In grocery retailing, promotions and recommendations, derived from traditional data mining techniques, apply uniformly to all customers and not to individual ones, thus failing to meet each customer’s personal needs. On the other hand, recommender systems have been widely explored in the field of e-commerce managing to provide targeted personalized recommendations for products and services. Des...

W elcome to the December issue of Computer, the final issue for which I serve as editor in chief. As a longtime IEEE Computer Society volunteer, it has been a special privilege for me to serve as the EIC for Computer, the Society's flagship publication. These past four years have presented many opportunities, challenges, and rewarding experiences. Through this message, I wish to express my grat...

Recommender Systems have been successfully deployed in a variety of e-Commerce application scenarios. Customer selections of services or standard goods are supported as well as product configuration tasks. Little research has however been done on the application of Recommender Systems outside the virtual domain in real-world stationary trade. This surprises as on a business side, brick-and-mort...

This article discusses a potential application of radio frequency identification (RFID) and collaborative filtering for targeted advertising in grocery stores. Every day hundreds of items in grocery stores are marked down for promotional purposes. Whether these promotions are effective or not depends primarily on whether the customers are aware of them or not, and secondarily whether the custom...

We present a new methodology to create colorful textile antennas that can be embroidered within logos or other aesthetic shapes. Conductive threads (e-threads) have already been used in former embroidery unicolor approaches as attributed to the corresponding conductive material, viz. silver or copper. But so far, they have not been adapted to ‘print’ colorful textile antennas. For the first tim...

This paper describes an application of real time data capture and wireless transmission of meteorological data used by agricultural administrators to support operational decisions such as irrigation scheduling and pesticide application. Forestry companies need such information for managing operations during the fire season. The system architecture based on distributed wireless data communicatio...

Electronic identity (eID) cards promise to supply a universal, nation-wide mechanism for user authentication. Most European countries have started to deploy eID for government and private sector applications. Are government-issued electronic ID cards the proper way to authenticate users of online services? We use the German eID project as a showcase to discuss eID from an application perspectiv...

C omputer systems have become a vital part of the modern research environment, supporting all aspects of the research lifecycle [1]. The community uses the terms " eScience " and " eResearch " to highlight the important role of computer technology in the ways we undertake research, collaborate, share data and documents, submit funding applications , use devices to automatically and accurately c...

The main purpose of this exploratory study is to improve our understanding of the potential of RFID technology in the context of selected activities in one specific supply chain in the utility industry. Empirical data was gathered from two closely inter-related firms from three layers of the supply chain. A research approach is proposed where we aim to identify RFID opportunities, build potenti...

In todays world transactions are increasingly being performed over the internet but require identification of users as in face-to-face transactions. In order to facilitate eGovernance as well as other eCommerce services Electronic Identification (eID) schemes, which intend to provide unique and reliable identification and authentication of the users, have been introduced. eID schemes commonly i...