• Asian Journal of Business Environment
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.13-17
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• 2016

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to evaluate two multinational companies that seem to have reconciled the two mandates of CSR and profit maximization while becoming multibillion dollar companies and examine their organizational culture and practices and their management and leadership in order to determine the controlling factors, if any, that have elicited their success while renowned for their CSR policies. Research design, data, and methodology - This is a case study, an analytical approach, which focuses on exploring and analyzing the CSR policies of Starbucks and IKEA. Results - IKEA and Starbucks considered their position in the global business environment and their social responsibilities as crucial and did more than a cursory lip service to the issues. In fact, they both took the more difficult long-term approach and tried to resolve the root causes for the environmental and social issues in their supply chain. Ultimately though, it is the ethical leadership of the top management that sets the tone for the organizational culture and its CSR. Conclusion - IKEA and Starbucks are "living proof" that a company can be successful while treating its employees and the community of suppliers and associates with respect and dignity and while making this world a better place.

• Proceedings of the Korea Inteligent Information System Society Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.461-470
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• 2005

A dynamic supply chain that is composed of many different companies with different rent roles and interests allows free joining and secession. Buyers place orders simultaneously and manufacturers should compete each other for the orders. The purpose of our paper is how to find the optimal formation of supply chain ill a global viewpoint while allowing each member company to pursue his local goal The dynamic nature of supply chain formation causes the variation of cost depending on how many orders a manufacturer would accept. We propose a multi-agent based negotiation protocol that efficiently leads to the formation of optimal supply chain without giving up maximization of the individual profit in multi-agent environment of the make-to-order industry. The goal of the negotiation is to form a supply chain to minimize the overall sum of manufacturers' manufacturing cost, and earliness cost and tardiness cost based on SET model. We compare the negotiation protocol with Branch & Bound method. Finally, the validity and performance of buyer's negotiation has been tested experimentally.

• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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• v.32 no.8
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• pp.667-674
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• 2008

In this paper, operational problems of Busan Port and competitiveness deciding factors are analyzed by field data research and interview with employees in shipping companies and terminal operation companies. In the analysis, the problems Busan Port currently has are identified as follows: 1) low price competitiveness, 2) Lack of new port back facilities and connecting transportion system 3) Lack of operation ability of container terminal 4) Inefficient pour labor supply system. In order to strengthen the competitiveness and leap up to a hub port in North East Asia, Busan port is investigated to enhance below requirements. 1) Hiring more equipment and increase productivity in terminal 2) Integrating terminal operation companies to react maximization of vessel 3) Maintaining cost advantages 4)Proactively inviting global carriers to participate in the terminal operation 5)Making business environment for Global Terminal Operator to participate in the terminal operation in order to take advantage of their global marketing power.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.127-137
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• 2014

Project Financing (PF) development project is the type which influences national economy and building industry largely because it is exerted by using borrowed money from many kinds of investors and huge amount of financial raising. Many domestic PF projects are focused mainly on the profit maximization lacking in a sufficient feasibility study. Nowadays many projects are suspending due to the global finance debacle and stagnation of real estate industry. Therefore, in this paper, risk factors of PF project are deducted and Key Success Factors (KSFs) are derived through Factor-Analysis and qualified using Fuzzy-AHP method. And through the evaluation of the derived success factors in real projects, a strong correlationship has been identified between the score of each PF success factor and the level of success and/or expected rate of return (ROR). So, the result of this paper can help decision makers of the PF projects make a better decision and give a meaningful guidance in achieving successful PF projects.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.43 no.3 s.309
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• pp.84-91
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• 2006

In this paper, we present a new segmentation algorithm for color images based on mathematical morphology and a Gaussian mixture model(GMM). We use the morphological operations to determine the number of components in a mixture model and to detect their modes of each mixture component. Next, we have adopted the GMM to represent the probability distribution of color feature vectors and used the deterministic annealing expectation maximization (DAEM) algorithm to estimate the parameters of the GMM that represents the multi-colored objects statistically. Finally, we segment the color image by using posterior probability of each pixel computed from the GMM. The experimental results show that the morphological operation is efficient to determine a number of components and initial modes of each component in the mixture model. And also it shows that the proposed DAEM provides a global optimal solution for the parameter estimation in the mixture model and the natural color images are segmented efficiently by using the GMM with parameters estimated by morphological operations and the DAEM algorithm.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.7-21
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• 1999

