Exploring the Service Quality for the Virtual Government ¡@¡@¡@¡@¡@¡@¡@Abstract ¡@¡@The virtual government has been defined as the citizen services provider on the Internet. In addition to its 24-hour and 7-day everlasting service hours, it has also reinvented the ways governmental agencies deliver their services. The citizens, without any limitation of service hours and physical locations, are entitled to get access to the online governmental services such as information inquiry, online service delivery, and paperless office. The virtual government has indeed played an important role between public agencies and citizens. ¡@¡@This thesis aim to explore the citizens requirements and evaluation for the virtual government. Based on the PZB model and SERVQUAL measures of service quality, this study proposes a conceptual framework and empirical measures that assess the online governmental services. The results have shown that: ¡Ð On the dimensions for service quality: Five dimensions for measuring online governmental services quality are extracted based on factor analysis of the 24-item questionnaire. They are system functions, convenience to citizens, reliability, efficiency, and attraction. ¡Ð On the model for service quality: Based on factor analysis and 1-way analysis of variance, citizens overall satisfaction is not significantly related to their perceived service quality. The results suggest that the overall satisfaction can be evaluated directly from citizens¡¦ expected service quality due to the fact that their expected and perceived quality of online governmental services do not differ substantially. Keywords: virtual government, service quality, PZB model, SERVQUAL

The purpose of this article is to identify how Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network (IP VPN) affects the business strategy for Taiwan Internet Service Provider, using X Company as an example. With the change in technology, the world¡¦s business environment change from day to day. The break though development such as Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network, create a whole new era of communication. With the pressure coming from both the fixed network carrier (Type 1 telecommunications enterprises) and the existing Internet service provider competitors. X Company needs to find a new market niche to maintain its competition. Strategy becomes most important when the existing business model is coming into a mature stage. A partnership with other service carriers or an innovation within the same business filed becomes the crucial decision. Through X Company¡¦s internal data, this thesis will analyzed the strength and weakness compare to its current competitors. With the data from the customer survey, X Company can also identify the need of its customers. At the end, this thesis will prove X Company¡¦s trend toward IP VPN transformations is the right strategy. As data traffic expected to outgrow voice traffic in the coming year, X Company¡¦s transformation to IP-based Virtual Private Networks is the right strategy. IP VPN setup will be the trend of increasing dependence on the corporate network as a way of interconnecting users with enterprise software, business process, databases, and intellectual capital. Companies are transferring more enterprise applications between sites, as well as data replication and transfer. But enterprises are aiming at the same time to combine the effectiveness of information sharing with the network with the need to make sure security, manageability, functionality and privacy while being paying attention on cost control. X Company IP VPNs offer a more reasonable mean of doing so without the necessity for expensive leased line dedicated connections.

The characteristics of liquid and solid aerosols have been intensively investigated by means of optical diagnostic techniques. Part I describes the characteristics of liquid aerosol formation formed by heat transfer fluids (HTFs) from bulk liquids. Part II investigates the characteristics of convective transport behavior of solid particles in virtual impactor (VI). The objective of part I is to establish correlations which offer predictions on atomized particle size of HTFs which are widely and commonly used in process industries. There are numerous reports stating that mist explosions formed from leakage cause disastrous accidents in process industries. For safety concerns, the characteristics of mist formation should be known in order to prevent HTFs from catching on fire or exploding. The empirical data on formation of mist are collected by the optical measurement technique, the Fraunhofer diffraction. The Buckingham-PI theorem is applied to establish a correlation between empirical data and representative physical properties of HTFs. Final results of correlations are solved by a statistical method of linear regression. The objective of part II is to investigate the characteristics of convective transport behavior in virtual impactor (VI) which is used to sort polydisperse precursor powder in the process industries of superconductor wire. VI is the device to separate polydisperse particles as a function of particle size by using the difference in inertia between different sizes of particles. To optimize VI performance, the characteristics of convective transport should be identified. This objective is achieved by visualization techniques. The applied visualization techniques are Mie-scattering and laser induced fluorescence (LIF). To investigate analytically, a local Stokes number is introduced in order to offer criteria on predicting the efficiency of VI performance and boundary effect on particle separation. The achieved results can enhance performance and eliminate defects by having knowledge of the behavior of solid particles in VI.

Mobile robots are used for a wide range of purposes such as mapping an environment and transporting material goods. Regardless of the specific application, the navigation of the mobile robot is usually divided into three separate parts: localization, path planning and path execution. Localization is the process of determining the location of the robot with respect to a reference coordinate system. There are many different approaches to localizing a mobile robot which employ a wide variety of sensors. The objective of my research is to develop a method for the localization of multiple mobile robots equipped with inexpensive range sensors in an indoor environment. Each mobile robot will be equipped with a rotating infrared sensor and a rotating CMOS camera. The multiple mobile robot system will be treated as a linked robot for localization. The proposed localization method is verified via both simulation and experiment. Through the use of the virtual link length and relative heading information, a system of mobile robots can be effectively localized using detected environmental features.

The purpose of this project is to develop a software framework, a 3D engine, which will generate images to be projected onto facets of a spatially immersive display (SID). The goal is to develop a software library to support the creation of images of specified 3D environments which are specific to the display geometries of a polyhedral class of SIDs. Part of this goal is developing auxiliary software to allow this library to be thoroughly tested. When properly working, the images being displayed on adjoining faces of the SID appear spatially and temporally consistent with one another, creating the illusion that the user is within a surrounding three-dimensional space.

