Corporate social responsibility in online retail – Perceptions from online discussions on Amazon

Online retail has experienced substantial growth due to the increased utilization of digital technologies. The growth in the industry has created numerous multinational corporations, which serve customers all around the world. As a result, the online retailers’ efforts in sustainability have been more often in publicity. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the efforts going beyond the company’s interest in order to bring social good, have been discussed in the academic community for decades. While the various effects of CSR in retail and business generally have been realized, the research aims to make a contribution by examining the concept from the viewpoint of online retail by focusing on interaction at online discussion forums. The main research question asks: What is the role of online retailer CSR in the online discussion forum context? In order to answer this question, additional three sub-research questions are suggested: 1) What elements of CSR are relevant in the online retailer context? 2) How are discussion forums used in communication regarding CSR and online retail by different discusser types? 3) What kind of company perceptions and consumer behavior appear in online discussions of Amazon’s CSR? The study is qualitative of nature, using the content analysis research method to examine posts found from four different public online discussion forums. A qualitative, interpretative analysis was used, although quantitative measures regarding discussion posts were also presented. The analysis contains a coding process, where attributes are attached to discussion posts. As a result of the process, specific patterns can be indicated in order to categorize the posts. As the research uses Amazon as the case company, the case study method is also adopted. In the online retail context, ethics regarding the online retailer’s tax and labor policies are found as most relevant elements. Customers, using discussion forums to share their experiences and opinions regarding online retailer CSR efforts, are realized as the most prominent stakeholder. The research also highlights the role of online retailer employees providing details on internal business practices. However, the not realize the possibility to participate in discussions. Most discussion posts refer either to a positive, negative or mixed reaction towards CSR efforts, it is suggested that the concept is relevant also in online retail. Although online retailer CSR efforts are somewhat linked to company perceptions, the concept has a minimal role in consumer behavior. In online retail, CSR efforts can reduce the risk of being involved in discussions related to controversies. In addition, online retailer CSR efforts should communicate how the retailer contributes locally.siirretty Doriast

Image Analysis and Development of Graphical User Interface for Pole Vault Action

In recent years, motion estimation analysis has become one of the vital research areas in sport and has attracted the interest of many researchers toward events such as swimming, pole vaulting, and hurdling. In this paper, we present a novel method for determining the step length, speed, and the feet-contact-time on the running track of a pole vault athlete using a mono-camera arrangement. The step length and step frequency are essential descriptors of the approach run in pole vaulting. The approach along a linear trajectory is familiar to many throwing and jumping events. The measurement setting and image processing, as well as the step registration stages such as the block matching and optimal flow algorithm are presented and compared to alternative methods. The validation of the step size and step frequency accuracy is provided, using manually digitized step sizes as the baseline. The proposed methodology is efficient and straightforward, providing immediate feedback to the athlete and coaches. We were also successful in building a basic Graphical User Interface (GUI) to illustrate pole-vaulting actions during a performance. This research could be used as an initial step for developing a fully interactive platform that is capable of yielding supportive instructions to the athletes and the coaches on a real-time basis for self-assessment and further improvement.</p

Sähköäjohtavat, läpinäkyvät ja taipuisat hiilinanoputki ohutkalvot

Elektroniikan uusimpiin alueisiin kuuluu hiilinanoputkiin perustuva elektroniikka. Tämän työn aihe on uusi haara läpinäkyvien elektrodien alueella. Tämä työ kuvailee hiilinanoputkiin perustuvien läpinäkyvien, johtavien ja taipuisien kerrosten prosessi- ja valmistusvaiheet ja tutkii niiden ominaisuuksia. Tämän tyyppisen materiaalin kysyntä perustuu nykyisten kaupallisten materiaalien, kuten läpinäkyvien johtavien oksidien, kovaan hintaan, saatavuuteen ja hankaliin valmistusvaiheisiin. Työn teoriaosassa käydään läpi hiilinanoputkien historia ja tavallisimmat ominaisuudet. Erityyppisten hiilinanoputkien ero tehdään selväksi. Hiilinanoputkien synteesi esitetään yksityiskohtaisesti. Hiilinanoputki ohutkalvojen ominaisuudet esitellään, keskittyen kahteen pääominaisuuteen jotka ovat pintajohtavuus ja läpinäkyvyys. Teoriaosa esittää myös hiilinanoputki ohutkalvojen yleisimmät valmistustavat ja kuvailee hiilinanoputki ohutkalvoja käyttävien sovellusten valmistusta. Tutkimusosa käsittää käytetyt menetelmät ja laitteiston. Kahta pääominaisuutta tutkitaan useilla eri prosessi- ja muokkausvaiheilla. Pintajohtavuutta tutkitaan perkolaatioteorian avulla. Huoneenlämmössä tapahtuva Hiilinanoputki ohutkalvojen valmistus ja muokkaus esitetään askel askeleelta yksityiskohtaisesti. Tulososassa esitetään saadut tulokset. Tulokset ovat hyvin verrattavissa muihin julkaistuihin tuloksiin ajatellen kahta pääominaisuutta. Hiilinanoputki ohutkalvoihin liittyvistä tulevista töistä mainitaan

