Globalization has developed more and more within the business world as well as private life during the last decades. Globalization has influenced the way companies are conducting business and their approach towards the consumers which can have an influence on their way of purchasing. Consumers nowadays have more than ever the possibility to get involved and gather experiences from abroad, as well as companies are taking advantage of this globalization. Within this thesis the following question will be discussed: Do consumers see the value companies try to create for them with an identical offer the same way in different markets? This idea is based on Theodore Levitt’s theory of globalization which comprises standardization of an offer since consumer needs are homogenizing globally. Douglas & Wind instead state that segmentation with adaptations is necessary to fulfill all consumer needs. Within this elaboration the question whether standardization is accepted and liked by the consumers is discussed and analyzed by including an empirical research. This research is based on Zeithaml’s model of the Perceived Quality Components, which was the fundamental base behind formulating the survey questions. These were submitted in Germany, the Republic of Ireland and Sweden to be able to discuss and visualize how the consumers of these different markets perceive different aspects of a company’s offer. One particular company, which is seen as doing business globally, was chosen as a test object. Based on the test object Lidl - which consumers were questioned about in the survey - it was possible to conduct a comparison of consumers’ general expectations against components of Lidl’s offer such as price, weekly specials, product range, etc. where differences and similarities between the three countries of Lidl’s fulfillment of these expectations were achieved. They were analyzed to discover to which extent globalization is present. Resulting from the comparison it was concluded that nowadays segmentation is important but developing with time globalization seems to increase in significance. Recommendations for further research about topics which were omitted due to limited resources are presented.

In this thesis, a pass-transistor logic synthesizer is developed for logic mapping of any combinational circuits based on only two types of cells: 2-to-1 multiplexors and inverters. The input contains several sum-of-product Boolean function expressions. Our synthesizer will consider the hardware sharing among these Boolean functions in order to save area. The output of our synthesizer is pass-transistor-based circuits with optimized transistor width in terms of user-specified speed and power performance measurement. During optimization, the Elmore RC delay model is used to estimate the critical path delay and the power is characterized by the switching of all the internal nodes. The final outputs are HSPICE netlists and Verilog gate-level code that allow more detailed timing simulation and automatic placement-routing.

Due to the improvement of the living standard and economic situation of consumers in Taiwan, the consumption of cosmetics and skincare products has been popularized and the market scale is keep expanding. Among all kinds of cosmetics and skincare products in different channels, the self-selective ones play an important role in the industry. There are many chain stores sell self-selective cosmetics and skincare products, but only Watsons tend to draw consumers¡¦ attention with its eye-catching marketing strategy in many aspects. Thus, the study is about the marketing strategy of Watsons and the discussion is mainly about the relationship between marketing strategy, consumers¡¦ characteristic and shopping motive. In order to dig deeper from this case study of Watsons, the analysis is performed both in statistics and case interview. The result shows that age is appropriate for consumer segmentation. And among all marketing strategy variables, the purchasing convenience and the commodity factor is closely related to the purchasing behavior directly or not, while the importance of customer service can barely shift the consumers¡¦ shopping motive or the purchasing behavior.

This thesis proposes an approach to segmenting and identifying mixed-language speech. Automatic LID can be divided into four steps, feature extraction, segmentation, segment clustering, and re-labeling. In feature extraction, we compare the group delay feature (GDF) with MFCC feature. Unlike the traditional feature from Fourier trans-form magnitude, GDF uses the phase spectrum. In segmentation, we compare delta Bayesian information criterion (delta-BIC) with support vector machines (SVMs). A delta-BIC is applied to segment the input speech utterance into a sequence of lan-guage-dependent segments using acoustic features. The segments are clustered using the K-means algorithm. Finally, re-labeling is used to determine the language of the clusters. SVMs proceed to segment and identify automatically after model training. Considering the effect of the accent issue, we use the corpus English Across Taiwan (EAT) to perform our system. The experimental results show that the system can reach 78.13% in the frame hit rate under the baseline 57.77%.

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Informatique : Paris 8 : 2008. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr. p. 120-127. Index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-86). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1984.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1983.

This work presents a novel real-time algorithm for runway detection and tracking applied to the automatic takeoff and landing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The algorithm is based on a combination of segmentation based region competition and the minimization of a specific energy function to detect and identify the runway edges from streaming video data. The resulting video-based runway position estimates are updated using a Kalman Filter, which can integrate other sensory information such as position and attitude angle estimates to allow a more robust tracking of the runway under turbulence. We illustrate the performance of the proposed lane detection and tracking scheme on various experimental UAV flights conducted by the Saudi Aerospace Research Center. Results show an accurate tracking of the runway edges during the landing phase under various lighting conditions. Also, it suggests that such positional estimates would greatly improve the positional accuracy of the UAV during takeoff and landing phases. The robustness of the proposed algorithm is further validated using Hardware in the Loop simulations with diverse takeoff and landing videos generated using a commercial flight simulator.

Medical image analysis is a ubiquitous and essential part of modem health care. A crucial first step to this is segmentation, which is often complicated by many factors including subject diversity, pathology, noise corruption, and poor image resolution. Traditionally, manual tracing by experts was done. While considered accurate, this process is time consuming and tedious, especially when performed slice-by-slice on three-dimensional (3D) images over large datasets or on two-dimensional (2D) but topologically complicated images such as a retinography. On the other hand, fully-automated methods are typically faster, but work best with data-dependent, carefully tuned parameters and still require user validation and refinement. This thesis contributes to the field of medical image segmentation by proposing a highly-automated, interactive approach that effectively merges user knowledge and efficient computing. To this end, our work focuses on graph-based methods and offer globally optimal solutions. First, we present a novel method for 3D segmentation based on a 3D Livewire approach. This approach is an extension of the 2D Livewire framework, and this method is capable of handling objects with large protrusions, concavities, branching, and complex arbitrary topologies. Second, we propose a method for efficiently segmenting 2D vascular networks, called ‘Live-Vessel’. Live-Vessel simultaneously extracts vessel centrelines and boundary points, and globally optimizes over both spatial variables and vessel radius. Both of our proposed methods are validated on synthetic data, real medical data, and are shown to be highly reproducible, accurate, and efficient. Also, they were shown to be resilient to high amounts of noise and insensitive to internal parameterization.