| 1. |
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| 2. |
- Aagerup, Ulf, 1969-, et al.
(författare)
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How image and awareness relates to internal and external stakeholders' acceptance of B2B rebranding
- 2023
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The acquisitions of brands by companies have become more frequent, representing a significant and effective way for firms to reach international new markets. This recent trend has led to a rise in rebranding, particularly in the business-to-business (B2B) sector. Since marketing literature primarily focuses on B2C brand strategies, literature on the field constantly overlooks B2B characteristics. This is sorely needed, because, despite massive investments, many acquisitions fail, especially international acquisitions where one faces cross-country differences. This is unsurprising because most companies' M&A considerations do not place much weight on brand strategy, and brand equity is typically not handled very well but is often treated as an after-thought compared to more pressing financial matters (e.g. how rebranding affects stock returns) and operational matters (e.g. descriptions of enablers and barriers to the rebranding process). Previous studies in this field emphasise how to do rebranding. However, they treat the brand itself as a black box —it is only how you execute the B2B rebranding process that is investigated, not which dimensions of the customer's brand knowledge should be prioritised. This is unfortunate, because rebranding an acquired brand without an idea of the desired end result is like navigating without a destination —even if you execute well, you will most likely not end up where you need to be. This paper addresses this gap by providing insights into the significant factors that drive B2B rebranding strategies, focusing on the transfer of brand equity from the acquired B2B brand to the acquiring company's brand.This study was conducted in one B2B firm going through rebranding process in the life science sector. Getinge was founded in 1904 in Sweden and is a global medical technology firm. The company provides equipment and systems in the healthcare and life sciences sector and has become a global leader in the field of Surgical Workflow. The international growth has been possible through incorporating new innovative offerings. These have been both internally developed, but also acquired internationally. A significant number of international acquisitions have been made throughout the years. In 2021 the company employed over 10,000 people worldwide, with products marketed in over 135 countries.Besides being one of the most valued companies in the sector, Getinge was chosen since the firm has initiated a rebranding process after a long-time international growth strategy, including acquisitions of many different international brands. Moreover, since B2B companies commonly rely on corporate, rather than product branding. Getinge is an appropriate choice since this study, therefore, focuses on a company that uses the same name for its company and its products.By examining an in-depth single case study of a multinational B2B company in the life sciences industry, this paper contributes to the research in international rebranding by validating that brand equity is a relevant consideration for B2B rebranding processes. Specifically, it argues that brand awareness transfer plays an essential role during the rebranding process, especially when it comes to external branding. Customers generally accept the new brand if the value proposition remains unchanged. However, they need to be made aware of the change to avoid confusion. Internally by contrast, the most significant challenge seems to be the transfer of brand image. Awareness is easy; during a rebranding process employees immediately become aware of the change. They however exhibit strong opinions for or against rebranding depending on their emotional connections to the old brand.These results extend the theory on international rebranding after M&As by demonstrating that the B2B context requires different prioritizations than consumer goods rebranding. The study shows how various stakeholders respond throughout the rebranding process. Firms can plan their rebranding process in mind that both brand image and brand awareness are important for brand equity during the rebranding process. However, firms need to prioritise one over the other depending on their specific audience (internal and external). Moreover, the realisation that awareness is a crucial success factor in B2B rebranding might help companies leverage brand equity in international M&As.
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| 3. |
- Aagerup, Ulf, 1969-
(författare)
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Intermediate Luxury Fashion : Brand Building via Fat Discrimination
- 2016
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Ingår i: 11th Global Brand Conference. - Saltaire, UK : Greenleaf Publishing. ; , s. 23-28
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate if intermediate luxury fashion brands discriminate overweight and obese consumers.Design/methodology/approach: 1,454 intermediate luxury garments were tallied and measured in-store in London. The physical sizes of the garments were matched to the body sizes of the population, and a gap analysis was carried out in order to determine whether the supply of clothes match the relative importance of each market segment.Findings: While previous research shows that mass-market fashion companies do not discriminate overweight and obese consumers, intermediate luxury garments come in very small sizes compared to the individuals that make up the population.Research limitations/implications: The findings show that purveyors of intermediate luxury fashion limit assortments of garments so they avoid fat typical user imagery.Practical implications: Companies that market products that are sensitive to the typical user imagery can optimize their brands by limiting undesirable customer types access to their brands, provided that 1) they have the financial strength to reject customers whose image would be detrimental to the brand, 2) the companies are active in an industry in which people would tolerate customer rejection, and 3) they sell a product that actually can be denied undesirable customers.Social implications: The study shows that fat consumers are relegated to mass-market fashion but are excluded from intermediate luxury fashion. This constitutes a social inequality.Originality/value: The result of this study provides quantitative evidence that companies control assortments to exclude undesirable typical user imagery. It also delineates under which conditions they do it. This adds to the theory of user imagery.
