Critical factors for market sales promotion on social media in banking sector

Banks are adopting social media for market sales promotions as it is popular and enables targeted marketing, direct customer engagement, and multiple forms of engagement at a lower cost. However, the effectiveness of market sales promotions is not clear as they primarily rely on number of likes, sharing, and comments than the actual customer conversions. Moreover, it is unclear what factors to be considered while launching and running a successful market sales promotion campaign. We identify those factors through a case study of twelve market sales promotions from different banks in Sri Lanka. The research was conducted as a qualitative analysis based on the Straussian grounded theory, because this version of grounded theory allows a literature review for theoretical sampling, concept development, and defining properties and dimensions. Data were gathered through a set of interviews and observations. We found that six factors that mainly contribute to a successful market sales promotion campaign, namely the type of the promotion, target audience, timing of campaign, platform for communication, mode of communication, and resources. Moreover, platform rules, regulations, and organizational constraints affect the strength of the relationship between the independent and dependent factors

Factors affecting the adoption of e-commerce in Sri Lanka: internet users’ perspective

Despite being one of the earliest adopters of the Internet in the region, e-commerce adaptation in Sri Lanka appears to be relatively low. In this paper, we identify user-related barriers that prevent the wide-spread adoption of e-commerce in Sri Lanka. We adopted a mix-method methodology to identify Internet user-related adoption factors and to understand e-commerce merchants’ views on those factors. First, a preliminary survey was carried out by interviewing stakeholders to identify barriers affecting e-commerce adoption. Next, users’ perspective was captured using an online and paper-based survey. Survey results were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Finally, a set of interviews were conducted with e-commerce merchants to identify their views on those factors. Affordability, knowledge and awareness, and facilities expected from retailers were identified as the most significant factors contributing to the e-commerce adoption. Government and legal factors, consumer perception, and digital infrastructure are the least significant factors. Smoothening of the delivery process, convenient return policies, and enhancing government involvement to promote e-commerce were identified as the key recommendations to strengthen e-commerce adoption. Keywords: E-commerce adoption

Resource and query aware, multi-attribute resource discovery for P2P systems

Distributed, multi-attribute Resource Discovery (RD) is a fundamental requirement in collaborative Peer-to-Peer (P2P), grid, and cloud computing. We present an efficient and load balanced, P2P-based multi-attribute RD solution that consists of five heuristics, which can be executed independently and distributedly. First heuristic maintains a minimum number of nodes in a ring-like overlay while pruning nodes that do not significantly contribute to the range query resolution. Removing nonproductive nodes reduces the cost (e.g., hops and latency) of advertising resources and resolving queries. Second and third heuristics dynamically balance the key and query load distribution by transferring some of the keys to its predecessor/successor and by adding new predecessors/successors to handle transferred keys when existing nodes are insufficient, respectively. Last two heuristics form cliques of nodes (that are placed orthogonal to the overlay ring) to dynamically balance the highly skewed key and query loads. By applying these heuristics in the presented order, a RD solution that better responds to real-world resource and query characteristics is developed. Its efficacy is demonstrated using a simulation-based analysis under a variety of single and multi-attribute resource and query distributions derived from real workloads

Distributed, multi-user, multi-application, and multi-sensor data fusion over named data networks

Named Data Networking (NDN) routes data based on their application-layer content names enabling location independence, in-network caching, and enhanced security. A proof-of-concept solution is presented that demonstrates the applicability of NDN for multi-user, multi-application, and multi-sensor data-fusion systems. The system consists of a collaborative network of weather radars name data based on their geographic location and weather feature (e.g., reflectivity of clouds and wind velocity). This enables end users to specify an area of interest for a particular weather feature while being oblivious to the placement of radars and associated computing facilities. Conversely, the data-fusion system can also use its knowledge about the underlying system to decide the best sensing and data processing strategies. Such sensor-independent names also enhance resilience, enable processing data close to the source, and benefit from NDN features such as in-network caching and duplicate query suppression, consequently reducing the bandwidth requirements of the entire data-fusion system. The solution is implemented as an overlaid NDN enabling the benefits of both the NDN and overlay networks. Simulation-based analysis using reflectivity data from an actual weather event showed 84% reduction in peak bandwidth consumption of radars and 95% reduction in peak query resolution latency

