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Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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On Mining Rating Dependencies In Online Collaborative Rating Networks, Hady W. Lauw, Ee Peng Lim, Ke Wang May 2009

On Mining Rating Dependencies In Online Collaborative Rating Networks, Hady W. Lauw, Ee Peng Lim, Ke Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The trend of social information processing sees e-commerce and social web applications increasingly relying on user-generated content, such as rating, to determine the quality of objects and to generate recommendations for users. In a rating system, a set of reviewers assign to a set of objects different types of scores based on specific evaluation criteria. In this paper, we seek to determine, for each reviewer and for each object, the dependency between scores on any two given criteria. A reviewer is said to have high dependency between a pair of criteria when his or her rating scores on objects based …


Dynamic Programming Approximations For Partially Observable Stochastic Games, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein May 2009

Dynamic Programming Approximations For Partially Observable Stochastic Games, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Partially observable stochastic games (POSGs) provide a rich mathematical framework for planning under uncertainty by a group of agents. However, this modeling advantage comes with a price, namely a high computational cost. Solving POSGs optimally quickly becomes intractable after a few decision cycles. Our main contribution is to provide bounded approximation techniques, which enable us to scale POSG algorithms by several orders of magnitude. We study both the POSG model and its cooperative counterpart, DEC-POMDP. Experiments on a number of problems confirm the scalability of our approach while still providing useful policies.


Ss-Ids: Statistical Signature Based Ids, Payas Gupta, Chedy Raissi, Gerard Dray, Pascal Poncelet, Johan Brissaud May 2009

Ss-Ids: Statistical Signature Based Ids, Payas Gupta, Chedy Raissi, Gerard Dray, Pascal Poncelet, Johan Brissaud

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Security of web servers has become a sensitive subject today. Prediction of normal and abnormal request is problematic due to large number of false alarms in many anomaly based Intrusion, Detection Systems(IDS). SS-IDS derives automatically the parameter profiles from the analyzed data thereby generating the Statistical Signatures. Statistical Signatures are based on modeling of normal requests and their distribution value without explicit intervention. Several attributes are used to calculate the behavior of the legitimate request on the web server. SS-IDS is best suited for the newly installed web servers which doesn't have low gene number of requests in. the data …


Sharing Hierarchical Mobile Multimedia Content Using The Mobitop System, Quang Minh Nguyen, Thi Nhu Quynh Kim, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Ee-Peng Lim, Yin-Leng Theng, Kalyani Chatterjea, Chew-Hung Chang, Aixin Sun, Khasfariyati Razikin May 2009

Sharing Hierarchical Mobile Multimedia Content Using The Mobitop System, Quang Minh Nguyen, Thi Nhu Quynh Kim, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Ee-Peng Lim, Yin-Leng Theng, Kalyani Chatterjea, Chew-Hung Chang, Aixin Sun, Khasfariyati Razikin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We introduce MobiTOP (Mobile Tagging of Objects and People), a map-based application which allows users to contribute and share geo-referenced multimedia annotations via mobile devices. An important feature of MobiTOP is that annotations are hierarchical, allowing annotations to be annotated to an arbitrary depth. MobiTOP's interface was designed using a participatory design methodology to ensure that the user interface meets the needs of potential users. In an evaluation, a group of student-teachers involved in a geographical field study were tasked to collaboratively identify rock formations using the MobiTOP system. The students who were in the field were guided by their …


Semisupervised Svm Batch Mode Active Learning With Applications To Image Retrieval, Steven C. H. Hoi, Rong Jin, Jianke Zhu, Michael R. Lyu May 2009

Semisupervised Svm Batch Mode Active Learning With Applications To Image Retrieval, Steven C. H. Hoi, Rong Jin, Jianke Zhu, Michael R. Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Active learning has been shown as a key technique for improving content-based image retrieval (CBIR) performance. Among various methods, support vector machine (SVM) active learning is popular for its application to relevance feedback in CBIR. However, the regular SVM active learning has two main drawbacks when used for relevance feedback. First, SVM often suffers from learning with a small number of labeled examples, which is the case in relevance feedback. Second, SVM active learning usually does not take into account the redundancy among examples, and therefore could select multiple examples in relevance feedback that are similar (or even identical) to …


How Tagging Helps Bridge The Gap Between Social And Technical Aspects In Software Development, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey May 2009

How Tagging Helps Bridge The Gap Between Social And Technical Aspects In Software Development, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Empirical research on collaborative software development practices indicates that technical and social aspects of software development are often intertwined. The processes followed are tacit and constantly evolving, thus not all of them are amenable to formal tool support. In this paper, we explore how ldquotaggingrdquo, a lightweight social computing mechanism, is used to bridge the gap between technical and social aspects of managing work items. We present the results from an empirical study on how tagging has been adopted and adapted over the past two years of a large project with 175 developers. Our research shows that the tagging mechanism …


