Exploring new patterns and mechanisms for advanced information technology and systems in the internet-era: introduction to the WITS’05 special issue

Abstract

This special issue includes four articles that were presented in the 15th Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (WITS’05), held in December 10–11, 2005, Las Vegas, Nevada. Since its first meeting in 1991 in MIT, WITS has become a premier annual forum for discussion and interaction among scholars with research interests in the cutting edge issues of information technology and systems. WITS’05 addressed many important research issues as the corporate world evolves toward service-oriented computing that can support business on demand, enabled by the emergence of web services, agent technologies, wireless computing, e-commerce standards, P2P technologies, the business web, among other technologies. The four selected articles have been extended substantially and went through two rounds of reviews. Collectively, these four articles explore new patterns and mechanisms that extend the new boundaries of information technologies and systems. It is our pleasure to make these four fine articles available to the community through the journal of Information Technology and Management. We thank all authors and reviewers for their diligent work that made this special issue possible. Next, we give a brief overview of the four papers in terms of their main discoveries and important contributions. The first article, ‘‘Combining probability models and Web mining models: A framework for proper name transliteration’’ by Zhou, Huang, and Chen combines probability models and web mining models to develop a framework for proper name transliteration. The authors argue that web pages are created today in almost every popular language. However, language boundaries prevent information sharing and discovery across countries. Their paper studies transliteration (referred to that proper names are translated phonetically) issue on the Web. Previous transliteration models can be categorized into four approaches: a rule-based approach, a machine learning approach, a statistical approach, and a web mining approach. This paper proposes a generic proper name transliteration framework which improves the traditional statistical approach by incorporating an enhanced Hidden Markov Model and a web mining model. Evaluation of the proposed framework is very promising as it boosted the performance by 79.05%. Singh and Sen in their article ‘‘Exploring local search in winner determination problem,’’ report their research in developing a new combinatorial auction mechanism for a wide range of practical applications such as allocation of railroads, auction of adjacent pieces of real estate, auction of airport landing slots, and distributed job shop scheduling. Determining the winning bundles in combinatorial auctions is an NP-complete problem. The inefficiency problem in existing approaches to combinatorial auction poses a limitation in conducting combinatorial auctions with multiple rounds of bidding and hinders the widespread use of combinatorial auctions on the Internet. This paper proposes a local search algorithm for combinatorial auctions, which takes only fraction of the CPU time taken by T. Han College of Business, University of Nevada, NV, Las Vegas 89154, USA