Concordia University

About: Concordia University is a education organization based out in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Control theory & Population. The organization has 13565 authors who have published 31084 publications receiving 783525 citations. The organization is also known as: Sir George Williams University & Loyola College, Montreal.

The critical success factors in the client‐consulting relationship

Abstract: Purpose – The primary intent of this study is to examine recent projects involving external management consultants at a North American telecommunications firm, from the employees’ point of view, to measure the extent to which the aforementioned “critical success factors” were perceived as being evident. A secondary purpose was to examine which, if any, of these factors differ between more or less successful consulting projects with a view to building a model to predict employees’ perceptions of the level of the projects’ success. A third objective was to gather employee opinions on the use of management consultancy and other factors that might contribute to the success of consulting projects.Design/methodology/approach – A total of 102 employees responded to a questionnaire consisting of 59 questions. A model including six independent variables was able to predict overall rating of project success, with an adjusted R2=0.68, F=27.81 (p<0.0001). The significant variables, in order of importance, were: the s...

The Coupling of Ownership and Control and the Allocation of Financial Resources: Evidence from Hong Kong

Abstract: Theoretical and empirical research regarding the impact of corporate ownership on the behaviour and performance of firms have typically focused on consequences stemming from the separation of ownership and control. While large scale business enterprise characterized by such a separation is dominant in the US, Japan and the UK, firms in which ownership and control is coupled in the hands of individuals and their families are apparent in many other large developed economies and are dominant in most emerging markets. This paper examines consequences regarding the generation and allocation of financial resources stemming from the coupling of ownership and control among Hong Kong based firms. In doing so, we join insights from the economics literature regarding the incentive and risk bearing consequences of coupled ownership and control with the extant management, sociology and history literatures regarding Chinese family business groups and develop and six hypotheses pertaining to patterns in the allocation of financial resources. Results indicate that coupled ownership and control is positively related with dividend payout levels and financial liquidity while it is negatively related to investments in capital expenditures. Consistent with these results, we also find that coupled ownership and control is positively related to short-term (accounting) profitability.

Age estimation using Active Appearance Models and Support Vector Machine regression

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel age estimation technique that combines Active Appearance Models (AAMs) and Support Vector Machines (SVMs), to dramatically improve the accuracy of age estimation over the current state-of-the-art techniques. In this method, characteristics of the input images, face image, are interpreted as feature vectors by AAMs, which are used to discriminate between childhood and adulthood, prior to age estimation. Faces classified as adults are passed to the adult age-determination function and the others are passed to the child age-determination function. Compared to published results, this method yields the highest accuracy recognition rates, both in overall mean-absolute error (MAE) and mean-absolute error for the two periods of human development: childhood and adulthood.

Exploring the h-index at the author and journal levels using bibliometric data of productive consumer scholars and business-related journals respectively

Abstract: Using both author-level and journal-level data, Hirsch's h-index is shown to possess substantial heuristic value in that it yields accurate results whilst requiring minimal informational acquisition effort. As expected, the h-index of productive consumer scholars correlated strongly with their total citation counts. Furthermore, the h-indices as obtained via ISI/Thompson and GoogleScholar were highly correlated albeit the latter yielded higher values. Finally, using a database of business-relevant journals, a significant correlation was found between the journals' h-indices and their citation impact scores.

Objective Evaluation of Multiple Sclerosis Lesion Segmentation using a Data Management and Processing Infrastructure

Abstract: We present a study of multiple sclerosis segmentation algorithms conducted at the international MICCAI 2016 challenge. This challenge was operated using a new open-science computing infrastructure. This allowed for the automatic and independent evaluation of a large range of algorithms in a fair and completely automatic manner. This computing infrastructure was used to evaluate thirteen methods of MS lesions segmentation, exploring a broad range of state-of-theart algorithms, against a high-quality database of 53 MS cases coming from four centers following a common definition of the acquisition protocol. Each case was annotated manually by an unprecedented number of seven different experts. Results of the challenge highlighted that automatic algorithms, including the recent machine learning methods (random forests, deep learning, …), are still trailing human expertise on both detection and delineation criteria. In addition, we demonstrate that computing a statistically robust consensus of the algorithms performs closer to human expertise on one score (segmentation) although still trailing on detection scores.