Information Technology Applications in Hospitality and Tourism: A Review of Publications from 2005 to 2007

The tourism and hospitality industries have widely adopted information technology (IT) to reduce costs, enhance operational efficiency, and most importantly to improve service quality and customer experience. This article offers a comprehensive review of articles that were published in 57 tourism and hospitality research journals from 2005 to 2007. Grouping the findings into the categories of consumers, technologies, and suppliers, the article sheds light on the evolution of IT applications in the tourism and hospitality industries. The article demonstrates that IT is increasingly becoming critical for the competitive operations of the tourism and hospitality organizations as well as for managing the distribution and marketing of organizations on a global scale

ToScA North America (6 – 8 June 2017, The University of Texas, Austin, TX) Program

ToScA North America will address key areas of science, including Multi-modal Imaging, Geosciences, Forensics, Increasing Contrast, Educational Outreach, Data, Materials Science and Medical and Biological Science.University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray CT Facility (UTCT); Jackson School of Geosciences, The University of Texas at Austin; Natural History Museum (London); Royal Microscopical Society (Oxford, UK)Geological Science

IT Feature Use over Time and its Impact on Individual Task Performance

Although anecdotal evidence in organizations and research studies suggest that the functional potential of installed IT applications is underutilized and that most users apply just a narrow band of features, there is still little understanding about the nature and implications of change in IT feature use (ITFU) over time. Drawing on technology capability broadening-deepening and IT skill acquisition literatures, this study investigates how IT use—conceptualized at the IT feature level—evolves over time and how it affects continual and distal task performance during the initial usage of an IT application. The results of two longitudinal panel studies of 330 and 314 IT users show that, when users start using an IT application for task accomplishment, ITFU increases nonlinearly over time with diminishing growth rates. At early stages of system use, users predominantly extend their ITFU to become more familiar with the system’s feature potential, while, at later stages, when users have increasingly recognized a match between the requirements of a work task and system features, they focus more heavily on leveraging a stable subset of IT features to benefit from task completion. As such, the magnitude in broadening and deepening capabilities in using IT features decreases over time. Moreover, both studies reveal that growth in ITFU has, in and of itself, significant impacts not only on immediate performance perceptions but also on more delayed, objective task performance. Researchers will benefit from the study results by better understanding the dynamics of individual ITFU and their performance implications. Managers striving to encourage users to expand their IT feature repertoire may use the results to conduct experiencebased feature upgrades or training programs

Systems Thinking in a Second Grade Curriculum: Students Engaged to Address a Statewide Drought

Faced with issues, such as drought and climate change, educators around the world acknowledge the need for developing students’ ability to solve problems within and across contexts. A systems thinking pedagogy, which recognizes interdependence and interconnected relationships among concrete elements and abstract concepts (Meadows, 2008; Senge et al., 2012), has potential to transform the classroom into a space of observing, theorizing, discovering, and analyzing, thus linking academic learning to the real world. In a qualitative case study in one school located in a major metropolitan area in California, USA teachers and their 7- and 8-year-old students used systems thinking in an interdisciplinary project-based curriculum. Through reflection and investigations, students devised solutions and used innovative approaches to publicly engage peers and family members in taking action to address an environmental crisis

Information Technology (IT) Identity: A Conceptualization, Proposed Measures, and Research Agenda

With increasing embeddedness of information technologies (IT) in organizational processes, and services, individuals\u27 long-term IT use has become instrumental to business success. At the same time, IS research has illustrated that under-utilization by end-users often prevents organizations from realizing expected benefits from their technology investments. Because individual use is the critical link between technology investments and enhanced organizational performance through IT, in recent years, information systems researchers have begun to focus attention on the post-adoption phases of technology assimilation. The overarching goal of this relatively new research stream is to understand factors that influence individuals\u27 attempts to use IT to their fullest potential in the work setting. To advance research on post-adoption IT use, this three essay dissertation develops, operationalizes, and tests the new concept of information technology (IT) identity--defined as, the set of meanings an individual attaches to the self in relation to IT--as a product of individuals\u27 personal histories of interacting with IT, as well as a force that shapes their thinking and guides their IT use behaviors. The first essay builds the core concept through exploring whether young people\u27s individual self-concepts are tied to their interactions with mobile phones. The second essay draws on a rich repertoire of literature to formally theorize the domain and dimensions of IT identity, as well as its nomological net. By examining the processes by which IT identity is constructed and maintained, this essay offers IS researchers a new theoretical lens for examining individuals\u27 long-term IT use. The third essay develops an operational definition of IT identity and empirically tests the conditions under which the construct is a more or less salient predictor of individuals\u27 post-usage intentions and continued IT use than existing IS constructs. The results presented help delimit a role for IT identity in bridging the gap between current models of use and models that explain long term and richer IT use behaviors. Extending understanding of why and how individuals use IT in the long term may help provide a basis for designing managerial interventions that promote organizational assimilation of IT. Thus, by proposing and operationalizing IT identity as a core construct in explaining individual IT use, this research has the potential to advance theory and contribute to practice

Applications in security and evasions in machine learning : a survey

In recent years, machine learning (ML) has become an important part to yield security and privacy in various applications. ML is used to address serious issues such as real-time attack detection, data leakage vulnerability assessments and many more. ML extensively supports the demanding requirements of the current scenario of security and privacy across a range of areas such as real-time decision-making, big data processing, reduced cycle time for learning, cost-efficiency and error-free processing. Therefore, in this paper, we review the state of the art approaches where ML is applicable more effectively to fulfill current real-world requirements in security. We examine different security applications' perspectives where ML models play an essential role and compare, with different possible dimensions, their accuracy results. By analyzing ML algorithms in security application it provides a blueprint for an interdisciplinary research area. Even with the use of current sophisticated technology and tools, attackers can evade the ML models by committing adversarial attacks. Therefore, requirements rise to assess the vulnerability in the ML models to cope up with the adversarial attacks at the time of development. Accordingly, as a supplement to this point, we also analyze the different types of adversarial attacks on the ML models. To give proper visualization of security properties, we have represented the threat model and defense strategies against adversarial attack methods. Moreover, we illustrate the adversarial attacks based on the attackers' knowledge about the model and addressed the point of the model at which possible attacks may be committed. Finally, we also investigate different types of properties of the adversarial attacks