A Practical Perspective on Human Capital Post Merger Integration in Central and Eastern Europe

Driven by a philosophy of shareholder value, mergers and acquisitions form a new economic, social and cultural environment. It is only by a profound understanding of the success factors in mergers and acquisitions that they are able to improve transaction management and create new economic values. In this paper we focus on the perception of employees on a merger or acquisition, the impact it has on the new organization and what should be further done by the management team in order to ensure that critical employees are kept within the organization. We present a survey among 146 companies in 6 countries from Central and Eastern Europe that have experienced mergers or acquisitions in the last 5 years, in which we exhibit a comprehensive view of employees’ satisfaction on different hierarchical and demographic levels on the success of integration. In addition, this report includes information on risks identified that need to be addressed in the forthcoming period, especially by the organizations included in this survey, to cover areas that have been overlooked or that have been insufficiently addressed in the run to integrate faster.mergers; acquisitions; integration; human capital; survey; factors; items.

Scalable wavelet-based coding of irregular meshes with interactive region-of-interest support

This paper proposes a novel functionality in wavelet-based irregular mesh coding, which is interactive region-of-interest (ROI) support. The proposed approach enables the user to define the arbitrary ROIs at the decoder side and to prioritize and decode these regions at arbitrarily high-granularity levels. In this context, a novel adaptive wavelet transform for irregular meshes is proposed, which enables: 1) varying the resolution across the surface at arbitrarily fine-granularity levels and 2) dynamic tiling, which adapts the tile sizes to the local sampling densities at each resolution level. The proposed tiling approach enables a rate-distortion-optimal distribution of rate across spatial regions. When limiting the highest resolution ROI to the visible regions, the fine granularity of the proposed adaptive wavelet transform reduces the required amount of graphics memory by up to 50%. Furthermore, the required graphics memory for an arbitrary small ROI becomes negligible compared to rendering without ROI support, independent of any tiling decisions. Random access is provided by a novel dynamic tiling approach, which proves to be particularly beneficial for large models of over 10(6) similar to 10(7) vertices. The experiments show that the dynamic tiling introduces a limited lossless rate penalty compared to an equivalent codec without ROI support. Additionally, rate savings up to 85% are observed while decoding ROIs of tens of thousands of vertices

Desenvolvimento da Tecnologia Friction Stir Channeling Helicoidal Cilíndrico: Aplicação no fabrico de Permutadores

Com esta dissertação contribuiu-se para o desenvolvimento do processo Friction Stir Channeling Helicoidal Cilíndrico, uma tecnologia de processamento no estado sólido que permite a produção de canais internos contínuos, num componente monolítico cilíndrico e numa única passagem. O principal objetivo foi a determinação dos parâmetros e seleção de ferramentas para a produção canais estanques, com secções transversais constantes. Foram efetuados ensaios com diversas combinações de parâmetros e de ferramentas. Concluiu-se que é necessário ter especial atenção à razão entre o diâmetro da ferramenta e o diâmetro do componente cilíndrico a processar. Após a determinação dos parâmetros e ferramentas, procedeu-se à produção de um canal helicoidal cilíndrico. Desta forma foi possível produzir, com sucesso, um permutador de calor tubular funcional. Posteriormente, o permutador foi colocado em funcionamento demonstrando a viabilidade desta tecnologia.In this dissertation, a contribution was made to the development of the Cylindrical Helical Friction Stir Channeling process, a solid-state processing technology that allows the production of continuous internal channels in a monolithic cylindrical component and in a single pass. The main objective was to determine the parameters and tools for producing watertight channels with constant cross sections. Tests were carried out with various combinations of parameters and tools. It was concluded that special attention needs to be paid to the ratio of the tool diameter and the diameter of the cylindrical component. After determining the tools and parameters, the cylindrical helical channel was produced. In this way a functional cylindrical heat exchanger could be successfully manufactured. Subsequently, the exchanger was put into operation, demonstrating the feasibility of this technology

Intra-WZ quantization mismatch in distributed video coding

During the past decade, Distributed Video Coding (DVC) has emerged as a new video coding paradigm, shifting the complexity from the encoder-to the decoder-side. This paper addresses a problem of current DVC architectures that has not been studied in the literature so far, that is, the mismatch between the intra and Wyner-Ziv (WZ) quantization processes. Due to this mismatch, WZ rate is spent even for spatial regions that are accurately approximated by the side-information. As a solution, this paper proposes side-information generation using selective unidirectional motion compensation from temporally adjacent WZ frames. Experimental results show that the proposed approach yields promising WZ rate gains of up to 7% relative to the conventional method

Building a Cloud Governance Bus

Thought still at its first steps, cloud governance lays the foundation upon which business innovations can be built. It fills in the gaps left by cloud providers and allows major players on the IT market to be challenged by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for their share.At the core of cloud governance, its bus enables interaction and communication between various services and governance components. The cloud governance bus is a step forward for the enterprise service bus (ESB) into the cloud environment, addressing data integration and full implementation of enterprise integration patterns. This paper covers current requirements for ESB migration to the cloud environment and proposes a cloud governance architecture that meets the given requirements

Distributed coding of endoscopic video

Triggered by the challenging prerequisites of wireless capsule endoscopic video technology, this paper presents a novel distributed video coding (DVC) scheme, which employs an original hash-based side-information creation method at the decoder. In contrast to existing DVC schemes, the proposed codec generates high quality side-information at the decoder, even under the strenuous motion conditions encountered in endoscopic video. Performance evaluation using broad endoscopic video material shows that the proposed approach brings notable and consistent compression gains over various state-of-the-art video codecs at the additional benefit of vastly reduced encoding complexity

ExpPoint-MAE: Better interpretability and performance for self-supervised point cloud transformers

In this paper we delve into the properties of transformers, attained through self-supervision, in the point cloud domain. Specifically, we evaluate the effectiveness of Masked Autoencoding as a pretraining scheme, and explore Momentum Contrast as an alternative. In our study we investigate the impact of data quantity on the learned features, and uncover similarities in the transformer's behavior across domains. Through comprehensive visualiations, we observe that the transformer learns to attend to semantically meaningful regions, indicating that pretraining leads to a better understanding of the underlying geometry. Moreover, we examine the finetuning process and its effect on the learned representations. Based on that, we devise an unfreezing strategy which consistently outperforms our baseline without introducing any other modifications to the model or the training pipeline, and achieve state-of-the-art results in the classification task among transformer models