by Lam Pak Chio. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-105). / Abstract also in Chinese. / Abstract --- p.ii / Acknowledgements --- p.v / Contents / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Background --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Problem Definition and Approach --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Outline --- p.5 / Chapter 2 --- Algorithm Outline --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.7 / Chapter 2.2 --- Assumptions --- p.7 / Chapter 2.3 --- Object Model --- p.8 / Chapter 2.4 --- Hand Model --- p.9 / Chapter 2.5 --- Measurement Data --- p.11 / Chapter 2.6 --- Algorithm Outline --- p.12 / Chapter 3 --- Calculation of Contact States --- p.14 / Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.14 / Chapter 3.2 --- Problem Analysis --- p.15 / Chapter 3.3 --- Details of Algorithm --- p.17 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Calculation of Contact Points --- p.18 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Calculation of Object Position and Orientation --- p.26 / Chapter 3.3.2.1 --- The Object Orientation --- p.26 / Chapter 3.3.2.2 --- The Object Position --- p.28 / Chapter 3.3.3 --- Contact Points on Other Fingers --- p.32 / Chapter 4 --- Calculation of Contact Motion --- p.34 / Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.34 / Chapter 4.2 --- Search-tree --- p.34 / Chapter 4.3 --- Cost Function --- p.36 / Chapter 4.4 --- Details of Algorithm --- p.37 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Calculation of the Next Instant Contact States --- p.39 / Chapter 4.4.1.1 --- Contact Region Estimation --- p.41 / Chapter 4.4.1.2 --- Contact Point Calculation --- p.45 / Chapter 4.4.1.3 --- Object Position and Orientation Calculation --- p.48 / Chapter 4.4.1.4 --- Contact Motion Calculation --- p.50 / Chapter 5 --- Implementation --- p.56 / Chapter 5.1 --- Introduction --- p.56 / Chapter 5.2 --- Architecture of Friendly Teaching System --- p.56 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- CyberGlove --- p.57 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- CyberGlove Interface Unit --- p.57 / Chapter 5.2.3 --- Host Computer --- p.58 / Chapter 5.2.4 --- Software --- p.58 / Chapter 5.3 --- Algorithm Implementation --- p.59 / Chapter 5.4 --- Examples for Calculation of Contact Configuration --- p.59 / Chapter 5.5 --- Simulation --- p.68 / Chapter 5.6 --- Experiments --- p.82 / Chapter 5.6.1 --- Translation of an Object --- p.82 / Chapter 5.6.2 --- Rotation of an Object --- p.90 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusions --- p.98 / References --- p.101 / Appendix --- p.106

Ding Dan. / "October 2001." / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-130). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

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<p><strong>Problem</strong> : How does Japanese company coordinate with its subsidiaries in Thai and Chinese markets?</p><p><strong>Purpose</strong> :  To describe organization structure of Japanese company as well as compare how headquarters coordinates with its subsidiaries in Thai and Chinese markets. Also, this thesis will give benefits for the academics and managers of other multinational corporations.</p><p><strong>Method</strong> :  Qualitative approach and comparative design are implemented in this thesis meanwhile secondary data from internet, documentary research  and primary data from semi-structured interview through telephone & email are used for collecting information. More importantly, Tokai Carbon is chosen as a case study to understand organization structure and its coordination between Japanese company and Thai & Chinese subsidiaries.</p><p><strong>Conclusion</strong> : The organization structure and coordination should  be concerned in multinational corporations. Tokai Carbon Co., Ltd. as a multinational Japanese company who runs business and establishes various subsidiaries in worldwide mostly centralizes power to headquarters. Also, Tokai Carbon Co., Ltd. applied means of formal and informal coordination in order to cooperate between Tokai Carbon Co., Ltd. (headquarters) and Thai Tokai Carbon Product Co., Ltd (Thai subsidiaries) & Tokai Carbon Tianjin Co., Ltd. (Chinese subsidiaries). With respect to formal and informal mechanisms, these two mechanisms are similarly implemented in collaboration between headquarters and Thai & Chinese subsidiaries. Nonetheless, there are a few differences on informal tools in form of lateral relations and socialization.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-125). Also available in electronic version.

