‘Mind the Gap’: diagnosing the relationship between the IT organisation and the rest of the business

The senior management of many organisations are continually disappointed with the benefits and value which they perceive they are getting from their investments in IT. This frustration with IT, and in particular with the IT function, has seen many organisations choose to rid themselves of the ‘problem’ altogether by outsourcing IT activities to a third party. The fact that there is a separate organisational unit responsible for IT activities has led to the emergence of gap between this so called IT organisation and the rest of the business. Culture is often used to explain the gap as if this somehow justifies an organisations inability to effectively leverage IT. However, the premise underlying this article is that culture is an excuse for rather than a cause of ineffective application of IT for business benefits and value. The clear message from this article is that achieving high performance from IT is not just about the IT function's ability to build, maintain and deliver systems, but is an organisational wide activity requiring a strong business/IT partnership. A framework grounded in the research literature, which identifies the elements to manage in creating high performance from IT, is developed and operationalised. The findings of an exploratory survey are presented and research and practitioner implications developed.     

What Do the Sun and the Sky Tell Us About the Camera?

As the main observed illuminant outdoors, the sky is a rich source of information about the scene. However, it is yet to be fully explored in computer vision because its appearance in an image depends on the sun position, weather conditions, photometric and geometric parameters of the camera, and the location of capture. In this paper, we analyze two sources of information available within the visible portion of the sky region: the sun position, and the sky appearance. By fitting a model of the predicted sun position to an image sequence, we show how to extract camera parameters such as the focal length, and the zenith and azimuth angles. Similarly, we show how we can extract the same parameters by fitting a physically-based sky model to the sky appearance. In short, the sun and the sky serve as geometric calibration targets, which can be used to annotate a large database of image sequences. We test our methods on a high-quality image sequence with known camera parameters, and obtain errors of less that 1% for the focal length, 1° for azimuth angle and 3° for zenith angle. We also use our methods to calibrate 22 real, low-quality webcam sequences scattered throughout the continental US, and show deviations below 4% for focal length, and 3° for the zenith and azimuth angles. Finally, we demonstrate that by combining the information available within the sun position and the sky appearance, we can also estimate the camera geolocation, as well as its geometric parameters. Our method achieves a mean localization error of 110 km on real, low-quality Internet webcams. The estimated viewing and illumination geometry of the scene can be useful for a variety of vision and graphics tasks such as relighting, appearance analysis and scene recovery.     

A Note on the Difference between the Camera Resection and the PnP Problem

The camera resection and the PnP problem are both of great importance in computer vision field.However,these two fundamentally different problems are often mistaken one another in the literature.In this short note,the essential differences of these two problems are clarified,and such a clarification seems helpful for those who are working on the problems.     

Respond to the input equipment in the VC

The ways to program the respond to the input equipment in Visual C++ program language are introduced in this paper. It also presents all the examples for keyboard, mouse, and joystick.     

Shaping the drivers’ interaction: how the new vehicle systems match the technological requirements and the human needs

Although it is not always possible to derive from statistics the causes of an accident, data clearly show that they are mostly due to a lack of driver’s perception, with high direct and indirect social costs for society (Hutchinson in Road accidents statistics, Rumsby Scientific Publishing, 1987; Kawai in Convergence 1994, Conference Proceedings, 1994; Boussuge in Bilan et perspectives, Revue Gen. des Routes et des Aerodromes, N. 726, 1995). Therefore, a strong integration among all the actors involved (i.e., the drivers, the vehicle or technical system in general and the driving environment) is quite necessary. From the beginning of 1980s, there has been a shift in system concept design, moving from a technological approach towards a human-centred design approach (Norman and Draper 1986; Rouse 1991). Firstly this approach was applied to the human–computer interaction domain, and has also been extended towards complex and automated technological systems (Sheridan in Telerobotics, automation, and human supervisory control, MIT Press, 1992; Scerbo in Human performance in automated systems: theory and applications, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996) in several domains as, among the others, automotive (Michon in Generic intelligent driver support, Taylor & Francis, 1994) and industrial plants (Cacciabue in Giuseppe mantovani ergonomia, II Mulino, 2000). According to these perspectives, the role of user’s needs in the design process of a certain system becomes crucial; nevertheless, the technological requirements, i.e., the so-called “machine needs” should maintain a role of which the designer should be totally aware. Otherwise, the risk is to fail the design process making a system incoherent and ineffective. Thus, this paper aims at presenting such types of needs, the mutual interaction between machine and users, as well as the interaction of both with the surrounding environment. The work is based on several experiences conducted in the automotive domain.

Naturality of the conditional and the recursion ∗

In a class of categories, including E. Manes's assertional ones, the control structures if-then-else and repeat-until are modeled as natural transformations of suitable functors. This context show how the three basic pieces of any structured programming language (concatenation, conditional and recursion) share naturality.     

EFTPoS– the engine of the card business

The slow but increasing spread of chip-based payment cards, the introduction of the euro and the recent flurry of panic over the security of the smart card payment system in France offers new opportunities to point-of-sale terminal manufacturers.     

Crossing the Line or Making the Case?

Anyone who has searched the Internet for products and services has experienced the wonderful assortment of products, services and resources that can be found online. We are witnessing the rapid growth of truly global commerce with unparalleled opportunity for choice and selection, competition and more. However, when criminals operating in another nation attack, the operators of E-commerce systems confront one of the most serious downsides of global operations since there is little or no commonality on how police officials in various nations will respond. Possible conflicts can arise in the absence of common codes of criminal conduct, standards of collaboration and consensus as to how the “civilized” forces of law and order will proceed against the denizens of the “dark side”.     

