How Business Intelligence Can Help You to Better Understand Your Customers

Companies can incur heavy losses when customers do not return; therefore, they need to have a better understanding of their customers' behaviors in order to improve service and products. And nowadays, there are multiple resources of customers' data especially with web services, such as websites, chatbots, emails, social media, PoS, ERP, CRM, SCM, therefore, it becomes difficult to collect all this huge data altogether and analyze it manually This paper highlights the role of business intelligence in improving the relationship with the customers, and explores the techniques used to analyze customers' data in order to predict their demands and reach their satisfaction

Leveraging on Digital Technologies to Up-Scale Tourism for Economic Growth in Africa

The application of digital technologies in various human endeavours today is unabated. This article presents information and communications technologies (ICTs) as a driving force for promoting tourism in Africa for accelerated economic growth. Descriptive methodology was used in the study. The study relied on the explored impacts of tourism on socio-economic development of the developing nations of Africa and encourages the adoption of persona models in implementing technological strategies geared toward the promotion of tourism products and services on the continent. The article advocates technology compliance by all tourism organizations and involvement of all stakeholders, agencies of governments and ICT drivers in making Africa a destination of choice to the world by adopting appropriate technological provisions

Evaluation of Multi-Peer and Self-Assessment in Higher Education: A Brunei Case Study

This article presents an evaluation of the use of peer and self-assessment as part of the learning process in a public speaking assessment coursework, with students from two departments taking part. Students were assessed by themselves, their peers and the lecturer using an online platform, Google forms, utilizing a set of rubrics. The marks were compared between markers to identify similarities and differences. After the process, student feedback on the experience was obtained using a questionnaire utilizing the Likert seven point scale to rate different questions. Analysis of the marks awarded found that whilst there might be correlations between different markers (i.e. peer – self) for marks on certain subsections of the work, there was no overall correlation between marks. Student perceptions to the exercise indicated that the use of rubrics was well received; students considered it a fair assessment method and it provided information on how to perform well in the assessment

Applying the Computational Intelligence Paradigm to Nuclear Power Plant Operation: A Review (1990-2015)

In the guise of artificial neural networks (ANNs), genetic/evolutionary computation algorithms (GAs/ECAs), fuzzy logic (FL) inference systems (FLIS) and their variants as well as combinations, the computational intelligence (CI) paradigm has been applied to nuclear energy (NE) since the late 1980s as a set of efficient and accurate, non-parametric, robust-to-noise as well as to-missing-information, non-invasive on-line tools for monitoring, predicting and overall controlling nuclear (power) plant (N(P)P) operation. Since then, the resulting CI-based implementations have afforded increasingly reliable as well as robust performance, demonstrating their potential as either stand-alone tools, or - whenever more advantageous - combined with each other as well as with traditional signal processing techniques. The present review is focused upon the application of CI methodologies to the - generally acknowledged as - key-issues of N(P)P operation, namely: control, diagnostics and fault detection, monitoring, N(P)P operations, proliferation and resistance applications, sensor and component reliability, spectroscopy, fusion supporting operations, as these have been reported in the relevant primary literature for the period 1990-2015. At one end, 1990 constitutes the beginning of the actual implementation of innovative, and – at the same time – robust as well as practical, directly implementable in H/W, CI-based solutions/tools which have proved to be significantly superior to the traditional as well as the artificial-intelligence-(AI)derived methodologies in terms of operation efficiency as well as robustness-to-noise and/or otherwise distorted/missing information. At the other end, 2015 marks a paradigm shift in terms of the emergent (and, swiftly, ubiquitous) use of deep neural networks (DNNs) over existing ANN architectures and FL problem representations, thus dovetailing the increasing requirements of the era of complex - as well as Big - Data and forever changing the means of ANN/neuro-fuzzy construction and application/performance. By exposing the prevalent CI-based tools for each key-issue of N(P)P operation, overall as well as over time for the given 1990-2015 period, the applicability and optimal use of CI tools to NE problems is revealed, thus providing the necessary know-how concerning crucial decisions that need to be made for the increasingly efficient as well as safe exploitation of NE

The Utilization of Social Media by Small and Medium Food Vendors in Brunei Darussalam

