Is the Internet a US invention?—an economic and technological history of computer networking

Although the inventions embodied in the Internet originated in a diverse set of industrial economies, the US was consistently the source of critical innovations and an early adopter of new applications. Why did other nations, including several that made important inventive contributions to the Internet, not play a larger role in its development, particularly in the creation of new business organizations, governance institutions, and applications? We argue that the role of the US “national innovation system” in the creation of the Internet echoes several key themes of US technological development before 1940. The presence of a large domestic market, a set of antitrust and regulatory policies that weakened the power of incumbent telecommunications firms, and a diverse private/public research community that was willing to work with both domestic and foreign inventions were important preconditions for US leadership in computer networking innovation.     

A survey on evaluation of summarization methods

The increasing volume of textual information on any topic requires its compression to allow humans to digest it. This implies detecting the most important information and condensing it. These challenges have led to new developments in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) such as narrative summarization and evaluation methodologies for narrative extraction. Despite some progress over recent years with several solutions for information extraction and text summarization, the problems of generating consistent narrative summaries and evaluating them are still unresolved. With regard to evaluation, manual assessment is expensive, subjective and not applicable in real time or to large collections. Moreover, it does not provide re-usable benchmarks. Nevertheless, commonly used metrics for summary evaluation still imply substantial human effort since they require a comparison of candidate summaries with a set of reference summaries. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, we provide a comprehensive overview of existing metrics for summary evaluation. We discuss several limitations of existing frameworks for summary evaluation. Second, we introduce an automatic framework for the evaluation of metrics that does not require any human annotation. Finally, we evaluate the existing assessment metrics on a Wikipedia data set and a collection of scientific articles using this framework. Our findings show that the majority of existing metrics based on vocabulary overlap are not suitable for assessment based on comparison with a full text and we discuss this outcome.     

In search of insights into the generation of techno-economic trends: Micro- and macro-constituencies in the microprocessor industry

In the field of technology policy, few challenges are more intriguing than understanding the nature of technical and market trends. This paper deals with this problem by using the sociotechnical constituencies approach in order to integrate the treatment of “micro”/“macro” issues — from product to industry. The case study is that of the microprocessor industry where at present a Risc (reduced instruction set computer) technology is emerging in a field where a powerful and far-from-exhausted Cisc (complex instruction set computer) technology tends to occupy almost every segment of the market. The analysis reveals how emerging product-constituencies do implement pro-active trend-creating strategies in order to establish themselves as industrial trends, and, by so doing, they simultaneously re-define the existing content of the “macro” industrial level. The study also reveals the important role of the nature and maturity of microprocessor technology in conditioning the constituency-building strategies implemented by different players. Microprocessor technology is specifically characterised as an architectural, codified-knowledge component with indirect network externalities and weak appropriability regime. Finally, the paper also highlights the potential risks of both fragmentation and complete proprietary control of technology in technological processes involving strongly competitive situations.     

Institutional frameworks and innovation in the German and UK pharmaceutical industry

This paper analyzes how governance structures impact the innovation capabilities of leading German and UK firms in the pharmaceutical industry. Our main objective is to show how variation in national institutional frameworks influences the innovation process, and thus, relative performance. There are two main conclusions. First, the corporate governance structure allowed leading UK firms to more quickly adapt than German firms to rapidly changing external environmental conditions in the global pharmaceutical industry. Secondly, leading UK firms have an advantage in generating innovative drugs (“blockbusters”) than do German firms due to the nature of the institutional framework in which they are embedded.     

Technology and Academic Virtue: Student Plagiarism Through the Looking Glass

Plagiarism is the misuse of and failure to acknowledge source materials. This paper questions common responses to the apparent increase in plagiarism by students. Internet plagiarism occurs in a context – using the Internet as an information tool – where the relevant norms are far from obvious and models of virtue are difficult to identify and perhaps impossible to find. Ethical responses to the pervasiveness of Internet-enhanced plagiarism require a reorientation of perspective on both plagiarism and the Internet as a knowledge tool. Technological strategies to “catch the cheats” send a “don’t get caught” message to students and direct the limited resources of academic institutions to a battle that cannot be won. More importantly, it is not the right battleground. Rather than characterising Internet-enabled plagiarism as a problem generated and solvable by emerging technologies, we argue that there is a more urgent need to build the background conditions that enable and sustain ethical relationships and academic virtues: to nurture an intellectual community.     