Constraint-Based Dynamic Programming For Decentralized Pomdps With Structured Interactions, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein May 2009

Constraint-Based Dynamic Programming For Decentralized Pomdps With Structured Interactions, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Decentralized partially observable MDPs (DEC-POMDPs) provide a rich framework for modeling decision making by a team of agents. Despite rapid progress in this area, the limited scalability of solution techniques has restricted the applicability of the model. To overcome this computational barrier, research has focused on restricted classes of DEC-POMDPs, which are easier to solve yet rich enough to capture many practical problems. We present CBDP, an efficient and scalable point-based dynamic programming algorithm for one such model called ND-POMDP (Network Distributed POMDP). Specifically, CBDP provides magnitudes of speedup in the policy computation and generates better quality solution for all …


An Agent-Based Commodity Trading Simulation, Shih-Fen Cheng, Yee Pin Lim, Chao-Chi Liu May 2009

An Agent-Based Commodity Trading Simulation, Shih-Fen Cheng, Yee Pin Lim, Chao-Chi Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, the study of trading in electronic markets has received significant amount of attention, particularly in the areas of artificial intelligence and electronic commerce. With increasingly sophisticated technologies being applied in analyzing information and making decisions, fully autonomous software agents are expected to take up significant roles in many important fields. This trend is most obvious in the financial domain, where speed of reaction is highly valued and significant investments have been made in information and communication technologies.Despite the successes of automated trading in many important classes of financial markets, commodity trading has lagged behind, mainly because of …


Automatic Mining Of Functionally Equivalent Code Fragments Via Random Testing, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su May 2009

Automatic Mining Of Functionally Equivalent Code Fragments Via Random Testing, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Similar code may exist in large software projects due to some common software engineering practices, such as copying and pasting code and n-version programming. Although previous work has studied syntactic equivalence and small-scale, coarse-grained program-level and function-level semantic equivalence, it is not known whether significant fine-grained, code-level semantic duplications exist. Detecting such semantic equivalence is also desirable because it can enable many applications such as code understanding, maintenance, and optimization. In this paper, we introduce the first algorithm to automatically mine functionally equivalent code fragments of arbitrary size - down to an executable statement. Our notion of functional equivalence is …


Predicting Outcome For Collaborative Featured Article Nomination In Wikipedia, Meiqun Hu, Ee Peng Lim, Ramayya Krishnan May 2009

Predicting Outcome For Collaborative Featured Article Nomination In Wikipedia, Meiqun Hu, Ee Peng Lim, Ramayya Krishnan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In Wikipedia, good articles are wanted. While Wikipedia relies on collaborative effort from online volunteers for quality checking, the process of selecting top quality articles is time consuming. At present, the duty of decision making is shouldered by only a couple of administrators. Aiming to assist in the quality checking cycles so as to cope with the exponential growth of online contributions to Wikipedia, this work studies the task of predicting the outcome of featured article (FA) nominations. We analyze FA candidate (FAC) sessions collected over a period of 3.5 years, and examine the extent to which consensus has been …


The Impact Of Process Choice In High Maturity Environments: An Empirical Analysis, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan May 2009

The Impact Of Process Choice In High Maturity Environments: An Empirical Analysis, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present the results of a three year field study of the software development process choices made by project teams at two leading offshore vendors. In particular, we focus on the performance implications of project teams that chose to augment structured, plan-driven processes to implement the CMM level-5 Key Process Areas (KPAs) with agile methods. Our analysis of 112 software projects reveals that the decision to augment the firm-recommended, plan-driven approach with improvised, agile methods was significantly affected by the extent of client knowledge and involvement, newness of technology, and the project size. Furthermore this decision had a significant and …


A Novel Framework For Efficient Automated Singer Identification In Large Music Databases, Jialie Shen, John Shepherd, Bin Cui, Kian-Lee Tan May 2009

A Novel Framework For Efficient Automated Singer Identification In Large Music Databases, Jialie Shen, John Shepherd, Bin Cui, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the past decade, there has been explosive growth in the availability of multimedia data, particularly image, video, and music. Because of this, content-based music retrieval has attracted attention from the multimedia database and information retrieval communities. Content-based music retrieval requires us to be able to automatically identify particular characteristics of music data. One such characteristic, useful in a range of applications, is the identification of the singer in a musical piece. Unfortunately, existing approaches to this problem suffer from either low accuracy or poor scalability. In this article, we propose a novel scheme, called Hybrid Singer Identifier (HSI), for …


