Case: MaaS Global Whim app

Platform business model has disrupted and transformed industries around the world. It allows organizations to revolutionize their value chains and tap into a diverse pool of external players, resulting in accelerated innovation and value creation. Platform business has extended beyond technology-driven industries to more traditional and less digital ones. This study examines how platform could reshape the traditional transportation industry, using the case study of Mobiliy-as- a-Service (MaaS) – an innovative mobility ecosystem that integrates various transport modes and offers them as a mobility service package via one interface. The ability to attract participants is vital to a platform’s success. This overarching purpose of this study is to understand what motivates different stakeholders, such as public and private transport service providers, to join a MaaS platform and how a MaaS operator (the platform owner) could attract them to its ecosystem to improve urban transport. The empirical research was conducted as an intensive embedded single case study, focusing on the MaaS ecosystem in the Helsinki capital region (MaaS Global Oy/Whim app). Research data was collected through ten semi-structured interviews with the founder of MaaS Global and representatives of public and private transport service providers. Data analysis followed standard steps of qualitative content analysis, including transcription, within-interview analysis, cross- interview analysis, and synthesis. Moreover, the research findings were reviewed against existing literature to improve quality and validity of the findings. The research concludes that the motivations of platform participants are mostly extrinsic and include both monetary and non-monetary types of motivation. The motivations can be categorized under four main themes: financial gains, reputation and credibility, learning benefits, and social contribution. Additionally, the findings also demonstrate that a platform owner can leverage four facilitating drivers to influence platform participation: expected rewards, a sense of autonomy, a sense of competence and a sense of relatedness. In practical terms, a strong business case with clear financial gains is vital to attract platform participants. Furthermore, the platform should be perceived as transparent and fair, which includes clear pricing and earning logic, and clear decision rights, procedures and data exchange. Finally, supporting resources regarding technical integration, such as testing and toolkits, are also considered as important in facilitating platform participation

Electronic structure calculations for point defects, interfaces, and nanostructures of TiO2

Transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) play an important role not only in optoelectronic and photovoltaic devices but also in future transparent electronics. A transparent conductor arises upon degenerately doping a semiconductor (insulator) so that the conduction becomes metallic (resistivity ~ temperature). The extra electrons occupy the conduction band (CB) states of the host and the conductivity is determined by the electron optical effective mass. Recently, anatase TiO2 films doped with Nb, i.e., Ti1-xNbxO2 (TNO), have attracted a great deal of interest as a promising candidate for TCO applications because of their low resistivity (~ 10^-4 Omega.cm) and high optical transmittance (90 % in the visible light region). A few experimental studies have been reported for the optical effective mass of electrons as a function of the carrier concentration in Nb-doped anatase, on the directions which are either orthogonal or parallel to the tetragonal axis of the crystal. In this thesis, I have determined the optical effective mass of electrons in Nb-doped anatase based on band structure calculations. The anisotropy of the crystal and the nonparabolicity of the bands have both been taken into account. I have found that in the range concentration which is relevant to transparent conductive oxide applications, the optical effective mass is determined by several branches of the conduction band, leading to a complicated dependence on the carrier concentration. The function for the optical effective mass obtained by our calculations agrees well with that obtained experimentally. In particular, the strong anisotropy of the optical effective mass has already been confirmed. Although Ta-doping of anatase TiO2 appears to be effective as well, this possibility has been not well explored. I have compared the two dopants, i.e., Nb and Ta, for doping anatase TiO2. The Ta dopant has a considerably higher solubility and a lower optical effective mass, thus acquiring more advantages than Nb. Moreover, my calculations have also explained why a reducing atmosphere is necessary for the efficient dopant incorporation, without invoking oxygen vacancies as proposed in the literature. There is no study on the effects from the quantum confinement of dopants in anatase nanowires (ANWs). Therefore, I report here the first demonstration on the role of Nb- and Ta-dopants in ANWs. The pure ANWs cut by keeping the screw axis of the original bulk structures are consistently lower in energy than the similarly oriented nanowires in which the screw symmetry is destroyed. Both Nb and Ta dopants prefer the sub-corner sites of the most stable ANWs. At the highest symmetry, the band structure of the doped ANW is similar to that of the perfect one. The increase of the photocatalytic activity upon mixing rutile and anatase powders is usually explained by assuming change separation between the two phases. There are many contradicting theories regarding the particular charge transfer between these phases. Therefore, another goal of this thesis is to study the electronic properties of the interface between anatase and rutile phases of TiO2. By calculating the band line-up of a rutile-anatase interface, I have found that both the conduction band minimum (CBM) and the valence band maximum (VBM) of the rutile phase are higher than those of the anatase phase. As a result, electrons are expected to transfer from the rutile phase to the anatase phase while holes move in the opposite direction. In my work, the optical electron effective mass is determined from the band structure of the material, which is in turn calculated by the version of density functional theory (DFT) in the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) implemented in the Vienna Ab Initio Simulation Package (VASP) package. For bulk materials, both the Perdew-Berke-Enzerhof (PBE) and the screened hybrid functional (HSE06) are used for the exchange energy. Although the HSE06 functional gives better results compared with the existing experimental measurements for Nb- and Ta-doped anatase TiO2 bulk materials, similar calculations with HSE06 for nanowires are far more expensive. Therefore, my calculations for nanowires are carried out only with the pure GGA-PBE functional. To determine the rutile-anatase interface, I have used the density functional based tight binding (DFTB) method for the molecular dynamic simulations, and then relaxed by ab initio calculations with PBE functional at 0K

PROBLEMS OF LEARNING SPEAKING SKILLS ENCOUNTERED BY ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS AT BA RIA-VUNG TAU UNIVERSITY, VIETNAM

Speaking skills is one of the four major language skills that most language learners desire to master in order to communicate effectively in different contexts. It is important to determine main factors hindering learners to speak English fluently. In order to achieve the aim of discovering and analyzing the problems in learning speaking skills faced by English major students at Ba Ria-Vung Tau University (BVU), 65 students participated in this study by completing the questionnaire made by the researcher. The result reveals that the dominant problems these students often encounter are associated with linguistic problems and non-linguistic problems. Although students have striven to deal with their learning speaking problems, but their attempts seem to be unsuccessful. Therefore, some recommendations in the light of findings are also presented in this paper

Bank loan loss in Vietnam : a dialectical view

Loan loss recognition and communication have been contentious issues in Vietnam recently. Before 2012, the State Bank of Vietnam and commercial banks continuously signaled that the banking system was under control, with the nonperforming loans (NPLs) ratio below 3%. However, a belief expressed through newspapers and other media was that the NPL ratio was much higher under international standards. This ratio became controversial when different figures were disclosed from different sources, and it has fluctuated strongly since 2012. The acceleration of NPLs in 2012 froze credit flows and the economy. Later, the NPL ratio steadily decreased until it reached the benchmark of 3%, which was announced as the safety level, and it has remained thus since 2014. However, many believe that the published figure of 3% represented just a part of the NPL iceberg. Most recently, the National Financial Supervisory Commission announced that the NPL was 9.5% at the end of 2017, while according to the banking industry’s report it was below 3%. Accompanying the different NPL numbers is the continuous change from 2012 to date in accounting regulation on debt classification and provisioning. That constant change represents the embarrassment of bank regulators in regulating loan loss recognition. It raises the research question why loan loss recognition and communication are contentious issues in the Vietnamese context. Answering this question is expected to equip Vietnam’s bank regulators with a theoretical basis for their decision-making in regulating loan loss recognition, and improve transparency in loan loss recognition as well. Seemingly, loan loss recognition used to be controversial in many other countries, such as Japan, the United States and China before, during and after their financial crisis. It led to the issuance of bank regulations such as Basel Accords I and II as well as new accounting standards - IAS 39 Financial Instruments: Recognition and Measurement, IFRS 7 Financial Instruments: Disclosures and IFRS 9 Financial Instruments - to resolve that controversy. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is repeated in Vietnam. It leads to the following subresearch questions: ‘Is Vietnam experiencing the same issue that occurred in other countries?’ and ‘Has Vietnam learned from history given that the country has been equipped with those new rules?

Authenticating Người Mỹ gốc Việt: Vietnamese Americans and the Struggle for Identity

This dissertation is a critical investigation of the politics of identity among the U.S. diasporic Vietnamese community, in particular, the discourse of authenticity that has been prevalent in the community and its (in)adequacy as a means of displacing racialization and othering as a minoritized community. Using a critical phenomenological approach, the study consisted of interviews with 14 Vietnamese subjects currently living in the U.S. whose family heritage(s) are traceable, in part or in whole, to Vietnam and/or who are racially marked as bearers of Vietnamese culture. A thematic analysis of the interviewees\u27 personal stories uncovered three ideological challenges to authenticating Vietnamese identity: (1) an admission to a lack in historical knowledge of Vietnam, (2) have challenged the governance of Vietnamese-ness through an American/Vietnamese dichotomy of identity, and (3) the development of a old yet new identity as a potential alternative articulation of identity for younger generations of Vietnamese Americans. An examination of the implications of such thematics for displacing racialization of the community shows both the understandable logic that gave rise to practices of cultural authentication as a survival strategy and at the same time the inadequacy of such practices for bridging the existing disconnect between the identity signifiers Vietnamese and American and for the continued constitution of Vietnamese subjects as other, as possessing a foreign and non-American identity

Context-dependent feature analysis with random forests

In many cases, feature selection is often more complicated than identifying a single subset of input variables that would together explain the output. There may be interactions that depend on contextual information, i.e., variables that reveal to be relevant only in some specific circumstances. In this setting, the contribution of this paper is to extend the random forest variable importances framework in order (i) to identify variables whose relevance is context-dependent and (ii) to characterize as precisely as possible the effect of contextual information on these variables. The usage and the relevance of our framework for highlighting context-dependent variables is illustrated on both artificial and real datasets.Comment: Accepted for presentation at UAI 201

Optimizing model-agnostic Random Subspace ensembles

This paper presents a model-agnostic ensemble approach for supervised learning. The proposed approach is based on a parametric version of Random Subspace, in which each base model is learned from a feature subset sampled according to a Bernoulli distribution. Parameter optimization is performed using gradient descent and is rendered tractable by using an importance sampling approach that circumvents frequent re-training of the base models after each gradient descent step. The degree of randomization in our parametric Random Subspace is thus automatically tuned through the optimization of the feature selection probabilities. This is an advantage over the standard Random Subspace approach, where the degree of randomization is controlled by a hyper-parameter. Furthermore, the optimized feature selection probabilities can be interpreted as feature importance scores. Our algorithm can also easily incorporate any differentiable regularization term to impose constraints on these importance scores

A weighted residual relationship for the contact problem with Coulomb friction

International audienceIn this work, a weighted residual relationship is proposed as an extension of the standard virtual work principle to deal with the large deformation contact problem with Coulomb friction. This weak form is a mixed relationship involving the displacements and the multipliers defined on the reference contact surface of the contactor and is shown to be equivalent to the strong form of the initial/boundary value contact problem. The discretization in space by means of the finite element method is carried out on the mixed relationship in a simple way in order to obtain the semi-discrete equation system. The contact tangent stiffness is derived and numerical examples are presented to assess the efficiency of the formulation. (c) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved