Exploring the Retargeting Strategy of Telepresence

Retargeting is based on the “Rule of Seven”, which is an old theory coined by Dr. Jeffrey Lant and states that a customer must to be touched 7 times before becoming aware of a product or service and take action. Thus, it is critical to increase consumer touch points through Retargeting to drive potential sales. Therefore, this study strives to explore the remarketing strategies of virtual reality (VR) retargeting campaigns in accordance with telepresence theory for the tourism industry. VR telepresence is proposed as a formative second-order construct driven by reality judgement, internal/external correspondence, and attention/abortion. We further found that consumers’ experiences with VR retargeting campaigns were classified as either positive or negative effects on their sense of immersion to enhance consumer purchase intention. Finally, it hopes to provide more insights on VR design strategies of experiential marketing for the tourism industry. Based on a survey by Statista (2017), 96% of internet users in the U.S. would leave an online shopping website without making a purchase, suggesting that very few people would actually buy something during their first visit to a site, even if they have the intention to do so. Another study by OmniVirt (2018), based on over 700 million ads served, found that in a promotional campaign that was displayed 700 million times, 85% of internet users are willing to finish watching a 360-degree video, compared to 58% for its 2D video counterpart. In order to produce advertisements that attract a wider audience and boost sales, more and more brands are turning to immersive experiences. Compared to traditional ad campaigns featuring similar elements and positioning, immersive advertising can lead to higher click through rates, which in turn increases brand awareness (Parikh, 2019). With a view to enhancing consumers’ experience with retargeting marketing campaigns, the present study addresses how precision and immersive experiential marketing targeted at potential customers can increase their motivation to purchase. Based on Marvin Minsky’s (1980) theory of telepresence, three virtual reality (VR) scenarios featuring life-like images and audios are designed and stimulated by a computing device in a high-fidelity stereoscopic virtual 3D space, creating an immersive user experience. Through this immersive virtual experience (Lanier, 1988), the author examines consumers’ emotional states evoked by the virtual environment, which serves as the basis for further discussion on the effectiveness of VR retargeting travel ads. Research methods employed in this study to measure participants’ positive and negative emotions include administering a written questionnaire and monitoring their brainwave activities. In sum, the main objective of the present study is to explore the impacts of telepresence as well as the quality of retargeting on consumer purchase behavior. The expected contributions of this study are threefold: (1) addressing the quality of retargeting advertising (which has yet to be thoroughly explored in the past) in order to formulate a better understanding of the interaction between advertising quality and consumer behavior; (2) incorporating telepresence as part of consumer experience has a positive impact on retargeting advertising, encouraging potential buyers to take action; and (3) brain wave analysis can offer insights into participant’ positive and negative emotions, which improves the validity of this study. In conclusion, this study strives to explore the remarketing strategies of virtual reality (VR) retargeting campaigns in accordance with telepresence theory for the tourism industry. The practical findings of the present study can serve as a reference for digital marketers in setting the optimal advertising strategies to elicit the desire to purchase from prospective customers

High Performance Biological Pairwise Sequence Alignment: FPGA versus GPU versus Cell BE versus GPP

This paper explores the pros and cons of reconfigurable computing in the form of FPGAs for high performance efficient computing. In particular, the paper presents the results of a comparative study between three different acceleration technologies, namely, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), Graphics Processor Units (GPUs), and IBM’s Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE), in the design and implementation of the widely-used Smith-Waterman pairwise sequence alignment algorithm, with general purpose processors as a base reference implementation. Comparison criteria include speed, energy consumption, and purchase and development costs. The study shows that FPGAs largely outperform all other implementation platforms on performance per watt criterion and perform better than all other platforms on performance per dollar criterion, although by a much smaller margin. Cell BE and GPU come second and third, respectively, on both performance per watt and performance per dollar criteria. In general, in order to outperform other technologies on performance per dollar criterion (using currently available hardware and development tools), FPGAs need to achieve at least two orders of magnitude speed-up compared to general-purpose processors and one order of magnitude speed-up compared to domain-specific technologies such as GPUs

Assessing the safety and efficacy of switching to brinzolamide/timolol fixed combination as a replacement therapy in patients with uncontrolled intraocular pressure in Taiwan

AbstractPurposeThe objective of this study is to assess the safety and efficacy of switching to brinzolamide 1% and timolol 0.5% fixed combination (BTFC) from prior pharmacotherapy in patients with open-angle glaucoma (OAG) or ocular hypertension (OH) in Taiwan.MethodsThis was a multicenter, open-labeled, interventional prospective study. The 8-week study involved patients with OAG or OH with uncontrolled intraocular pressure (IOP) and consisted of three study visits to the clinical site. Patients were instructed to discontinue their prior medications at the first visit, prior to starting the study medication. Enrolled patients were dosed with BTFC twice daily in both eyes for 8 weeks. IOP measurements and safety evaluations were conducted at both Week 4 and Week 8.ResultsA total of 74 patients were enrolled. The overall mean IOP reductions from baseline after Week 8 of BTFC was 3.45 mmHg (15.42%); when subgrouped by prior medication class (β-blockers vs. non-β-blockers), the reduction in mean IOP after transitioning to BTFC at Week 8 was as follows: subgroup β-blockers were 3.23 mmHg (14.9 %) and non-β-blockers were 3.58 mmHg (15.25%). All mean IOP changes from baseline were statistically significant (p < 0.001). Of the 69 patients (per protocol population) who were switched to BTFC regardless of prior therapy, 37 (53.6%) patients at Week 4 and 38 (55.1%) patients at Week 8 had IOP ≤ 18 mmHg. No treatment-related serious adverse events were reported in this study.ConclusionThe results of this study demonstrated the potential benefit of using BTFC as a replacement therapy in order to ensure adequate IOP control. BTFC administered twice daily was safe and effective in patients with uncontrolled IOP in Taiwan

Symmetry breaking and criticality in tensor-product states

We discuss variationally optimized matrix-product states for the transverse-field Ising chain, using D*D matrices with small D=2-10. For finite system size N there are energy minimums for symmetric as well as symmetry-broken states, which cross each other at a field value hc(N,D); thus the transition is first-order. A continuous transition develops as N->infinity. The asymptotic critical behavior is then always of mean-field type (the magnetization exponent beta=1/2), but a window of field strengths where true Ising scaling holds (beta=1/8) emerges with increasing D. We also demonstrate asymptotic mean-field behavior for infinite-size two-dimensional tensor-product (iPEPS) states with small tensors.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure