Individual,social, and organizational contexts for active knowledge sharing in communities of practice

Firms that have implemented knowledge management initiatives are now interested in nurturing voluntary knowledge sharing organizations, called communities of practice (CoPs). Adopting the Triandis model on attitude formation, we identified and validated a set of organizational factors that was anticipated to have effects on knowledge sharing by CoP members such as perceived consequences, affect, social factors and facilitating conditions. One hundred and seventy-nine members from 70 CoPs of a large multinational electronics firm participated in this survey. Based on the PLS analysis, perceived consequences, affect, social factors, and facilitating conditions were found to significantly affect knowledge sharing in CoPs.     

Effects of gender differences on the subjective perceived intensity of steering wheel rotational vibration based on a multivariate regression model

The aims of this study were to determine equal sensation curves for hand–arm steering wheel rotational vibration and to investigate the effect of gender on the subjective perceived intensity of steering wheel hand–arm vibration. Psychophysical response tests of 40 participants (20 males and 20 females) were performed using a steering wheel rotational vibration simulator using the category-ratio Borg CR10 scale procedure for direct estimation of perceived intensity. The test stimuli were sinusoidal vibrations at 22 third octave band centre frequencies in the range from 3 to 400 Hz, with acceleration amplitudes in the range from 0.04 to 27 m/s² r.m.s. Multivariate regression procedures were applied to the experimentally acquired data in order to establish a regression model expressing the Borg CR10 perceived intensity values as a function of the two independent parameters of the frequency and amplitude of vibration. The equal sensation curves suggested a non-linear dependency of the subjective perceived intensity on both frequency and amplitude. Females were found to provide higher Borg CR10 perceived intensity values than males (p < 0.05), particularly at the higher intensity levels above approximately 1.0 m/s² r.m.s and at the higher frequencies above approximately 20 Hz.

Relevance to industry

For the manufacturers of steering systems and of other automobile components this study provides vibration perception curves and identifies the possible importance of gender towards the perception of vibration which arrives at the steering wheel.     

Designing of a type-2 fuzzy logic filter for improving edge-preserving restoration of interlaced-to-progressive conversion

This paper focuses on recently advanced fuzzy models and the application of type-2 fuzzy sets in video deinterlacing. The final goal of the proposed deinterlacing algorithm is to exactly determine an unknown pixel value while preserving the edges and details of the image. To begin, we will discuss some artefacts of spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal domain deinterlacing methods. In order to address the aforementioned issues, we adopted type-2 fuzzy sets concepts to design a weight evaluating approach. In the proposed method, the upper and lower fuzzy membership functions of the type-2 fuzzy logic filters are derived from the type-1 (or primary) fuzzy membership function. The weights from upper and lower membership functions are considered to be multiplied with the candidate deinterlaced pixels. Experimental results proved that the performance of the proposed method was superior, both objectively and subjectively to other different conventional deinterlacing methods. Moreover, the proposed method preserved the smoothness of the original image edges and produced a high-quality progressive image.     

A forward-secure e-mail protocol without certificated public keys

Forward secrecy in an e-mail system means that compromising of the long-term secret keys of the mail users and mail servers does not affect the confidentiality of the e-mail messages. Previous forward-secure e-mail protocols used the certified public keys of the users using PKI (Public Key Infrastructure). In this paper, we propose a password-based authenticated e-mail protocol providing forward secrecy. The proposed protocol does not require certified public keys and is sufficiently efficient to be executed on resource-restricted mobile devices.     

A remote user authentication scheme without using smart cards

User authentication is one of the fundamental procedures to ensure secure communications over an insecure public network channel. Especially, due to tamper-resistance and convenience in managing a password file, various user authentication schemes using smart cards have been proposed. A smart card however far from ubiquitous because of the high cost of a smart card and the infrastructure requirements. In this paper, we study secure user authentication using only a common storage device such as a universal serial bus (USB) memory, instead of using smart cards. We first show that the existing schemes using smart cards cannot be immediately converted into schemes using a common storage device. We then propose a practical and secure user authentication scheme, capable of supporting the use of the common storage device, which retains all the advantages of schemes using smart cards.     

Scale‐aware Structure‐Preserving Texture Filtering

This paper presents a novel method to enhance the performance of structure‐preserving image and texture filtering. With conventional edge‐aware filters, it is often challenging to handle images of high complexity where features of multiple scales coexist. In particular, it is not always easy to find the right balance between removing unimportant details and protecting important features when they come in multiple sizes, shapes, and contrasts. Unlike previous approaches, we address this issue from the perspective of adaptive kernel scales. Relying on patch‐based statistics, our method identifies texture from structure and also finds an optimal per‐pixel smoothing scale. We show that the proposed mechanism helps achieve enhanced image/texture filtering performance in terms of protecting the prominent geometric structures in the image, such as edges and corners, and keeping them sharp even after significant smoothing of the original signal.     

Real-Time MPEG-2 Video Codec System Using Multiple Digital Signal Processors

A real-time MPEG-2 video codec system, called the KAIST image computing system (KICS), was developed using multiple multimedia video processors (MVP, TMS320C80). The number of computations and optimum implementation of the MPEG-2 algorithm were analyzed for real-time processing. An MVP simulator was used to perform the timing analysis for the real-time MPEG-2 encoding and decoding, and it verified the design of the KICS. Task partitioning and mapping of the MPEG-2 algorithm to multiple MVPs were performed based on load-balancing, minimum data I/O, and the properties of the MVP. The KICS uses five MVPs for MPEG-2 real-time encoding of a main profile at the main level whereas it uses three MVPs for real-time decoding.     

Run-to-run control of inductively coupled C2F6 plasma etching of SiO2: Construction of a numerical process with a computational fluid dynamics code

A numerical process to simulate SiO₂ dry etching with inductively coupled C₂F₆ plasmas has been constructed using a commercial CFD code as a first step to design a run-to-run control system. The simulator was found to reasonably predict the reactive ion etching behavior of C₂F₆ plasmas and used to investigate the effects of plasma operating variables on the etch rate and uniformity. The relationship between the operating variables and the etching characteristics was mathematically modeled through linear regression for future run-to-run control system design.     

Video gameplay, personality and academic performance

The relationship between video gameplay, video game genre preference, personality, and GPA was investigated in an online correlational study with university students. In addition to administering self-report measures of GPA and personality, we asked three different questions regarding styles of video gameplay. The first asked the average time spent playing video games per week (habitual players), the second asked the total time spent playing favorite video games (selective players), and the third asked the number of different video games played in a year (diverse players). Students who were medium in selective player style (spent 11-50 h) had significantly higher GPAs than students low on selective player style (spent 0-10 h). Students high on habitual playing style (7 or more hours a week) showed significantly lower levels of Conscientiousness compared to students low on habitual playing style (0-1 h a week). Students who were high on the diverse style (i.e., 7 or more games played a year) showed significantly higher Openness scores than students low on the diverse style (0-3 games a year). Finally, several notable relations were found between video game genre preference, GPA, and personality. Results are discussed in terms of the positive implications of video gameplay on academic performance.