Are Online Auction Markets Efficient? An Empirical Study Of Market Liquidity And Abnormal Returns., Robert J. Kauffman, Trent J Spaulding, Charles A. Wood May 2009

Are Online Auction Markets Efficient? An Empirical Study Of Market Liquidity And Abnormal Returns., Robert J. Kauffman, Trent J Spaulding, Charles A. Wood

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Technological advances have facilitated investment in collectibles through online auction markets, where information regarding product characteristics, current and historical prices, and product availability is available to millions of market participants. However, market inefficiencies may still exist, where prices do not reflect market information and where savvy speculators can profit. Using unit root and variance ratio tests, we examine 8538 rare stamp and 56,997 rare coin auctions to evaluate the efficiency of online markets. In particular, we study market liquidity, abnormal returns and weak-form efficiency. We find an inverse relationship between market efficiency and liquidity. Bidder competition intrinsic to liquidity increases …


Joint Ranking For Multilingual Web Search, Wei Gao, Cheng Niu, Ming Zhou, Kam-Fai Wong Apr 2009

Joint Ranking For Multilingual Web Search, Wei Gao, Cheng Niu, Ming Zhou, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ranking for multilingual information retrieval (MLIR) is a task to rank documents of different languages solely based on their relevancy to the query regardless of query’s language. Existing approaches are focused on combining relevance scores of different retrieval settings, but do not learn the ranking function directly. We approach Web MLIR ranking within the learning-to-rank (L2R) framework. Besides adopting popular L2R algorithms to MLIR, a joint ranking model is created to exploit the correlations among documents, and induce the joint relevance probability for all the documents. Using this method, the relevant documents of one language can be leveraged to improve …


Optimal Digital Content Distribution Strategy In The Presence Of Consumer-To-Consumer Channel, Yunfang Feng, Zhiling Guo, Wei-Yu Kevin Chiang Apr 2009

Optimal Digital Content Distribution Strategy In The Presence Of Consumer-To-Consumer Channel, Yunfang Feng, Zhiling Guo, Wei-Yu Kevin Chiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although the online business-to-consumer (B2C) channel is the primary selling channel for digital content (e.g., videos, images, and music), modern digital technology has made possible the legal dissemination of such content over the consumer-to-consumer (C2C) channel through personal computing devices, such as PCs, mobile phones, and portable media players. This paper investigates the optimal channel structure and the corresponding pricing and service strategies for digital content distribution in order to understand the business value of introducing the C2C channel alongside the prevailing B2C channel. We identify conditions under which it is more profitable to use both B2C and C2C channels …


An Incremental Threshold Method For Continuous Text Search Queries, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Hwee Hwa Pang Apr 2009

An Incremental Threshold Method For Continuous Text Search Queries, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Hwee Hwa Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A text filtering system monitors a stream of incoming documents, to identify those that match the interest profiles of its users. The user interests are registered at a server as continuous text search queries. The server constantly maintains for each query a ranked result list, comprising the recent documents (drawn from a sliding window) with the highest similarity to the query. Such a system underlies many text monitoring applications that need to cope with heavy document traffic, such as news and email monitoring. In this paper, we propose the first solution for processing continuous text queries efficiently. Our objective is …


Optimizing Service Systems Based On Application-Level Qos, Qianhui Liang, Xindong Wu, Hoong Chuin Lau Apr 2009

Optimizing Service Systems Based On Application-Level Qos, Qianhui Liang, Xindong Wu, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Making software systems service-oriented is becoming the practice, and an increasingly large number of service systems play important roles in today's business and industry. Currently, not enough attention has been paid to the issue of optimization of service systems. In this paper, we argue that the key elements to be considered in optimizing service systems are robustness, system orientation, and being dynamic and transparent. We present our solution to optimizing service systems based on application-level QoS management. Our solution incorporates three capabilities, i.e., 1) the ability to cater to the varying rigidities on Web service QoS in distinct application domains …


Efficient Mining Of Closed Repetitive Gapped Subsequences From A Sequence Database, Bolin Ding, David Lo, Jiawei Han, Siau-Cheng Khoo Apr 2009

Efficient Mining Of Closed Repetitive Gapped Subsequences From A Sequence Database, Bolin Ding, David Lo, Jiawei Han, Siau-Cheng Khoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There is a huge wealth of sequence data available, for example, customer purchase histories, program execution traces, DNA, and protein sequences. Analyzing this wealth of data to mine important knowledge is certainly a worthwhile goal. In this paper, as a step forward to analyzing patterns in sequences, we introduce the problem of mining closed repetitive gapped subsequences and propose efficient solutions. Given a database of sequences where each sequence is an ordered list of events, the pattern we would like to mine is called repetitive gapped subsequence, which is a subsequence (possibly with gaps between two successive events within it) …


