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Due to strong growth in the virtual business environment, online internationalization has become a topic of high interest. This makes it necessary for firms providing software online to carefully investigate and understand barriers and differences in countries before entering them. Further, companies expanding abroad face a variety of differences compared to their home market, which has to be carefully understood in order to succeed internationally and to avoid misinterpretations. This thesis took a qualitative approach and was based on six semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions, all performed with CEOs, founders or managers with explicit knowledge in the online internationalization phase of their firms. The insights from the interviews acknowledge which differences and barriers the firms faced and how they perceived them. The outline and result of the study were based on the four dimensions of cultural, administrative, geographic and economic challenges. The result showed that the cultural and geographic dimensions were barely perceived as barriers by the firms, the administrative dimensions moderately, whereas the companies clearly perceived the economic dimensions as barriers in their internationalization processes. Additional findings of the study were the importance of cultural leadership, hierarchies & decision-making processes, high-density clusters and pricing strategies.

Recognition of text from camera-captured scene/born-digital images help in the development of aids for the blind, unmanned navigation systems and spam filters. However, text in such images is not confined to any page layout, and its location within in the image is random in nature. In addition, motion blur, non-uniform illumination, skew, occlusion and scale-based degradations increase the complexity in locating and recognizing the text in a scene/born-digital image. Text localization and segmentation techniques are proposed for the born-digital image data set. The proposed OTCYMIST technique won the first place and placed in the third position for its performance on the text segmentation task in ICDAR 2011 and ICDAR 2013 robust reading competitions for born-digital image data set, respectively. Here, Otsu’s binarization and Canny edge detection are separately carried out on the three colour planes of the image. Connected components (CC’s) obtained from the segmented image are pruned based on thresholds applied on their area and aspect ratio. CC’s with sufficient edge pixels are retained. The centroids of the individual CC’s are used as nodes of a graph. A minimum spanning tree is built using these nodes of the graph. Long edges are broken from the minimum spanning tree of the graph. Pairwise height ratio is used to remove likely non-text components. CC’s are grouped based on their proximity in the horizontal direction to generate bounding boxes (BB’s) of text strings. Overlapping BB’s are removed using an overlap area threshold. Non-overlapping and minimally overlapping BB’s are used for text segmentation. These BB’s are split vertically to localize text at the word level. A word cropped from a document image can easily be recognized using a traditional optical character recognition (OCR) engine. However, recognizing a word, obtained by manually cropping a scene/born-digital image, is not trivial. Existing OCR engines do not handle these kinds of scene word images effectively. Our intention is to first segment the word image and then pass it to the existing OCR engines for recognition. In two aspects, it is advantageous: it avoids building a character classifier from scratch and reduces the word recognition task to a word segmentation task. Here, we propose two bottom-up approaches for the task of word segmentation. These approaches choose different features at the initial stage of segmentation. Power-law transform (PLT) was applied to the pixels of the gray scale born-digital images to non-linearly modify the histogram. The recognition rate achieved on born-digital word images is 82.9%, which is 20% more than the top performing entry (61.5%) in ICDAR 2011 robust reading competition. In addition, we explored applying PLT to the colour planes such as red, green, blue, intensity and lightness plane by varying the gamma value. We call this technique as Nonlinear enhancement and selection of plane (NESP) for optimal segmentation, which is an improvement over PLT. NESP chooses a particular plane with a proper gamma value based on Fisher discrimination factor. The recognition rate is 72.8% for scene images of ICDAR 2011 robust reading competition, which is 30% higher than the best entry (41.2%). The recognition rate is 81.7% and 65.9% for born-digital and scene images of ICDAR 2013 robust reading competition, respectively, using NESP. Another technique, midline analysis and propagation of segmentation (MAPS), has also been proposed. Here, the middle row pixels of the gray scale image are first segmented and the statistics of the segmented pixels are used to assign text and non-text labels to the rest of the image pixels using min-cut method. Gaussian model is fitted on the middle row segmented pixels before the assignment of other pixels. In MAPS, we assume the middle row pixels are least affected by any of the degradations. This assumption is validated by the good word recognition rate of 71.7% on ICDAR 2011 robust reading competition for scene images. The recognition rate is 83.8% and 66.0% for born-digital and scene images of ICDAR 2013 robust reading competition, respectively, using MAPS. The best reported results for ICDAR 2003 word images is 61.1% using custom lexicons containing the list of test words. On the other hand, NESP and MAPS achieve 66.2% and 64.5% for ICDAR 2003 word images without using any lexicon. By using similar custom lexicon, the recognition rates for ICDAR 2003 word images go up to 74.9% and 74.2% for NESP and MAPS methods, respectively. In place of passing an image segmented by a method, manually segmented word image is submitted to an OCR engine for benchmarking maximum possible recognition rate for each database. The recognition rates of the proposed methods and the benchmark results are reported on the seven publicly available word image data sets and compared with these of reported results in the literature. Since no good Kannada OCR is available, a classifier is designed to recognize Kannada characters and words from Chars74k data set and our own image collection, respectively. Discrete cosine transform (DCT) and block DCT are used as features to train separate classifiers. Kannada words are segmented using the same techniques (MAPS and NESP) and further segmented into groups of components, since a Kannada character may be represented by a single component or a group of components in an image. The recognition rate on Kannada words is reported for different features with and without the use of a lexicon. The obtained recognition performance for Kannada character recognition (11.4%) is three times the best performance (3.5%) reported in the literature.

