Toward a General Theory of Client Acceptance and Continuance Decisions

This study investigates the theoretical perspectives used in the extant auditing literature on client acceptance and continuance decisions. First, the different client acceptance and continuance decisions are presented. Second, the paper identifies and discusses the single-client approach and introduces “the auditor-client relationship life cycle” as an integrative framework for this perspective commonly used in academia. Third, the audit firm portfolio management perspective is examined. Finally, the apparent incommensurability of the single-client and the clients-portfolio approaches is discussed and the foundation for a general theory of the client acceptance and continuance decisions is developed

Gauge Invariant Framework for Shape Analysis of Surfaces

This paper describes a novel framework for computing geodesic paths in shape spaces of spherical surfaces under an elastic Riemannian metric. The novelty lies in defining this Riemannian metric directly on the quotient (shape) space, rather than inheriting it from pre-shape space, and using it to formulate a path energy that measures only the normal components of velocities along the path. In other words, this paper defines and solves for geodesics directly on the shape space and avoids complications resulting from the quotient operation. This comprehensive framework is invariant to arbitrary parameterizations of surfaces along paths, a phenomenon termed as gauge invariance. Additionally, this paper makes a link between different elastic metrics used in the computer science literature on one hand, and the mathematical literature on the other hand, and provides a geometrical interpretation of the terms involved. Examples using real and simulated 3D objects are provided to help illustrate the main ideas.Comment: 15 pages, 11 Figures, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence in a better resolutio

Optimal Level of Participatory Approach in an NGO Development Project

Many authors, Bradley (2006), Banerjee (2007), Mohan (2008) and Sen (1999) among others, argue that the participatory approach in the development projects of a non-governmental organization, NGO, is more effective and sustainable than the externally imposed expert-driven approach. According to this research stream, the participatory approach promotes self-respect, dignity, inclusiveness, and empowerment of people involved in the project and, simultaneously, it improves the external local environment for the NGO. The key point of this paper is that adopting only the participatory approach may not be optimal, as this approach involves costs to learn about local culture, values and attitudes, and to design and implement feasible participatory development practices. Accordingly, an economically sensible and sustainable strategy for the NGO will be to use a mixture of both approaches. In this paper, the optimal level of participatory approach is theoretically derived and numerically illustrated

Développement d'un appareil de caractérisation d'éléments de connecteurs électriques boulonnés

Le présent travail porte sur l'identification des grades (ou classes) de la boulonnerie utilisée dans les postes de distribution d'Hydro-Québec. Afin d'assurer une identification rapide des grades des boulons, les normes nationales et internationales (SAE, ASTM, ISO, BS, NF, DIN, JIS, etc) préconisent différentes sortes de marquages. La diversité de ces normes ainsi que l'absence complète de marquage en cas de tiges filetés (qui sont souvent utilisées pour remplacer les boulons) créent des dfificultés dans les postes lorsqu'il s'agit de faire un bon choix, essentiellement pour les éléments de fixation en acier de grades 2 et 5. Cette situation engendre des frais très importants pour les opérations d'inspection et de remplacement d'un élément de fixation, en plus des inconvénients dus à la mise hors service des lignes de distribution. Notre mandat consistait à analyser la situation actuelle dans les postes de distribution d'Hydro-Québec et à fournir une solution technique au problème d'identification de grades des éléments de fixation. Suite à cette analyse, nous avons proposé d'utiliser la mesure de dureté comme technique rapide et non destructive d'identification. Les valeurs de la résistance à la rupture pour la boulonnerie de grades 2 et 5 sont respectivement 75 et 120kpsi. Ainsi, les expériences qui ont été réalisés sur des boulons normalisées ont démontré que un essai de dureté peut remplacer un essai de traction pour le cas de notre application. La conception, la fabrication et le calibrage d'un appareil permettant la réalisation de la mesure de dureté de type Brinell pour l'identification des grades de la boulonnerie ont été réalisées dans le cadre de ce projet. Cet appareil est doté d'un système de levier pour l'application de la charge sur une bille de diamètre 3,175mm et d'un limiteur de force capable de reproduire la charge maximale de 300kgf avec une bonne répétabilité (écart-type de 3,18kgf). L'utilisation de cet appareil, qui ne contient aucune composante électronique, ne nécessite aucune qualification technique spéciale, ce qui représente un critère principal de la conception. Finalement, une série d'essais de validation effectués sur des boulons normalisés, a démontré que l'identification des grades à l'aide de l'appareil développé donne des résultats fiables. En effet, une simple visualisation de l'empreinte créée lors d'un essai de type Brinell, permet de faire la comparaison de la taille de celle-ci par rapport à un échantillon étalon fourni avec l'appareil et par conséquent, d'indiquer précisément le grade de l'élément de fixation

