Background: This study will be beneficial for Swedish companies that wish to enter the French market and will also benefit companies in France that have something to do with Sweden or that are playing on the Swedish origin. The outcome of this study will give a perspective on Swedishness in Swedish companies, brands and products with French consumers.References to places and countries such as French wine, Hollywood movies, and Russian roulette are examples of how the origin of countries can create associations influencing consumers' product evaluation and buying behaviour. In the process of understanding French consumers' product country image in relation to Sweden, it is important to map their buying behaviour and associations to Swedish companies, brands and products. The consumer perception of the country of origin can together with other attributes add brand equity to a company, brand or a product. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to understand how Swedishness in Swedish brands and products influences the perception of quality and to assist companies in their decision making on how to market in France. Conclusion: French consumers are influenced by global and national perceptions of countries of origin. Swedishness and Scandinavia have a particularly good reputation with French consumers. This influence is high and influences the consumers' quality-perception process through various influencers. Presentation of figures that can be used as generic figures when considering the influencers of your country's image when marketing cross-nationally.

<p><strong>Background: </strong>This study will be beneficial for Swedish companies that wish to enter the French market and will also benefit companies in France that have something to do with Sweden or that are playing on the Swedish origin. The outcome of this study will give a perspective on Swedishness in Swedish companies, brands and products with French consumers.References to places and countries such as French wine, Hollywood movies, and Russian roulette are examples of how the origin of countries can create associations influencing consumers' product evaluation and buying behaviour. In the process of understanding French consumers' product country image in relation to Sweden, it is important to map their buying behaviour and associations to Swedish companies, brands and products. The consumer perception of the country of origin can together with other attributes add brand equity to a company, brand or a product.</p><p><strong>Purpose</strong>: The purpose of this study is to understand how Swedishness in Swedish brands and products influences the perception of quality and to assist companies in their decision making on how to market in France.</p><p><strong>Conclusion</strong>: French consumers are influenced by global and national perceptions of countries of origin. Swedishness and Scandinavia have a particularly good reputation with French consumers. This influence is high and influences the consumers' quality-perception process through various influencers. Presentation of figures that can be used as generic figures when considering the influencers of your country's image when marketing cross-nationally.</p>

Various carbon content hydrogenated amorphous silicon carbide (a-Si1&iexcl / xCx:H) and hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) thin films have been deposited on various substrates by using plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) technique. Transmission spectra of these films have been determined within UV-Visible region and the obtained data were analysed to find related physical constants such as / refractive indices, thicknesses, etc. Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectrometry technique has been used to determine transmission &amp / reflection type spectra of these films. Obtained data were analysed to determine bond structures of the films. E&reg / ects of relative concentration of ethylene (C2H4) gas on thin film bond structure and on optical constants have been questioned.

Submitted by FERNANDO ENRIQUE SERNA ALGARÍN null (ferse1129@gmail.com) on 2018-01-10T21:52:53Z No. of bitstreams: 1 tese.pdf: 948147 bytes, checksum: 94d535ccc424f5f4201747cae4382d6a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Hellen Sayuri Sato null (hellen@ift.unesp.br) on 2018-01-12T15:54:08Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 algarin_fcs_dr_ift.pdf: 948147 bytes, checksum: 94d535ccc424f5f4201747cae4382d6a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-01-12T15:54:08Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 algarin_fcs_dr_ift.pdf: 948147 bytes, checksum: 94d535ccc424f5f4201747cae4382d6a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-10-02 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) / Nesta tese empregamos um modelo de interação de contato que preserva simetrias para estudar estrututura hadrônica e matéria de quarks. A interação de contato é uma representação de kernels não perturbativos usados em equações de Dyson-Schwinger e Bethe-Salpeter da Cromodinâmica Quântica (QCD). A ideia básica do modelo está baseada num esquema de subtração que evita passos tradicionais no cálculo de de integrais divergentes que invariavelmente levam a violações de simetrias. Em temperatura zero, as equações de Dyson-Schwinger equation para os propagadores dos quarks u; d; s and c são resolvidas e amplitudes de estado ligado de Bethe-Salpeter, que respeitam a invariância sob translações espaço-temporais e as identidades de Ward-Takahashi associadas com simetrias globais da QCD, são obtidas para calcular as massas e as constantes de decaimento eletrofracas dos mésons pseudoscalares π; K, D e Ds e dos mésons vetorias ρ, K*, D* e Ds*. As predições do modelo estão em bom acordo com dados experimentais e da QCD na rede. Em adição, estendemos o modelo para temperaturas diferentes de zero; neste caso, o problema de violação de simetrias está restrito apenas às partes puramente divergentes porque os termos que dependem das distribuições térmicas são finitas e não requerem regularização. Finalmente, investigamos a dependência com a temperatura das contribuições das flutuações quânticas quark-π e quark-σ aos coeficientes de transporte de viscosidade de cisalhamento η e volumétrica ζ e as suas razões com a densidade de entropia s. As larguras térmicas originárias dessas fluctuações são calculadas com o formalismo de teoria de campos a temperatura finita de tempo real. Para esse cálculo, empregamos os resultados obtidos com as equações de Dyson-Schwinger e Bethe-Salpeter para a dependência com a temperatura das massas dos mésons e as contantes de acoplamento quark-méson. Os resultados para as razões η/s and ζ/s estão em bom acordo com resultados com a literatura obtidos com modelos e técnicas diferentes. Em particular, nossos resultados para η/s possuem um mínimo muito próximo ao limite inferior da conjectura AdS/CFT, η/s = 1/4π. / In thesis, a symmetry-preserving contact interaction model is used to study hadron structure and quark matter. The contact interaction is a representation of nonperturbative kernels used in Dyson-Schwinger and Bethe-Salpeter equations of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). The basic idea of the model is based on a subtraction scheme that avoids standard steps in the evaluation of divergent integrals that invariably lead to symmetry violation. At zero temperature, the Dyson-Schwinger equation is solved for the u; d; s and c quark propagators and the boundstate Bethe-Salpeter amplitudes respecting spacetime-translation invariance and the Ward-Green-Takahashi identities associated with global symmetries of QCD are obtained to calculate masses and electroweak decay constants of the pseudoscalar π; K, D and Ds and vector ρ, K*, D*, and Ds* mesons. The predictions of the model are in good agreement with available experimental and lattice QCD data. In addition, we extend the model to nonzero temperature; here, the problem of symmetry violation is associated only with the purely divergent parts because the effects due to the termal distributions are finite and do not need regularization. We compute the temperature dependence of the masses and decay constants of the pseudoscalar mesons considered here. Finally, we have investigated the temperature dependence of the contributions of quark-π and quark-σ quantum fluctuations to the transport coefficients of shear η and bulk ζ viscosities and their ratios to the entropy density s. The quark thermal widths originating those fluctuations are calculated with the formalism of real-time thermal field theory. For these calculations, we have used the results obtained via Dyson-Schwinger and Bethe-Salpeter equations for the temperature dependence of constituent quark and meson masses and quark-meson couplings. The results for the ratios η/s and ζ/s are in fair agreement with results of the literature obtained from different models and techniques. In particular, our result for η/s has a minimum very close to the conjectured AdS/CFT lower bound, η/s = 1/4π. / CNPq:140041/2014-1

A Teoria de Negócios Internacionais sugere que ao aumentar o seu grau de internacionalização, as Empresas Multinacionais dos Países Emergentes dependerão cada vez menos dos efeitos dos seus países de origem, escapando assim das mazelas e deficiências desses países e igualando-se às Empresas Multinacionais dos Países Desenvolvidos. Essa argumentação de escape do país de origem, ou argumentação de escape, enfrenta, no entanto, dois desafios. O primeiro refere-se à geração das vantagens competitivas das multinacionais. As firmas originárias dos países desenvolvidos utilizam-se principalmente de capacidades tecnológicas e marketing para construir suas vantagens com base em seus produtos e marcas diferenciados, enquanto as multinacionais dos países emergentes o fazem a partir do aproveitamento de condições específicas do seu país de origem, utilizando-se de capacidades de inovação em processos e operações e em funções administrativas. O segundo desafio refere-se a evidências empíricas de que efeitos de país de origem se fazem sentir mesmo nas empresas multinacionais maduras de países desenvolvidos. A presente pesquisa busca ampliar o conhecimento sobre as capacidades de inovação das empresas multinacionais de países emergentes através do estudo dos limites do argumento do escape. Uma análise longitudinal das capacidades de inovação das empresas multinacionais brasileiras é utilizada para este fim. Estuda-se um período de cinco anos em que o ambiente de negócios do Brasil mudou de estável e favorável a turbulento e desafiador. A análise utiliza dois \"surveys\" aplicados em 2010 e 2015, além de informação complementar de fontes primárias e secundárias. Os resultados sugerem que as capacidades de inovação dessas empresas multinacionais ainda podem sofrer influência do ambiente institucional político e econômico do seu país de origem, mesmo com incremento do seu grau de internacionalização. Observam-se ainda diferentes consequências conforme a estratégia de internacionalização utilizada pelas firmas. As implicações dos achados são discutidas. / The international Business theory suggests that as they increase their degree of internationalization, Multinationals from Emerging Markets reduce their dependency on their Country of Origin Effects, escaping from these countries\' instabilities and deficiencies, therefore leveling with Multinationals from developed countries. The escape from the country of origin, or escape argument, faces two challenges. The first is that firms from developed countries base their advantages on technology and marketing capabilities to build strong products and brands, whereas firms from emerging countries do so mainly by exploiting their country of origin effects using innovative capabilities related to process and operations and to administrative functions. The second challenge relates to empirical evidence of the persistence of country of origin effects on mature multinational firms from developed countries. This research attempts to improve the knowledge on the innovation capability of Emerging Markets Multinational Enterprises through studying the limits of the escape argument. A longitudinal analysis of the innovative capabilities of Brazilian Multinational firms is used for that purpose. The five-year period studied involves a shift in Brazil\'s conditions from a stable and positive institutional environment to one of turbulence and instability. The research uses data from two surveys executed in 2010 and 2015, as well as other primary and secondary sources. The results suggest that the innovative capabilities from Emerging Market Multinationals can still suffer influences from changes in their home country political and economic institutional environment, even with an increase in their degree of internationalization. The outcomes vary according to the internationalization strategy used by the firms. Implications of these findings are discussed.