This research examines the factors that contribute to the utilization of social media by the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in the food industry in Brunei Darussalam. It also investigates how social media provides opportunities to SMEs. This research was done using a quantitative method through primary research that was focused on small and medium-sized food vendors in Brunei Darussalam. Survey questions were distributed to food SMEs and vendors, who use social media to assist them in conducting their business, to serve as a guideline to understand how social media networks can lead to positive business outcomes and how understanding key factors may lead to optimizing product portfolios and to discover new opportunities for their business to expand. Based on the authors' research, cost effectiveness was found to influence social media usage among the small and medium food vendors in Brunei. Factors such as trust, interactivity and compatibility, however were not found to be the factors influencing the utilization of social media

Identity Authentication Security Management in Mobile Payment Systems

Mobile payment is a new payment method offering users mobility, reachability, compatibility, and convenience. But mobile payment involves great uncertainty and risk given its electronic and wireless nature. Therefore, biometric authentication has been adopted widely in mobile payment in recent years. However, although technology requirements for secure mobile payment have been met, standards and consistent requirements of user authentication in mobile payment are not available. The flow management of user authentication in mobile payment is still at its early stage. Accordingly, this paper proposes an anonymous authentication and management flow for mobile payment to support secure transaction to prevent the disclosure of users' information and to reduce identity theft. The proposed management flow integrates transaction key generation, encryption and decryption, and matching to process users' personal information and biometric characteristics based on mobile equipment authentication carrier

Analysis of Speeches by the Former President of the US, Barack Hussein Obama, Regarding the Middle East and Northern Africa

The main intention in this article is to critically analyze the ex-president Barack Obama's speeches regarding the Middle East and (North) Africa and see how US-America, Middle East, and Africa are framed in political ideologies. Data is collected from the four speeches delivered by the ex-president of the USA in different places and settings. The data is analyzed using critical discourse analysis (CDA). The findings revealed that political ideology sleeplessly aspires to safeguard the interests of America and her “true” allies to sustain their world power and to suppress the “others” in the counterfeit names of tolerance, engagement, aid and support, democracy and freedom, knowledge-driven economy, peace and security, etc., that targets the younger generation. Contemporary pretexts and extensions have been done with discourse manipulations and real-life interventions

Involvement of the Applied Translation Procedures in Compatibility of Persian Medical Terms With International Naming Criteria

Medical language, as many technical languages, is rich with morphologically complex words. The increasing number of foreign words and specific terms incorporated into the native language are due to the ongoing development of technology and science. Many problems appear in medical translation when the Persian translators try to employ non-Persian or imported words in medical texts, in which multiple equivalents may be created for one particular word based on the individual preferences of authors and translators in the target language. According to this study, following the analysis of the data based on the applied translation procedures and word formation processes, the compatibility of the resulted characteristics has been investigated based on Sager's naming criteria and it is concluded that the main problem is due to the translation procedures of borrowing and substitution

The Nature and Role of User Beliefs Regarding a Website's Design Quality

Researchers and practitioners have long been interested in identifying the criteria that users consider important in assessing whether a system is worth using. However, past research in this domain has not taken into account the characteristics of a system's design and their quality in a systematic and comprehensive manner, which is likely to have limited the development of actionable design guidelines. The article addresses this issue by suggesting a research model that links user beliefs—which have traditionally been used in IT acceptance and success research (i.e., information quality, system quality, usefulness, and ease of use)—to their beliefs regarding the quality of three categories of a system's design (i.e., visual quality, page layout quality, and navigation quality) and testing it in the context of organizational intranets. The analysis of data collected from 159 intranet website users in three organizations supported the model, suggesting that the three categories of design quality beliefs significantly influenced users' assessment of their system's information quality and system quality

Mobile Health and Telemedicine: Awareness, Adoption and Importance of Health Study

In 2016, the U.S. Government health expenditures reached $3.35 trillion and the cost per person stood at$10,345. Health is seen as impacting both one's quality of life and finances. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) (2008 - 2016) brought the issue of cost to the forefront for all people especially those in the health disparate communities. Advances in health informatics coupled with new approaches to healthcare delivery may hold promise for this large industry in the USA that critically needs to be cost effective in order to sustain itself. This paper reports a study that investigated importance of health, mobile health (m-Health) and telemedicine awareness along with its adoption in a health disparate community that has one of the Historical Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs) in the country. The findings were that, all participants owned a mobile (cell) phone with smart features. Although a large number them indicated that their health was very important to them, there was lack of awareness and adoption of m-Health and telemedicine