Country Image, e-WOM and Purchase Intention of Korean Products in China——With Korean Cosmetic Products as an Example

Country image is viewed as the overall perception of consumers from a particular country, based on their prior perception of the country’s production and marketing strengths and weaknesses and this image affect customer attitudes like purchase intention. The purpose of our study was to develop and validate the relationship among country image, e-WOM and purchase intention of foreign products. Based on literatures, a comprehensive set of constructs and hypotheses was compiled with a methodology for testing them. A questionnaire was constructed and data were collected from 255 customers in Beijing and Shanghai. The results indicated that country image affect purchase intention of Korean Cosmetic products through e-WOM

Invisible Watermarking for Audio Generation Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have gained prominence in the image domain for their capabilities in data generation and transformation, achieving state-of-the-art performance in various tasks in both image and audio domains. In the rapidly evolving field of audio-based machine learning, safeguarding model integrity and establishing data copyright are of paramount importance. This paper presents the first watermarking technique applied to audio diffusion models trained on mel-spectrograms. This offers a novel approach to the aforementioned challenges. Our model excels not only in benign audio generation, but also incorporates an invisible watermarking trigger mechanism for model verification. This watermark trigger serves as a protective layer, enabling the identification of model ownership and ensuring its integrity. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that invisible watermark triggers can effectively protect against unauthorized modifications while maintaining high utility in benign audio generation tasks.Comment: This is an invited paper for IEEE TPS, part of the IEEE CIC/CogMI/TPS 2023 conferenc

A hierarchical expected improvement method for Bayesian optimization

The Expected Improvement (EI) method, proposed by Jones et al. (1998), is a widely-used Bayesian optimization method, which makes use of a fitted Gaussian process model for efficient black-box optimization. However, one key drawback of EI is that it is overly greedy in exploiting the fitted Gaussian process model for optimization, which results in suboptimal solutions even with large sample sizes. To address this, we propose a new hierarchical EI (HEI) framework, which makes use of a hierarchical Gaussian process model. HEI preserves a closed-form acquisition function, and corrects the over-greediness of EI by encouraging exploration of the optimization space. We then introduce hyperparameter estimation methods which allow HEI to mimic a fully Bayesian optimization procedure, while avoiding expensive Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampling steps. We prove the global convergence of HEI over a broad function space, and establish near-minimax convergence rates under certain prior specifications. Numerical experiments show the improvement of HEI over existing Bayesian optimization methods, for synthetic functions and a semiconductor manufacturing optimization problem

Computing resources market in grid and cloud based on contract management

With the development of information technologies and the popularity of on-line shopping, a special market where people can trade computing resources easily and safely has been focused on recently. The architecture of such a market in economic Grid environment is overall presented and discussed in this paper. Some efficient management mechanisms, including contract constrain, third-party depository service, dynamic reputation evaluation and dynamic price fluctuation, are employed into this market and proved to be important roles in regulating trading activities and keeping the market in healthy operations. Furthermore, the computing resources market in Cloud environment is also proposed and preliminarily discussed in this paper.5 page(s

A New Method for Hour-by-Hour Bias Adjustment of Satellite Precipitation Estimates over Mainland China

Highly accurate near-real-time satellite precipitation estimates (SPEs) are important for hydrological forecasting and disaster warning. The near-real quantitative precipitation estimates (REGC) of the recently developed Chinese geostationary meteorological satellite Fengyun 4A (FY4A) have the advantage of high spatial and temporal resolution, but there are errors and uncertainties to some extent. In this paper, a self-adaptive ill-posed least squares scheme based on sequential processing (SISP) is proposed and practiced in mainland China to correct the real-time biases of REGC hour by hour. Specifically, the scheme adaptively acquires sample data by setting temporal and spatial windows and constructs an error-correction model based on the ill-posed least squares method from the perspectives of climate regions, topography, and rainfall intensity. The model adopts the sequential idea to update satellite precipitation data within time windows on an hour-by-hour basis and can correct the biases of real-time satellite precipitation data using dynamically changing parameters, fully taking into account the influence of precipitation spatial and temporal variability. Only short-term historical data are needed to accurately rate the parameters. The results show that the SISP algorithm can significantly reduce the biases of the original REGC, in which the values of relative bias (RB) in mainland China are reduced from 11.2% to 3.3%, and the values of root mean square error (RMSE) are also reduced by about 17%. The SISP algorithm has a better correction in humid and semi-humid regions than in arid and semi-arid regions and is effective in reducing the negative biases of precipitation in each climate region. In terms of rain intensity, the SISP algorithm can improve the overestimation of satellite precipitation estimates for low rain intensity (0.2–1 mm/h), but the correction for high rain intensity (>1 mm/h) needs further improvement. The error component analysis shows that the SISP algorithm can effectively correct the hit bias. This study serves as a valuable reference for real-time bias correction using short-term accumulated precipitation data