******************************************************************************

                                    Seminar


       Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management,

                    The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title:
The Design and Evaluation of Accessibility on Web Navigation

Speaker:
Prof. Benjamin P.C. Yen
School of Business
The University of Hong Kong

Date : February 24, 2006 (Friday)

Time : 4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Venue : Room 513, William M.W. Mong Engineering Building

(Engineering Building Complex Phase 2), CUHK

Abstract:
The Internet has been deployed to maintain and enhance the business
competitiveness in a trend of emerging Web technology and rapidly growing
demand for e-commerce. One of the most critical factors of success in
e-commerce is providing highly efficient and effective information retrieval
on company Web sites, which is heavily influenced by the site structure and
page organization. In order to keep the balance between the easiness of page
access and the popularity of page, the Web design guideline is requited to
take into account both accessibility and popularity of pages. Having observed
the lack of measures to reflect this important factor, this paper focuses on
the accessibility to measure and improve the quality of information retrieval.
The accessibility of the Web pages is modeled as graph traversal problems.
Four exemplary accessibility models for Web sites are introduced. A case study
is carried out to demonstrate the application of accessibility model that
discovers the potential problems and improves the page and link structures. An
evaluation for complexity and applicability is done on the four models to
summarize the conditions applicable for each model. A guideline based on
accessibility-popularity (A-P) plot is proposed for evaluation and improvement
of Web design.

Bio:
Dr. Yen received his BS degree from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan,
and MS / MPhil / Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University, U.S.A. Prior to
joining School of Business at The University of Hong Kong, he was associated
with department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management at Hong
Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Dr. Yen has collaborated
with international companies in the U.S. and Asia, such as Siemens, Bell Labs,
Philips Labs, Paragon Management Systems, Daran Eastman, etc. His research
interests include information technology in supply chain management,
electronic catalogs, Web information retrieval, and scheduling theory /
systems / applications.

Note : Cookies and drinks will be available at 4:15 pm.

 _______________________________________________________________________________