Problem : How does Japanese company coordinate with its subsidiaries in Thai and Chinese markets? Purpose :  To describe organization structure of Japanese company as well as compare how headquarters coordinates with its subsidiaries in Thai and Chinese markets. Also, this thesis will give benefits for the academics and managers of other multinational corporations. Method :  Qualitative approach and comparative design are implemented in this thesis meanwhile secondary data from internet, documentary research  and primary data from semi-structured interview through telephone &amp; email are used for collecting information. More importantly, Tokai Carbon is chosen as a case study to understand organization structure and its coordination between Japanese company and Thai &amp; Chinese subsidiaries. Conclusion : The organization structure and coordination should  be concerned in multinational corporations. Tokai Carbon Co., Ltd. as a multinational Japanese company who runs business and establishes various subsidiaries in worldwide mostly centralizes power to headquarters. Also, Tokai Carbon Co., Ltd. applied means of formal and informal coordination in order to cooperate between Tokai Carbon Co., Ltd. (headquarters) and Thai Tokai Carbon Product Co., Ltd (Thai subsidiaries) &amp; Tokai Carbon Tianjin Co., Ltd. (Chinese subsidiaries). With respect to formal and informal mechanisms, these two mechanisms are similarly implemented in collaboration between headquarters and Thai &amp; Chinese subsidiaries. Nonetheless, there are a few differences on informal tools in form of lateral relations and socialization.

With the emergence of the Internet as a global structure for communication and interaction, many “business to consumer” and “business to business” applications have migrated online, thus increasing the need for software agents that can act on behalf of people, institutions or companies with private and often conflicting interests. The design of such agents, and the protocols (i.e., mechanisms) through which they interact, has therefore naturally become an important research theme. Classical mechanism design techniques from the economics literature do not account for the costs entailed with the full revelation of preferences that they require. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how to design mechanisms that only require the revelation of partial preference information and are applicable in any mechanism design context. We call this partial revelation mechanism design. Reducing revelation costs is thus our main concern. With only partial revelation, the designer has some remaining uncertainty over the agents’ types, even after the mechanism has been executed. Thus, in general, the outcome chosen will not be optimal with respect to the designer’s objective function. This alone raises interesting questions about which (part of the) information should be elicited in order to minimize the degree of sub-optimality incurred by the mechanism. But this sub-optimality of the mechanism’s outcome choice function has additional important consequences: most of the results in classical mechanism design which guarantee that agents will reveal their type truthfully to the mechanism rely on the fact that the optimal outcome is chosen. We must therefore also investigate if, and how, appropriate incentives can be maintained in partial revelation mechanisms. We start by presenting our own model for partial revelation mechanism design. Our second contribution is a negative one regarding the quasi-impossibility of implementing partial revelation mechanisms with exact incentive properties. The rest of the thesis shows, in different settings, how this negative result can be bypassed in various settings, depending on the designer's objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue...) and the interaction type (sequential or one shot). Finally, we study how the approximation of the incentive properties can be further improved when necessary, and in the process, introduce and proves the existence of a new equilibrium concept.

With the emergence of the Internet as a global structure for communication and interaction, many “business to consumer” and “business to business” applications have migrated online, thus increasing the need for software agents that can act on behalf of people, institutions or companies with private and often conflicting interests. The design of such agents, and the protocols (i.e., mechanisms) through which they interact, has therefore naturally become an important research theme. Classical mechanism design techniques from the economics literature do not account for the costs entailed with the full revelation of preferences that they require. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how to design mechanisms that only require the revelation of partial preference information and are applicable in any mechanism design context. We call this partial revelation mechanism design. Reducing revelation costs is thus our main concern. With only partial revelation, the designer has some remaining uncertainty over the agents’ types, even after the mechanism has been executed. Thus, in general, the outcome chosen will not be optimal with respect to the designer’s objective function. This alone raises interesting questions about which (part of the) information should be elicited in order to minimize the degree of sub-optimality incurred by the mechanism. But this sub-optimality of the mechanism’s outcome choice function has additional important consequences: most of the results in classical mechanism design which guarantee that agents will reveal their type truthfully to the mechanism rely on the fact that the optimal outcome is chosen. We must therefore also investigate if, and how, appropriate incentives can be maintained in partial revelation mechanisms. We start by presenting our own model for partial revelation mechanism design. Our second contribution is a negative one regarding the quasi-impossibility of implementing partial revelation mechanisms with exact incentive properties. The rest of the thesis shows, in different settings, how this negative result can be bypassed in various settings, depending on the designer's objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue...) and the interaction type (sequential or one shot). Finally, we study how the approximation of the incentive properties can be further improved when necessary, and in the process, introduce and proves the existence of a new equilibrium concept.

