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College and university environments offer one of the best opportunities for the adoption of smart card technology. This study explores the possibility of developing smart card as a university application and investigates whether it will help to reduce the university business administration procedures as well as increase their service efficiency. This involved investigating the response of two groups (experienced and non-experienced) towards the adoption or the intention to embrace the technology of a university smart card. Studying the experiences gained by Nanyang Technological University (NTU, Singapore) students using smart card application in their university may provide an insightful picture for a university that is considering adopting such a technological innovation.Results show that compatibility pre-adoption construct is the key element that plays the most influential factor in motivating local students for adoption. This suggests that to ensure adoption, it is important to guarantee that the university smart cards are socially acceptable among the university students (fit well with the students' norm and environment). Another implication of this study is that Murdoch University (MU, Australia) students would most probably be willing to accept the adoption of a university smart card given that the results show MU students' response of (probability= 168/200) and NTU students' response of 100% (probability= 50/50) acceptance toward using their university smart card. The results also show a significant culture difference between MU students and NTU students, indicating that smart card manufacturer should take note of the ranking of user preference when designing a university smart card in order to optimize the adoption process.

Universities teach project management to information technology (IT) students. The project management principles that students have previously learned are often put into practice in a project course, intended to give final year students the experience of applying their knowledge to real or simulated projects. This paper reports on research that investigated the use of, and usefulness of, project management in student IT projects. The results show that there was a wide range in the application of project management practices, with students being more likely to produce the initial documentation associated with some of the project management knowledge areas than to make use of it throughout the project to monitor the project’s progress. The results also showed that the number of project management guidelines applied in student projects was not linked with IT project success. However, there was a strong relationship between project management plan quality and obtaining a good software product.

Success of digital ecosystem depends on a reliable supporting infrastructure that offers and transports services and information thereby empowers the business system to function properly. This implies the utmost importance to maintain the reliability, confidentiality and integrity of the network and communication systems. This paper reports an initial pilot study on the use of a simulation game called CyberCIEGE for raising the awareness and knowledge on Information Security among a small group of Thai students. The paper provides an overview of the software, the experiment and results, and, a discussion on the next phase of this proposed project.

The availability of multiple media channels through the Internet has added new dimensions of communication between people or communities who are geographically separated. In the environment of informal communication on the Internet, chat applications are popular in which a user may be represented only by a nickname or an alias. This suggests that a person may be able to communicate more freely when his or her identity is concealed. Popular chatting or instant messaging (IM) systems such as Microsoft MSN Messenger, America Online's Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and GoogleTalk have changed the way that a user may communicate with friends, acquaintances, and business colleagues. Once limited to desktop personal computers (PCs) or laptops, popular instant messaging systems are finding their way onto handheld devices and mobile phones. This allows a user to chat from virtually anywhere. Nowadays, IM is found on almost every personal PC connected to the Internet as well as on many corporate desktops.

Search engine is one of the reasons for e-commerce success in today's world. They are playing an important role in supplying both international and local communities with various dimensions of business information for the customers and other interested parties. In Thailand, two of the most popular and successful Thai search engines are Sanook.com and Hunsa.com at httv://www.sanook.com and httv://www.hunsa. com respectively. This study aims to analyse their business strategies and models including related aspects through a qualitative approach. The study was based on interviews with the CEO or CIO of the companies and individuals who have particular interests in search engines and assessment of the Websites. The research outcomes cover the search engine companies' background, business strategies and models; industry, competitors and environmental analysis; key business drivers and threats. The study also covers innovation factors and adoption including Website assessment through evaluation of the search engines and their future development.