Corporate social responsibility in online retail – Perceptions from online discussions on Amazon

Online retail has experienced substantial growth due to the increased utilization of digital technologies. The growth in the industry has created numerous multinational corporations, which serve customers all around the world. As a result, the online retailers’ efforts in sustainability have been more often in publicity. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the efforts going beyond the company’s interest in order to bring social good, have been discussed in the academic community for decades. While the various effects of CSR in retail and business generally have been realized, the research aims to make a contribution by examining the concept from the viewpoint of online retail by focusing on interaction at online discussion forums. The main research question asks: What is the role of online retailer CSR in the online discussion forum context? In order to answer this question, additional three sub-research questions are suggested: 1) What elements of CSR are relevant in the online retailer context? 2) How are discussion forums used in communication regarding CSR and online retail by different discusser types? 3) What kind of company perceptions and consumer behavior appear in online discussions of Amazon’s CSR? The study is qualitative of nature, using the content analysis research method to examine posts found from four different public online discussion forums. A qualitative, interpretative analysis was used, although quantitative measures regarding discussion posts were also presented. The analysis contains a coding process, where attributes are attached to discussion posts. As a result of the process, specific patterns can be indicated in order to categorize the posts. As the research uses Amazon as the case company, the case study method is also adopted. In the online retail context, ethics regarding the online retailer’s tax and labor policies are found as most relevant elements. Customers, using discussion forums to share their experiences and opinions regarding online retailer CSR efforts, are realized as the most prominent stakeholder. The research also highlights the role of online retailer employees providing details on internal business practices. However, the not realize the possibility to participate in discussions. Most discussion posts refer either to a positive, negative or mixed reaction towards CSR efforts, it is suggested that the concept is relevant also in online retail. Although online retailer CSR efforts are somewhat linked to company perceptions, the concept has a minimal role in consumer behavior. In online retail, CSR efforts can reduce the risk of being involved in discussions related to controversies. In addition, online retailer CSR efforts should communicate how the retailer contributes locally.siirretty Doriast

2019 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC)

Abstract— Designing accurate and automatic multi-target detection is a challenging problem for autonomous vehicles. To address this problem, we propose a late multi-modal fusion framework in this paper. The framework provides complimentary information from RGB and thermal infrared cameras in order to improve the detection performance. For this purpose, it first employs RetinaNet as a dense simple deep model for each input image separately to extract possible candidate proposals which likely contain the targets of interest. Then, all proposals are generated by concatenating the obtained proposals from two modalities. Finally, redundant proposals are removed by Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS). We evaluate the proposed framework on a real marine dataset which is collected by a sensor system onboard a vessel in the Finnish archipelago. This system is used for developing autonomous vessels, and records data in a range of operation and climatic conditions. The experimental results show that our late fusion framework can get more detection accuracy compared with middle fusion and uni-modal frameworks. </p

2019 22th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION)

Safety and security are critical issues in maritime environment. Automatic and reliable object detection based on multi-sensor data fusion is one of the efficient way for improving these issues in intelligent systems. In this paper, we propose an early fusion framework to achieve a robust object detection. The framework firstly utilizes a fusion strategy to combine both visible and infrared images and generates fused images. The resulting fused images are then processed by a simple dense convolutional neural network based detector, RetinaNet, to predict multiple 2D box hypotheses and the infrared confidences. To evaluate the proposed framework, we collected a real marine dataset using a sensor system onboard a vessel in the Finnish archipelago. This system is used for developing autonomous vessels, and records data in a range of operation and climatic and light conditions. The experimental results show that the proposed fusion framework able to identify the interest of objects surrounding the vessel substantially better compared with the baseline approaches.</p

Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (ICPRAM 2016)

This paper proposes a digital camera based swimming analysis system for athletic use with a low budget. The recreational usage is possible during the analysis phase, and no alterations of the pool environment are needed. The  system is of minimum complexity, has a real-time feedback mode, uses only underwater cameras, is flexible and can be installed in many types of public swimming pools. Possibly inaccurate camera placement poses no problem. Both commercially available and tailor made software were utilized for video signal collection and computational analysis and for providing a fast visual feedback for swimmers to improve the athletic performance.The small number of cameras with a narrow overlapping view makes the conventional stereo calibration inaccurate and a direct planar calibration method is proposed in this paper instead. The calibration method is presented and its accuracy is evaluated. The quick feedback is a key issue in improving the athletic performance. We have developed two indicators, which are easy to visualize. The first one is the swimming speed measured from the video signal by tracking a marker band at the waist of the swimmer,another one is the rudimentary swimming cycle analysis focusingto the regularity of the cycle. </p