Dynamic mechanism design is an important area of multiagent systems, and commonly used in resource allocation where the resources are time related or the agents exist dynamically. We focus on a multiagent model within which the agents stay, and the resources arrive and depart. The resources are interpreted as work or jobs and are called tasks. The allocation outcome space has a special restriction that every agent can only work on one resource at a time, because every agent has a finite computational capability in reality. We propose a dynamic mechanism and analyze its incentive properties; we show that the mechanism is incentive compatible. Empirically, our dynamic mechanism performs well and is able to achieve high economic efficiency, even outperforming standard approaches if the agents are concerned about future tasks. We also introduce a static mechanism under the setting of a restricted outcome space; it is proved that the static mechanism is incentive compatible, and its computational complexity is much less than that of the standard VCG mechanism.

<p>Diseases caused by smooth muscle dysfunction such as hypertension and asthma are major public health concerns, a better understanding of the signaling pathways that regulate smooth muscle contraction could identify new drug targets. The opposing effects of two enzymes; calcium/calmodulin regulated myosin light chain kinase (MLCK) and smooth muscle myosin phosphatase (SMPP-1M) determine the amount of force generated by smooth muscle. The calcium-independent signaling mediated by myosin phosphatase is regulated by several kinases which include zipper interacting protein kinase (ZIPK). Our laboratory has shown that ZIPK is able to phosphorylate and inhibit SMPP-1M which results in increased smooth muscle contraction. Additional studies demonstrated that ZIPK is also regulated by phosphorylation. The goal of this study is to identify kinases in the context of smooth muscle that regulate ZIPK and to define the events required for ZIPK activation. </p><p>A proteomic approach which employed ATP-affinity chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry isolated discreet kinase activities towards ZIPK, these activities were attributed to integrin-linked kinase (ILK) and Rho kinase 1 (ROCK1). ILK phosphorylates ZIPK at Thr180 while ROCK1 phosphorylates ZIPK at Thr265 and Thr299. </p><p>Additionally the ATP-affinity media used for kinase enrichment in the proteomic screen was used as a tool to measure ZIPK activation. Pre-incubating ZIPK with ROCK before the assay resulted in increased binding which suggests phosphorylation of ZIPK by ROCK is activating. Increasing the substrate concentration in the assay resulted in increased ZIPK binding, this result was only observed when the assay was performed with the full-length protein. Phosphorylation of residues in the kinase domain along with substrate binding relieves inhibition and results in kinase activation. </p><p>Finally fluorescence microscopy along with targeted mutations of ZIPK was used to determine the mechanism of cellular transport. This was done to address the difference in cellular localization between human and murine cells. The localization of human ZIPK is dictated by nuclear localization sequence 2 (NLS2) and the phosphorylation state of Thr299; the mechanism is not shared by the murine form of ZIPK. </p><p>Completion of this work has provided additional information about the signaling interactions that take place in smooth muscle; the results suggest that ZIPK is a convergence point for multiple signaling pathways that lead to SMPP-1 inhibition and subsequently smooth muscle contraction. This study also contributes significantly to our knowledge of the molecular dynamics that lead to active full length ZIPK. Future research that employs animal modeling as a tool to investigate ZIPK will be informed by the experiments that address the cellular localization of ZIPK.</p> / Dissertation