State of the Art in Skinning Techniques for Articulated Deformable Characters

Skinning is an indispensable component of the content creation pipeline for character animation in the context of feature films, video games, and in the special effects industry. Skinning techniques define the deformation of the character skin for every animation frame according to the current state of skeletal joints. In this state of the art report, we focus on the existing research in the areas of skeleton-based deformation, volume preserving techniques and physically based skinning methods. We also summarize the recent research in deformable and soft bodies simulations for articulated characters, and discuss various geometric and examples-based approaches

Position based skinning of skeleton-driven deformable characters

© ACM, 2017. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in SCCG '14: Proceedings of the 30th Spring Conference on Computer Graphics, 9781450330701, May 2014 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2643188.2643194 ; Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected] Universit

The Impact of the Organizational Justice on the Development of the Organizational Citizenship Behavior in Jordanian Press Organizations

This study aimed to explore the impact of the organizational justice on the development of organizational citizenship behavior in the Jordanian press organizations. The population for the present study consists of all workers in Jordanian press organizations. This population includes 1835 employees. They are working across four press organizations, which are Jordan Press Foundation, the company of Jordan Press and Publishing, the Arab Printers Company, and the company of Jordan United Press and Publishing. 204 questionnaires were distributed to collect the necessary data and to test hypotheses of this study. The empirical results revealed that there was a significant statistical impact of the organizational justice (equity of distributions, fairness of procedures and fairness of transactions) on the organizational citizenship. The study recommended that the development of organizational citizenship strongly depended on the deploying of the organizational justice through: (a)the fairness of tasks and duties distribution through across organization, (b) commensurate these tasks and duties with employees’ abilities, (c) distribution of incentives depending on the merits of employees, (d) participation in decision making process supported the organizational citizenship and developed justice practices, (e) transparency through providing sufficient information and discussing work-related decisions found for the organizational justice and then deployed the organizational citizenship. Key words: organizational justice, organizational citizenship behavior, Jordan Press Organizations

The Impact of Knowledge Management Success Factors on Electronic Business in Jordanian Telecom Companies

Abstract: The study aimed to identify the impact of knowledge management success factors represented (organizational culture, administrative leadership, organizational structure, information technology infrastructure, standards) on electronic business (electronic information, electronic communications, electronic work flow), and the study community included all employees in Jordanian telecom companies, where the three telecommunications companies (Umniah, Zain, Orange) agreed to participate in the study, and (240) questionnaires were distributed to employees in those companies, and (191) questionnaires were retrieved, of which (188) were valid questionnaires for analysis with an actual response amount of (78.3%), which is similar to the final study sample. The study used the descriptive analytical method, and assumed a positive impact of the factors of success of knowledge management on electronic business in Jordanian telecom companies. The results showed that there is an awareness of the factors of success of knowledge management among employees in Jordanian telecom companies, where the arithmetic averages for the organizational culture variables, information technology infrastructure and knowledge measures came within the level of high importance, and the variable of administrative leadership and the organizational structure variable came within the level of intermediate importance in the current study, as well all averages of e-business dimensions came within the high level of importance, as well as the overall e-business variable, in addition to that, the results indicated a positive impact of the factors of success of knowledge management on e-business in Jordanian telecom companies; as the variable of knowledge management success factors explained (65.7%) of the variance in e-business, and the results also indicated that the variable of information technology infrastructure was the most influencing electronic information, and the second ranked in the impact of organizational culture, while the variables of administrative leadership do not affect the organizational structure and measures of knowledge on electronic information, and the results also showed that the variable of the information technology infrastructure ranked first in the impact on electronic communications, followed by the effect of the variable of organizational culture, and then the organizational structure variable, while the administrative leadership and knowledge standards variables do not affect, finally it showed the results indicated that the variable of the IT infrastructure was the most influential in the electronic work flow, and came second in the organizational structure, and the organizational culture ranked third, and the fourth came the variable of administrative leadership, while the electronic work flow variable was not affected by knowledge measures. Based on the results, the study recommended the need to pay attention to the employees awareness of the importance of success factors Knowledge Management, given its impact on e-business, by maintaining the level of organizational culture, and constantly enhancing it, raising the level of awareness of managers and decision makers about the importance of knowledge management success factors and their impact on e-business, developing the capabilities of employees, and creating a special administrative unit, concerned with knowledge management and organization Its operations, in addition to adopting successful organizational structures that increase the level of knowledge, as well as the need to develop and promote electronic business in Jordanian telecom companies, by paying attention to the communication infrastructure, and providing modern electronic workflow systems, the study also recommended researchers to conduct other studies on management success factors Knowledge and e-business in other study societies and other organizational outputs

CAPITAL STRUCTURE AND CORPORATE PERFORMANCE EMPIRICAL STUDY ON THE PUBLIC JORDANIAN SHAREHOLDINGS FIRMS LISTED IN THE AMMAN STOCK MARKET

The study investigates the effect of capital structure on the performance of the public Jordanian firms listed in Amman stock market. The study used multiple regression model represented by ordinary least squares (OLS) as a technique to examine what is the effect of capital structure on the performance by applying on 76 firms (53 industrial firms and 23 service corporation) for the period(2001-2006).The results of the study concluded that capital structure associated negatively and statistically with firm performance on the study sample generally. In addition, the study found out that there was no significant difference to the impact of the financial leverage between high financial leverage firms and low financial leverage firms on their performance. Finally, the study also showed that the effect of financial leverage on the basis of the growth that there is no difference between the financial leverage of high growth firms and low growth firms on the performance, which it was negatively and statistically

