The focus of this study is on lecturer’s use of online technology in the higher education context. Precisely, this study aims to understand the effect of personal innovativeness in IT (PI) in determining technology adoption behavior of lecturers in the higher education institutes in Sri Lanka. In this study, the variable of personal innovativeness in IT is integrated with the UTAUT framework an...

Large environments that are designed for travel, leisure, and for everyday life – such as transport hubs, amusement parks, and shopping centers – feature different locations that are frequently visited by pedestrians. Each visit is evoked by one’s motivation to engage in some kind of activity at a certain location. By means of modeling the pedestrians’ interests in locations with the aid of com...

The efficiency and product quality of hydro-abrasive machining (HAM) could be considerably improved if the energy dissipation phenomenon of the jet-like tool during the material removal is clearly understood. An on-line technique for quantifying the amount of energy dissipated in the workpiece during HAM using acoustic emission (AE) measurements is presented in this paper. The measured AE-signa...

Competitive isomorphism refers to the phenomenon of competing firms becoming similar as they mimic each other under common market forces. With the growing presence of firms as well as their consumers and suppliers on the Web, we discover a parallel phenomenon of online isomorphism wherein the web footprints of competing firms are found to overlap. We propose new online metrics based on the cont...

In contrast to popular literature on technology acceptance, this research-in-progress paper does not intend to build an explanatory model of technology acceptance but a predictive model so as to predict whether a specific person is likely to accept some technology. We show that the constructs that were identified in the classic UTAUT (such as performance expectancy, effort expectancy and social...

One important function of the discussion forums of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is for students to post problems they are unable to resolve and receive help from their peers and instructors. There are a large proportion of threads that are not resolved to the satisfaction of the students for various reasons. In this paper, we attack this problem by firstly constructing a conceptual model...

Fashion, and especially apparel, is the fastest-growing category in online shopping. As consumers requires sensory experience especially for apparel goods for which their appearance matters most, images play a key role not only in conveying crucial information that is hard to express in text, but also in affecting consumer’s attitude and emotion towards the product. However, research related to...

Over the past decade, online social media has had a tremendous impact on the way people engage in social activism. For instance, about 26M Facebook users expressed their support in upholding the cause of marriage equality by overlaying their profile pictures with rainbow-colored filters. Similarly, hundreds of thousands of users changed their profile pictures to a black dot condemning incidents...

Web pages for group discounts have become very popular in the past few years. In this paper we concentrate on the group discounts for the service industry in which a quality of the service plays an important role in retaining customers which in return affects business profitability. We present a model of the group discount offer from a merchant’s point view. A merchant decides about the size of...