LinkedIn

LinkedIn () est un réseau social professionnel en ligne créé en 2002 à Mountain View en Californie. L'entreprise est valorisée à 20 milliards de dollars en 2015. Le , Microsoft annonce le rachat du réseau social pour un montant de milliards de dollars américains soit milliards d'euros. Histoire LinkedIn a été fondé en et lancé en par Reid Hoffman et Allen Blue, membres de la Mafia PayPal, et trois autres entrepreneurs. Son capital est alors détenu par les fonds d'investissement Greylock, Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Bain Capital Venture et par ses fondateurs européens. En , the McGraw Hill Companies et SAP sont entrées au capital de LinkedIn. La société est devenue bénéficiaire en avec un modèle économique reposant sur trois sources de revenus :

La publicité (18 % des ressources)
Les abonnements (20 %)
Les services de recrutement (62 %)

Le réseau a par ailleurs lancé son réseau publicitaire en , le LinkedIn Audience Network. Après avoir levé 1

Preventing Breaks in Embodiment in Immersive Virtual Reality

Thibault Serge Mario Porssut

Virtual reality (VR) is immersive not only because of visual integration, but because we can act and perform in a virtual environment (VE). Beyond the mere fact that a VR system provides images computed directly from the users' viewpoint in stereoscopy, it can also provide a natural way to interact within the VE using the entire body. Full-body motion capture allows the user's movement to be mapped to a virtual body. Such a mapping may let users feel in control of (sense of agency), own (sense of body ownership) and locate themselves inside this virtual body (sense of self-location), thus leading them to feel embodied in this virtual body whenever these conditions are met (sense of embodiment (SoE)). Hence the integration of a full body avatar in VR is essential, as it brings even more; experiencing being someone else, train to recover mobility or having superhuman abilities. Most importantly, the avatar mediates the virtual nature of the VE to make it seamless for the user. Thus, this thesis focuses on helping the users execute complex movements in VR by applying a distortion to their movements. However, such a distortion is efficient only if users, when assisted, do not experience a break in embodiment (BiE), i.e., do not abruptly lose their sense of embodiment. Moreover, the way the virtual body is perceived is not consistent between users and some users might accept or reject a virtual body more easily than others. Therefore, this thesis explores how to prevent a BiE while distorting users' movement and adapting the VR experience to each individual. To this end, we designed a system combining brain-computer interface and machine learning to detect when users experience a BiE, compute users' preferences, and adapt the VR application's parameters. We first identified the user`s threshold for perceiving a movement distortion in some critical contexts, such as articular limits. We designed a new distortion to help users execute a complex movement. We introduced a method based on machine learning to find users' preferences when using our new distortion. We also established a link between the brain's error monitoring mechanism and the cognitive process of embodiment. This link exposed a new implicit EEG marker indicating when users experience a BiE. Finally, we designed a system to calibrate the distortion implicitly based on users' preferences with all these elements. This system first consists of detecting a BiE during a continuous movement thanks to state-of-the-art brain-computer interface algorithms. Our machine learning method then computes users' preferences, and the distortion is adapted dynamically. This original approach demonstrates the use of an implicit feedback loop to help users while preventing any BiE. Our framework opens an exciting perspective for personalized and self-adapting embodiment systems.

EPFL2021

IT Investment and its impacts

Shameem Hasan

This thesis empirically explored the impacts of IT investment on three different scenarios under the common denominator / threads of IT investments. It comprises three different essays on the impacts of IT investments. IT investments and its impact on many aspects of the firms are well known - like performance / productivity, output, market value etc. But I looked into areas that were not explored before and examined events that didnât take place after the advent and integration of Information Technology â like the past financial crisis. The main contribution of my dissertation is to examine how IT investments helps in the debt market, how it helps firms fare comparatively better during crisis period and how CEO characteristics influence the well-established existing link between IT investment and Innovation intensity. The first essay examines the effect of IT investment on the cost of bank loan for firms. We argue that IT affects the decision of banks through three mechanisms: wealth effect, risk effect, and information effect. First, IT investment serves as a signal for higher future revenue and lower operational costs, thus greater future cash flows. Second, on one hand, IT may be able to reduce the risk of being locked out to competition or adverse situations; on the other hand, IT investment itself can bring risk to business. Last, the use of IT can lead to better information quality and thus reduce the information asymmetry between firms and banks. Using a sample of 270 firms between the year of 1991 and 2006, we find that IT investment is associated with lower interest rate from banks. More important, we find the strength of this relationship is contingent upon the role of IT in the industry and time period. In my second essay, the goal was to investigate whether IT investment contributed to better or worse performance during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. We took the available data for U.S. public companies (the final sample comprises 570 companies) and traced IT investments made in the years prior to the crisis period, we checked the impact of IT investments on the annual stock returns and relative changes in return (as well as for book values). After controlling for relevant risk and other independent variables during the 2007-2009 periods, we found evidence that indicates that although most of the firms suffered during the crisis period, expenditure in IT was significantly associated with relatively better performance for sample firms during the crisis period. The third essay brings in the role of CEO to examine whether CEOâs characteristics affects the already established link between IT investments and Innovation activities. We constructed data from multiple sources; we also developed empirical model to test our hypothesis and ran a series of regression tests. We find that CEOâs managerial ability and risk-taking incentive (determined by compensation scheme) are complements for IT investment. Thus for CEOs with lower ability and/or lower risk-taking incentive, firms can still achieve higher innovation efficiency by increasing expenditure in IT. On the other hand, CEOâs ownership of the firm substitutes the link. CEO with larger ownership enhances firmâs innovation efficiency by due diligence, but not necessarily through the channel of IT investment. In together, this paper shows that CEO is an important and significant factor in the conversion of IT investment to innovation efficiency.

EPFL2018

IT Investment and its impacts

Shameem Hasan

EPFL2018

Preventing Breaks in Embodiment in Immersive Virtual Reality

Thibault Serge Mario Porssut

EPFL2021

Preventing Breaks in Embodiment in Immersive Virtual Reality

IT Investment and its impacts

Improving magnetic particle immunoassay kinetics using long linkers

IT Investment and its impacts

Improving magnetic particle immunoassay kinetics using long linkers

Preventing Breaks in Embodiment in Immersive Virtual Reality