Software piracy and counterfeiting is a global problem that has resulted in huge economic losses ... more Software piracy and counterfeiting is a global problem that has resulted in huge economic losses worldwide. This paper proposes a theory-based approach to study the key factors contributing to piracy and counterfeiting issues. We first developed a theoretical model linking the antecedents into the key factors using information acquired from an extended literature review. We then undertook a survey of thirty business professionals representing different industries, functional roles and different levels of work exposure to software usages in Singapore to investigate the issues. Specifically, the objectives of the survey were to: (1) investigate the key issues associated to software piracy and counterfeiting; (2) identify the factors that have contributed to the software piracy and counterfeiting; and (3) draw up a refined list of appropriate measures to counter software piracy and counterfeiting. Through the structural use of Non-Parametric Correlation Test, Chi-Square Test for Independence, Fisher Exact Probability Test and Phi value, our findings showed that the lack of awareness to software usage laws and regulations, the perceived lack of enforcement measures and penalties, and the lack of educational programs catering to the proper usage of software were the key factors contributing to the software piracy and counterfeiting issues. The findings are useful to managers of software companies and policy-makers in reviewing existing software protection policies, laws and regulations, such that any flaws or loopholes can be identified.
Tuberculosis (TB) is a major public health problem in India which accounts for nearly one-fifth o... more Tuberculosis (TB) is a major public health problem in India which accounts for nearly one-fifth of the global TB burden. Though India has been gaining success in eliminating TB, the disease still kills 1000 people daily. It is of prime importance to control the TB situation in India. Motivated by the need to explore factors influencing TB, a qualitative study was conducted with 14 doctors and key TB informants in India over a period of one month involving face-to-face interviews. The interviewees came from diverse backgrounds and vocations, thus providing a rich data on varied issues in controlling the spread of TB in India for enhanced patient care. The data was coded and analyzed. The findings suggest the need to address mental and social well-being of the TB patients through three main themes, namely, Alerts, Care and Education, in order to control the TB situation in India.
An architecture of a prototype digital work environment (DWE), designed to lead users of an acade... more An architecture of a prototype digital work environment (DWE), designed to lead users of an academic community to the required information resources based on their tasks, is proposed. The important aspects of the DWE include the identification of information resources available in the acad-emic environment, the various categories of users and the tasks associated with each category of users. Digital
DWE is aimed at providing a one-stop access point to local and remote digital library collections... more DWE is aimed at providing a one-stop access point to local and remote digital library collections, traditional in -house libraries, and most importantly, to the vast array of information resources that exists in the academic community's local Intranet. Due to vast amount of information available and the difficulty faced by students and staff in finding the relevant resources, there is a need for a better and logical organization of these resources. DWE uses tasks as a means of directing students and staff to the relevant resources. Tasks generally play an important role in system and user interface design. Identifying the user's tasks enables the designer to construct user interfaces reflecting the tasks' properties, including efficient usage patterns, easy-touse interaction sequences, and powerful assistance features. The resources in DWE are organized according to specific tasks performed by the research students and staff in the division of information studies. The tasks and resources were elicited based on the needs of faculty and students through interviews and focus groups. This paper focuses on the task of preparing and writing a Master dissertation. It highlight the importance of task based design in assisting and helping students and instructors from the time of selecting the research project to the time of submitting the final bound copies of the dissertation.
Recent proliferation of research in digital libraries has given rise to a number of working digit... more Recent proliferation of research in digital libraries has given rise to a number of working digital libraries around the world. These digital libraries have been defined, designed and developed differently, and therefore the experience that one might have from one particular digital library might not be the same with other digital libraries. Current status of twenty digital libraries around the world: twelve from the US, three from the UK, two from Australia, one from New Zealand, one from Singapore, and one from Canada, has been reviewed. Various features of these selected digital libraries were collected from their home pages, journal articles and the information published on the Web. The parameters used to study the chosen digital libraries include: contents, type of library, organization, user interface, access, information retrieval, search features, output format, and links to other Internet resources. While some of the chosen digital libraries cater for specific subject or document format, others play the role of digital as well as virtual libraries giving access to the local digital collection as well as remote collections accessible through the Web. While most of these digital libraries have been developed for use in-house or by authorised users, some digital libraries are globally accessible. The chosen digital libraries differ in terms of the information search and output facilities, and very few have the facility to store search histories. Only four digital libraries have books in electronic form -National library of Canada in general area, Gutenberg in subject-specific area, and SETIS and Carnegie Mellon University in special collection area.