In this paper, we proposed a new framework to incorporate an intelligent agent software robot into a crisis communication portal (CCNet) in order to send alert news to subscribed users via email and other mobile services such as Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) and General Packet Radio Services (GPRS). The content on the mobile services can be delivered either through mobile phone or Personal Digital Assistance (PDA). This research has shown that with our proposed framework, the embodied conversation agents system can handle questions intelligently with our multilayer architecture. At the same time, the extended framework can take care of delivery content through a more humanoid interface on mobile devices., {"references":["L. Palen, M. Salzman, and E. Youngs, \"Going wireless: behavior &\npractice of new mobile phone users,\" presented at the 2000 ACM\nconference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Philadelphia,\n2000.","J. Rickel and W. L. 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Complex engineering applications demand powerful computing resources. An object based distributed system is suitable for such applications due to the inherent parallelism nature in the object based computing model. As the model is based on message passing, which in turns relies on location transparent object names, an efficient name translation system is therefore required to map the object names to the corresponding physical addresses dynamically. In this paper, we propose a heuristic distributed search algorithm, the hierarchy random walker (HRW), to take advantage of the locality of object communications thereby increasing the overall system performance. Analysis of the simulation results from a number of benchmark programs have demonstrated that the benefits of the proposed algorithm are in terms of flexibility and efficient to locate the most used objects. The approach will be applied to intelligent techniques for engineering problems.

In times of crisis, an effective communication mechanism is paramount in providing accurate and timely information to the community. In this paper we study the use of an intelligent embodied conversational agent (ECA) as the front end interface with the public for a Crisis Communication Network Portal (CCNet). The proposed system, CCNet, is an integration of the intelligent conversation agent, AINI, and an Automated Knowledge Extraction Agent (AKEA). AKEA retrieves first hand information from relevant sources such as government departments and news channels. In this paper, we compare the interaction of AINI against two popular search engines, two question answering systems and two conversational systems.

Modern rural energy service (MRES) has been developed and implemented for years. It offers lots of advantage such as efficient energy and clean environment. However, MRES is used only in a particular group due to the lack of knowledge end promotion. This paper proposes the design end development of a knowledge management platform for promotion of MRES in ASEAN countries. The proposed system employs Web service technologies for enhancing and distribution the utilization of MRES.

This paper presents a novel framework for modeling embodied conversational agent for crisis communication focusing on the H5N1 pandemic crisis. Our system aims to cope with the most challenging issue on the maintenance of an engaging while convincing conversation. What primarily distinguishes our system from other conversational agent systems is that the human-computer conversation takes place within the context of H5N1 pandemic crisis. A Crisis Communication Network, called CCNet, is established based on a novel algorithm incorporating natural language query and embodied conversation agent simultaneously. Another significant contribution of our work is the development of a Automated Knowledge Extraction Agent (AKEA) to capitalize on the tremendous amount of data that is now available online to support our experiments. What makes our system differs from typical conversational agents is the attempt to move away from strictly task-oriented dialogue.

In 2002, the Thai government has endorsed an information technology policy framework entitled "Thailand Vision towards a Knowledge-Based Economy (IT 2010)". The policy emphasises the roles of information technology for the enablement and facilitation of economic and social development. One of the objectives is to develop the ability of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to compete in the world market. Although there are successful cases, majority of the companies among the Thai SMEs sector are still in an early stage of utilising e-commerce technologies to reap benefits from new opportunities. Therefore, there is a need to understand, to extract and to acquire knowledge about the adoption and use of the e-commerce technologies by SMEs in Thailand. Technology acceptance model (TAM) has been applied to many studies on the adoption and use of innovation and technologies. This proposed study intends to use a modified TAM named TECTAM (Thai E-commerce Technology Acceptance Model), as a research tool and model to study e-commerce acceptance among the Thailand's SMEs sector. The predominant dimensions of this study are based on TAM perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU). In terms of PU, the near-term and long-term usefulness are considered. On the other hand, the PEOU will be concerned with the social influence processes and the cognitive instrumental processes. In addition, this study will investigate how to increase the benefits from the relationship between TAM and other approaches. Finally, the study aims to apply the use of TECTAM model in terms of e-commerce technologies acceptance and how they could be used While the project is in a preliminary stage, the paper will detail the proposed methodology and approach of this project.