transform approach and the recognition of the license plates is achieved by the implementation of the feed-forward backpropagation artificial neural network. Experimental results show an average of 95% successful license plate localization and recognition in a total of 589 images captured from a complex outdoor environment.

ABSTRACT:
During the last decades software process improvement (SPI) has been recognized as a usable possibility to increase the quality of software development. Implemented SPI investments have often indicated increased process capabilities as well. Recently more attention has been focused on the costs of SPI as well as on the cost-effectiveness and productivity of software development, although the roots of economic-driven software engineering originate from the very early days of software engineering research. This research combines Value Engineering and capability assessment into usable new method in order to better respond to the challenges that cost-effectiveness and productivity has brought to software companies. This is done in part by defining the concepts of value, worth and cost and in part by defining the Value Engineering process and different enhancements it has seen to offer to software assessment. The practical industrial cases show that proposed two-dimensional method works in practise and is useful to assessed companies.

ABSTRACT:
If nonlinearities such as saturation of the amplifier gain and motor torque, gear backlash, and shaft compliances- just to name a few - are considered in the position control system of marine helm, traditional control methods are no longer sufficient to be used to improve the performance of the system. In this paper an alternative approach to traditional control methods - a neural network reference controller - is proposed to establish an adaptive control of the position of the marine helm to achieve the controlled variable at the command position. This neural network controller comprises of two neural networks. One is the plant model network used to identify the nonlinear system and the other the controller network used to control the output to follow the reference model. The experimental results demonstrate that this adaptive neural network reference controller has much better control performance than is obtained with traditional controllers.

ABSTRACT:
Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) require widely spread and guarantied quality communications services. Method of ITS decomposition to set of subsystems and quantification of communications subsystems parameters is introduced. Due to typical complexity of the IST solution and mobility as the typical system elements property idea of communications systems with multipath multivendor structures is adopted. Resolution of seamless switching within a set of available wireless access solutions is presented. CALM based system or specifically designed and configured L3/L2 switching can be relevant solution for multi-path access communication system. These systems meet requirements of the seamless secure communications functionality within even extensive cluster of moving objects. Competent decision processes based on precisely quantified system requirements and each performance indicator tolerance range must be implemented to keep service up and running with no influence of continuously changing conditions in time and served space. Method of different paths service quality evaluation and selection of the best possible active communications access path is introduced. Proposed approach is based on Kalman filtering, which separates reasonable part of noise and also allows prediction of the individual parameters near future behavior. Presented classification algorithm applied on filtered measured data combined with deterministic parameters is trained using training data, i.e. combination of parameters vectors line and relevant decisions. Quality of classification is dependent on the size and quality of the training sets. This method is studied within projects e-Ident, DOTEK and SRATVU which are elaborating results of project CAMNA.

ABSTRACT:
As the increasing competitive intensity in the current service market, organizational capabilities have been recognized as the importance of sustaining competitive advantage. The profitable growth for the firms has been fueled a need to systematically assess and renew the organization. The purpose of this study is to analyze the financial performance of the firms to create an effective evaluating structure for the Taiwan’s service industry. This study utilized TOPSIS (technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution) method to evaluate the operating performance of 12 companies. TOPSIS is a multiple criteria decision making method to identify solutions from a finite set of alternatives based upon simultaneous minimization of distance from an ideal point and maximization of distance from a nadir point. By using this approach, this study measures the financial performance of firms through two aspects and ten indicators. The result indicated e-life had outstanding performance among the 12 retailers. The findings of this study provided managers to better understand their market position, competition, and profitability for future strategic planning and operational management.

ABSTRACT:
The population-based evolutionary algorithms have emerged as powerful mechanism for finding optimum solutions of complex optimization problems. A promising new evolutionary algorithm, differential evolution, has garnered significant attention in the engineering optimization research. Differential evolution has the advantage of incorporating a relatively simple and efficient form of mutation and crossover. This paper aims at introducing differential evolution as an alternative approach for topology optimization of truss and continuous structure with stress and displacement constraints. In comparison the results with other studies, it shows that differential evolution algorithms are very effective and efficient in solving topology optimization problem of structure.

ABSTRACT:
This paper describes the architecture of an agent-based music service that generates dynamic playlists based on suggestions from multiple users. The system employs a number of agents capable of autonomy, mobility, scalability, collaboration and platform independence. In the system, agents are classified into two groups: requesters and music service team. Requesters work on behalf of their users, and bring music suggestions from the users to a DJ agent (DJ) which is part of the service team. The DJ has a reasoning component responsible for music selection and negotiation. Music selection is the result of negotiation among agents in sealed-bid auctions. The bidding strategy is specified by users. The amount of a bid implies the value of a song for a specific user; the DJ will evaluate this amount to determine the winner of the auction, whose song will be placed on the playlist. All agents interact with each other using an interaction/negotiation protocol, through agent messaging. A proof of concept implementation of this architecture shows that agents in the A-DJ system automatically perform tasks and collaborate with each other under the proposed protocol. The implementation appears to be scalable up to approximately 800 customers on a generalpurpose computer system.

