Information searches by consumers of miniature automobiles

We studied the information search behaviors of Chinese consumers of miniature automobiles. First, we identified the main sources where consumers acquire or seek information about miniature automobiles and discussed their extent of information search. Then, based on logistic regression and optimal scaling regression of statistics, we studied the influences of characteristics of consumers of miniature automobiles on the extent of information search and on Internet usage. The results indicate that consumers often utilize four sources to obtain information about miniature automobiles. The dominant information source for consumers is their friends/family, followed by dealers, newspapers, and TV. Age, occupation, education and income significantly affect the extent of information search, but gender and city of residence do not have significant impacts. Age, city of residence, occupation, education and income produce significant influences on Internet usage. Gender has an insignificant influence on whether a consumer uses the Internet to search for information.

Blockchain-Assisted Secure Fine-Grained Searchable Encryption for a Cloud-Based Healthcare Cyber-Physical System

The concept of sharing of personal health data over cloud storage in a healthcare-cyber physical system has become popular in recent times as it improves access quality.The privacy of health data can only be preserved by keeping it in an encrypted form,but it affects usability and flexibility in terms of effective search.Attribute-based searchable encryption(ABSE)has proven its worth by providing fine-grained searching capabilities in the shared cloud storage.However,it is not practical to apply this scheme to the devices with limited resources and storage capacity because a typical ABSE involves serious computations.In a healthcare cloud-based cyber-physical system(CCPS),the data is often collected by resource-constraint devices;therefore,here also,we cannot directly apply ABSE schemes.In the proposed work,the inherent computational cost of the ABSE scheme is managed by executing the computationally intensive tasks of a typical ABSE scheme on the blockchain network.Thus,it makes the proposed scheme suitable for online storage and retrieval of personal health data in a typical CCPS.With the assistance of blockchain technology,the proposed scheme offers two main benefits.First,it is free from a trusted authority,which makes it genuinely decentralized and free from a single point of failure.Second,it is computationally efficient because the computational load is now distributed among the consensus nodes in the blockchain network.Specifically,the task of initializing the system,which is considered the most computationally intensive,and the task of partial search token generation,which is considered as the most frequent operation,is now the responsibility of the consensus nodes.This eliminates the need of the trusted authority and reduces the burden of data users,respectively.Further,in comparison to existing decentralized fine-grained searchable encryption schemes,the proposed scheme has achieved a significant reduction in storage and computational cost for the secret key associated with users.It has been verified both theoretically and practically in the performance analysis section.

Controlled Rolling and Controlled Cooling Technology of Ultra-High Strength Steel with 700 MPa Grade

A wireless search system was integrated on Windows 2000 server. Based on the communication principle between wireless data and Internet,the object expression of search file,the automatic query of document information,the segment browsing of result information,and the receiving and sending of user information were realized by using Active Server Page 3 0,VB Script,WML Script insert languages and object orient database technology. The requirement querying information of material processing through Internet by GPRS,WAP mobile handset and so on was accomplished.

Investigating the relationships between facets of work task and selection and query-related behavior

Purpose: This study aims to explore the relationships between different facets of work task and selection and query-related behavior.Design/methodology/approach:An experiment was conducted to explore the issue. The researcher recruited 24 participants and assigned six simulated work task situations to each of them. Each experiment lasted around 2 hours and was recorded by the software tool Morae.Findings: Time(frequency) and time(length) are more closely related to user’s selection and query-related behavior compared to the facet ‘process’ of work task. Knowledge level of work task topic, degree of work task difficulty, and subjective work task complexity are significantly correlated with selection and query-related behavior. Work task difficulty and work task complexity are different concepts. Subjective work task complexity, work task difficulty, and knowledge of work task topic are significantly correlated with user’s selection and query-related behavior.Research limitations/implications: The limitations of this study include a small sample size,limited work task situations, and possible spurious relationships. This study has implications in informing task-based information seeking/search/retrieval research and interactive information retrieval(IIR) systems design.Originality/values: Previous studies usually did not touch upon how different facets of work tasks affected interactive activities. Some studies examining task complexity and information behavior were concerned with how work tasks affect users’ behavior at information-seeking level, rather than at information search level. This study makes contribution to interactive information retrieval,task-based information search and retrieval, and personalization of IR.

Development of Search System Used for Material Processing by Mobile Internet

A wireless search system was integrated on Windows 2000 server.Based on the communication principle between wireless data and Internet,the object expression of search file,the automatic query of document information,the segment browsing of result information,and the receiving and sending of user information were realized by using Active Server Page 3.0,VB Script,WML Script insert languages and object orient database technology.The requirement querying information of material processing through Internet by GPRS,WAP mobile handset and so on was accomplished.

