ICE-B 2010:proceedings of the International Conference on e-Business

The International Conference on e-Business, ICE-B 2010, aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners who are interested in e-Business technology and its current applications. The mentioned technology relates not only to more low-level technological issues, such as technology platforms and web services, but also to some higher-level issues, such as context awareness and enterprise models, and also the peculiarities of different possible applications of such technology. These are all areas of theoretical and practical importance within the broad scope of e-Business, whose growing importance can be seen from the increasing interest of the IT research community. The areas of the current conference are: (i) e-Business applications; (ii) Enterprise engineering; (iii) Mobility; (iv) Business collaboration and e-Services; (v) Technology platforms. Contributions vary from research-driven to being more practical oriented, reflecting innovative results in the mentioned areas. ICE-B 2010 received 66 submissions, of which 9% were accepted as full papers. Additionally, 27% were presented as short papers and 17% as posters. All papers presented at the conference venue were included in the SciTePress Digital Library. Revised best papers are published by Springer-Verlag in a CCIS Series book

Speech Activity and Speaker Change Point Detection for Online Streams

Disertační práce je věnována dvěma si blízkým řečovým úlohám a následně jejich použití v online prostředí. Konkrétně se jedná o úlohy detekce řeči a detekce změny mluvčího. Ty jsou často nedílnou součástí systémů pro zpracování řeči (např. pro diarizaci mluvčích nebo rozpoznávání řeči), kde slouží pro předzpracování akustického signálu. Obě úlohy jsou v literatuře velmi aktivním tématem, ale většina existujících prací je směřována primárně na offline využití. Nicméně právě online nasazení je nezbytné pro některé řečové aplikace, které musí fungovat v reálném čase (např. monitorovací systémy).Úvodní část disertační práce je tvořena třemi kapitolami. V té první jsou vysvětleny základní pojmy a následně je nastíněno využití obou úloh. Druhá kapitola je věnována současnému poznání a je doplněna o přehled existujících nástrojů. Poslední kapitola se skládá z motivace a z praktického použití zmíněných úloh v monitorovacích systémech. V závěru úvodní části jsou stanoveny cíle práce.Následující dvě kapitoly jsou věnovány teoretickým základům obou úloh. Představují vybrané přístupy, které jsou buď relevantní pro disertační práci (porovnání výsledků), nebo jsou zaměřené na použití v online prostředí.V další kapitole je předložen finální přístup pro detekci řeči. Postupný návrh tohoto přístupu, společně s experimentálním vyhodnocením, je zde detailně rozebrán. Přístup dosahuje nejlepších výsledků na korpusu QUT-NOISE-TIMIT v podmínkách s nízkým a středním zašuměním. Přístup je také začleněn do monitorovacího systému, kde doplňuje svojí funkcionalitou rozpoznávač řeči.Následující kapitola detailně představuje finální přístup pro detekci změny mluvčího. Ten byl navržen v rámci několika po sobě jdoucích experimentů, které tato kapitola také přibližuje. Výsledky získané na databázi COST278 se blíží výsledkům, kterých dosáhl referenční offline systém, ale předložený přístup jich docílil v online módu a to s nízkou latencí.Výstupy disertační práce jsou shrnuty v závěrečné kapitole.The main focus of this thesis lies on two closely interrelated tasks, speech activity detection and speaker change point detection, and their applications in online processing. These tasks commonly play a crucial role of speech preprocessors utilized in speech-processing applications, such as automatic speech recognition or speaker diarization. While their use in offline systems is extensively covered in literature, the number of published works focusing on online use is limited.This is unfortunate, as many speech-processing applications (e.g., monitoring systems) are required to be run in real time.The thesis begins with a three-chapter opening part, where the first introductory chapter explains the basic concepts and outlines the practical use of both tasks. It is followed by a chapter, which reviews the current state of the art and lists the existing toolkits. That part is concluded by a chapter explaining the motivation behind this work and the practical use in monitoring systems; ultimately, this chapter sets the main goals of this thesis.The next two chapters cover the theoretical background of both tasks. They present selected approaches relevant to this work (e.g., used for result comparisons) or focused on online processing.The following chapter proposes the final speech activity detection approach for online use. Within this chapter, a detailed description of the development of this approach is available as well as its thorough experimental evaluation. This approach yields state-of-the-art results under low- and medium-noise conditions on the standardized QUT-NOISE-TIMIT corpus. It is also integrated into a monitoring system, where it supplements a speech recognition system.The final speaker change point detection approach is proposed in the following chapter. It was designed in a series of consecutive experiments, which are extensively detailed in this chapter. An experimental evaluation of this approach on the COST278 database shows the performance of approaching the offline reference system while operating in online mode with low latency.Finally, the last chapter summarizes all the results of this thesis