Submitted by Nadir Basilio (nadirsb@uninove.br) on 2017-04-05T15:05:19Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Magda Sales Pinho.pdf: 1694833 bytes, checksum: a49d6b223e20ae622fcca7ac026eea6e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-04-05T15:05:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Magda Sales Pinho.pdf: 1694833 bytes, checksum: a49d6b223e20ae622fcca7ac026eea6e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-12-15 / In the organizational environment, social changes caused by access to Information Technology resources influence the production processes, specifically in the form of work and the way of seeing and interpreting work. The entry of young people into the labor market has presented a scenario of instability, dissatisfaction, and new behaviors in the procedures proposed by organizations that expect more commitment by the young employees. Currently, young people seek personal job satisfaction, self-realization, and recognition, which were less frequent behaviors in earlier generations (Twenge, 2010). The literature reports that these young people are creative, ambitious, and interested in people and groups (Tapscott, 2010). According to some authors, relational bonds (Eisner, 2005) and the role of leadership (Lipkin; Perrymore, 2009) have emerged as key factors for the stability of the young in the organization. This study aims to identify the perception of the young, digital generation on the support work offered by the organization. For that, the constructs of Perceived Organizational Support (POS) and Perceived Social Support (PSS) were studied. In this research a survey was used, replicating the questionnaires by Siqueira (2009). The study sample was composed of young, lower middle class, college students, who already work or have professional experience. The data collected in the survey were tabulated and processed by the PLS software. The Organizational Support construct was altered to identify variables that relate to the welfare of the employee, job satisfaction, the physical and environmental conditions of work, and the company's availability to assist the employee in case of need. The construct Social Support, the factor about the perception of the young regarding communication, was kept with just a small adjustment. The proposed changes in the organization of the Social Support construct suggest that respondents are less concerned about the factors that involve relationships with team members and the resources offered by companies for development of the work, and more concerned with information and communication. These areas are significant and valued factors by young people in their working environment. / No ambiente organizacional, as transformações decorrentes das mudanças sociais proporcionadas pelo acesso aos recursos da Tecnologia da Informação (TI) ocorrem nos processos de produção, na forma de trabalhar e na maneira de ver e interpretar o trabalho. Entretanto, o ingresso de jovens no mercado de trabalho tem apresentado um cenário de instabilidade, insatisfação e comportamentos novos frente aos procedimentos propostos pelas organizações, que esperam mais comprometimento por parte dos jovens empregados. Atualmente, os jovens buscam a satisfação pessoal no trabalho, autorrealização e o reconhecimento, comportamento menos frequente em gerações anteriores. (Twenge, 2010). A literatura informa que estes jovens são pessoas criativas, ambiciosas, interessadas pelas pessoas e pelos grupos (Tapscott, 2010). Segundo alguns autores, os vínculos relacionais (Eisner, 2005) e o papel da liderança (Lipkin; Perrymore, 2009) têm se mostrado fatores fundamentais para a estabilidade do jovem na organização. Este estudo tem por objetivo identificar a percepção do jovem da geração digital sobre o suporte ao trabalho oferecido pela organização. Para atingir esse objetivo, foram estudados os constructos de Percepção do Suporte Organizacional (PSO) e Percepção do Suporte Social (PSS). A pesquisa de campo utilizou uma pesquisa survey, replicando os questionários de Siqueira (2009). A população estudada foi composta por jovens estudantes universitários de classe média baixa, que já trabalham ou tiveram uma experiência profissional. Os dados levantados na pesquisa foram tabulados e processados por meio do software PLS - (Partial Least Square). Os resultados mostraram que o constructo Suporte Organizacional sofreu alteração e manteve variáveis que se relacionam ao bem estar do empregado, satisfação com o trabalho, condições físicas e ambientais de trabalho e disponibilidade da empresa em ajudar o empregado, em caso de necessidade. No constructo Suporte Social, foi mantido, quase sem alterações, o fator acerca da percepção do jovem sobre a comunicação. As alterações propostas na organização do constructo Suporte Social sugerem que os respondentes são pouco preocupados com os fatores que envolvem relacionamento com os integrantes da equipe e com os recursos ofertados pelas empresas para desenvolvimento dos trabalhos. A informação e a comunicação são fatores significativos e valorizados pelos jovens em seu ambiente de trabalho.