The article reviews the book “Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy,” by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian.

Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy

Suggested by the structure of the visual nervous system, a new algorithm is proposed for pattern recognition. This algorithm can be realized with a multilayered network consisting of neuron-like cells. The network, “neocognitron”, is self-organized by unsupervised learning, and acquires the ability to recognize stimulus patterns according to the differences in their shapes: Any patterns which we human beings judge to be alike are also judged to be of the same category by the neocognitron. The neocognitron recognizes stimulus patterns correctly without being affected by shifts in position or even by considerable distortions in shape of the stimulus patterns.

Neocognitron--A New Algorithm for Pattern Recognition Tolerant of Deformations and Shifts in Position

In the last 16 years, more than 200 research articles were published about research-paper recommender systems. We reviewed these articles and present some descriptive statistics in this paper, as well as a discussion about the major advancements and shortcomings and an overview of the most common recommendation concepts and approaches. We found that more than half of the recommendation approaches applied content-based filtering (55 %). Collaborative filtering was applied by only 18 % of the reviewed approaches, and graph-based recommendations by 16 %. Other recommendation concepts included stereotyping, item-centric recommendations, and hybrid recommendations. The content-based filtering approaches mainly utilized papers that the users had authored, tagged, browsed, or downloaded. TF-IDF was the most frequently applied weighting scheme. In addition to simple terms, n-grams, topics, and citations were utilized to model users' information needs. Our review revealed some shortcomings of the current research. First, it remains unclear which recommendation concepts and approaches are the most promising. For instance, researchers reported different results on the performance of content-based and collaborative filtering. Sometimes content-based filtering performed better than collaborative filtering and sometimes it performed worse. We identified three potential reasons for the ambiguity of the results. (A) Several evaluations had limitations. They were based on strongly pruned datasets, few participants in user studies, or did not use appropriate baselines. (B) Some authors provided little information about their algorithms, which makes it difficult to re-implement the approaches. Consequently, researchers use different implementations of the same recommendations approaches, which might lead to variations in the results. (C) We speculated that minor variations in datasets, algorithms, or user populations inevitably lead to strong variations in the performance of the approaches. Hence, finding the most promising approaches is a challenge. As a second limitation, we noted that many authors neglected to take into account factors other than accuracy, for example overall user satisfaction. In addition, most approaches (81 %) neglected the user-modeling process and did not infer information automatically but let users provide keywords, text snippets, or a single paper as input. Information on runtime was provided for 10 % of the approaches. Finally, few research papers had an impact on research-paper recommender systems in practice. We also identified a lack of authority and long-term research interest in the field: 73 % of the authors published no more than one paper on research-paper recommender systems, and there was little cooperation among different co-author groups. We concluded that several actions could improve the research landscape: developing a common evaluation framework, agreement on the information to include in research papers, a stronger focus on non-accuracy aspects and user modeling, a platform for researchers to exchange information, and an open-source framework that bundles the available recommendation approaches.

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Research-paper recommender systems: a literature survey

This paper surveys and analyzes the state of the art of agent-mediated electronic commerce (e-commerce), concentrating particularly on the business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) aspects. From the consumer buying behavior perspective, agents are being used in the following activities: need identification, product brokering, buyer coalition formation, merchant brokering, and negotiation. The roles of agents in B2B e-commerce are discussed through the business-to-business transaction model that identifies agents as being employed in partnership formation, brokering, and negotiation. Having identified the roles for agents in B2C and B2B e-commerce, some of the key underpinning technologies of this vision are highlighted. Finally, we conclude by discussing the future directions and potential impediments to the wide-scale adoption of agent-mediated e-commerce.

Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce

Manufacturing process planning is the process of selecting and sequencing manufacturing processes such that they achieve one or more goals and satisfy a set of domain constraints. Manufacturing scheduling is the process of selecting a process plan and assigning manufacturing resources for specific time periods to the set of manufacturing processes in the plan. It is, in fact, an optimization process by which limited manufacturing resources are allocated over time among parallel and sequential activities. Manufacturing process planning and scheduling are usually considered to be two separate and distinct phases. Traditional optimization approaches to these problems do not consider the constraints of both domains simultaneously and result in suboptimal solutions. Without considering real-time machine workloads and shop floor dynamics, process plans may become suboptimal or even invalid at the time of execution. Therefore, there is a need for the integration of manufacturing process-planning and scheduling systems for generating more realistic and effective plans. After describing the complexity of the manufacturing process-planning and scheduling problems, this paper reviews the research literature on manufacturing process planning, scheduling as well as their integration, particularly on agent-based approaches to these difficult problems. Major issues in these research areas are discussed, and research opportunities and challenges are identified