Evaluations of innovation programmes in selected European countries

The incorporation of an evaluation procedure in a growing number of innovation policy programmes has now become an accepted feature in the public management of many countries. There already exists substantial experience on the conduct of such evaluations. The purpose of this paper is to present some sample evaluations of measures to promote innovation in a number of European OECD countries (Federal Republic of Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden). Reference will be made to four of them to illustrate the diversity of the evaluative approaches applied to the wide spectrum of measures to promote innovation. Each of these examples will be studied in detail in order to identify their characteristic features, particularly with attention to their causes, performance and their use in political decision processes.A conceptual framework will be presented in order to propose a typology of various forms of evaluation and to characterize the four case studies. It shows that concept and process of evaluations are strongly influences by the specific context and consensus or dissent on objectives and resources. The case studies give a clearer insight into the factors determining the use of results of evaluations; and to what extent the role of evaluations varies from pure legitimation to a systematic and rational basis for decision making in the area of technology policy.Innovation policy consists of government actions towards technological developments and their implementation in the economy. Innovation, in this case, is defined as the development of technologically new or improved products or techniques and their commercialization in the market or implementation within production. Often evaluation means the examination and assessment of the mode of action and of the effectiveness of government innovation policy. However, finding a general interpretation of the expression “evaluation of an innovation policy” presents greater difficulty, and here wide divergences are evident. In the Federal Republic of Germany and the Netherlands, the term encompasses all forms of monitoring and assessing the operation and/or the effectiveness of an innovation policy. In Sweden, evaluation usually means performance of the a posteriori analysis of a measure. The terms “ex ante evaluation” and “follow-up evaluation” are respectively used for the explicit designation of prospective and retrospective analyses. In France, the term “evaluation” is associated with the notion of value. It often carries the connotation of a value assessment with the full monitoring implications of that expression.     

Intelligent information retrieval: diagnosing information need. : Part I. The theoretical framework for developing an intelligent IR tool

The research examines the notion that the principles underlying the procedure used by doctors to diagnose a patient's disease are useful in the design of “intelligent” IR systems because the task of the doctor is conceptually similar to the computer (or human) intermediary's task in “intelligent information retrieval”: to draw out, through interaction with the IR system, the user's query/information need. The research is reported in two parts. In Part II, an information retrieval tool is described which is based on “intelligent information retrieval” assumptions about the information user. In Part I, presented here, the theoretical framework for the tool is set out. This framework is borrowed from the diagnostic procedure currently used in medicine, called “differential diagnosis”. Because of the severe consequences that attend misdiagnosis, the operating principle in differential diagnosis is (1) to expand the uncertainty in the diagnosis situation so that all possible hypotheses and evidence are considered, then (2) to contract the uncertainty in a step by step fashion (from an examination of the patient's symptoms, through the patient's history and a physical (signs), to laboratory tests). The IR theories of Taylor, Kuhlthau and Belkin are used to demonstrate that these medical diagnosis procedures are already present in IR and that it is a viable model with which to design “intelligent” IR tools and systems.     

Supervised approaches for explicit search result diversification

Diversification of web search results aims to promote documents with diverse content (i.e., covering different aspects of a query) to the top-ranked positions, to satisfy more users, enhance fairness and reduce bias. In this work, we focus on the explicit diversification methods, which assume that the query aspects are known at the diversification time, and leverage supervised learning methods to improve their performance in three different frameworks with different features and goals. First, in the LTRDiv framework, we focus on applying typical learning to rank (LTR) algorithms to obtain a ranking where each top-ranked document covers as many aspects as possible. We argue that such rankings optimize various diversification metrics (under certain assumptions), and hence, are likely to achieve diversity in practice. Second, in the AspectRanker framework, we apply LTR for ranking the aspects of a query with the goal of more accurately setting the aspect importance values for diversification. As features, we exploit several pre- and post-retrieval query performance predictors (QPPs) to estimate how well a given aspect is covered among the candidate documents. Finally, in the LmDiv framework, we cast the diversification problem into an alternative fusion task, namely, the supervised merging of rankings per query aspect. We again use QPPs computed over the candidate set for each aspect, and optimize an objective function that is tailored for the diversification goal. We conduct thorough comparative experiments using both the basic systems (based on the well-known BM25 matching function) and the best-performing systems (with more sophisticated retrieval methods) from previous TREC campaigns. Our findings reveal that the proposed frameworks, especially AspectRanker and LmDiv, outperform both non-diversified rankings and two strong diversification baselines (i.e., xQuAD and its variant) in terms of various effectiveness metrics.     

A second look at Egghe’s universal IR surface and a simple derivation of a complete set of universal IR evaluation points

Egghe’s three papers regarding the universal IR surface (2004, 2007, 2008) clearly represent an original and significant contribution to the IR evaluation literature. However, Egghe’s attempt to find a complete set of universal IR evaluation points (P,R,F,M) fell short of his goal: his universal IR surface equation did not suffice in and of itself, and his continuous extension argument was insufficient to find all the remaining points (quadruples). Egghe found only two extra universal IR evaluation points, (1,1,0,0) and (0,0,1,1), but it turns out that a total of 15 additional, valid, universal IR evaluation points exist. The gap first appeared in Egghe’s earliest paper and was carried into subsequent papers. The mathematical method used here for finding the additional universal IR evaluation points involves defining the relevance metrics P,R,F,M in terms of the Swets variables a,b,c,d. Then the maximum possible number of additional quadruples is deduced, and finally, all the invalid quadruples are eliminated so that only the valid, universal IR points remain. Six of these points may be interpreted as being continuous extensions of the universal IR surface, while the other nine points may be interpreted as being “off the universal IR surface.” This completely solves the problem of finding the maximum range possible of universal IR evaluation points.     

