Automated identification of different lead users regarding the innovation process

Lead users are often established in an organizational innovation process to attenuate the difficulties a company faces, such as high costs or the obscurity of customers’ needs. But to benefit from these lead users a major challenge is to characterize and identify them especially in the fast-moving world of social media. Therefore, we aim to design a tool to identify lead users automatically for the two innovation phases (“Idea generation” and “Development”) by combining different approaches such as social network analysis, topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Thus, we consulted the design science approach and applied our artifact to 11,481 contributions of an online digital platform. The technical realization of the six different characteristics and their respective weighting according to the different phases of the innovation process resulted in different lead users and showed the necessity of distinguishing between them. Our results were evaluated and confirmed by the identified lead users and an expert. Hence, our investigation contributes to both practice and theory (kernel theories and design theory) alike.

     

Evaluating the reduced flight deck crew concept using cognitive work analysis and social network analysis: comparing normal and data-link outage scenarios

Cognition, Technology & Work - The aim of the present paper is to demonstrate how a subset of methods from Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) in combination with Social Network Analysis (SNA) can be...     

On techniques for angle compensation in nonideal iris recognition.

The popularity of the iris biometric has grown considerably over the past two to three years. Most research has been focused on the development of new iris processing and recognition algorithms for frontal view iris images. However, a few challenging directions in iris research have been identified, including processing of a nonideal iris and iris at a distance. In this paper, we describe two nonideal iris recognition systems and analyze their performance. The word "nonideal" is used in the sense of compensating for off-angle occluded iris images. The system is designed to process nonideal iris images in two steps: 1) compensation for off-angle gaze direction and 2) processing and encoding of the rotated iris image. Two approaches are presented to account for angular variations in the iris images. In the first approach, we use Daugman's integrodifferential operator as an objective function to estimate the gaze direction. After the angle is estimated, the off-angle iris image undergoes geometric transformations involving the estimated angle and is further processed as if it were a frontal view image. The encoding technique developed for a frontal image is based on the application of the global independent component analysis. The second approach uses an angular deformation calibration model. The angular deformations are modeled, and calibration parameters are calculated. The proposed method consists of a closed-form solution, followed by an iterative optimization procedure. The images are projected on the plane closest to the base calibrated plane. Biorthogonal wavelets are used for encoding to perform iris recognition. We use a special dataset of the off-angle iris images to quantify the performance of the designed systems. A series of receiver operating characteristics demonstrate various effects on the performance of the nonideal-iris-based recognition system.     

Analysis of the human immune response to vaccinia by use of a novel protein microarray suggests that antibodies recognize less than 10% of the total viral proteome

Control of smallpox by mass vaccination was one of the most effective public health measures ever employed for eradicating a devastating infectious disease. However, new methods are needed for monitoring smallpox immunity within current vulnerable populations, and for the development of replacement vaccines for use by immunocompromized or low-responding individuals. As a measure for achieving this goal, we developed a protein microarray of the vaccinia virus proteome by using high-throughput baculovirus expression and purification of individual elements. The array was validated with therapeutic-grade, human hyperimmune sera, and these data were compared to results obtained from individuals vaccinated against smallpox using Dryvax. A high level of reproducibility with a very low background were apparent in repetitive assays that confirmed previously reported antigens and identified new proteins that may be important for neutralizing viral infection. Our results suggest that proteins recognized by antibodies from all vaccinees constituted <10% of the total vaccinia proteome.     

Reconciling fault-tolerant distributed computing and systems-on-chip

Classic distributed computing abstractions do not match well the reality of digital logic gates, which are the elementary building blocks of Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) and other Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuits: Massively concurrent, continuous computations undermine the concept of sequential processes executing sequences of atomic zero-time computing steps, and very limited computational resources at gate-level make even simple operations prohibitively costly. In this paper, we introduce a modeling and analysis framework based on continuous computations and zero-bit message channels, and employ this framework for the correctness & performance analysis of a distributed fault-tolerant clocking approach for Systems-on-Chip (SoCs). Starting out from a “classic” distributed Byzantine fault-tolerant tick generation algorithm, we show how to adapt it for direct implementation in clockless digital logic, and rigorously prove its correctness and derive analytic expressions for worst case performance metrics like synchronization precision and clock frequency. Rather than on absolute delay values, both the algorithm’s correctness and the achievable synchronization precision depend solely on the ratio of certain path delays. Since these ratios can be mapped directly to placement & routing constraints, there is typically no need for changing the algorithm when migrating to a faster implementation technology and/or when using a slightly different layout in an SoC.     

A unified method for optimal arbitrary pole placement

We consider the classic problem of pole placement by state feedback. We offer an eigenstructure assignment algorithm to obtain a novel parametric form for the pole-placing feedback matrix that can deliver any set of desired closed-loop eigenvalues, with any desired multiplicities. This parametric formula is then exploited to introduce an unconstrained nonlinear optimisation algorithm to obtain a feedback matrix that delivers the desired pole placement with optimal robustness and minimum gain. Lastly we compare the performance of our method against several others from the recent literature.     

Modelling and characterization of AlN-actuated microcantilevers vibrating in the first in-plane mode

The characterization of the first in-plane mode of aluminum nitride-actuated piezoelectric microcantilevers was carried out by using electrical and optical techniques. The top electrode of the cantilever was specifically designed to allow for an efficient electrical actuation of these in-plane modes. In order to confirm the in-plane nature of the modal vibration, the detection of the electrically induced movement was performed optically with the help of a stroboscopic microscope. In parallel, resonances were also measured electrically by means of an impedance analyzer. The quality factor and the resonant frequencies of the in-plane modes were estimated from the corresponding measurement data when applying both detection techniques. Our results show quality factor values as high as 3,000 for the first in-plane mode in air.     

利用可持续指标监测与调控大昆明区区域城镇发展

本文针对昆明的发展特征及面临的挑战,引入了一种全覆盖的综合规划方法来从整体上协调空间的各种职能及保护自然潜力.对大昆明区采用基于GIS的区域模型模拟了这些政策和方法的潜在影响力.结果显示,污染减少、土地利用成本和基础设施的建设成本降低,同时城市的竞争力提高.     

大昆明区空间规划面临的机遇和挑战

本文针对昆明的发展特征及面临的挑战,引入了一种全覆盖的综合规划方法来从整体上协调空间的各种职能及保护自然潜力.对大昆明区采用基于GIS的区域模型模拟了这些政策和方法的潜在影响力.结果显示,污染减少、土地利用成本和基础设施的建设成本降低,同时城市的竞争力提高.