In many scenarios, events such as singularities and transients that carry important information about a signal undergo spreading during acquisition or transmission and it is important to localize the events. For example, edges in an image, point sources in a microscopy or astronomical image are blurred by the point-spread function (PSF) of the acquisition system, while in a speech signal, the epochs corresponding to glottal closure instants are shaped by the vocal tract response. Such events can be extracted with the help of techniques that promote sparsity, which enables separation of the smooth components from the transient ones. In this thesis, we consider development of such sparsity promoting techniques. The contributions of the thesis are three-fold: (i) an auditory-motivated continuous wavelet design and representation, which helps identify singularities; (ii) a sparsity-driven deconvolution technique; and (iii) a sparsity-driven deconvolution technique for reconstruction of nite-rate-of-innovation (FRI) signals. We use the speech signal for illustrating the performance of the techniques in the first two parts and super-resolution microscopy (2-D) for the third part. In the rst part, we develop a continuous wavelet transform (CWT) starting from an auditory motivation. Wavelet analysis provides good time and frequency localization, which has made it a popular tool for time-frequency analysis of signals. The CWT is a multiresolution analysis tool that involves decomposition of a signal using a constant-Q wavelet filterbank, akin to the time-frequency analysis performed by basilar membrane in the peripheral human auditory system. This connection motivated us to develop wavelets that possess auditory localization capabilities. Gammatone functions are extensively used in the modeling of the basilar membrane, but the non-zero average of the functions poses a hurdle. We construct bona de wavelets from the Gammatone function called Gammatone wavelets and analyze their properties such as admissibility, time-bandwidth product, vanishing moments, etc.. Of particular interest is the vanishing moments property, which enables the wavelet to suppress smooth regions in a signal leading to sparsi cation. We show how this property of the Gammatone wavelets coupled with multiresolution analysis could be employed for singularity and transient detection. Using these wavelets, we also construct equivalent lterbank models and obtain cepstral feature vectors out of such a representation. We show that the Gammatone wavelet cepstral coefficients (GWCC) are effective for robust speech recognition compared with mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC). In the second part, we consider the problem of sparse blind deconvolution (SBD) starting from a signal obtained as the convolution of an unknown PSF and a sparse excitation. The BD problem is ill-posed and the goal is to employ sparsity to come up with an accurate solution. We formulate the SBD problem within a Bayesian framework. The estimation of lter and excitation involves optimization of a cost function that consists of an `2 data- fidelity term and an `p-norm (p 2 [0; 1]) regularizer, as the sparsity promoting prior. Since the `p-norm is not differentiable at the origin, we consider a smoothed version of the `p-norm as a proxy in the optimization. Apart from the regularizer being non-convex, the data term is also non-convex in the filter and excitation as they are both unknown. We optimize the non-convex cost using an alternating minimization strategy, and develop an alternating `p `2 projections algorithm (ALPA). We demonstrate convergence of the iterative algorithm and analyze in detail the role of the pseudo-inverse solution as an initialization for the ALPA and provide probabilistic bounds on its accuracy considering the presence of noise and the condition number of the linear system of equations. We also consider the case of bounded noise and derive tight tail bounds using the Hoe ding inequality. As an application, we consider the problem of blind deconvolution of speech signals. In the linear model for speech production, voiced speech is assumed to be the result of a quasi-periodic impulse train exciting a vocal-tract lter. The locations of the impulses or epochs indicate the glottal closure instants and the spacing between them the pitch. Hence, the excitation in the case of voiced speech is sparse and its deconvolution from the vocal-tract filter is posed as a SBD problem. We employ ALPA for SBD and show that excitation obtained is sparser than the excitations obtained using sparse linear prediction, smoothed `1=`2 sparse blind deconvolution algorithm, and majorization-minimization-based sparse deconvolution techniques. We also consider the problem of epoch estimation and show that epochs estimated by ALPA in both clean and noisy conditions are closer to the instants indicated by the electroglottograph when with to the estimates provided by the zero-frequency ltering technique, which is the state-of-the-art epoch estimation technique. In the third part, we consider the problem of deconvolution of a specific class of continuous-time signals called nite-rate-of-innovation (FRI) signals, which are not bandlimited, but specified by a nite number of parameters over an observation interval. The signal is assumed to be a linear combination of delayed versions of a prototypical pulse. The reconstruction problem is posed as a 2-D SBD problem. The kernel is assumed to have a known form but with unknown parameters. Given the sampled version of the FRI signal, the delays quantized to the nearest point on the sampling grid are rst estimated using proximal-operator-based alternating `p `2 algorithm (ALPAprox), and then super-resolved to obtain o -grid (O. G.) estimates using gradient-descent optimization. The overall technique is termed OG-ALPAprox. We show application of OG-ALPAprox to a particular modality of super-resolution microscopy (SRM), called stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM). The resolution of the traditional optical microscope is limited by di raction and is termed as Abbe's limit. The goal of SRM is to engineer the optical imaging system to resolve structures in specimens, such as proteins, whose dimensions are smaller than the di raction limit. The specimen to be imaged is tagged or labeled with light-emitting or uorescent chemical compounds called uorophores. These compounds speci cally bind to proteins and exhibit uorescence upon excitation. The uorophores are assumed to be point sources and the light emitted by them undergo spreading due to di raction. STORM employs a sequential approach, wherein each step only a few uorophores are randomly excited and the image is captured by a sensor array. The obtained image is di raction-limited, however, the separation between the uorophores allows for localizing the point sources with high precision. The localization is performed using Gaussian peak- tting. This process of random excitation coupled with localization is performed sequentially and subsequently consolidated to obtain a high-resolution image. We pose the localization as a SBD problem and employ OG-ALPAprox to estimate the locations. We also report comparisons with the de facto standard Gaussian peak- tting algorithm and show that the statistical performance is superior. Experimental results on real data show that the reconstruction quality is on par with the Gaussian peak- tting.