The aggregate power of all resources on the Internet is enormous. The Internet can be viewed as a massive virtual organization that holds tremendous amounts of information and resources with different ownerships. However, little is known about how to run this organization efficiently. This dissertation studies the problems of distributed task and resource allocation among self-interested agents in virtual organizations. The developed solutions are not allocation mechanisms that can be imposed by a centralized designer, but decentralized interaction mechanisms that provide incentives to self-interested agents to behave cooperatively. These mechanisms also take computational tractability into consideration due to the inherent complexity of distributed task and resource allocation problems. Targeted allocation mechanisms can achieve global task allocation efficiency in a virtual organization and establish stable resource-sharing communities based on agents’ own decisions about whether or not to behave cooperatively. This high level goal requires solving the following problems: synthetic task allocation, decentralized coalition formation and automated multiparty negotiation. For synthetic task allocation, in which each task needs to be accomplished by a virtual team composed of self-interested agents from different real organizations, my approach is to formalize the synthetic task allocation problem as an algorithmic mechanism design optimization problem. I have developed two approximation mechanisms that I prove are incentive compatible for a synthetic task allocation problem. This dissertation also develops a decentralized coalition formation mechanism, which is based on explicit negotiation among self-interested agents. Each agent makes its own decisions about whether or not to join a candidate coalition. The resulting coalitions are stable in the core in terms of coalition rationality. I have applied this mechanism to form resource sharing coalitions in computational grids and buyer coalitions in electronic markets. The developed negotiation mechanism in the decentralized coalition formation mechanism realizes automated multilateral negotiation among self-interested agents who have symmetric authority (i.e., no mediator exists and agents are peers). In combination, the decentralized allocation mechanisms presented in this dissertation lay a foundation for realizing automated resource management in open and scalable virtual organizations.

This interdisciplinary research project combines the fields of nautical archaeology and computer visualization to create an interactive virtual reconstruction of the 1606 Portuguese vessel Nossa Senhora dos Mártires, also known as the Pepper Wreck. Using reconstruction information provided by Dr. Filipe Castro (Texas A&M Department of Anthropology), a detailed 3D computer model of the ship was constructed and filled with cargo to demonstrate how the ship might have been loaded on the return voyage from India. The models are realistically shaded, lighted, and placed into an appropriate virtual environment. The scene can be viewed using the real-time immersive and interactive system developed by Dr. Frederic Parke (Texas A&M Department of Visualization). The process developed to convert the available information and data into a reconstructed 3D model is documented. This documentation allows future projects to adapt this process for other archaeological visualizations, as well as informs archaeologists about the type of data most useful for computer visualizations of this kind.

Interactive art is rapidly becoming a part of cosmopolitan society through public displays, video games, and art exhibits. It is a means of exploring the connections between our physical bodies and the virtual world. However, a sense of disconnection often exists between the users and technology because users are driving actions within an environment from which they are physically separated. This research involves the creation of a custom interactive, immersive, and real-time video-based mark-making installation as public art. Using a variety of input devices including video cameras, sensors, and special lighting, a painterly mark-making experience is contemporized, enabling the participant to immerse himself in a world he helps create. This work illustrates the potential of making the user-technology disconnection more seamless between the physical and virtual worlds. Using unobtrusive interfaces, the user?s physical interactions can be encouraged. The development of this installation progressed through improvements based on user feedback from iterative public displays of the work. This process is to serve as a guideline for other artists working in interactive media who are also exploring perceived intimacy in user interactions.

In a multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSOC), parallel processors are utilized to enhance overall performance. However, the communication between processors and memory modules can affect overall performance significantly. We proposed a software design of communication performance estimation for system synthesis. We designed a hardware simulator of mesh communication architecture of MPSOC. We implemented the simulator of router nodes in SystemC language. An analytical communication performance estimation model can be trained with data measured from communication simulation. It can then be utilized for estimating inter-processor communication performance in an MPSOC.

¡@¡@Lewis Carroll in his Alice¡¦s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass creates in two journeys of dreams a singular space-time, in which the non-sense words, paradoxical conversations, anti-causality events, disordered time and labyrinthine space are permeated. It is, beyond doubt, a space-time of Virtual. Thus, Virtuality is the point of the thesis, and the Dream is the initial of Virtuality. The author attempts to reflect the thinking-gesture that Carroll ever develops in terms of Writing(form) and Dream (content). ¡@¡@First, Alice¡¦s story as a virtual text, demonstrates the Dream by the special language¡Xin particular Carroll¡¦s answerless riddles, the portmanteau words with meaning-implosion, and the homophones which show the displacement of sense¡Xto attack the representation of thought, allowing us to see the impotence of designation in language. Dream, functioning as the absolute difference of actuality, will not possibly be the sameness of actuality. The dream is thus not the permutation of the experience of actuality, even though they may be similar or mirrors of each other. However, this is not a representation of actuality, but a demonstration of repetition. If not, it will be mere actual, not virtual. For Carroll, Dream is a virtual field that coexists with actuality, and both virtuality and actuality should be regarded as absolute Difference, with respective reality. ¡@¡@Moreover, Alice¡¦s adventure, with its un-sequential events¡Xas the plot ¡§murdered time¡¨ in story suggests¡Xcreates a time without its chronological flowing, but a time suspended. The time is on the one hand a moment that suspensive, and is a most intensive instant on the other hand, where all the forces encounter, resonate and emit at this ultimate second. Thus, the Dream becomes a purely intensive world, and Alice is the continuum of intensities which constitutes by dynamically linked events. Plus, through the differentiating and repetition of the Dream, Alice¡¦s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass folds another book with the same title, a Double of eternal absent in actuality¡Xthe shine of virtual names by Lewis Carroll thus emerges.