Mobile banking application post adoption characteristics in Estonia

This thesis aims to study post adoption user characteristics of mobile banking applications in Estonia more specifically how important is the technology for Estonian Bank account holders. Furthermore, it focuses on understanding if Estonian banks follow the approved application creation steps. For this research 212 beneficiary were surveyed. However only 195 are using m-banking applications, full data was used for analyzing different general characteristics such as internet and mobile phone usage around the country. Analysis is following Mixed research design more specifically Embedded. The findings revealed that usage of bank applications is quite popular in Estonia as majority of interviewed people are using it 3-5 days a week. Moreover, most of the Estonian bank account holders treat the product as highly important. In spite of the fact that usage of mobile banking application is high in the county, the study acknowledged some defects that might be taken into consideration from Banking sector

The appraisal of Facebook online community: An exposition of mobile commerce in social media reviews

Peer reviewe

The dynamics of complex systems. Studies and applications in computer science and biology

Our research has focused on the study of complex dynamics and on their use in both information security and bioinformatics. Our first work has been on chaotic discrete dynamical systems, and links have been established between these dynamics on the one hand, and either random or complex behaviors. Applications on information security are on the pseudorandom numbers generation, hash functions, informationhiding, and on security aspects on wireless sensor networks. On the bioinformatics level, we have applied our studies of complex systems to theevolution of genomes and to protein folding

Políticas de Copyright de Publicações Científicas em Repositórios Institucionais: O Caso do INESC TEC

A progressiva transformação das práticas científicas, impulsionada pelo desenvolvimento das novas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), têm possibilitado aumentar o acesso à informação, caminhando gradualmente para uma abertura do ciclo de pesquisa. Isto permitirá resolver a longo prazo uma adversidade que se tem colocado aos investigadores, que passa pela existência de barreiras que limitam as condições de acesso, sejam estas geográficas ou financeiras. Apesar da produção científica ser dominada, maioritariamente, por grandes editoras comerciais, estando sujeita às regras por estas impostas, o Movimento do Acesso Aberto cuja primeira declaração pública, a Declaração de Budapeste (BOAI), é de 2002, vem propor alterações significativas que beneficiam os autores e os leitores. Este Movimento vem a ganhar importância em Portugal desde 2003, com a constituição do primeiro repositório institucional a nível nacional. Os repositórios institucionais surgiram como uma ferramenta de divulgação da produção científica de uma instituição, com o intuito de permitir abrir aos resultados da investigação, quer antes da publicação e do próprio processo de arbitragem (preprint), quer depois (postprint), e, consequentemente, aumentar a visibilidade do trabalho desenvolvido por um investigador e a respetiva instituição. O estudo apresentado, que passou por uma análise das políticas de copyright das publicações científicas mais relevantes do INESC TEC, permitiu não só perceber que as editoras adotam cada vez mais políticas que possibilitam o auto-arquivo das publicações em repositórios institucionais, como também que existe todo um trabalho de sensibilização a percorrer, não só para os investigadores, como para a instituição e toda a sociedade. A produção de um conjunto de recomendações, que passam pela implementação de uma política institucional que incentive o auto-arquivo das publicações desenvolvidas no âmbito institucional no repositório, serve como mote para uma maior valorização da produção científica do INESC TEC.The progressive transformation of scientific practices, driven by the development of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which made it possible to increase access to information, gradually moving towards an opening of the research cycle. This opening makes it possible to resolve, in the long term, the adversity that has been placed on researchers, which involves the existence of barriers that limit access conditions, whether geographical or financial. Although large commercial publishers predominantly dominate scientific production and subject it to the rules imposed by them, the Open Access movement whose first public declaration, the Budapest Declaration (BOAI), was in 2002, proposes significant changes that benefit the authors and the readers. This Movement has gained importance in Portugal since 2003, with the constitution of the first institutional repository at the national level. Institutional repositories have emerged as a tool for disseminating the scientific production of an institution to open the results of the research, both before publication and the preprint process and postprint, increase the visibility of work done by an investigator and his or her institution. The present study, which underwent an analysis of the copyright policies of INESC TEC most relevant scientific publications, allowed not only to realize that publishers are increasingly adopting policies that make it possible to self-archive publications in institutional repositories, all the work of raising awareness, not only for researchers but also for the institution and the whole society. The production of a set of recommendations, which go through the implementation of an institutional policy that encourages the self-archiving of the publications developed in the institutional scope in the repository, serves as a motto for a greater appreciation of the scientific production of INESC TEC