ABSTRACT
The growth of green-oriented businesses for sustainable development (SD) is no longer optional in the current dynamic world, especially for manufacturing businesses in general. Accordingly, the present study investigates the interlinkages between green organizational strategy (GOS), environmental corporate social responsibility (ECSR), and organizational sustainable performance (OSP) by exploring the key mediating role of green technology innovation (GTI). This study uses a quantitative method to gather data from Chinese manufacturing industries, employing a well-structured questionnaire. Senior and middle-level managers were the intended respondents. From the primary survey, 264 valid responses were gathered. The final data were analyzed using SmartPLS (version 3.3.9) by adopting structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the associations between the targeted constructs, and the results add to the recent literature by offering a cohesive model of GOS, ECSR, GTI, and OSP. The findings revealed that GOS has a strong positive effect on ECSR, GTI, and OSP. Further, ECSR has a strong positive impact on GTI and OSP. Meanwhile, GTI is a key mediating variable in these relationships, which previous studies have not explored. This study innovatively integrates the three green traits, namely, GOS, ECSR, and GTI, into a comprehensive model that is understudied in existing literature in order to help businesses improve their sustainable competitive advantage. The ultimate aim is to help businesses improve their environmental performance and achieve solid sustainability over the long term. Copyright © 2022 Ye, Hao, Shahzad and Kamran.
ABSTRACT
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, videoconferencing has become the default mode of communication in our daily lives at homes, workplaces and schools, and it is likely to remain an important part of our lives in the post-pandemic world. Despite its significance, there has not been any systematic study characterizing the user-perceived performance of existing videoconferencing systems other than anecdotal reports. In this paper, we present a detailed measurement study that compares three major videoconferencing systems: Zoom, Webex and Google Meet. Our study is based on 62 hours' worth of more than 1.1K videoconferencing sessions, which were created with a mix of emulated videoconferencing clients deployed in the cloud, as well as real mobile devices running from a residential network over two separate periods with nine months apart. We find that the existing videoconferencing systems vary in terms of geographic scope and resource provisioning strategies, which in turns determine streaming lag experienced by users. We also observe that streaming rate can change under different conditions (e.g., available bandwidth, number of users in a session, mobile device status), which affects user-perceived streaming quality. Beyond these findings, our measurement methodology enables reproducible benchmark analysis for any types of comparative or longitudinal study on available videoconferencing systems.
ABSTRACT
Contactless hospitality services are technology-enabled innovative services combating the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Surveying 1,537 hotel guests, this study explores the relationships between customer experience, customer delight, customer equity, and brand trust in contactless hospitality services. A theoretical model is proposed to investigate the antecedents and consequences of customer equity. The moderating effect of health concerns lies on the path from customer equity to trust. A multi-group analysis was conducted to examine the invariance among proposed paths between two customer groups. The effects of delight on equity and equity on trust are stronger for the low technology readiness group.
ABSTRACT
Due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, there is an urgent need to research the spread of disease and prevention strategies. As the spread of COVID-19 is closely related to the structure of human social networks, there are a lot of existing works that use a topological structure to analyze the characteristics of spread. Several studies have proposed certain strategies to prevent COVID-19 by analyzing the topological structure of the contact network, but most of the existing works have focused on detecting dense groups such as cliques;however, as the clique is the densest subgraph, it is easy for it to be influenced when the data has noise or lacks some edges. To reduce the influences of noise or lacks of data, there is a concept of gamma-quasicliques is considered in this paper. gamma-quasi-cliques is less restrictive and denser than cliques, and it is thus more suitable for analyzing and detecting communities in social networks to identify the close contacts of patients and achieve timely control under high levels of epidemic prevention strategies. Therefore, this paper proposed an algorithm based on the traditional formal concept analysis method for detecting gamma-quasi-cliques, and also designed a model for detecting and mining close contacts and sub-close (secondary) contacts in the patient's contact network. Consequently, manual intervention occurs in response to the asymptomatic close or sub-close contacts detected by this model, and nucleic acid testing and home isolation are performed to prevent the widespread of COVID-19. In our experiments, a real-life contact network is used to determine the ideal value of gamma for the detection of quasi-clique, which is 0.6, and the results show the validity and feasibility of the model.