An empirical study on user satisfaction in relation to those influencing factors for the development of database resources

In taking into full consideration of the technology acceptance model(TAM),this empirical study has made a few assumptions and also has formulated a model for the study on the level of satisfaction of database users. This research project was conducted by collecting relevant data from library users of five universities. Specifically, it aimed to measure database users' level of satisfaction and tried to find factors affecting these graduate students who are using databases regularly at their university libraries. An analysis of the collected data shows that the level of database users' satisfaction could be directly affected by the database service quality, the easiness of accessing the system and user perceived notion of usefulness of those databases that they use often. This study also found that database users' gender could be a significant factor in their perceived notion of easiness of accessing databases, and also in their perceived notion of satisfaction for their successful information retrieval operations. The frequency of accessing databases by these graduate students has an impact on users' perceived notion of easiness of database access. The users' school classifications could make a significant difference in their perceived notion on the extent of usefulness of a particular database.

Query Performance Prediction for Information Retrieval Based on Covering Topic Score

We present a statistical method called Covering Topic Score （CTS） to predict query performance for information retrieval. Estimation is based on how well the topic of a user＇s query is covered by documents retrieved from a certain retrieval system. Our approach is conceptually simple and intuitive, and can be easily extended to incorporate features beyond bag- of-words such as phrases and proximity of terms. Experiments demonstrate that CTS significantly correlates with query performance in a variety of TREC test collections, and in particular CTS gains more prediction power benefiting from features of phrases and proximity of terms. We compare CTS with previous state-of-the-art methods for query performance prediction including clarity score and robustness score. Our experimental results show that CTS consistently performs better than, or at least as well as, these other methods. In addition to its high effectiveness, CTS is also shown to have very low computational complexity, meaning that it can be practical for real applications.

Meta-Path-Based Search and Mining in Heterogeneous Information Networks

Information networks that can be extracted from many domains are widely studied recently. Different functions for mining these networks are proposed and developed, such as ranking, community detection, and link prediction. Most existing network studies are on homogeneous networks, where nodes and links are assumed from one single type. In reality, however, heterogeneous information networks can better model the real-world systems, which are typically semi-structured and typed, following a network schema. In order to mine these heterogeneous information networks directly, we propose to explore the meta structure of the information network, i.e., the network schema. The concepts of meta-paths are proposed to systematically capture numerous semantic relationships across multiple types of objects, which are defined as a path over the graph of network schema. Meta-paths can provide guidance for search and mining of the network and help analyze and understand the semantic meaning of the objects and relations in the network. Under this framework, similarity search and other mining tasks such as relationship prediction and clustering can be addressed by systematic exploration of the network meta structure. Moreover, with user＇s guidance or feedback, we can select the best meta-path or their weighted combination for a specific mining task.

Enhancing Time Series Clustering by Incorporating Multiple Distance Measures with Semi-Supervised Learning

Time series clustering is widely applied in various areas. Existing researches focus mainly on distance measures between two time series, such as dynamic time warping （DTW） based methods, edit-distance based methods, and shapelets-based methods. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate, for the first time, that no single distance measure performs significantly better than others on clustering datasets of time series where spectral clustering is used. As such, a question arises as to how to choose an appropriate measure for a given dataset of time series. To answer this question, we propose an integration scheme that incorporates multiple distance measures using semi-supervised clustering. Our approach is able to integrate all the measures by extracting valuable underlying information for the clustering. To the best of our knowledge, this work demonstrates for the first time that the semi-supervised clustering method based on constraints is able to enhance time series clustering by combining multiple distance measures. Having tested on clustering various time series datasets, we show that our method outperforms individual measures, as well as typical integration approaches.

Facilitating Service Discovery with Semantic Overlay

Service Oriented Architecture （SOA） and Peer-to-Peer （P2P） computing share many common characteristics. It is believed that the combination of the two emerging techniques is a very promising method in promoting the web services （WS）. Because the service discovery plays a key role in the integration, here a P2P-based framework to manage the knowledge of service and locating services is proposed. In this paper, the details of the principle, constructing and maintaining of service semantic overlay architecture have been described, and the way how the semantic overlay facilitates discovery of service resources is illustrated. To enable the semantic web service superiority, Service Ontology, which is considered as the service semantic model, is employed to depict service. The service discovery includes two phases： searching on the service semantic overlay; and local discovery in peer＇s service repository. Various solutions have been proposed to realize those two phases. Furthermore, tests are carried out to evaluate service discovery on the architecture.