Understanding luxury in the premium automotive industry

This paper summarises the findings of investigations to date in understanding what luxury and premiumness mean to the high-end automotive consumer. Existing writings on luxury and premiumness are considered. An exploratory study was carried out in two countries using 309 respondents and 18 prestige cars. A "stream of consciousness" approach was used to capture respondent's views on a selection of vehicles. The codified transcripts were used to identify key differences between the top and bottom rated vehicles, in terms of the nature and quantity of emotional responses elicited. This paper describes some of these key product differences that were self-reported to impact upon a luxury response. Finally, suggestions are made as to the next steps required for this research. © 2007 ACM.

Understanding ground deformation mechanisms during multi-propped excavation in soft clay

To maximize the utility of high land cost in urban development, underground space is commonly exploited, both to reduce the load acting on the ground and to increase the space available. The execution of underground constructions requires the use of appropriate retaining wall and bracing systems. Inadequate support systems have always been a major concern, as any excessive ground movement induced during excavation could cause damage to neighboring structures, resulting in delays, disputes and cost overruns. Experimental findings on the effect of wall stiffness, depth of the stiff stratum away from the wall toe and wall toe fixity condition are presented and discussed. © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group.

Discriminative spoken language understanding using word confusion networks

Current commercial dialogue systems typically use hand-crafted grammars for Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) operating on the top one or two hypotheses output by the speech recogniser. These systems are expensive to develop and they suffer from significant degradation in performance when faced with recognition errors. This paper presents a robust method for SLU based on features extracted from the full posterior distribution of recognition hypotheses encoded in the form of word confusion networks. Following [1], the system uses SVM classifiers operating on n-gram features, trained on unaligned input/output pairs. Performance is evaluated on both an off-line corpus and on-line in a live user trial. It is shown that a statistical discriminative approach to SLU operating on the full posterior ASR output distribution can substantially improve performance both in terms of accuracy and overall dialogue reward. Furthermore, additional gains can be obtained by incorporating features from the previous system output. © 2012 IEEE.

Predictive coding and the slowness principle: an information-theoretic approach.

Understanding the guiding principles of sensory coding strategies is a main goal in computational neuroscience. Among others, the principles of predictive coding and slowness appear to capture aspects of sensory processing. Predictive coding postulates that sensory systems are adapted to the structure of their input signals such that information about future inputs is encoded. Slow feature analysis (SFA) is a method for extracting slowly varying components from quickly varying input signals, thereby learning temporally invariant features. Here, we use the information bottleneck method to state an information-theoretic objective function for temporally local predictive coding. We then show that the linear case of SFA can be interpreted as a variant of predictive coding that maximizes the mutual information between the current output of the system and the input signal in the next time step. This demonstrates that the slowness principle and predictive coding are intimately related.

Foresight vehicle programme - Customer understanding processes in design

Customer feedback is normally fed into product design and engineering via quality surveys and therefore mainly comprises negative comments: complaints about things gone wrong. Whilst eradication of such problems will result in a feeling of satisfaction in existing customers, it will not instil the sense of delight required to attract conquest buyers. CUPID's aim is to conceive and evaluate ideas to stimulate product desirability through the provision of delightful features and execution. By definition, surprise and delight features cannot be foreseen, so we have to understand sensory appeal and, therefore, the "hidden" voice of the customer. Copyright © 2002 Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc.

Understanding the kink formation in GaAs/InAs heterostructural nanowires

The kinks formation in heterostructural nanowires was observed to be dominant when InAs nanowires were grown on GaAs nanowires. Nanowires were grown through vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) mechanism in an MOCVD (metalorganic chemical vapor deposition) reactor. GaAs nanowires were grown in [1 1 1 ]B direction on a GaAs (1 1 1 )B substrate. When InAs nanowires grown on the GaAs nanowires, most of the InAs nanowires changed their growth directions from [1 1 1 ]B to other 〈111〉B directions. The kinks formation is ascribed to the large compressive misfit strain at the GaAs/InAs interface (7.2% lattice mismatch between GaAs and InAs) and the high mobility of indium species during MOCVD growth. The in-depth analysis of the kinks formation was done by growing InAs for short times on the GaAs nanowires and characterizing the samples. The hindrance to compressively strain InAs to form coherent layers with GaAs pushed the InAs/Au interfaces to the sides of the GaAs nanowires growth ends. New InAs/Au interfaces have generated at the sides of GaAs nanowires, due to lateral growth of InAs on GaAs nanowires. These new interfaces led the InAs nanowires growth in other 〈111〉B directions. The morphological and structural features of these heterostructural kinked nanowires were characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) techniques. © 2006 IEEE.