The <Emphasis Type="Italic">MinK</Emphasis> framework: towards measuring individual knowledge

Knowledge is the currency of the current economy and a vital resource for sustaining organisational performance in today’s knowledge-based intensively competitive business environment. To avoid the detrimental consequences of knowledge loss, managers are urged to identify where knowledge stocks exist and how knowledge flows within their organisations by identifying knowledge holders among their employees. Although some studies have attempted to use different methods to measure knowledge at the organisational level, very few have addressed the individual knowledge holder. Moving from a critical literature review of the existing knowledge measurement approaches, this paper proposes a novel framework that enables organisations to measure individual knowledge in the business context using a set of metrics, which are subsequently validated via a series of in-depth interviews with senior managers. A summary of the managers’ views on individual knowledge measurement is presented, and reflections on the industry application of the proposed framework and recommendations for its improvement are also discussed.     

A big data analytics framework for detecting user-level depression from social networks

Depression is one of the most common mental health problems worldwide. The diagnosis of depression is usually done by clinicians based on mental status questionnaires and patient's self-reporting. Not only do these methods highly depend on the current mood of the patient, but also people who experience mental illness are often reluctantly seeking help. Social networks have become a popular platform for people to express their feelings and thoughts with friends and family. With the substantial amount of data in social networks, there is an opportunity to try designing novel frameworks to identify those at risk of depression. Moreover, such frameworks can provide clinicians and hospitals with deeper insights about depressive behavioral patterns, thereby improving diagnostic process. In this paper, we propose a big data analytics framework to detect depression for users of social networks. In addition to syntactic and syntax features, it focuses on pragmatic features toward modeling the intention of users. User intention represents the true motivation behind social network behaviors. Moreover, since the behaviors of user's friends in the network are believed to have an influence on the user, the framework also models the influence of friends on the user's mental states. We evaluate the performance of the proposed framework on a massive real dataset obtained from Facebook and show that the framework outperforms existing methods for diagnosing user-level depression in social networks.     

Toward a Longitudinal Model of e-Commerce: Environmental,Technological, and Organizational Drivers of B2C Adoption

Despite the important benefits for firms of commercial initiatives on the Internet, e-commerce is still an emerging distribution channel, even in developed countries. Thus, more needs to be known about the mechanisms affecting its development. A large number of works have studied firms' e-commerce adoption from technological, intraorganizational, institutional, or other specific perspectives, but there is a need for adequately tested integrative frameworks. Hence, this work proposes and tests a model of firms' business-to-consumer (called B2C) e-commerce adoption that is founded on a holistic vision of the phenomenon. With this integrative approach, the authors analyze the joint influence of environmental, technological, and organizational factors; moreover, they evaluate this effect over time. Using various representative Spanish data sets covering the period 1996–2005, the findings demonstrate the suitability of the holistic framework. Likewise, some lessons are learned from the analysis of the key building blocks. In particular, the current study provides evidence for the debate about the effect of competitive pressure, since the findings show that competitive pressure disincentivizes e-commerce adoption in the long term. The results also show that the development or enrichment of the consumers' consumption patterns, the technological readiness of the market forces, the firm's global scope, and its competences in innovation continuously favor e-commerce adoption.     

Public policies towards Research Joint Venture: Institutional design and participants’ characteristics

In this paper, we present several insights regarding the influence of institutional design on the process of Research Joint Venture (RJV) formation. Our results are obtained with a firm-level dataset on RJVs formed under the umbrella of the Eureka initiative and of the European Union’s Framework Programmes (EU-FPs) for science and technology. We focus on firms that are known to have a high probability of forming RJVs, with the latter identified as firms with a past experience in collaborative research. The results indicate that EU-FP RJVs are consistent with a “top-down” and “mission oriented” research policy. By contrast, Eureka RJVs appear as more market driven and “bottom-up”.     