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| 4. |
- Abalo, Ernesto, et al.
(författare)
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Emerging Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Era of E-government : A Study of Users of ‘Swedish Public Employment Service’ on the Internet
- 2008
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Ingår i: Media and Global Divides. - Stockholm : Organizing Committee for the IAMCR Congress 2008. - 918835430X ; , s. 44-45
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the area of governmental information for and services to citizens digitalization has certainly become a buzzword. Framed within the discourses on e-government or e-governance – or different mixtures of the two – various analyses have tried to point out, or even anticipate possible consequences of the appropriation of digital technologies, mainly the internet, in governmental services.On the one hand, these analyses have pointed out a great deal of opportunities connected to the incorporation of the internet into governmental information and services. Policy makers have been quick to point to the increased accessibility as a great opportunity for the citizens; in Sweden this vision of accessibility has even been referred to as ‘24:7-governmental agencies’. Academics, among others, have also suggested that the digitalization of information and services opens up new possibilities for citizen control of governments.On the other hand, a number of problems have also been identified. For instance, the digitalization of public registers holding personal information has been interpreted as a threat to the citizens’ integrity: Will digitalization bring a new surveillance society? The most frequently debated problem, however, at least within research, has been the fear of digital divides. Will the internet create digital cleavages between different groups of citizens?So far, however, neither the hopeful nor the dystopian analyses have made enough efforts to critically evaluate their claims. Such evaluations can start from different points of departure, and in this paper the starting point is the citizens as users of governmental information and services through the internet: What patterns of inclusion and exclusion emerge as a governmental agency digitalizes its information and services by making them increasingly internet based?The paper presents statistical data from a survey of 762 unemployed citizens using the Swedish Public Employment Service, a governmental agency that has come to rely specifically heavy on internet based information and service. The initial analysis of data reveals interesting differences between social groups in terms of both perception and use of the internet – in general – and the resources offered by SPES in particular. For instance, the users’ various degrees of education is a strong, determining factor when it comes to use of internet SPES’ services.The paper starts from a conceptual elaboration of various notions of e-government and e-governance. Thereafter, the survey data is described and elaborated on before moving into a discussion of the wider significance of the findings: What does data suggest in terms of patterns of inclusion in and exclusion from a society in which governmental agencies, to an increasing extent, use the internet for their information and services?
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| 5. |
- Abdeljaber, Osama, et al.
(författare)
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Analysis of the Trajectories of Left-turning Vehicles at Signalized Intersections
- 2020
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Ingår i: Transportation Research Procedia. - : Elsevier BV. ; , s. 1288-1295, s. 1288-1295
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Internationally, an annual number of more than a million fatalities are caused by road traffic crashes, with particularly signalized intersections being crash prone locations within the highway system. An accumulation of conflicts between drivers is caused by the different movements (through and turning) from different directions at the intersection; hence, studying the trajectories of turning vehicles is an important step towards improving traffic safety performance of these facilities. In view of that, the current paper aims at providing further insight into the behaviour of left-turning vehicles (right-hand traffic rule) at signalized intersections in the State of Qatar. At first, a total of 44 trajectories of free-flowing vehicles were manually extracted from a recorded video for a single approach of Lekhwair signalized intersection in Doha City, State of Qatar. After that, the extracted trajectories were statistically analysed in an attempt to explore the factors affecting the path of left-turning vehicles at signalized intersections. The results suggest that the characteristics of the extracted paths are significantly related to the vehicle’s entry speed, minimum speed throughout its turning manoeuvre, and the lateral distance between the exit point and the curb (i.e., targeted exit lane). Provided that the speed parameters can be fairly an indication to the driving behaviour, it can be concluded that the driver’s attitude plays an important role in drawing the manoeuvre of a turning vehicle as does the pre-selection of the exit lane. Finally, the effort presented in this paper can be regarded as a way forward towards understanding the behaviour of turning vehicles at signalised intersection in the State of Qatar.
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| 6. |
- Abdeljaber, Osama, et al.