Too big to fail, TBTF: a better solution is a mixture of solutions

This paper presents a critical analysis of a subset of solutions of the too big to fail, TBTF, problem in the banking sector. For evaluation, it uses specified criteria factors which are pooled in one place from the existing literature. Findings show that no single solution is sufficient enough to solve the TBTF problem; suggesting that a mixture of solutions is a better solution

A DYNAMIC GEOMETRY-BASED APPROACH FOR 4D FACIAL EXPRESSIONS RECOGNITION

International audienceIn this paper we present a fully automatic approach for identity-independent facial expression recognition from 3D video sequences. Towards that goal, we propose a novel approach to extract a scalar field that represents the defor- mations between faces conveying different expressions. We extract relevant features from this deformation field using LDA and then train a dynamic model on these features using HMM. Experiments conducted on BU-4DFE dataset fol- lowing state-of-the-art settings show the effectiveness of the proposed approach

3D Dynamic Expression Recognition Based on a Novel Deformation Vector Field and Random Forest

International audienceThis paper proposes a new method for facial motion extraction to represent, learn and recognize observed expressions, from 4D video sequences. The approach called Deformation Vector Field (DVF) is based on Riemannian facial shape analysis and captures densely dynamic information from the entire face. The resulting temporal vector field is used to build the feature vector for expression recognition from 3D dynamic faces. By applying LDA-based feature space transformation for dimensionality reduction which is followed by a Multiclass Random Forest learning algorithm, the proposed approach achieved 93% average recognition rate on BU-4DFE database and outperforms state-of-art approaches

Enhancing Gender Classification by Combining 3D and 2D Face Modalities

International audienceShape and texture provide different modalities in face-based gender classification. Although extensive works have been reported in the literature, the majority of them are in the scope of shape or texture modality individually. Among them, only a few concern their combination, and to the best of our knowledge, no work considers the combination with the 3D face surface. In our work, we investigate the combination of shape and texture modalities for gender classification, with both the combination of range images and gray images, and the combination of 3D meshes and gray images. In 10-fold subject-independent cross-validation with Random Forest on the FRGC-2.0 dataset, we achieved a correct gender classification rate of 93.27%± 5.16, which outperforms each individual modality and is comparable to the state-of-the-art. Results confirm that shape and texture modalities are complementary, and their combination enhances the performance of face-based gender classification

Fusion d'Experts pour une Biométrie Faciale 3D Robuste aux Déformations

Session "Posters"National audienceNous étudions dans cet article l'apport de la géométrie tridimensionnelle du visage dans la reconnaissance des individus. La principale contribution est d'associer plusieurs experts (matcheurs) de biométrie faciale 3D afin d'achever de meilleures performances comparées aux performances individuelles de chacun, notamment en présence d'expressions. Les experts utilisés sont : (E1) Courbes radiales élastiques, (E2) MS-eLBP, une version étendue multi-échelle de l'opérateur LBP, (E3) l'algorithme de recalage non-rigide TPS, en plus d'un expert de référence (Eref) l'algorithme de recalage rigide connu ICP. Profitant de la complémentarité de chacun des experts, la présente approche affiche un taux d'identification qui dépasse les 99% en présence d'expressions faciales sur la base FRGCv2. Une étude comparative avec l'état de l'art confirme le choix et l'intérêt de combiner plusieurs experts afin d'achever de meilleurs performance

Portfolio efficiency and the "limit on size" debate for a too-big-to-fail (TBTF) bank

Does limiting the size of a large bank reduce its insolvency risk? This paper shows that the answer to this question depends upon how exactly paring down of the bank size is done. The risk may go down or it may rise conditional on the composition of assets and liabilities of the pared down bank. Secondly, the paper investigates mean-standard deviation (μ/σ) efficiency of various possible paring down scenarios and suggests μ/σ efficient assets and liabilities compositions that do not depend on limiting the size of the bank. Accordingly, the findings of this paper create serious doubt about the validity of the “limit on size” solution to the “Too Big To Fail”, TBTF, problem