DIMENSIONS OF THE QUALITY OF SERVICE IN THE JORDANIAN TOURISM COMPANIES AND THEIR RELATIONS TO CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

The present study aimed to reveal the reality of the dimensions of quality of service in the Jordanian tourism companies and their relationship to customer satisfaction. Preliminary data have been collected from customers through questionnaire has been designed for this purpose, after analyzing the data, the study found a positive relationship between reliability, safety, credibility and tangibility and customers satisfaction among Jordanian tourism companies. While there was no relationship between the responsiveness and eligibility and between customer satisfaction in tourism companies The study recommended that the tourism companies have to continue and concern of all the components of service quality and to enhance it in order to get the satisfaction of employees. The Jordanian tourism companies have to concern over the responsiveness and eligibility regard the respond to the customer needs, and the administration of the company should take care of the customers’ complaints and queries. The employees should shorten some of the actions in order to speed customer service. Signboards should be available at the time of provision of services, and provide a sufficient number of staff who provides service to customers. The companies should raise the efficiency of the staff, raise their deductive ability to perform their roles, provide them with the knowledge to their work, to provide staff with adequate information about the service provided, and the company should pay attention that the staff provides the services with highly skilled

A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF PRODUCT INNOVATION IN JORDAN’S PHARMACEUTICAL SECTOR

Product Innovation, especially New Product Development (NPD) is critical for the continued success, development, and long-term growth of a company. Despite extensive research on how to achieve NPD success, NPD process remains a difficult and a highly risky venture. The research was conducted to investigate factors that affect NPD in the Jordanian pharmaceutical sector. Five factors were conceptually identified from past literature as initial factors. They include senior management support (SMS), cross-functional teams (CFT), customer involvement (CI), supplier integration (SI), and time to market (TTM). These five factors were used to build the basic research model as independent variables; whereas NPD was the dependent variable for the research model. A qualitative research methodology was designed and used to achieve the research objectives. The needed data for this study was captured through personal interviews, and a survey that targeted all Jordanian pharmaceutical companies. The population from which respondents was chosen included research and development managers, marketing managers, and other personnel involved in NPD process in Jordanian pharmaceutical producing companies. Through conducting a number of personal interviews and using Content Analytical Technique (CAT) for data analysis, the results of the research show the existence of a number of factors that affect NPD process in Jordanian pharmaceutical sector such as: SMS, TTM, CFT, R&R, Knowledge, and Technology. In addition, a number of factors were identified as NPD challenges and constraints. These factors include the toughness and lack of clarity in R&R related to NPD process, the lack of financial and human resources, as well as addition to increasing DC. This paper suggests several recommendations. Firstly, senior managements need to provide enough support to NPD process whether as financial, moral or any other kind of support. Secondly, companies have to take the necessary actions to speed up NPD process in order to get the benefits of introducing products earlier into the market. Thirdly, companies have to work hard to ensure higher levels of knowledge among their staff, especially those who are involved in NPD process by providing continued periodic training to them

Skin Deformation Methods for Interactive Character Animation

Character animation is a vital component of contemporary computer games, animated feature films and virtual reality applications. The problem of creating appealing character animation can best be described by the title of the animation bible: “The Illusion of Life”. The focus is not on completing a given motion task, but more importantly on how this motion task is performed by the character. This does not necessarily require realistic behavior, but behavior that is believable. This of course includes the skin deformations when the character is moving. In this paper, we focus on the existing research in the area of skin deformation, ranging from skeleton-based deformation and volume preserving techniques to physically based skinning methods. We also summarize the recent contributions in deformable and soft body simulations for articulated characters, and discuss various geometric and example-based approaches

A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF PRODUCT INNOVATION IN JORDAN’S PHARMACEUTICAL SECTOR

Product Innovation, especially New Product Development (NPD) is critical for the continued success, development, and long-term growth of a company. Despite extensive research on how to achieve NPD success, NPD process remains a difficult and a highly risky venture. The research was conducted to investigate factors that affect NPD in the Jordanian pharmaceutical sector. Five factors were conceptually identified from past literature as initial factors. They include senior management support (SMS), cross-functional teams (CFT), customer involvement (CI), supplier integration (SI), and time to market (TTM). These five factors were used to build the basic research model as independent variables; whereas NPD was the dependent variable for the research model. A qualitative research methodology was designed and used to achieve the research objectives. The needed data for this study was captured through personal interviews, and a survey that targeted all Jordanian pharmaceutical companies. The population from which respondents was chosen included research and development managers, marketing managers, and other personnel involved in NPD process in Jordanian pharmaceutical producing companies. Through conducting a number of personal interviews and using Content Analytical Technique (CAT) for data analysis, the results of the research show the existence of a number of factors that affect NPD process in Jordanian pharmaceutical sector such as: SMS, TTM, CFT, R&R, Knowledge, and Technology. In addition, a number of factors were identified as NPD challenges and constraints. These factors include the toughness and lack of clarity in R&R related to NPD process, the lack of financial and human resources, as well as addition to increasing DC. This paper suggests several recommendations. Firstly, senior managements need to provide enough support to NPD process whether as financial, moral or any other kind of support. Secondly, companies have to take the necessary actions to speed up NPD process in order to get the benefits of introducing products earlier into the market. Thirdly, companies have to work hard to ensure higher levels of knowledge among their staff, especially those who are involved in NPD process by providing continued periodic training to them