Journal of The American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2007
In contrast to many recent large-scale catastrophic events, such as the Turkish earthquake in 199... more In contrast to many recent large-scale catastrophic events, such as the Turkish earthquake in 1999, the 9/11 attack in New York in 2001, the Bali Bombing in 2002, and the Asian Tsunami in 2004, the initial rescue effort towards Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. in 2005 had been sluggish. Even as Congress has promised to convene a formal inquiry into the response to Katrina, this article offers another perspective by analyzing the delayed response through the lens of knowledge management (KM). A KM framework situated in the context of disaster management is developed to study three distinct but overlapping KM processes, namely, knowledge creation, knowledge transfer, and knowledge reuse. Drawing from a total of more than 400 documents-including local, national, and foreign news articles, newswires, congressional reports, and television interview transcripts, as well as Internet resources such as wikipedia and blogs-14 major delay causes in Katrina are presented. The extent to which the delay causes were a result of the lapses in KM processes within and across the government agencies are discussed.
The surge of interest in the World-Wide-Web (WWW) with its potential commercial payoff has result... more The surge of interest in the World-Wide-Web (WWW) with its potential commercial payoff has resulted in an explosion of information as organisations join in the fray to publish and do business on the Internet. In addition, Intranet, the private corporate WWW-based network has also emerged to provide cost-effective and efficient groupware and information management solutions for organisations. As a result, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) used for constructing WWW documents, has become a contender for authoring future office documents. This paper examines the current practices of WWW publishing and highlights its inadequacies and drawbacks. It demonstrates the need and advantages of using a hypermedia database system to manage Web publications and briefly describes the design and prototyping of the D4W3 hypermedia database system.
Communication and collaboration with other people is a major theme in the information seeking pro... more Communication and collaboration with other people is a major theme in the information seeking process. Collaborative querying addresses this issue by sharing other users' search experiences to help users formulate appropriate queries to a search engine. This paper describes a collaborative querying system that helps users with query formulation by finding previously submitted similar queries through mining web logs. The system operates by clustering and recommending related queries to users using a hybrid query similarity identification approach. The system employs a graph-based approach to visualize the query recommendations.
The Internet environment, with its packet-switched network and lack of resource reservation mecha... more The Internet environment, with its packet-switched network and lack of resource reservation mechanisms, has made the delivery of low bit-rate real-time communication services, such as audio and video, particularly difficult and challenging. The high potential transmission delay and data packet loss under varying and uncontrollable network conditions will almost certainly lead to unpleasant and unintelligible audio and jerky video play-out.
The surge of interest in the World-Wide-Web (WWW) with its potential commercial payoff has result... more The surge of interest in the World-Wide-Web (WWW) with its potential commercial payoff has resulted in an explosion of information as organizations join in the bandwagon to publish and do business on the Internet. A related development, Intranet, which basically uses the same Internet technology to building private corporate WWW-based networks, has emerged to provide cost-effective and efficient groupware and information management solutions for organisations. As a result, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), used for constructing WWW documents, has become a contender for authoring future office documents. With this scenario, this study examines WWW practices and highlights the inadequacy and drawbacks of current publishing on the WWW. This paper will demonstrate the need as well as the advantages in having a hypermedia database system to maintain and manage office or WWW documents and describes the design and prototyping of the D4W3 hypermedia database system.