Efficient Evaluation Of Multiple Preference Queries, Hou U Leong, Nikos Mamaoulis, Kyriakos Mouratidis Apr 2009

Efficient Evaluation Of Multiple Preference Queries, Hou U Leong, Nikos Mamaoulis, Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Consider multiple users searching for a hotel room, based on size, cost, distance to the beach, etc. Users may have variable preferences expressed by different weights on the attributes of the searched objects. Although individual preference queries can be evaluated by selecting the object in the database with the highest aggregate score, in the case of multiple requests at the same time, a single object cannot be assigned to more than one users. The challenge is to compute a fair 1-1 matching between the queries and a subset of the objects. We model this as a stable-marriage problem and propose …


The Digital Wallet: Opportunities And Prototypes, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu Apr 2009

The Digital Wallet: Opportunities And Prototypes, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Example digital wallet applications support secure P2P mobile cash transactions and alleviate point-of-sale confusion for consumers using multiple payment, discount, and loyalty cards.


Beyond Output Voting: Detecting Compromised Replicas Using Hmm-Based Behavioral Distance, Debin Gao, Michael K. Reiter, Dawn Song Apr 2009

Beyond Output Voting: Detecting Compromised Replicas Using Hmm-Based Behavioral Distance, Debin Gao, Michael K. Reiter, Dawn Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many host-based anomaly detection techniques have been proposed to detect code-injection attacks on servers. The vast majority, however, are susceptible to "mimicry" attacks in which the injected code masquerades as the original server software, including returning the correct service responses, while conducting its attack. "Behavioral distance," by which two diverse replicas processing the same inputs are continually monitored to detect divergence in their low-level (system-call) behaviors and hence potentially the compromise of one of them, has been proposed for detecting mimicry attacks. In this paper, we present a novel approach to behavioral distance measurement using a new type of hidden …


Ensuring Dual Security Modes In Rfid-Enabled Supply Chain Systems, Shaoying Cai, Tieyan Li, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng Apr 2009

Ensuring Dual Security Modes In Rfid-Enabled Supply Chain Systems, Shaoying Cai, Tieyan Li, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While RFID technology has greatly facilitated the supply chain management, designing a secure, visible, and efficient RFID- enabled supply chain system is still a challenge since the three equally important requirements (i.e., security, visibility, and efficiency) may conflict to each other. Few research works have been conducted to address these issues simultaneously. In this paper, we observe the different security requirements in RFID-enabled supply chain environments and differentiate the simplified model into two security levels. Accordingly, dual security modes are properly defined in our RFID setting. In the relatively secure environment, our system is set to the weak security mode, …


Exploring Hierarchically Organized Georeferenced Multimedia Annotations In The Mobitop System, Thi Nhu Quynh Kim, Khasfariyati Razikin, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Yin Leng Theng, Quang Minh Nguyen, Ee-Peng Lim, Aixin Sun, Chew Hung Chang, Kalyani Chatterjea Apr 2009

Exploring Hierarchically Organized Georeferenced Multimedia Annotations In The Mobitop System, Thi Nhu Quynh Kim, Khasfariyati Razikin, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Yin Leng Theng, Quang Minh Nguyen, Ee-Peng Lim, Aixin Sun, Chew Hung Chang, Kalyani Chatterjea

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We introduce MobiTOP, a map-based interface for accessing hierarchically organized georeferenced annotations. Each annotation contains multimedia content associated with a location, and users are able to annotate existing annotations, in effect creating a hierarchy. MobiTOPs interface was designed using a participatory design methodology to ensure that the user interface meets the needs of potential users. A pilot study to compare the MobiTOP interface with a space-filling thumbnail (SFT) interface suggested that participants preferred the MobiTOP design for accessing annotations even though the SFT interface was conceptually easier to understand resources.