Analysis of the “Hiring Above the Median” Selection Strategy for the Hiring Problem

This paper gives a precise mathematical analysis of the behaviour of “hiring above the median” strategies for a problem in the context of “on-line selection under uncertainty” that is known (at least in computer science related literature) as the “hiring problem”. Here a sequence of candidates is interviewed sequentially and based on the “score” of the current candidate an immediate decision whether to hire him or not has to be made. For “hiring above the median” selection rules, a new candidate will be hired if he has a score better than the median score of the already recruited candidates. Under the natural probabilistic model assuming that the ranks of the first n candidates are forming a random permutation, we show exact and asymptotic results for various quantities of interest to describe the dynamics of the hiring process and the quality of the hired staff. In particular we can characterize the limiting distribution of the number of hired candidates of a sequence of n candidates, which reveals the somewhat surprising effect, that slight changes in the selection rule, i.e., assuming the “lower” or the “upper” median as the threshold, have a strong influence on the asymptotic behaviour. Thus we could extend considerably previous analyses (Krieger et al., Ann. Appl. Probab., 17:360–385, 2007; Broder et al., Proceedings of the 19th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), pp. 1184–1193, ACM/SIAM, New York/Philadelphia, 2008 and Archibald and Martinez, Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC 2009), Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, pp. 63–76, 2009) of such selection rules. Furthermore, we discuss connections between the hiring process and the Chinese restaurant process introduced by Pitman (Combinatorial Stochastic Processes, Springer, Berlin, 2006).     

Technology in the classroom: Burning the bridges to the gaps in gender-biased education?

This review introduces the concepts of gender bias and technology in education. It discusses the interaction between the two in the educational setting and the effects this interaction may have on teachers, students and materials used in the classroom. It is argued that areas in the educational setting that have been focused on as materials and practices that are biased have also been translated into the use of educational technology that is biased. This review makes the point that biases that have been pointed out and studied within the educational system have not been solved by the use of technology (as some had hoped). In fact, the biases have simply been converted into a new form and may have actually served to undo some the bias-eliminating practices that had been starting to take place in classrooms. Implications and suggestions for change are discussed.     

Can the World-Wide Web Bridge the Semantic Gap?

The World-Wide Web provides tremendous resources in Multimedia Data, Ubiquitous Interconnection, and Storage/Computing Power. In this short note, we raise but not answer the question: Can the WWW help bridge the Semantic Gap in Computer Vision? Even if the answer turns out to be NO, we hope that by exploring these resources, we may gain a deeper understanding of the Semantic Gap challenge.     

Understanding the success of strategic IT benchmarking—Exploring the role of the individual level

IT organizations use strategic IT benchmarking (SITBM) to improve business-IT alignment or for developing IT strategies. However, SITBM often does not result in the desired outcomes. Because the extant literature does not contribute to improving SITBM success, we conduct a deductive-inductive study to understand which factors distinguish successful and unsuccessful SITBM. We find that traditional project-level factors do not explain SITBM success; they are necessary but not sufficient. Rather, we show that the individual level is instrumental for explaining SITBM success, especially by ensuring the buy-in of relevant project team members – a perspective not yet discussed by pertinent literature.     

on the go

品牌、广告、LOGO,视觉、形象、感性。当读图时代不可避免地到来,企业的形象识别,已跳离了标志的属性,无不关乎企业品质,俨然成为企业的精神图腾和价值地图。在消费时代,并不缺乏视觉饕餮,但是,我们觉得,珍馐美馔,更适合用细嚼慢咽的方式,来咂摸滋味,吸取营养。以后每周,我们将奉上一道精心烹饪的视觉大菜,色、香、味、营养,一应俱全。当然我们也希望您,把让自己齿颊留芳的菜品,写一纸小文,推荐给我们,与更多的读者分享。     

On the Formalization of the Modal μ-Calculus in the Calculus of Inductive Constructions

We present a natural deduction proof system for the propositional modal μ-calculus and its formalization in the calculus of inductive constructions. We address several problematic issues, such as the use of higher-order abstract syntax in inductive sets in the presence of recursive constructors, and the formalization of modal (sequent-style) rules and of context sensitive grammars. The formalization can be used in the system Coq, providing an experimental computer-aided proof environment for the interactive development of error-free proofs in the modal μ-calculus. The techniques we adopt can be readily ported to other languages and proof systems featuring similar problematic issues.     

rating the development

. The fundamental and comprehensive train of thought steering investment and financing patterns was briefed at the beginning of this paper. After that, some     

in the Late Jurassic, especially the huge volume

stage, the collapse arose when the transitional magma chamber was emptied. Subvolcanic rooks intruded along the collapsed ring faults. The volcanic complex is mainly composed of fragmentizing phenocrystic rhyolites.The volcanic activities began with the acid, with the high     

From the Editor-in-Chief

ItismygreathonortobenamedtosucceedProfessorXiaPeisuasEditor-in-ChiefoftheJournalofComputerScienceandTechnology(JCST).ProfessorXiaPeisuisapioneerintheresearchanddevelopmentofcomputersinChina.SincethepublicationofthefirstissueofJCSTinJanuary1986,sheandthepreviousEditorialBd.ardshavedevotedmucheffortstoimprovingthequalityofthisjournal.AnumberofdistinguishedcomputerscientistsovertheworldhavejoinedtheEditorialBoard,andJCSThaJsestablishedareputationforhighqualityandrelevance.WeoweProfes…