Earticle

The Ewha Music Database (EMDB) is an online database comprised of primary source materials related to music education from East Asia during the modern era (1880 to 1945) when Korea, Japan, and China were geopolitically and culturally intertwined. We developed the incipit search in EMDB as an embedded tool. This is the first attempt in Korea to implement a unique search function of musical data using alphabets of musical notes. Unlike in traditional search system that uses general literature information search conditions, such as author, title, publisher, year, number of pages, etc., it offers a new way of searching a musical piece/work and sheet music. This study confirms that digital information technology is an important methodology for research of music culture as a field of humanities.

Facial recognition is a biometric technology that is used in various fields such as user authentication and identification of human characteristics. Face recognition applications are practically used in various fields, but very few applications have been developed to improve the factory work environment. We implemented applications that uses face recognition to identify a specific employee in a factory .work environment and provide customized information for each employee. Factory workers need documents describing the work in order to do their assigned work. Factory managers can use our application to register documents needed for each worker, and workers can view the documents assigned to them. Each worker is identified using face recognition, and by tracking the worker's face during work, it is possible to know that the worker is in the workplace. In addition, as a mobile app for workers is provided, workers can view the contents using a tablet, and we have defined a simple communication protocol to exchange information between our applications. We demonstrated the applications in a factory work environment and found several improvements were required for practical use. We expect these results can be used to improve factory work environments.

Most of today's large-scale cloud systems and enterprise data centers are distributing resources to improve scalability and resource utilization. NVMe-over-Fabric protocol allows submitting NVMe commands to a remote NVMe SSD through RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) network. It is attracting attention recently because it is possible to construct a disaggregation storage system with low latency through the protocol. However, the current I/O stack of NVMe-over-Fabric has an inefficient structure for maintaining compatibility with the traditional I/O stack. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new mechanism to reduce I/O latency and CPU overhead by modifying I/O path of NVMe-over-Fabric to pass through legacy block layer. According to the performance evaluation results, the proposed mechanism is able to reduce the I/O latency and CPU overhead by up to 22% and 24% compared to the existing NVMe-over-Fabrics protocol, respectively.

Smartphones provide blind users with screenreader as an accessibility tool. However, blind users often experience difficulties accessing online shopping malls via smartphones due to their inconsistent and image-based layouts. To enable screenreader users to get access to the detailed information about products while they are shopping online, we have developed BarrierFreeShop, an accessible mobile shopping application for people with visual impairments. BarrierFreeShop has three accessibility features: (1) layout automation, (2) review summarization, and (3) optical character recognition. We conducted a user study with 80 participants with visual impairments where they were asked to use BarrierFreeShop for a month. The findings revealed the effectiveness of our app in terms of speed and post interview feedback. We have also discovered typical shopping experiences that participants had during the test. This research suggests that computer vision technologies can improve accessibility issues in online shopping malls. In addition, we have confirmed that extracting contents from images help people with visual impairments to get better access to product information.

Hashtags (#) have received a great deal of attention from academia and industry as an effective digital tool for engaging social media users and facilitating electronic word-of-mouth for brands. We delved into motivations concerning people’s brand-related hashtag-posting behavior on social media. The findings revealed three motivations for posting brand-related hashtags on social media: social acceptance, brand altruism, and incentive seeking. Additionally, we examined the relationships between motivations and brand relationship variables. The results showed that social acceptance and brand-related altruism predicted all of the five relationship variables (i.e., brand attitude, brand trust, brand affective and calculative commitment and brand loyalty), while incentive-seeking predicted brand calculative commitment and brand loyalty. The findings of the study provide some meaningful insights into the development of brand communication strategies and help marketers capitalize on social media platforms to achieve higher user involvement.