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Agent-based distributed manufacturing process planning and scheduling: a state-of-the-art survey

We showed WFE, a real-time collaborative editing (RTCE) mechanism, in which a group of people can edit a web page on a web browser while members of the group share editing contents in real-time. In addition, we proposed applying WFE to a cloud computing environment, and we call the applied application WFE-S. The aim is to improve the system to have high scalability, elasticity, high responsiveness, and free it from maintenance. In this paper, we indicate further detailed implementation of WFE-S and Web applications using WFE-S. We showed that WFE-S enables us to make it easy to develop collaborative work systems as Web applications.

A Real-Time Collaborative Mechanism for Editing a Web Page and Its Applications

Inter-organizational collaboration in the public sphere is essentially important to address sustainability problems in contemporary regional societies. To facilitate public collaboration, we are developing a Web application for sharing public issues and their solutions as public goals. Since participating in abstract or general goals is more difficult than concrete or specific ones, our system provides a functionality to break down individual public goals into concrete subgoals. Our Web application, GoalShare, is based on a linked open dataset of public goals that are linked with titles, participants, subgoals, related issues, related articles, and related geographic regions. GoalShare recommends public goals and users on the basis of similarity calculations taking into account not only surficial and semantic features but also contextual features extracted from subgoals and supergoals. We conducted experiments to investigate the effects of contextual features in subgoals and supergoals. Moreover, we conducted a trial workshop with GoalShare in Ogaki city to improve system design through actual use.

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A Goal Matching Service for Facilitating Public Collaboration Using Linked Open Data

We realized a system that provides manipulations of slide objects to enable users to give a reactive presentation. The ``reactive presentation'' means a presentation that can immediately react an unexpected context change. A presenter requires applying the presentation to the unexpected context such as the state of audiences, unexpected questions and audiences' knowledge. Attention controls by animations and effects are effective to deal with the context. Animations and effects such as movements and changes of size and color and feature of objects on slides can control audiences' attention and communicate non-verbal information. However, existing presentation applications do not support real-time manipulations of slide objects at the presentation mode. We expected that manipulations of objects on slides such as moving, zooming and adding effects enable presenters to control audiences' attention with the context change reactively. In this paper, we describe methods of the implementation of manipulating slide objects system with input devices properly, and discuss examinations of personalization to enhance operability of the system.

A Reactive Presentation Support System Based on a Slide Object Manipulation Method

In recent years, the standardization of news management and transmission format has advanced, and NewsML (news markup language) has appeared. NewsML is a format which was decided by the IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council). In this paper, we propose a next generation news management system based on an environment in which news management, transmission, and editing are performed. Concerning news management and transmission, our proposal, NVML (news value markup language), is a metadata description language for NewsML transmission that is to be independent of NewsML. NVML is used for two purposes. One is a metadata management for link management and distribution of NewsML documents. The other is metadata management for assigning values to news. By making link management and content management separate, both news distributors and subscribers can manage NewsML and NVML, while maintaining link adjustments. Moreover, by attaching values to news, users can search, view, and reuse news based on values. Concerning news editing, we created an input candidate support system based on news continuity and an automatic system of judging news categories.

Realizing a News Value Markup Language for News Management Systems Using NewsML

WWW has developed rapidly, and it is becoming easy to make personal web sites. In general, we create and edit web pages by using a HTML authoring software or writing HTML source codes in a text editor. Then, we need to upload them to a web server. When we make and build our own web pages by the existing tools, it takes a lot of time and effort to complete the necessary tasks. In this paper, we propose a home page authoring support system in which we directly edit and make web pages on a web browser. Current experimental results demonstrate that our system can effectively support novices to create their web pages. Also, we show two real-world applications that effectively utilize our system.

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ieejeiss/125/4/125_4_660/_pdf

Toramatsu Shintani

Papers

A Real-Time Collaborative Mechanism for Editing a Web Page and Its Applications

A Goal Matching Service for Facilitating Public Collaboration Using Linked Open Data

A Reactive Presentation Support System Based on a Slide Object Manipulation Method

Realizing a News Value Markup Language for News Management Systems Using NewsML

Implementing an Online Writable Web Page System and Its Applications