Harnessing previously issued queries to facilitate collaborative querying is an approach that can... more Harnessing previously issued queries to facilitate collaborative querying is an approach that can help users in digital libraries and other information systems better meet their information needs. Here, the kernel step is to identify and cluster similar queries by mining the query logs. However because of the short lengths of queries, it is relatively difficult to cluster queries effectively using on the terms used since they cannot convey enough information. This paper introduces a hybrid method to cluster queries by utilizing both the query terms and the results returned to queries. Experiments show that this method outperforms existing query clustering techniques.
Web information monitoring: an analysis of Web page updates
Online Information Review, 2001
... Siu Cheung Hui, Siu Cheung Hui is an Associate Professor at the School of Computer Engineerin... more ... Siu Cheung Hui, Siu Cheung Hui is an Associate Professor at the School of Computer Engineering, at Nanyang Technological ... An abundance of animated images, image maps, fancy background images, frames and advanced font handling are characteristic of commercial ...
Knowledge of the Internet Protocol (IP) address is essential for connection establishment in cert... more Knowledge of the Internet Protocol (IP) address is essential for connection establishment in certain classes of synchronous distributed applications such as Internet telephony and videoconferencing systems. A problem of dynamic IP addressing arises when the connection to the Internet is through an Internet Service Provider since the IP address is dynamically allocated only at connection time.
With the advent of Internet technology, it is now feasible to provide effective and efficient hel... more With the advent of Internet technology, it is now feasible to provide effective and efficient help desk service over the global Internet to meet customers' requirements and satisfaction. In this research, we have designed and developed a Web-based intelligent help desk support environment, WebHotLine, to support the customer service centre of a large multinational corporation in the electronics industry. This paper describes the basic architecture of the environment that supports the major functions of Web-based fault information retrieval, online multilingual translation capability, different operating modes of video-conferencing for enhanced support and direct intelligent fault diagnosis by customers or customer support engineers. As a result, WebHotLine helps to save cost in eliminating the expensive overseas telephone charges, reduction in machine down time and number of on-site visits by service engineers as in traditional help desk environment.
In a traditional help desk environment, service engineers typically provide a worldwide customer-... more In a traditional help desk environment, service engineers typically provide a worldwide customer-base support through the use of long-distance telephone calls. Such a mode of support is inefficient, ineffective and generally results in high costs, long service cycles, and poor quality of service. The rapid growth of the World Wide Web technology, with its widespread acceptance and accessibility, have resulted in the emergence of Web-based help desk systems. Depending on the functionality provided by such systems, most of the associated disadvantages of the traditional help desk environment can be eliminated. This paper describes a Web-based integrated system, the WebHotLine system, that possesses Web-based retrieval, online multilingual translation capability for service records, rule-base reasoning for direct intelligent fault diagnosis by customers or service engineers, different modes of video conferencing for enhanced customer support and network security for secure data communications.
A framework for evaluating Internet telephony systems
Internet Research, 1998
An Internet telephony system functions like a conventional telephone to support real-time voice c... more An Internet telephony system functions like a conventional telephone to support real-time voice communication over the Internet. Numerous proprietary systems have surfaced since its introduction as a result of its main attraction of allowing transcontinental telephone calls to be made at the price of local telephone calls. Currently, these systems are at their infancy stage with no support for standards
The growth and diversity of electronic journals (e-journals) in the past five years had led many ... more The growth and diversity of electronic journals (e-journals) in the past five years had led many to predict the extinction of print journals and that a new paradigm is sweeping scholarship. Some others however, believe that future electronic scholarly journals will be different from their print antecedents and that both will fill a different niche, and will be necessary for the growth of knowledge. This paper considers the future of e-journals in the light of the use and perception of graduate student end-users, and their expectations of future e-journals. A segment of the results from a recent user study that present significant implications for the design of future e-journals are reported. The results show a significantly high acceptance of e-journals by this category of users. Generally, e-journals are expected to be different from print journals, with novel forms of functionality not possible in their print counterparts.
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