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The interdisciplinary nature of video networking, coupled with various recent developments in standards, proposals and applications, poses great challenges to the research and industrial communities working in this area. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a tutorial and survey on recent advances in video networking from an integrated perspective of both video signal processing and networking.

Detailed technical descriptions and insightful analysis are presented for recent and emerging video coding standards, in particular the H.264 family. The applications of selected video coding standards in emerging wireless networks are then introduced with an emphasis on scalable video streaming in multihomed mobile networks. Both research challenges and potential solutions are discussed along the description, and numerical results through simulations or experiments are provided to reveal the performances of selected coding standards and networking algorithms.

The tutorial helps to clarify the similarities and differences among the considered standards and networking applications. A number of research trends and challenges are identified, and selected promising solutions are discussed. This practice would provoke further thoughts on the development of this area and open up more research and application opportunities.

Not all the concerned video coding standards are complemented with thorough studies of networking application scenarios.

The discussed video coding standards are either playing or going to play indispensable roles in the video industry; the introduced networking scenarios bring together these standards and various emerging wireless networking paradigms towards innovative application scenarios.

The comprehensive overview and critiques on existing standards and application approaches offer a valuable reference for researchers and system developers in related research and industrial communities.

This study aims to examine the connection between strategy‐linked outsourcing goals and measures of outsourcing performance. The strategies of growth, cost, and differentiation (core competence) are examined in terms of their relationship with goal achievement and cost performance measures.

Regression analysis and ANOVA were applied to survey data collected from 165 purchasing executives.

Findings support a positive relationship between goal intensity for a single strategy and achievement of goals related to that strategy. Findings also suggest that firms with high commitment to growth and cost strategies tend to achieve cost‐related performance at higher levels than firms with a lower commitment to same. Finally, the findings also suggest that firms pursuing a single or dominant strategy achieve lower levels of cost saving performance, as compared with firms pursuing a “balanced” approach that emphasizes two or three different strategies in roughly equal measure.

This study relies on very limited performance variables, mainly cost reduction. Additional variables that addressed growth and core competence would provide additional insight on the link between outsourcing and performance.

Goal intensity is positively related to higher performance on desired outsourcing outcomes. Firms demonstrated greater success in their ability to pursue multiple outsourcing strategies over firms pursuing a single strategy.

The link between strategy and outsourcing performance had not been empirically established.

Light field images (LFIs) have gained popularity as a technology to increase the field of view (FoV) of plenoptic cameras since they can capture information about light rays with a large FoV. Wide FoV causes light field (LF) data to increase rapidly, which restricts the use of LF imaging in image processing, visual analysis and user interface. Effective LFI coding methods become of paramount importance. This paper aims to eliminate more redundancy by exploring sparsity and correlation in the angular domain of LFIs, as well as mitigate the loss of perceptual quality of LFIs caused by encoding.

This work proposes a new efficient LF coding framework. On the coding side, a new sampling scheme and a hierarchical prediction structure are used to eliminate redundancy in the LFI's angular and spatial domains. At the decoding side, high-quality dense LF is reconstructed using a view synthesis method based on the residual channel attention network (RCAN).

In three different LF datasets, our proposed coding framework not only reduces the transmitted bit rate but also maintains a higher view quality than the current more advanced methods.

(1) A new sampling scheme is designed to synthesize high-quality LFIs while better ensuring LF angular domain sparsity. (2) To further eliminate redundancy in the spatial domain, new ranking schemes and hierarchical prediction structures are designed. (3) A synthetic network based on RCAN and a novel loss function is designed to mitigate the perceptual quality loss due to the coding process.

The purpose of this study is to develop an in-depth understanding of the overall process of facilitating co-creation of e-government services, focusing on the government's role in fostering citizen engagement.

This study conducted a meta-synthesis of qualitative case studies encompassing analyses on a case-specific level followed by syntheses on a cross-study level.

Through meta-synthesis, the study developed an integrated framework, the process theory view of enabling co-creation of e-government services, illustrating how co-creation could be initiated and facilitated by the government.

By providing critical insights into co-creation steps, the process theory view offers a holistic theoretical understanding of enabling co-creation by identifying factors driving and motivating governments to initiate co-creation activities, interpreting the prerequisites for co-creation and the importance of impact assessment.

This study offers important implications for public authorities, administrators and policymakers by helping them enhance their knowledge base on the co-creation process to facilitate a higher level of collaboration between citizens and government for effective and efficient public service delivery through e-government.