ABSTRACT:
This paper proposes an efficient satellite image retrieval and knowledge discovery model. The strategy comprises two major parts. First, a computational algorithm is used for off-line satellite image feature extraction, image data representation and image retrieval. Low level features are automatically extracted from the segmented regions of satellite images. A self-organization feature map is used to construct a two-layer satellite image concept hierarchy. The events are stored in one layer and the corresponding feature vectors are categorized in the other layer. Second, a user friendly interface is provided that retrieves images of interest and mines useful information based on the events in the concept hierarchy. The proposed system is evaluated with prominent features such as typhoons or high-pressure masses.

ABSTRACT:
Within the era of e-manufacturing and e-business, e-maintenance provides the opportunity for a new maintenance generation. E-maintenance integrates existing telemaintenance principles, with web-services and modern e-collaboration principles. Collaboration allows not only to share and exchange information but also knowledge and (e)-intelligence. This paper outlines the basic capabilities provided by e-maintenance to companies as well as describes emerging challenges to benefit from these new operational improvement opportunities

ABSTRACT:
Marketing writers' assertion that online communities are the future for organisations may be misguided, although peer-to-peer networks are certainly the future for consumers. Brands have experienced ‘consumer revulsion’ at their poorly-planned attempts to enter online communities to interact with customers. The Internet has facilitated a revolution amongst consumers, providing a medium for online communities to thrive. Source credibility is paramount and Internet users are being selective with exactly whose message they are willing to accept, absorb and ultimately, allow to influence their buying decisions. The primary objective of this research is to undertake an exploratory investigation into the dynamics of online communities and how membership influences the buying decision for consumers of genre novels. Through the process of online focus groups and the completion of online questionnaires, data on the dynamics of online relationships between consumers and authors, the buying habits of consumers and the acceptance of online word-of-mouth (WOM) were extracted and analysed. This research demonstrates that the dynamics of online communities are highly complex and in no way inferior or less fulfilling than real-life relationships and that the influence of online relationships on our buying decisions have no less impact than real-life encounters.

ABSTRACT:
Although research into the use of optics in computers has increased in the last and current decades, the fact remains that electronics is still superior to optics in almost every way. Research into the use of optics at this stage mirrors the research into electronics after the 2nd World War. The advantages of using fiber optics over wiring are the same as the argument for using optics over electronics in computers. Even through totally optical computers are now a reality, computers that combine both electronics and optics, electro-optic hybrids, have been in use for some time. In the present paper, architecture of optical interconnect is built up on the bases of four Vertical-Cavity Surface- Emitting Laser Diodes (VCSELD) and two optical links where thermal effects of both the diodes and the links are included. Nonlinear relations are correlated to investigate the power-current and the voltage-current dependences of the four devices. The good performance (high speed) of the interconnect is deeply and parametrically investigated under wide ranges of the affecting parameters. The high speed performance is processed through three different effects, namely the device 3-dB bandwidth, the link dispersion characteristics, and the transmitted bit rate (soliton). Eight combinations are investigated; each possesses its own characteristics. The best architecture is the one composed of VCSELD that operates at 850 nm and the silica fiber whatever the operating set of causes. This combination possesses the largest device 3-dB bandwidth, the largest link bandwidth and the largest soliton transmitted bit rate. The increase of the ambient temperature reduces the high-speed performance of the interconnect

ABSTRACT:
This article investigates the application of the service-oriented architectural style in the context of large organizations. It introduces an architectural reference framework that allows for a business process-centered development of composite applications. The framework groups artifacts of similar abstraction levels as well as concerns at five distinguished layers. This way, the service-oriented principles of abstraction and autonomy can be respected when designing applications. The layers also correspond to phases of a design methodology and cover the aspects of composite applications from process-centered orchestration, over transactional coordination to data transformation and connectivity. Based on the framework this article shows as well how an integration design methodology can be used to leverage the application systems in the context of a given business process.

ABSTRACT:
“Information is power if and only if you have the knowledge to know what it means, the will to use it, the ability to apply it, and access to a channel of communication” [1]. We see this in current fields of research as varied as Marketing, Philosophy, and Communications Studies, and in current issues about who owns and controls technology. But a character from a far older tradition helps explain many problems in society today with technology: Trickster, the mythical character who confuses fact with fiction, makes good use of Technoism, a term coined by Davis [2] in 1999 to denote suppressed skepticism and blind compliance with the chaotic and uncontrolled progression of technology in our lives that leads to a dangerous split between the “haves” and “have-nots” of the technology world. This paper will discuss the use of Technoism to give the public and users of technology a false sense of power and control over their lives when in fact they are being duped into a financially motivated campaign of consumer exploitation. The paper makes some recommendations for establishing a conscience in the use of technology.