SERVICE-PROCESS CONFIGURATIONS IN ELECTRONIC RETAILING: A TAXONOMIC ANALYSIS OF ELECTRONIC FOOD RETAILERS

Service-processes of electronic retailers are founded on electronic technologies that provide flexibility to sense and respond online to the dynamic and complex needs of customers. In this paper, we develop a taxonomy of service-processes in electronic retailing and demonstrate their linkage to customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. The taxonomy is grounded in a conceptual classification scheme that differentiates service-process stages on a continuum of flexibility. Using data on electronic service-processes collected from 255 electronic food retailers, we identified eight configurations for the taxonomy. We also collected and analyzed publicly reported customer satisfaction survey data that were available for 52 electronic food retailers in the study sample. The results of this analysis indicate positive and significant correlation of the ordering of the taxonomy configurations with (i) customer satisfaction with product information, product selection, web site aesthetics, web site navigation, customer support, and ease of return, and (ii) customer loyalty. Taken together, the results of our empirical analyses demonstrate that the taxonomy captures information and variety within and across the electronic service-process configurations in ways that can be related to customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.Marketing, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Creating harmonious and legible colour schemes in the automated generation of multimedia presentations

Due to the growing amount of information on the web, the user specific requirements and different characteristics of output devices, the opportunities for the automatic generation of multimedia presentations grow. The multimedia presentation generator, that resides in a dynamic environment, such as a museum website, where the user requirements, presentation device characteristics, presentation content and the domain characteristics are not known in advance, needs to be able to compose a presentation. With respect to stylistic design, graphic designers can create a template providing stylistic aspects, but as soon as any of the dynamic attributes of the system change this can result in the need for redesign. We argue that with the correct balance between form and function and by using relevant aspects of design theory, the automatic presentation generator can keep harmony and legibility factors in balance. The aim of this work is to demonstrate this approach on the example of automatic colour design with the use of colour theory from Itten and Tufte. By taking required legibility factors into account, harmonious and well balanced colour schemes, adapted to the requirements of the user, the characteristics of the presentation platform, the content's domain and discourse model can be created. We apply our approach to the domain of presentation environments for musea for fine arts

Visual balance--the tightrope of computer generated layout

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1995.Includes bibliographical references (leaves [55]-60).by Xiaoyang Yang.M.S

Adaptive Layout for Interactive Documents

This thesis presents a novel approach to create automated layouts for rich illustrative material that could adapt according to the screen size and contextual requirements. The adaption not only considers global layout but also deals with the content and layout adaptation of individual illustrations in the layout. An unique solution has been developed that integrates constraint-based and force-directed techniques to create adaptive grid-based and non-grid layouts. A set of annotation layouts are developed which adapt the annotated illustrations to match the contextual requirements over time

Adaptive Methods for Robust Document Image Understanding

A vast amount of digital document material is continuously being produced as part of major digitization efforts around the world. In this context, generic and efficient automatic solutions for document image understanding represent a stringent necessity. We propose a generic framework for document image understanding systems, usable for practically any document types available in digital form. Following the introduced workflow, we shift our attention to each of the following processing stages in turn: quality assurance, image enhancement, color reduction and binarization, skew and orientation detection, page segmentation and logical layout analysis. We review the state of the art in each area, identify current defficiencies, point out promising directions and give specific guidelines for future investigation. We address some of the identified issues by means of novel algorithmic solutions putting special focus on generality, computational efficiency and the exploitation of all available sources of information. More specifically, we introduce the following original methods: a fully automatic detection of color reference targets in digitized material, accurate foreground extraction from color historical documents, font enhancement for hot metal typesetted prints, a theoretically optimal solution for the document binarization problem from both computational complexity- and threshold selection point of view, a layout-independent skew and orientation detection, a robust and versatile page segmentation method, a semi-automatic front page detection algorithm and a complete framework for article segmentation in periodical publications. The proposed methods are experimentally evaluated on large datasets consisting of real-life heterogeneous document scans. The obtained results show that a document understanding system combining these modules is able to robustly process a wide variety of documents with good overall accuracy

MotionScan: Towards Brain Concussion Detection with a Mobile Tablet Device

This thesis reports on a study to determine the viability of using a mobile tablet device as a brain concussion detection tool. The research builds upon the results of a prior method of collecting data for measuring motion sensitivity, where a user presses and releases a force sensor to balance a rising and falling line on a computer display. The motion sensitivity data collected using this force sensor device was shown to have less irregularity in persons with concussion. The MotionScan application, developed for this research, uses the accelerometer of a tablet device to record motor movement of a user while the user tries to control a free-moving ball on the tablet screen to trace a line. Data collection sessions were conducted with 20 participants, where researchers recorded motor performance data for similar tasks using both the MotionScan application and the force sensor device. Researchers analyzed the performance outcomes on the tablet application and force sensor device, and validated that they both record motor movements similarly. Participants were also asked for their feedback on the interface of MotionScan and the data collection process, which was used to improve the usability of MotionScan and data collection processes. The research demonstrates that a tablet device can measure the variability in a person’s motor sensitivity and with more research could be used as a concussion detection tool

Adaptive graphic design that leverages human creativity

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-89).This thesis proposes the investigation of a distributed architecture to facilitate automatic adaptation of graphical representation in digital documents to constraints imposed by the presentation device. The goal of the system is to select the most effective graphical solution from among a set of such solutions given the characteristics of the viewing environment (i.e. resolution, screen area, aspect ratio, color depth) or to determine that all available solutions lie below a specified effectiveness threshold in order to prompt manual, human redesign for that particular case. Such a system demonstrates a new hybrid architecture for problem-solving systems that is able to leverage the systematic protocols of pure computing systems with the creative intelligence of human invention.by William Kelly Norton, Jr..S.M