Community-based caching for enhanced lookup performance in P2P systems

—Large Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems exhibit the presence of communities based on user interests. Resources commonly shared within individual communities are in general relatively less popular and inconspicuous in the system-wide behavior. Hence, such communities are unable to benefit significantly from caching and replication that focus only on the most dominant queries. A Community-Based Caching (CBC) solution that enhances both communitywide and system-wide lookup performance is proposed. CBC consists of a sub-overlay formation scheme and a Local-Knowledge-based Distributed Caching (LKDC) algorithm. Sub-overlays enable communities to forward queries through their members. While queries are forwarded, LKDC algorithm causes members to identify and cache resources of interests to them, resulting in faster resolution of queries for popular resources within each community. Distributed local caching requires global information (e.g., hop count and popularity of contents) that is difficult and costly to obtain. However, by means of an analysis of globally optimal behavior and structural properties of the overlay, we develop the heuristic-based LKDC algorithm that not only relies on purely local information but also provides close-to-optimal caching performance. CBC is adaptive to changing popularity and user interests, works with any skewed distribution of queries, and introduces minimal modifications and overhead to the overlay network

Computing Requirements of Sri Lankan Scientific Community

Significant improvements in Information and Communication (ICT) infrastructure over the last decade put Sri Lanka among the top developing nations for ICT-led economic and social growth. While ICT has also contributed to increased research outcomes through better access to world-class knowledge, research resources, and other researchers, overall growth and significance of research findings are not in par with most of the top developing nations. In this research, through surveys and interviews, we explore the current state of computing resources available for research, as well as the needs and challenges faced by researchers. We identified a number of challenges, including shortage of computational and storage resources, cost of software licenses, limited awareness of alternative tools, inadequate programing skills among graduate students, unavailability of research computing support staff, unreliable infrastructure,and organizational constraints. We further discuss potential solutions to address some of these technical and nontechnical challenges

Collaborative applications over peer-to-peer systems-challenges and solutions

Emerging collaborative Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems require discovery and utilization of diverse, multi-attribute, distributed, and dynamic groups of resources to achieve greater tasks beyond conventional file and processor cycle sharing. Collaborations involving application specific resources and dynamic quality of service goals are stressing current P2P architectures. Salient features and desirable characteristics of collaborative P2P systems are highlighted. Resource advertising, selecting, matching, and binding, the critical phases in these systems, and their associated challenges are reviewed using examples from distributed collaborative adaptive sensing systems, cloud computing, and mobile social networks. State-of-the-art resource discovery/aggregation solutions are compared with respect to their architecture, lookup overhead, load balancing, etc., to determine their ability to meet the goals and challenges of each critical phase. Incentives, trust, privacy, and security issues are also discussed, as they will ultimately determine the success of a collaborative P2P system. Open issues and research opportunities that are essential to achieve the true potential of collaborative P2P systems are discussed. © 2012 Springer Science + Business Media, LLC

An Analysis of Data Driven, Decision-Making Capabilities of Managers in Banks

Organizations are adopting data analytics and Business Intelligence (BI)tools to gain insights from the past data, forecast future events, and to gettimely and reliable information for decision making. While the tools arebecoming mature, affordable, and more comfortable to use, it is also essentialto understand whether the contemporary managers and leaders are ready forData-Driven Decision Making (DDDM). We explore the extent the Decision Makers(DMs) utilize data and tools, as well as their ability to interpret variousforms of outputs from tools and to apply those insights to gain competitiveadvantage. Our methodology was based on a qualitative survey, where weinterviewed 12 DMs of six commercial banks in Sri Lanka at the branch,regional, and CTO, CIO, and Head of IT levels. We identified that on manyoccasions, DMs' intuition overrules the DDDM due to uncertainty, lack of trust,knowledge, and risk-taking. Moreover, it was identified that the quality ofvisualizations has a significant impact on the use of intuition by overrulingDDDM. We further provide a set of recommendations on the adoption of BI toolsand how to overcome the struggles faced while performing DDDM

Преобразование Фурье банаховозначных функций : аннотация к дипломной работе / Юрий Владимирович Ярошевич; БГУ, Механико-математический факультет, Кафедра функционального анализа; науч. рук. Яблонская А. Г.

Significant improvements in Information and Communication (ICT) infrastructure over the last decade put Sri Lanka among the top developing nations for ICT-led economic and social growth. While ICT has also contributed to increased research outcomes through better access to world-class knowledge, research resources, and other researchers, overall growth and significance of research findings are not in par with most of the top developing nations. In this research, through surveys and interviews, we explore the current state of computing resources available for research, as well as the needs and challenges faced by researchers. We identified a number of challenges, including shortage of computational and storage resources, cost of software licenses, limited awareness of alternative tools, inadequate programing skills among graduate students, unavailability of research computing support staff, unreliable infrastructure, and organizational constraints. We further discuss potential solutions to address some of these technical and nontechnical challenges.IEEE IEEE Sri Lanka Section Robotics and Automation Section Chapter, IEEE Sri Lanka Sectio