While it is widely acknowledged that citizen engagement is crucial for improving and transforming the development and delivery of e-government services, it is equally recognized as a challenging and complex task. Through a meta-synthesis of qualitative case studies, this study is one of the first to develop a process theory view for offering a holistic understanding and crucial insights for addressing the concerns over the co-creation of e-government services.

The conceptual synthesis of the accepted bodies of knowledge in a culture provides a sense of meaning in existence, a viable image of the future, and individual and collective motivations. In our age, the dominant bodies of knowledge are fragmented and, although they are more accurate than ever before in limited domains, they fail to guide the imagination and inspire purposive action. To rectify this situation we need to develop a coherent and explicit conceptual synthesis that is based on science but extends beyond the current range of validated scientific theories, overcoming the noxious separation of the factual and the moral, the empirical and the mystical, the sensate and the affective. General systems theory, a metadiscipline created specifically for the purpose of integrating scientific research and theories, is a highly qualified instrument for promoting the required science‐based conceptual synthesis. Efforts in this direction are aided by the intrinsic tendency within science to correct for overspecialization and fragmentation through a search for integrative general theories, and by the rising perception of societal need for integrated bodies of knowledge, capable of coping with the increasing complexity of contemporary problems.

The purpose of this paper is to contrast two views, a transformative and a coordinative view, on business process management (BPM) in order to propose an integrated view.

The investigation has been made with the purpose of developing a synthesis of these two views working as thesis and antithesis. The core of such dialectic approach is to create a synthesis that transcends contradictions of the thesis and antithesis. Pros and cons in the two perspectives have been identified and an integrated process view has been proposed, as well as operationalised into modelling methods. The integrated process view comprises a number of definitions of different process types (business process, assignment process, transformation process and provision process).

The paper derives characteristics of the transformative as well as the coordinative view. These are used as the basis for pinpointing important characteristics of an integrative view. These characteristics put forward coordination in relation to transformation as well as assignment processes in relation to other types of processes (such as transformation processes and provision processes)

The proposed integrated view has practical implications in the work of modelling, analysing and designing business processes.

The value of the paper is that it presents a complementary view on business processes derived from two existing views. In the paper, coordination aspects are seen as superior to transformation.

The purpose of this paper is to address the qualitative synthesis and use of existing management research to inform management practice.

Three methods of qualitative synthesis, each with contrasting methodologies, are presented and their potential contribution in the management field explored.

Professional practice could be improved if practitioners had better access to the products of a large body of management research. Evidence‐based reviews of the literature in the management field could form a crucial bridge between research and practice. The task of reviewing and synthesising qualitative studies comprises a key challenge.

The key issues in conducting qualitative synthesis are highlighted and the barriers and enablers to the application of the product of qualitative synthesis in practice are discussed.

The paper stimulates debate about what counts as an effective synthesis of qualitative research and highlights the growing array of approaches. In so doing the paper presents new models for the production of evidence‐based reviews.

Challenges traditional models and approaches to performance management and presents an alternative methodology for developing performance objectives and managing performance. Argues that existing approaches generally do not succeed in meeting their objectives, are flawed in implementation, act to demotivate staff, and are often perceived as forms of control which are inappropriately used to “police” performance. Suggests that the alternative approach utilized in the case study organization, the British School of Osteopathy, is particularly appropriate for professional staff in the not‐for‐profit sector. Attempts to incorporate ethical concerns over performance management and, using a stakeholder approach, involves those affected in a dialogue over the design of performance measures and methods for performance improvement. Addresses four main ethical principles, namely: respect for the individual, mutual respect, procedural fairness and transparency of decision making.

Much has been written about how methods of working and communicating can improve the productivity of innovation for industry. Less has been related to this from the overall development of science and policies that assist this. The changing organisational context of industrial research brings the need for scientific publishers to reinvent themselves for this market segment. Scientific communication, including one of its key functions, awareness, is examined and it is concluded that functions and processes in scientific communication may be organised more efficiently to increase the productivity of industrial research. The new context of virtual communities, exploiting the opportunities for interactivity, provides the organisational basis for introducing new methods for inculcating new approaches to knowledge management, for innovation in industry to occur more effectively. An approach to better understanding knowledge synthesis and the potential role of the publisher, as communications facilitator, is discussed.