A system framework for gamified Cost Engineering

This study develops a system framework and an enterprise IT solution for integrating gamification elements to efficiently implement and continuously perform Cost Engineering. Cost Engineering is a systematic approach to manage knowledge and competencies regarding costs reduction measures throughout the life cycle of products and is technology, resource and time intensive. Gamification as a non-monetary multidimensional incentive system holds great potential to implement and establish Cost Engineering in a novel and less resource demanding manner and stipulate knowledge sharing and dissemination. Building on a review of the relevant literature we conducted 20 interviews with experts from eight companies of the German and Austrian high-tech manufacturing industry to examine the system requirements from an organizational perspective. Analyzing the interviews, we found that companies need a flexible platform where the game elements help to align management objectives with concrete tasks, meet legislative regulations and have different evaluation methods. Our proposed system framework combines the organizational and IT requirements with gamification elements to efficiently steer Cost Engineering methods and best manage knowledge and competencies.     

Robust Adaptive Neural Control for a Class of Time‐Varying Delay Systems with Backlash‐like Hysteresis Input

This paper proposes a robust adaptive dynamic surface control (DSC) scheme for a class of time‐varying delay systems with backlash‐like hysteresis input. The main features of the proposed DSC method are that 1) by using a transformation function, the prescribed transient performance of the tracking error can be guaranteed; 2) by estimating the norm of the unknown weighted vector of the neural network, the computational burden can be greatly reduced; 3) by using the DSC method, the explosion of complexity problem is eliminated. It is proved that the proposed scheme guarantees all the closed‐loop signals being uniformly ultimately bounded. The simulation results show the validity of the proposed control scheme.     

Discriminative sequential association latent dirichlet allocation for visual recognition

Graphical models have been employed in a wide variety of computer vision tasks. Assignments of latent variables in typical models usually suffer the confused explanation in sampling way. In this paper we present discriminative sequential association Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a novel statistical model for the task of visual recognition, and especially focus on the case of few training examples. By introducing the switching variables and formulating the direct discriminative analysis, the sequential associations are considered as priori to establish a relevance determination mechanism to obtain the reasonable assignments of latent variables and avoid the invalid labeling oscillations. We demonstrate the power of our model on two common-used datasets, and the experiment results show that our model can achieve better performances with efficient convergence and give well interpretations of specific topic assignments at the same time.     

Bidirectional teleportation of a pure EPR state by using GHZ states

In the present paper, a novel bidirectional quantum teleportation protocol is proposed. By using entanglement swapping technique, two GHZ states are shared as a quantum channel between Alice and Bob as legitimate users. In this scheme, based on controlled-not operation, single-qubit measurement, and appropriate unitary operations, two users can simultaneously transmit a pure EPR state to each other, While, in the previous protocols, the users can just teleport a single-qubit state to each other via more than four-qubit state. Therefore, the proposed scheme is economical compared with previous protocols.     

Categories of quantum and classical channels

We introduce a construction that turns a category of pure state spaces and operators into a category of observable algebras and superoperators. For example, it turns the category of finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces into the category of finite-dimensional C*-algebras and completely positive maps. In particular, the new category contains both quantum and classical channels, providing elegant abstract notions of preparation and measurement. We also consider nonstandard models that can be used to investigate which notions from algebraic quantum information theory are operationally justifiable.     

Scheme for implementing multitarget qubit controlled-NOT gate of photons and controlled-phase gate of electron spins via quantum dot-microcavity coupled system

We propose a deterministic scheme to implement the multiqubit controlled-NOT gate of photons and multiqubit controlled-phase gate of electron spins with one control qubit and multiple target qubits using quantum dots in double-sided optical cavities. The scheme is based on spin selective photon reflection from the cavity and can be achieved in a nondestructive way. We assess the feasibility of the scheme and show that the gates can be implemented with high average fidelities by choosing the realistic system parameters appropriately. The scheme is useful in quantum information processing such as entanglement preparation, quantum error correction, and quantum algorithms.     

Upper bound on singlet fraction of two-qubit mixed entangled states

We demonstrate a new method to achieve the maximum singlet fraction using an entangled mixed two-qubit state as a resource. For this, we establish a tight upper bound on singlet fraction and show that the maximal singlet fraction obtained in Verstraete and Verschelde (Phys Rev Lett 90:097901(1)–097901(4), 2003) does not attain the upper bound on the singlet fraction derived here. Interestingly, we found that the required upper bound can, in fact, be achieved using local filtering operations.     

Lower bound on concurrence for arbitrary-dimensional tripartite quantum states

In this paper, we study the concurrence of arbitrary-dimensional tripartite quantum states. An explicit operational lower bound of concurrence is obtained in terms of the concurrence of substates. A given example shows that our lower bound may improve the well-known existing lower bounds of concurrence. The significance of our result is to get a lower bound when we study the concurrence of arbitrary \(m\otimes n\otimes l\)-dimensional tripartite quantum states.     

Exploring and exploiting a historical corpus for Arabic

This paper presents a historical Arabic corpus named HAC. At this early embryonic stage of the project, we report about the design, the architecture and some of the experiments which we have conducted on HAC. The corpus, and accordingly the search results, will be represented using a primary XML exchange format. This will serve as an intermediate exchange tool within the project and will allow the user to process the results offline using some external tools. HAC is made up of Classical Arabic texts that cover 1600 years of language use; the Quranic text, Modern Standard Arabic texts, as well as a variety of monolingual Arabic dictionaries. The development of this historical corpus assists linguists and Arabic language learners to effectively explore, understand, and discover interesting knowledge hidden in millions of instances of language use. We used techniques from the field of natural language processing to process the data and a graph-based representation for the corpus. We provided researchers with an export facility to render further linguistic analysis possible.