Strategic motivators and expected benefits from e-Commerce in traditional organisations

This paper aims to identify the strategic motivators and expected benefits related to the implementation of e-commerce infrastructures in traditional “brick and mortar” organisations. Despite the fact that the clearest benefit from e-commerce might be expected to come from contribution to corporate profits, either from an increase of sales or reduction of costs, but this may not be the case. The literature suggests that there are different ways in which the potential benefits can be assessed. These ways are directly related to the evolution of e-commerce. This research has chosen six representative organisations from different sectors to explore their rationales for their e-commerce strategies. One of the main benefits reported is to increase the focus on the customer and improving internal communications. Additionally, obtaining competitive advantage was found to be a powerful motivator, despite the fact that the recent academic literature suggests that this is very difficult to achieve

Transition matrices for symmetric and quasisymmetric Hall-Littlewood polynomials

We introduce explicit combinatorial interpretations for the coefficients in some of the transition matrices relating to skew Hall-Littlewood polynomials P_lambda/mu(x;t) and Hivert's quasisymmetric Hall-Littlewood polynomials G_gamma(x;t). More specifically, we provide: 1) the G-expansions of the Hall-Littlewood polynomials P_lambda, the monomial quasisymmetric polynomials M_alpha, the quasisymmetric Schur polynomials S_alpha, and the peak quasisymmetric functions K_alpha; 2) an expansion of P_lambda/mu in terms of the F_alpha's. The F-expansion of P_lambda/mu is facilitated by introducing starred tableaux.Comment: 28 pages; added brief discussion of the Hall-Littlewood Q', typos corrected, added references in response to referee suggestion

A programmable VLSI filter architecture for application in real-time vision processing systems

An architecture is proposed for the realization of real-time edge-extraction filtering operation in an Address-Event-Representation (AER) vision system. Furthermore, the approach is valid for any 2D filtering operation as long as the convolutional kernel F(p,q) is decomposable into an x-axis and a y-axis component, i.e. F(p,q)=H(p)V(q), for some rotated coordinate system [p,q]. If it is possible to find a coordinate system [p,q], rotated with respect to the absolute coordinate system a certain angle, for which the above decomposition is possible, then the proposed architecture is able to perform the filtering operation for any angle we would like the kernel to be rotated. This is achieved by taking advantage of the AER and manipulating the addresses in real time. The proposed architecture, however, requires one approximation: the product operation between the horizontal component H(p) and vertical component V(q) should be able to be approximated by a signed minimum operation without significant performance degradation. It is shown that for edge-extraction applications this filter does not produce performance degradation. The proposed architecture is intended to be used in a complete vision system known as the Boundary-Contour-System and Feature-Contour-System Vision Model, proposed by Grossberg and collaborators. The present paper proposes the architecture, provides a circuit implementation using MOS transistors operated in weak inversion, and shows behavioral simulation results at the system level operation and electrical simulation and experimental results at the circuit level operation of some critical subcircuits

Very wide range tunable CMOS/bipolar current mirrors with voltage clamped input

In low power current mode signal processing circuits it is often necessary to use current mirrors to replicate and amplify/attenuate current signals and clamp the voltage of nodes with high parasitic capacitances so that the smallest currents do not introduce unacceptable delays. The use of tunable active-input current mirrors would meet both requirements. In conventional active-input current mirrors, stability compensation is required. Furthermore, once stabilized, the input current cannot be made arbitrarily small. In this paper we introduce two new active-input current mirrors that clamp their input node to a given voltage. One of them does not require compensation, while the other may under some circumstances. However, for both, the input current may take any value. The mirrors can operate with their transistors biased in strong inversion, weak inversion, or even as CMOS compatible lateral bipolar devices. If it is biased in weak inversion or as lateral bipolars, the current mirror gain can be tuned over a very wide range. According to the experimental measurements provided in this paper, the input current may spawn beyond nine decades and the current mirror gain can be tuned over 11 decades. As an application example, a sinusoidal gm-C-based VCO has been fabricated, whose oscillation frequency could be tuned for over seven decades, between 74 mHz and 1 MHz.Office of Naval Research (USA) N00014-95-1-040