(författare)
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Dynamic Testing of a Laboratory Stadium Structure
- 2016
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Ingår i: Geotechnical and Structural Engineering Congress 2016. - Reston, VA : American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). - 9780784479742 ; , s. 1719-1728
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Studies with large physical models are a vital link between the theoretical work and field applications provided that these models are designed to represent real structures where various types and levels of uncertainties can be incorporated. While comprehensive analytical and laboratory joint studies are ongoing at Qatar University, University of Central Florida and University of Alberta, this paper presents the initial findings of dynamic testing at Qatar University. A laboratory stadium structure (grandstand simulator) has been constructed at Qatar University. Capable of housing thirty spectators, Qatar University grandstand simulator is arguably the largest laboratory stadium in the world. The structure is designed in a way that several different structural configurations can be tested in laboratory conditions to enable researchers to test newly developed damage detection algorithms. The study presented in this paper covers the finite element modeling and modal testing of the test structure.
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| 7. |
- Abella, Jaume, et al.
(författare)
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SAFEXPLAIN : Safe and Explainable Critical Embedded Systems Based on AI
- 2023
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Ingår i: DATE 23: Design, Automation And Test In Europe. - 9783981926378 ; , s. 1-6
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Deep Learning (DL) techniques are at the heart of most future advanced software functions in Critical Autonomous AI-based Systems (CAIS), where they also represent a major competitive factor. Hence, the economic success of CAIS industries (e.g., automotive, space, railway) depends on their ability to design, implement, qualify, and certify DL-based software products under bounded effort/cost. However, there is a fundamental gap between Functional Safety (FUSA) requirements on CAIS and the nature of DL solutions. This gap stems from the development process of DL libraries and affects high-level safety concepts such as (1) explainability and traceability, (2) suitability for varying safety requirements, (3) FUSA-compliant implementations, and (4) real-time constraints. As a matter of fact, the data-dependent and stochastic nature of DL algorithms clashes with current FUSA practice, which instead builds on deterministic, verifiable, and pass/fail test-based software. The SAFEXPLAIN project tackles these challenges and targets by providing a flexible approach to allow the certification - hence adoption - of DL-based solutions in CAIS building on: (1) DL solutions that provide end-to-end traceability, with specific approaches to explain whether predictions can be trusted and strategies to reach (and prove) correct operation, in accordance to certification standards; (2) alternative and increasingly sophisticated design safety patterns for DL with varying criticality and fault tolerance requirements; (3) DL library implementations that adhere to safety requirements; and (4) computing platform configurations, to regain determinism, and probabilistic timing analyses, to handle the remaining non-determinism. © 2023 EDAA.
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| 8. |
- Abiri, Najmeh, et al.
(författare)
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Variational auto-encoders with Student’s t-prior
- 2019
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Ingår i: ESANN 2019 - Proceedings : The 27th European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning - The 27th European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning. - Bruges : ESANN. - 9782875870650
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We propose a new structure for the variational auto-encoders (VAEs) prior, with the weakly informative multivariate Student’s t-distribution. In the proposed model all distribution parameters are trained, thereby allowing for a more robust approximation of the underlying data distribution. We used Fashion-MNIST data in two experiments to compare the proposed VAEs with the standard Gaussian priors. Both experiments showed a better reconstruction of the images with VAEs using Student’s t-prior distribution.
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| 9. |
- Abuella, Mohamed, 1980-, et al.
(författare)
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Data-Driven Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Energy Efficiency in Short-Sea Shipping
- 2023
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Ingår i: Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. - Cham : Springer. - 9783031434297 - 9783031434303 ; , s. 226-241
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The maritime industry is under pressure to increase energy efficiency for climate change mitigation. Navigational data, combining vessel operational and environmental measurements from onboard instruments and external sources, are critical for achieving this goal. Short-sea shipping presents a unique challenge due to the significant influence of surrounding landscape characteristics. With high-resolution onboard data increasingly accessible through IoT devices, appropriate data representations and AI/ML analytical tools are needed for effective decision support. The aim of this study is to investigate the fuel consumption estimation model’s role in developing an energy efficiency decision support tool. ML models that lacking explainability may neglect important factors and essential constraints, such as the need to meet arrival time requirements. Onboard weather measurements are compared to external forecasts, and our findings demonstrate the necessity of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques for effective decision support. Real-world data from a short-sea passenger vessel in southern Sweden, consisting of 1754 voyages over 15 months (More of data description and code sources of this study can be found in the GitHub repository at https://github.com/MohamedAbuella/ST4EESSS), are used to support our conclusions. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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| 10. |
- Aceto, Luca, et al.
(författare)
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A rule format for unit elements
- 2010
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Ingår i: SOFSEM 2010. - Berlin : Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. - 9783642112652 - 9783642112669 ; , s. 141-152
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper offers a meta-theorem for languages with a Structural Operational Semantics (SOS) in the style of Plotkin. Namely, it proposes a generic rule format for SOS guaranteeing that certain constants act as left- or right-unit elements for a set of binary operators. We show the generality of our format by applying it to a wide range of operators from the literature on process calculi.
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