Yes / Working collaboratively with internal and external partners (suppliers, customers and internal stakeholders) has been at the epicentre of product design. Knowledge sharing has been well recognised in this context. However, there is limited research that has addressed the role of social media/Web 2.0 in facilitating knowledge sharing for sense- and decision-making within product design. To address this gap, this study draws on the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm and two vignettes that relate to ‘collaborative co-design’ and ‘collaborative design-to-order’. We illustrate the role of social media/Web 2.0 in building knowledge sharing capabilities for sense- and decision-making for internal and external partners during product design. Limitations and further research into the use of social media/Web 2.0 are also discussed.

No / Organizations in the not-for-profit (NFP) sector are increasingly collaborating with other organizations to mutually raise overall joint value created. However, literature on inter-organizational collaborations in the NFP sector lacks a clear, empirically proven understanding about which factors drive such joint value creation and whether and how these factors and their effects differ for the two parties involved. Based on the relational view and an analysis of 121 partnership dyads, we identify that some factors governing the successful creation of joint value differ for the two partners while others are relevant to both parties. Those latter factors, in turn, differ in their effects on the respective outcome.

Yes / The art of unwinding voluminous data expects the expertise in analyzing meaningful decisions out of the acquired information. To encounter new age challenges, practitioners are trying hard to shatter the constraints and work edge-to-edge to achieve higher performance (Market, Financial and Operational performance). It is evident that organizations desire to exploit maximum of their injected resources, but often fail to reap their actual potential. Developing resource-based capabilities stands out to be the most concerned aspect for the firms in recent times, and the same is studied by the previous scholars. In the dearth of literature, it is challenging to find out evidence which marks up the effect of strategic resources in the development of dynamic organizational capability. This study is a two-fold attempt to examine the relationship between organizational capabilities, i.e. big data predictive analytics while achieving superior organizational performance; also, examining the effect of control variables on superior organizational of performance. We tested our research hypotheses using cross-sectional data of 209 responses collected using pre-tested single-informant questionnaire. The results underpin criticality human factor while developing analytical capabilities dynamic in nature in the process of achieving superior performance.

Yes / This study examines the antecedents and market performance outcomes of disruptive business models on one hand and the boundary conditions of the disruptive business model–market performance relationship on the other hand.

We propose Instant High Dynamic Range Neural Radiance Fields (Instant HDR-NeRF), a method of learning high dynamic range (HDR) view synthesis from a set of low dynamic range (LDR) views with unknown and varying exposure and white balance in as little as minutes. Our method can render novel HDR views without ground-truth supervision, and novel LDR views in different exposure settings, including those that match the ground-truth LDR views. The key to our method is to model the physical process of the camera with two implicit MLPs: a radiance field and a monotonically increasing tone-mapper. Built upon Instant Neural Graphics Primitives (Instant-NGP), the radiance field encodes the scene geometry and radiance (from 0 to ∞), and outputs the densities and the radiance at locations along the camera ray. The monotonically increasing tone-mapper models the camera response function (CRF) where the radiance hits on the camera sensor and becomes a pixel value (from 0 to 255). The radiance at each location is combined with the learnable exposure parameters, optimized separately for each color band and for each image. A quantitative evaluation on benchmark datasets shows that our method outperforms prior HDR novel view synthesis methods in LDR rendering quality and training speed. To best of our knowledge, our method is also the first HDR radiance field that successfully recovers the ground-truth CRF with a low average error rate of 3.70%, while co-learning geometry, radiance, and exposures all at the same time through implicit functions. In practical applications, our method can produce high-fidelity 3D reconstruction of real-world scenes from images of varying exposure settings, which is particularly useful for casual capturing, where fixed settings aren’t guaranteed. The tone-mapper MLP can be easily controlled to simulate auto-exposure effects, making it useful in filming and video games. Furthermore, the HDR radiance maps produced by our method can be edited and tone-mapped according to user preferences.

The purpose of this study is to give a deeper understanding of Anna Sewell’s argumentation for a changed view on animals in her book Black Beauty and Sewell’s contribution to the animal welfare debate. The questions addressed in the study is: What arguments does Sewell present for a changed view on animals? What contemporary assumptions does Sewell challenge? Against what contemporary assumptions does her argument become effective? To answer these questions the material that are examined is Sewell’s book Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse (1877), first published in England. The theoretical perspective is that the book’s influence on the debate only is effective through two factors which is Sewell’s argumentation and the contemporary conditions that affected her way of arguing. These two factors become effective through interaction. The method used is a rhetorical analysis because it takes hold on text and context. Prior research has found through their perspective that the horses in Sewell’s book represent humans. But this study argues that the horses in Sewell’s book represent horses and that the book argues for a change in the way human’s attitude towards animals. The analysis in this study shows that Sewell’s argumentation can be divided into four categories of the contemporary ethics and context’s: Christianity, socialism, critique off fashion and machine. The conclusion drawn from the study is that Sewells arguments for a changed view on animals is based on these four categories where she must argue with and against them.

Simulation and statistical applications often mimic the behavior of a random phenomenon by way of generating random observations that form a known or empirical probability distribution with estimated parameter values. Generation of such random observations is called Random Variate Generation (RVG). The number of simulation and statistical applications provided on the World Wide Web (Web) is on the rise. To facilitate the development of simulation and statistical applications on the Web by way of reuse, there is a need for providing RVG as a Web service. This research involves the development of such a Web service for RVG, which can be invoked programmatically over the Web by using SOAP over the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) running on top of the Internet. To provide the RVG Web service, an RVG Web application is developed based on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) architecture. The RVG Web application is engineered by using the IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer and runs on the IBM WebSphere Application Server. A client simulation and statistical application may call the RVG Web service and request the generation of random variates from 27 probability distributions. In addition, the RVG Web service also provides general statistics, scatter plot, and histogram of the requested random variates. The plots and histograms are created in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). The RVG Web service: (a) accepts requests in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) format, which is specified according to a request schema, and (b) sends the results to the client application also in the XML format specified according to a reply schema. The interface specification and access information needed to invoke the RVG Web service are provided in the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) document. Any Web-based simulation or statistical application that needs generation of random variates, their scatter plots and histograms, can invoke the RVG Web service programmatically at http://sunfish.cs.vt.edu/RVGWebService . / Master of Science

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(経済学) / 甲第25081号 / 経博第688号 / 京都大学大学院経済学研究科経済学専攻 / (主査)教授 山田 仁一郎, 教授 若林 直樹, 教授 牧野 成史 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Economics / Kyoto University / DFAM

Ungdomar läser allt mindre i Sverige och senaste PISA- undersökningen visar sjunkande resultat vad gäller bland annat läsförmåga hos svenska ungdomar. En stor del av forskningen fokuserar på läsutveckling med yngre elever, därför är studiens syfte att undersöka speciallärares/specialpedagogers beskrivningar av arbetet för att främja elevers läsutveckling på mellan- och högstadiet. Frågeställningarna är: Hur beskriver speciallärare/specialpedagoger att de arbetar förebyggande med elevers läsutveckling? Hur beskriver speciallärare/specialpedagoger att de arbetar åtgärdande med elevers läsutveckling? Hur beskriver speciallärare/ specialpedagoger det systematiska arbetet kring elevers läsutveckling? Studiens teoretiska utgångspunkter är sociokulturellt perspektiv, Simple View of Reading och Response to Intervention. Det är en kvalitativ studie med semistrukturerade intervjuer där tio speciallärare beskriver sitt arbete för att främja läsutveckling. Materialet delades in i sex olika teman; att hitta elevens nivå, skolans samarbete och organisation kring läsutveckling, assisterande teknik, elevers läsmotivation, metoder och material samt, speciallärarstöd i klass, liten grupp eller med enskilda elever. Resultatet visade att speciallärarnas arbete varierar stort beroende på lokala förutsättningar och att speciallärarna/specialpedagogerna arbetar med läsningens olika delar på olika sätt, men att metoder och material som används varierar oerhört mycket. Speciallärarna/specialpedagogerna i studien är måna om att hitta elevens närmaste utvecklingszon för att sätta in rätt stöd vid rätt tid, vilket stämmer väl med Response to Intervention. Resultatet diskuteras.

Syftet med studien är att undersöka F-3 lärares uppfattningar om Skolverkets Nationella bedömningsstöd i Läsa och LegiLexis kartläggningsmaterial för läsutveckling. Studiens teoretiska utgångspunkter är läsmodellen The Simple View of Reading och lässtrategierna ljudningsstrategin och helordsläsning samt formativ och summativ bedömning. Vi har använt oss av intervjuer som datainsamlingsmetod och för att bearbeta samt analysera materialet använde vi oss av en tematisk analys. Resultatet presenteras utifrån respektive bedömning med samma teman och subteman som kopplas till studiens forskningsfrågor. Resultatet visar hur lärarna genomför bedömningarna, hur bedömningarna används i den fortsatta undervisningen samt vilka möjligheter och hinder som finns med respektive bedömning. En slutsats vi kan dra är att bedömningarna kräver varierade förutsättningar gällande tid, personal och verktyg. Det framkom dock att LegiLexis bedömning är mer tidseffektivt och kräver mindre personal vid själva genomförandet.