This paper proposes an improved training procedure in speech recognition based on the continuous density of the Hidden Markov Model (CDHMM). Of the three parameters (initial state distribution probability, state transition probability, output probability density function (p.d.f.) of state) governing the CDHMM model, we focus on the third parameter and propose an efficient algorithm that determines the p.d.f. of each state. It is known that the resulting CDHMM model converges to a local maximum point of parameter estimation via the iterative Expectation Maximization procedure. Specifically, we propose two independent algorithms that can be embedded in the segmental K -means training procedure by replacing relevant key steps; the adaptation of the number of mixture Gaussian p.d.f. and the initialization using the CDHMM parameters previously estimated. The proposed adaptation algorithm searches for the optimal number of mixture Gaussian humps to ensure that the p.d.f. is consistently re-estimated, enabling the model to converge toward the global maximum point. By applying an appropriate threshold value, which measures the amount of collective changes of weighted variances, the optimized number of mixture Gaussian branch is determined. The initialization algorithm essentially exploits the CDHMM parameters previously estimated and uses them as the basis for the current initial segmentation subroutine. It captures the trend of previous training history whereas the uniform segmentation decimates it. The recognition performance of the proposed adaptation procedures along with the suggested initialization is verified to be always better than that of existing training procedure using fixed number of mixture Gaussian p.d.f.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.99-105
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• 2017

Generally, stereo matching methods are used to estimate depth information based on color and spatial similarity. However, most depth estimation methods suffer from the occlusion region because occlusion regions cause inaccurate depth information. Moreover, they do not consider the temporal dimension when estimating the disparity. In this paper, we propose a temporal stereo matching method, considering occlusion and disregarding inaccurate temporal depth information. First, we apply a global stereo matching algorithm to estimate the depth information, we segment the image to occlusion and non-occlusion regions. After occlusion detection, we fill the occluded region with a reasonable disparity value that are obtained from neighboring pixels of the current pixel. Then, we apply a temporal disparity estimation method using the reliable information. Experimental results show that our method detects more accurate occlusion regions, compared to a conventional method. The proposed method increases the temporal consistency of estimated disparity maps and outperforms per-frame methods in noisy images.

• Journal of Korea Trade
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.23-44
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• 2022

Purpose - Recent issues such as vessel enlargement, strengthening of environmental regulations, and port smartization are expected to increase costs and intensify competition in the port industry. In the new normal era, when external growth has reached its limit, the efficient operation of ports is becoming indispensable for achieving sustainable growth. This study aims to identify the determinants of inefficiency by examining the cost structure and efficiency of container terminals in Korea and furthermore propose the political implications to derive the maximization of efficiency. Design/methodology - This study estimates the cost function of container terminal operators and identifies the efficiency of container terminals using stochastic cost frontier (SCF) in the first stage. In the second step, the SCF results are compared with the data envelopment analysis (DEA). Last, this paper proposes efficiency determinants on container terminal operation to establish appropriate strategies. Out of the 29 container terminal operators in South Korea, 13 operators participated in the survey. The translog cost function was estimated utilizing a total of 116 observations collected over the 2007-2017 period. Findings - Empirical analysis shows that economies of scale exist in Korea's container ports, which provides a rationale for the government's policy to establish the global terminal operator by integrating small terminal operators to enhance competitiveness. In addition, as a result of the determinants analysis, container throughput, weight of direct employment costs, and labour cost share have positive effects on improving cost efficiency, while inefficiency increases as the length of quay increases. More specifically, cost efficiency improves as the proportion of direct employment costs to outsourcing service costs increases. Originality/value - This study contributes to analyzing the inefficiency factors of container terminals through efficiency analysis with respect to a cost function. In addition, this study proposes the practical and political implications, such as establishing a long-term manpower pool, the application of the hybrid liner terminal system, and the construction of a statistical data system, to improve the cost inefficiency of terminal operators.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.26 no.11
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• pp.1679-1685
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• 2022

In this paper, we propose an optimal multi-hop transmission scheme to maximize the end-to-end data rate from the source to the destination node in a wireless powered communication network. The frame structure for multi-hop transmission is presented to transmit multi-hop data while harvesting energy. Then, the transmission time of each node that maximizes the end-to-end transmission rate is determined through mathematical analysis in consideration of different harvested energy and link quality among nodes. We derive an optimization problem through system modeling of the considered wireless powered multi-hop transmission, and prove that there is a global optimal solution by verifying the convexity of this optimization problem. This analysis facilitates to find the optimal solution of the considered optimization problem. The proposed optimal multi-hop transmission scheme maximizes the end-to-end rate by allocating the transmission time for each node that equalizes the transmission rates of all links.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.248-258
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• 2021

The study analyzed the financial determinants of corporate R&D intensity that require more attention from academics and practitioners in the Korean capital market. Domestic small and medium enterprises (SMEs) may face with developing substitutes by making more R&D investments in scale and scope, given the unprecedented economic conditions such as the limitation of importing core components and materials from other nation(s). KOSDAQ-listed SMEs were selected as sample data, whose R&D expenditures may be less than those of large firms during the post-global financial turmoil period (2010~2018). Static panel data model was applied, along with Tobit and stepwise regression models, for examining the validity of results. Logit, probit, and complementary log-log regressions were also employed for a relative analysis. R&D expenditures in the prior year, the interaction effect between the previous R&D intensity and high-tech sector, firm size, and growth rate were significant to determine R&D intensity. Moreover, a majority of explanatory variables were found to change between the years 2011 and 2018, while time-lagged effects between the R&D intensity and growth rate exist. Results of the study are expected to be used for future research to detect optimal levels of R&D expenditures for the value maximization of SMEs.