Disciplining the Future: A Critical Organizational Analysis of Internet Studies

This article provides a critical, cautionary stance toward the future structure of “Internet studies” as a field. A social constructionist reading of the process of organizing reveals the ways in which apparently obdurate structures are constructed and negotiated through everyday discursive practices. Subsequent structures and practices function ideologically to control organizational members in a concertive fashion by shaping and directing the conceptual frameworks for inquiry and action in a seemingly natural way. Definitions and metaphors construct conceptual boundaries of meaning for the field of inquiry, delimiting and protecting over time what counts as Internet and Internet studies. Over time, origins of knowledge are hidden within the structure of the organizations and a culture of unobtrusive control emerges. Unless radical measures are taken to reflexively interrogate everyday routines and habitual ways of talking in academic environments, the future field of Internet studies will not transcend the traditions of the academy but will be entrenched in and reproduce traditional structures and a traditional scholarly enterprise.     

Strategic motivators and expected benefits from e-commerce in traditional organisations

This paper aims to identify the strategic motivators and expected benefits related to the implementation of e-commerce infrastructures in traditional “brick and mortar” organisations. Despite the fact that the clearest benefit from e-commerce might be expected to come from contribution to corporate profits, either from an increase of sales or reduction of costs, but this may not be the case. The literature suggests that there are different ways in which the potential benefits can be assessed. These ways are directly related to the evolution of e-commerce. This research has chosen six representative organisations from different sectors to explore their rationales for their e-commerce strategies. One of the main benefits reported is to increase the focus on the customer and improving internal communications. Additionally, obtaining competitive advantage was found to be a powerful motivator, despite the fact that the recent academic literature suggests that this is very difficult to achieve.     

Is Korea a Strong Internet Nation?

The spectacular growth of the Internet in Korea has propelled her to the very top of the international rankings based on technology peneration statistics. The resulting international attention and national pride have fostered the notion of “Korea—a strong Internet nation.” The ready embrace of this idea by officials and the public at large has made a critical evaluation almost an anathema. This article reviews the published critiques, which have been rare and scattered, and opens up the “what next” question for an unbounded discussion.     

EdgeSumm: Graph-based framework for automatic text summarization

Searching the Internet for a certain topic can become a daunting task because users cannot read and comprehend all the resulting texts. Automatic Text summarization (ATS) in this case is clearly beneficial because manual summarization is expensive and time-consuming. To enhance ATS for single documents, this paper proposes a novel extractive graph-based framework “EdgeSumm” that relies on four proposed algorithms. The first algorithm constructs a new text graph model representation from the input document. The second and third algorithms search the constructed text graph for sentences to be included in the candidate summary. When the resulting candidate summary still exceeds a user-required limit, the fourth algorithm is used to select the most important sentences. EdgeSumm combines a set of extractive ATS methods (namely graph-based, statistical-based, semantic-based, and centrality-based methods) to benefit from their advantages and overcome their individual drawbacks. EdgeSumm is general for any document genre (not limited to a specific domain) and unsupervised so it does not require any training data. The standard datasets DUC2001 and DUC2002 are used to evaluate EdgeSumm using the widely used automatic evaluation tool: Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE). EdgeSumm gets the highest ROUGE scores on DUC2001. For DUC2002, the evaluation results show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art ATS systems by achieving improvements of 1.2% and 4.7% over the highest scores in the literature for the metrics of ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-L respectively. In addition, EdgeSumm achieves very competitive results for the metrics of ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-SU4.     

Democratic and Anti-Democratic Regulators of the Internet: A Framework

We employ Lessig's framework of regulation to conceptualize the relationship between the Internet and democracy. Lessig defines four classes of regulators, forces that control and define systems such as the Internet. They are markets, architectures, norms, and laws. We propose that a “democratic regulator” is a force that serves to enhance civil or political liberties. And we argue by example that there are democratic (and, indeed, anti-democratic) regulators that control aspects of cyberspace. Expressing the democratic effects of the Internet in this manner may prove useful for future comparisons across existing Internet and democracy theories, especially in the realm of quantitative analyses.     

互联网金融缓解科技初创企业融资困境的模式分析——源于深圳的经验

系统总结深圳借助互联网金融缓解科技初创企业融资困境的五种模式,旨在完善金融市场体系、打破银企信息不对称。     

IT incidents and business impacts: Validating a framework for continuity management in information systems

Information technology (IT) incidents that make data inaccessible may cause businesses to lose customers, reputation and market position. Previous studies on information management have identified data availability as a key priority, and the literature on disaster recovery and business continuity describes ways of preparing for and avoiding IT incidents. However, no frameworks for information system continuity management (ISCM) have yet been validated. This research draws on a framework for business continuity management, and extends it to the context of information systems. The framework is validated in a survey of IT managers and chief information officers in large private and public organisations operating in Finland. The results suggest that the embeddedness of continuity practices in an organisation has perceived business impacts whereas, in contradiction of previous theory, there is no such direct relation in the case of organisational alertness and preparedness. The theoretical contribution is to validate the ISCM framework statistically. On the practical level, social factors such as committed managers and employees are influential in decreasing negative business impacts. Further research on the embeddedness of continuity practices is called for.