科学研究費補助金 研究種目:基盤研究(B)(1) 課題番号:14310120 研究代表者:大塚 豊 研究期間:2002-2003年度

Effective implementation (in terms of time, cost, utilization of human resources, etc.) of information systems operation is a strategic issue in today's time when business processes are integrally aligned with the informatics. Currently, costs associated with software support and maintenance represent more than 90% of total costs. Software maintenance is a set of activities needed for cost-effective support of IT solution. IS / IT Center of excellence (COE) do not cover the area of software support and maintenance, there is no formalized methodology or procedural framework for COE for support and maintenance -- in reality, it means missing processes and procedures for creating it, management and evaluation of it. Moreover, there are missing recommendation about organization structure, services to be provided and overall continuous improvement. Therefore author proposes his own solution by definition and implementation of center of excellence for support and maintenance and its sub-centers of excellence for support and maintenance of particular applications. Current ontology of support and maintenance does not capture the necessary components and links -- namely missing management, planning and effort estimation views. Therefore author proposes his redefinition and enrichment of ontology of organizational structure about elements of competence and sub-competence center, typology of tasks (management, maintenance), and their management - estimating, planning and realization. In his work, Magne Jorgensen formulated conclusions that 83 to 84% of all estimation is done by pure expert estimates and estimating models are not used basically due to their complexity. Based on extending PERT formula about quality of estimator and historical experience, author introduced his simplified, easy to use approach to effort estimation in software maintenance. Both introduced formulas were verified in sub-competence center for supporting mortgage IS with significantly better result than only pure PERT estimate (98.8% and 91.8% against pure PERT 90.1%). In conclusion, author discusses the benefits of the implementation of center of excellence for support and maintenance and sub-centers of excellence for support and maintenance of particular applications, and overall fulfilling of thesis scope.