A STUDY ON TRAVEL INFORMATION ADOPTION INTENTION IN THE ONLINE SOCIAL COMMUNITY: THE PERSPECTIVES OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND INFORMATION ADOPTION MODEL

With the popularity of the online social community, people have become accustomed to sharing their travel experiences online. Internet users can read about others’ experiences, view tour photos, and gather information from other users during their leisure time or before travelling abroad. This study based on the information adoption theory and the concept of experience marketing; additionally, the moderating effects of consumption point on association among customer experiences, information usefulness, and information adoption intentions has been investigated. An Internet survey was conducted for data collection, and 492 returned responses were analyzed. The findings show that customer experience and information usefulness increase Internet users’ information adoption intentions and that the quality and credibility of Internet tourism information have a positive effect on customer experience and information usefulness. Content vividness was linked to an improved user experience. Consumption point influences the relationship between information usefulness and information adoption intentions, but it does not affect the relationship between customer experience and information adoption intention

Enhancement of Recombinant Protein Production in Transgenic Nicotiana benthamiana Plant Cell Suspension Cultures with Co-Cultivation of Agrobacterium Containing Silencing Suppressors.

We have previously demonstrated that the inducible plant viral vector (CMViva) in transgenic plant cell cultures can significantly improve the productivity of extracellular functional recombinant human alpha-1-antiryspin (rAAT) compared with either a common plant constitutive promoter (Cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV) 35S) or a chemically inducible promoter (estrogen receptor-based XVE) system. For a transgenic plant host system, however, viral or transgene-induced post-transcriptional gene silencing (PTGS) has been identified as a host response mechanism that may dramatically reduce the expression of a foreign gene. Previous studies have suggested that viral gene silencing suppressors encoded by a virus can block or interfere with the pathways of transgene-induced PTGS in plant cells. In this study, the capability of nine different viral gene silencing suppressors were evaluated for improving the production of rAAT protein in transgenic plant cell cultures (CMViva, XVE or 35S system) using an Agrobacterium-mediated transient expression co-cultivation process in which transgenic plant cells and recombinant Agrobacterium carrying the viral gene silencing suppressor were grown together in suspension cultures. Through the co-cultivation process, the impacts of gene silencing suppressors on the rAAT production were elucidated, and promising gene silencing suppressors were identified. Furthermore, the combinations of gene silencing suppressors were optimized using design of experiments methodology. The results have shown that in transgenic CMViva cell cultures, the functional rAAT as a percentage of total soluble protein is increased 5.7 fold with the expression of P19, and 17.2 fold with the co-expression of CP, P19 and P24

Enhanced call quality using user-specific voiceprint model

The audio quality of a call conducted using a user device such as a phone can be unsatisfactory due to a variety of reasons. Such reasons include noisy surroundings at the location from which the user conducts a call, position of the phone near the user’s face, users that speak with a soft voice, presence of far-end echoes, etc. This disclosure describes techniques that use a user-specific voiceprint to home into the user’s speech and cut out surrounding disturbances from a voice call. The techniques are implemented with user permission to generate and use the voiceprint

Application of online CO2 monitoring to enable a better understanding of cell culture performance variation between GMP-scale and scaled-down bioreactors

Dissolved carbon dioxide (dCO2) or partial pressure of carbon dioxide (pCO2) is an important process parameter that may impact process performance (product titer and viability) and product quality attributes (such as glycosylation) during mammalian cell culture process in a bioreactor. The impact of altered level of pCO2 on the cell culture process may manifest itself upon process scale-up if the CO2 removal rate is not consistent between the development scale and the manufacturing scale. The pCO2 level during cell culture process is normally determined through offline measurement; however, the offset between online and offline pCO2 may conceal the true effect of pCO2 on the cell culture process. In this presentation, several studies using online pCO2 monitoring will be summarized and discussed, including 1) implementation of online pCO2 probe for measurement of actual pCO2 levels in a large scale bioreactor, 2) comparison of online and offline pCO2, 3) correlation between pH and pCO2, 4) estimation of CO2 stripping rate in large scale bioreactors, and 5) effect of sample handling on pCO2 level measurement. The key findings in this presentation are intended to establish biopharmaceutical manufacturing process knowledge, which is valuable for all partners in the cell culture manufacturing network

Understanding Mainland Chinese tourists’ motivation and constraints of visiting Taiwan

China has been by far the fastest growing source market in recent years, and now is the biggest tourism source market in the world. Mainland Chinese travellers were permitted to directly visit Taiwan in 2008. Within a short period of time, the Mainland Chinese travel market has become the top source market for Taiwan’s tourism industry. However, limited attention has been paid to the travel behaviour of this significant market, such as why and why not Mainland Chinese travellers visit Taiwan. Using interviews, this study identified a list of motivation factors and travel constraint factors. Three themes, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and contextual factors, influenced Mainland Chinese tourists’ intention to visit Taiwan. Particularly, contextual factors, such as ‘the cross-strait relations’ between Mainland China and Taiwan, play a key role in influencing tourists’ visit intention. Like two sides of the same coin, ‘the cross-strait relations’ could be the facilitator to attract Mainland Chinese tourists or the inhibitor to stop Mainland Chinese visiting Taiwan

On Initial Trust Building for eCommerce: Revisiting from the Perspective of Signal Theory and Trust Transference

Trust building for consumers has been a main stream of research in e-commerce. However, little research pays attention to how consumers treat the revealed information about warranty, privacy statement, assurance, and related statements. Although this information is provided in real-world settings, their effectiveness has not been fully understood. This study attempts to look into this issue by employing signal theory and perspective of trust transference. Empirical results gathered from lab experiment show that warranty perception, rather than the assurance itself, is the critical antecedent of initial trust building. Once consumers discredit the revealed information in a web site, the signals will fail to induce consumers’ trust. Information from a trusted third party may be an efficient way to build consumer trust. However, it should be noted that information from trusted third party will not be effective if consumers fail to notice them, or misunderstand their meanings. Hence, e-tailers should devote to build initial trust by applying assurance and quality signals from independent institutions

Boosting Factual Consistency and High Coverage in Unsupervised Abstractive Summarization

Abstractive summarization has gained attention because of the positive performance of large-scale, pretrained language models. However, models may generate a summary that contains information different from the original document. This phenomenon is particularly critical under the abstractive methods and is known as factual inconsistency. This study proposes an unsupervised abstractive method for improving factual consistency and coverage by adopting reinforcement learning. The proposed framework includes (1) a novel design to maintain factual consistency with an automatic question-answering process between the generated summary and original document, and (2) a novel method of ranking keywords based on word dependency, where keywords are used to examine the coverage of the key information preserved in the summary. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the reinforcement learning baseline on both the evaluations for factual consistency and coverage