ABSTRACT
The usage of contactless payment has surged in recent years, especially during the Covid19 pandemic. A Passive relay (PR) attack against a contactless card is a well-known threat, which has been extensively studied in the past with many solutions available. However, with the mass deployment of mobile point-of-sale (mPoS) devices, there emerges a new threat, which we call mPoS-based passive (MP) attacks. In an MP attack, the various components required in a PR attack, including an NFC reader, a wireless link, a remote card emulator, and a remote payment terminal, are conveniently combined into one compact device, hence the attack becomes much easier. Since the attacker and the victim are in the same location, the previous distance bounding or ambient sensor-based solutions are no longer effective. In this paper, we propose a new orientation-based payment solution called OPay. OPay builds on the observation that when a user makes a legitimate contactless payment, the card and the terminal surface are naturally aligned, but in an attack scenario, this situation is less likely to occur. This allows us to distinguish the legitimate payments from passive attacks based on measuring the alignment of orientations. We build a concrete prototype using two Arduino boards embedded with NFC and motion sensors to act as a card and a payment terminal respectively. To evaluate the feasibility, we recruited twenty volunteers in a user study. Participants generally find OPay easy to use, fast and reliable. Experiments show that OPay can substantially reduce the attack success rate by 85-99% with little inconvenience to real users. To our best knowledge, OPay is the first solution that can prevent both the PR and MP attacks, while preserving the existing usage model in contactless payment. © 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
ABSTRACT
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, videoconferencing has become the default mode of communication in our daily lives at homes, workplaces and schools, and it is likely to remain an important part of our lives in the post-pandemic world. Despite its significance, there has not been any systematic study characterizing the user-perceived performance of existing videoconferencing systems other than anecdotal reports. In this paper, we present a detailed measurement study that compares three major videoconferencing systems: Zoom, Webex and Google Meet. Our study is based on 48 hours' worth of more than 700 videoconferencing sessions, which were created with a mix of emulated videoconferencing clients deployed in the cloud, as well as real mobile devices running from a residential network. We find that the existing videoconferencing systems vary in terms of geographic scope, which in turns determines streaming lag experienced by users. We also observe that streaming rate can change under different conditions (e.g., number of users in a session, mobile device status, etc), which affects user-perceived streaming quality. Beyond these findings, our measurement methodology can enable reproducible benchmark analysis for any types of comparative or longitudinal study on available videoconferencing systems. © 2021 ACM.
ABSTRACT
Purpose: Draws from the equity theory and customer equity literature, this study aims to argue that the implementation of contactless service as an innovative service design in the hospitality industry can generate customers’ emotional attachment and cognitive evaluation of the brand. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses partial least squares modeling and data from a large-scale survey of hotel guests who have experienced contactless service in mainland China. The authors performed an importance-performance map analysis to evaluate the significance of critical variables and constructs by including the performance dimension. Findings: Customer equity is a three-dimensional higher-order construct that embraces value-, brand- and relationship equity. A pleasant experience of contactless service in hospitality encounters generates a positive effect on customer equity and delight. Additionally, increased customer equity improves satisfaction and trust. Practical implications: This study provides practical evidence for hospitality practitioners to consider contactless service in creating memorable experiences, improve customer satisfaction, build trust and add value to hospitality brands. Originality/value: The findings of this study add to the understanding of emerging contactless services, contribute to the development of the equity theory and current customer equity literature and advance the implementation of innovative service design in hospitality. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.
ABSTRACT
The rapidly increasing number of confirmed cases and extremely large amounts of medical resources about coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic are enriching the COVID-19 domain knowledge bases. Undoubtedly, it is resulting in "information overload" and "information confusion" for users. Hence, how to achieve precision information navigation for COVID-19 related domain knowledge retrieval and personalized services, has become a huge challenge of this research. Due to the unique retrieval and navigation advantages of concept lattice, a framework of novel coronavirus COVID-19 domain knowledge navigation named CoNavigator, based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) theory is devised. It provides a promising approach for improving the retrieval efficiency from various novel coronavirus COVID-19 information resource platforms. Besides, some useful patterns are extracted and regarded as important evidence for an appropriate understanding of the pathological features of novel coronavirus COVID-19.