Describing Fuzzy Sets Using A New Concept: Fuzzify Functor, Kexin Wei, Zhaoxia Wang, Quan Wang Apr 2009

Describing Fuzzy Sets Using A New Concept: Fuzzify Functor, Kexin Wei, Zhaoxia Wang, Quan Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper proposed a fuzzify functor as an extension of the concept of fuzzy sets. The fuzzify functor and the first-order operated fuzzy set are defined. From the theory analysis, it can be observed that when the fuzzify functor acts on a simple crisp set, we get the first order fuzzy set or type-1 fuzzy set. By operating the fuzzify functor on fuzzy sets, we get the higher order fuzzy sets or higher type fuzzy sets and their membership functions. Using the fuzzify functor we can exactly describe the type-1 fuzzy sets, type-2 fuzzy sets and higher type or higher …


Opaque: Protecting Path Privacy In Directions Search, Ken C. K. Lee, Wang-Chien Lee, Hong Va Leong, Baihua Zheng Apr 2009

Opaque: Protecting Path Privacy In Directions Search, Ken C. K. Lee, Wang-Chien Lee, Hong Va Leong, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Directions search returns the shortest path from a source to a destination on a road network. However, the search interests of users may be exposed to the service providers, thus raising privacy concerns. For instance, a path query that finds a path from a resident address to a clinic may lead to a deduction about "who is related to what disease". To protect user privacy from accessing directions search services, we introduce the OPAQUE system, which consists of two major components: (1) an obfuscator that formulates obfuscated path queries by mixing true and fake sources/destinations; and (2) an obfuscated path …


Achieving Better Privacy Protection In Wireless Sensor Networks Using Trusted Computing, Yanjiang Yang, Robert H. Deng, Jianying Zhou, Ying Qiu Apr 2009

Achieving Better Privacy Protection In Wireless Sensor Networks Using Trusted Computing, Yanjiang Yang, Robert H. Deng, Jianying Zhou, Ying Qiu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is an ad-hoc wireless network composed of small sensor nodes deployed in large numbers. Sensor nodes are usually severely resource limited and power constrained. Security enforcement in WSNs is thus a challenging task. In this paper we propose a clustered heterogeneous architecture for WSNs, where high-end cluster heads are incorporated, and they are further equipped with trusted computing technology (TC). As such, the cluster heads act as trusted parties, and are expected to help effectively address privacy issues in WSNs. As concrete examples, we discuss in details how user query privacy and source location privacy …


Rsa-Based Certificateless Public Key Encryption, Junzuo Lai, Robert H. Deng, Shengli Liu, Weidong Kou Apr 2009

Rsa-Based Certificateless Public Key Encryption, Junzuo Lai, Robert H. Deng, Shengli Liu, Weidong Kou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Certificateless Public Key Cryptography was first introduced by Al-Riyami and Paterson in order to eliminate the inherent key-escrow problem of Identity-Based Cryptography. In this paper, we present a new practical construction of certificateless public key encryption scheme without paring. Our scheme is, in the random oracle model, provably secure under the assumption that the RSA problem is intractable.


House Of Cards, M. Thulasidas Mar 2009

House Of Cards, M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We are in dire straits - no doubt about it. Our banks and financial edifices are collapsing. Those left standing also look shaky. The financial industry as a whole is battling to survive. And, as its frontline warriors, we will bear the brunt of the blood- bath sure to ensue any minute now. A good opportunity to play solitaire?


Visual Word Proximity And Linguistics For Semantic Video Indexing And Near-Duplicate Retrieval, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo Mar 2009

Visual Word Proximity And Linguistics For Semantic Video Indexing And Near-Duplicate Retrieval, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bag-of-visual-words (BoW) has recently become a popular representation to describe video and image content. Most existing approaches, nevertheless, neglect inter-word relatedness and measure similarity by bin-to-bin comparison of visual words in histograms. In this paper, we explore the linguistic and ontological aspects of visual words for video analysis. Two approaches, soft-weighting and constraint-based earth mover’s distance (CEMD), are proposed to model different aspects of visual word linguistics and proximity. In soft-weighting, visual words are cleverly weighted such that the linguistic meaning of words is taken into account for bin-to-bin histogram comparison. In CEMD, a cross-bin matching algorithm is formulated such …


Electronic Commerce Research And Applications Ecra Co-Editors' Introduction For Volume 8, Issue 2, March - April 2009, Robert J. Kauffman, Patrick Y. K. Chau, Terry R. Payne, J. Christopher Westland Mar 2009

Electronic Commerce Research And Applications Ecra Co-Editors' Introduction For Volume 8, Issue 2, March - April 2009, Robert J. Kauffman, Patrick Y. K. Chau, Terry R. Payne, J. Christopher Westland

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many efforts are occurring around the world to improve supply chain performance to best-practice levels to improve the profitability of manufacturing and service firms. As a result, there is great interest among industry leaders and academic researchers to find ways to coordinate and streamline all of the activities in the supply procurement process as a basis for cost management, managed quality, and strategic competitiveness. With the Internet, the possibility of implementing many innovative new approaches to procurement has driven firms to want much higher performance than they currently seem to be able to achieve. Some of the innovations include dynamic …