Keynotes Presentations
The Role of Social Presence in Enhancing Consumers’
Attitudes towards Online Shopping
Dr. Khaled Hassanein, McMaster University
One significant difference between online and offline shopping environments, is that the offline shopping experience encompasses a wide range of emotions involving various types of interactions with humans through multiple sensory channels. The online shopping experience, on the other hand, is primarily geared towards reducing the user’s cognitive burden through functional and performance-based Website design heuristics. As such, e-Commerce may be viewed as being more impersonal, anonymous and automated than traditional person-to-person commerce. Consumers who use the Internet to purchase items are mostly faced with product images and descriptions that are displayed with little or no emotional appeal. Such products are usually accompanied by descriptions that are functional, attribute-based, and at the very least, unemotional. In this presentation, Dr. Hassanein will explore how incorporating various levels of human warmth and sociability in the Web interface can impact consumer attitudes towards online shopping. Differences across product types as well as different cultures in this regard will also be explored.
Evolving Smart Information Systems
Dr. Ajith Abraham, Technical University of Ostrava
We are blessed with the sophisticated technological artifacts that are enriching our daily lives and the society. It is believed that the future Internet is going to provide us the framework to integrate, control or operate virtually any device, appliance, monitoring systems, infrastructures etc. The challenge is to design intelligent machines and networks that could communicate and adapt according to the environment. In this talk, the concept of digital ecosystem will be presented and then various research challenges from several application perspective will be illustrated.
Creating value from Social Networking activity
Dr. Carl Adams, University of Portsmouth
Existing discourse on generating value from social networking (SN) activity is mainly focussed from the perspective of companies trying to sell their products and services. This is not surprising given that nearly one billion people, typically from the richer communities of the world, use SN sites. In addition, the wider infrastructure of SN sites offer data rich and supportive environments to engage potential customers. However, a company-only perspective does not capture the full range of value creation from SN activity.
This paper explores generating value from SN activity for a variety of stakeholders, including the hosting social networking companies, the individual SN ‘consumers’, a variety of business users and society in general. The paper presents value-chains for different groups of SN stakeholders and identifies challenges and opportunities affecting value creation. The paper notes interesting crossovers between value chains for different stakeholder groups. The paper argues that creating value for one stakeholder group will be made easier by considering the value chains of other stakeholder groups. The paper also examines alternatives to the advertising only model used by many social networking companies, the concepts of conduit support mechanisms for different corporate groups and a variety of personal support mechanisms emerging for individual users.
Competitive Arousal in Electronic Auctions
Dr. Marc T. P. Adam, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
We conduct a laboratory experiment in which we manipulate the degree of time pressure in a series of ascending clock auctions in order to influence the bidders’ level of arousal. During the experiment, we measure the auction participants’ heart rate and skin conductivity, which are well known proxies for arousal and emotionality in psychophysiology. We find that bidders’ physiological arousal and final prices are significantly higher in auctions with high time pressure. This result confirms the conjectures of previous research. Furthermore, the result can be interpreted as evidence for the existence of a hedonic value the bidders derive during exciting auctions and which accrues over and beyond the mere utilitarian value of the potential purchase. Moreover, in comparing the physiological arousal between winners and losers of an auction, we find that the “joy of winning” is indeed significantly stronger than the “frustration of losing” in ascending auctions.
From Supercomputing to Cluster Computing to Grid Computing to Cloud Computing
─ Challenges and Solutions
Dr. Yi Pan, Chair and Professor
Department of Computer Science, Georgia State University
34 Peachtree Street, Suite 1450, Atlanta,GA 30302-4110,USA
Cloud computing has emerged rapidly as a growing paradigm of on-demand access to computing, data and software utilities using a usage-based billing model. Users essentially rent resources and pay for what they use and everything including software, platform, and infrastructure is as a service. Cloud computing overlaps some of the concepts of cluster, distributed, grid, service, ubiquitous, utility and virtual computing; However it outgrows from these computing domains and has its own meaning now. Many mature technologies used in other computing models are also employed as components in cloud computing. Clearly, there are still many unresolved and open problems due to its unique characteristics which are different from supercomputing, cluster computing, grid computing, utility computing and service computing. In this talk, I will give a review of supercomputing, cluster computing, grid computing and cloud computing. Since the first supercomputer was developed 40 years ago, there have been many technological changes and many programming models developed. Hence, a review of technologies and approaches used in supercomputing, cluster computing, grid computing will be helpful for us to identify issues and approaches in cloud computing. Comparisons of these computing domains, their limitations and potential solutions will be included in this talk.
Latest Development of e-Business Technologies:
An Application Developer’s Perspective
Dr. Martin Zhao, Mercer University, USA
E-Business is technology driven and the technological landscape has been changing rapidly and drastically in the past decade. In this presentation, I am going to first overview the latest trends as represented by Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 and their impacts on individual user experiences and the enterprises. In the second half of the talk, I will be focusing on mashups using open APIs such as the Google Maps API. An anatomy of Google Maps mashups is to be given using a Virtual Campus Tour app developed for Mercer Admissions Office to show how some popular client-side technologies can be used together to develop a useful app with ease.
Innovation and Entrepreneurship:
Keys to E-Business Success in SMEs
Dr. Yanqing Duan, University of Bedfordshire, UK
Faced with today’s worldwide financial and economic turbulence, innovation and entrepreneurship are a matter of business survival. Development and deployment of emerging and innovative ICTs are providing, and will continuously offer new opportunities as well as challenges for e-business innovation, evolution and growth. This may be particularly true for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). However, why are some SMEs very successful in e-business whilst others are left behind? Extensive research has been conducted in understanding factors affecting e-business success from various theoretical and practical perspectives. It is argued that ICT innovation adoption and entrepreneurship are key to e-business success, especially in SMEs. Findings on critical factors are reviewed. Relevant concepts, theories and practices in innovation and entrepreneurship and their roles in SMEs e-business success will be discussed. Evidence from various case studies will be presented to support key arguments. Future directions and challenges for research and practice in innovation, entrepreneurship and e-business success in SMEs will be highlighted.
