Factors affecting trading partners’ knowledge sharing: Using the lens of transaction cost economics and socio-political theories

Knowledge sharing allows trading partners to orchestrate the operation of supply chain and capture positions of advantage. Yet, lack of knowledge sharing has been consistently found to be the most critical failure factor in supply chain management. This paper intends to study the factors affecting trading partners’ entering knowledge sharing ties. Drawing upon transaction cost economics and socio-political theories, we developed our research framework. The hypotheses derived were tested by data collected with six medium-sized companies. Data analysis showed that socio-political factors were more robust in affecting the focal firm’s decision on whether to share knowledge with a particular partner. In particular, trust towards the partner and the partner’s power were the primary factors leading the firm to enter the knowledge sharing ties. In contrast, asset specificity did not play an important role in affecting the firm’s knowledge sharing decision. Theoretical contribution and practical implications are discussed.     

A physics‐based model of DC and microwave characteristics of GaN/AlGaN HEMTs

A physics‐based model of AlGaN/GaN High Electron Mobility Transistor (HEMT) is developed for the analysis of DC and microwave characteristics. Large‐ and small‐signal parameters are calculated for a given device dimensions and operating conditions. Spontaneous and piezoelectric polarizations at the heterointerface and finite effective width of the 2DEG gas have been incorporated in the analysis. The model predicts a maximum drain current of 523 mA/mm and transconductance of 138 mS/mm for a 1 μm × 75 μm device, which are in agreement with the experimental data. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE, 2007.     

Control of dynamic microsystems

This paper formulates and solves control problems for nonlinear microsystems which comprise micro-electromechanical devices, micromachined transducers and microelectronics. We perform a consistent dynamic analysis and coherent designs with a minimum level of simplifications using high-fidelity mathematical models. The proposed methodology enables practical implementation for multi-input/multi-output systems due to overall conceptual consistency, design coherence, computational efficiency, algorithmic effectiveness and hardware simplicity. Various issues in nonlinear analysis and control are examined and experimentally verified substantiating design concepts for high-performance microsystems. The reported findings are demonstrated for a proof-of-concept closed-loop electrostatic microactuator.     

A survey of identity and handoff management approaches for the future Internet

Since its inception almost 40 years ago, the Internet has evolved and changed immensely. New technology solutions are desired to keep up with this unprecedented growth. Besides the traditional computing devices, different types of mobile devices need to be supported by the future Internet architecture. In this work, a survey of identity and handoff management solutions proposed in future Internet architectures is presented. Mobility protocols developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force initiatives are discussed to give the background on the user mobility support challenges with the current architecture. The next generation network architectures supported by global initiatives are presented and analyzed in terms of their support for seamless user and device mobility. Furthermore, this survey is extended to include the architectures proposed for wireless mesh networks, which are envisioned to be a part of the next generation networks with their self organizing and self configuring network characteristics.     

A tutorial on modelling and inference in undirected graphical models for hyperspectral image analysis

ABSTRACT

Undirected graphical models have been successfully used to jointly model the spatial and the spectral dependencies in earth observing hyperspectral images. They produce less noisy, smooth, and spatially coherent land-cover maps and give top accuracies on many datasets. Moreover, they can easily be combined with other state-of-the-art approaches, such as deep learning. This has made them an essential tool for remote-sensing researchers and practitioners. However, graphical models have not been easily accessible to the larger remote-sensing community as they are not discussed in standard remote-sensing textbooks and not included in the popular remote-sensing software and toolboxes. In this tutorial, we provide a theoretical introduction to Markov random fields and conditional random fields-based spatial–spectral classification for land-cover mapping along with a detailed step-by-step practical guide on applying these methods using freely available software. Furthermore, the discussed methods are benchmarked on four public hyperspectral datasets for a fair comparison among themselves and easy comparison with the vast number of methods in literature which use the same datasets. The source code necessary to reproduce all the results in the paper is published on-line to make it easier for the readers to apply these techniques to different remote-sensing problems.     

A Note on Square Rooting of Time Functions of Turing Machines

Abstract. No abstract.     

Study on the microstructure in a friction stir welded 2519-T87 Al alloy

The microhardness, grain size and distribution of the precipitates in various zones of a 2519-T87 aluminum alloy welded joint welded by friction stir welded were investigated. The dynamic recrystallization occurred in the weld nugget zone and the size of recrystallized grains was smaller than that in the thermo-mechanically affected zone, besides, θ′ and θ phase precipitated. The thermo-mechanically affected zone was divided into three ones: the zone close to the thermo-mechanically affected zone, where coarse θ′ precipitates were observed; the middle zone, where the mainly θ precipitates appeared; and the zone close to the heat-affected zone, where both thin θ′ and θ precipitates were observed. In the heat-affected zone, the size of θ′ precipitates was less than those in the base metal zone. On the transverse cross-section of welded joint the microhardness curve shows a W-shape.     

Experimental and numerical study of single and two-phase flow and heat transfer in aluminum foams

This paper investigates the flow boiling characteristics of water and FC-72 in aluminum foams. For the experiments, the heat transfer processes prior to nucleate boiling, the onset of nucleate boiling and the hysteresis effect were studied. The temperature jump, marking the transition from nucleate to film boiling was observed for FC-72. Numerical simulations were performed based on water to compare with the experiments. In the single-phase simulations, the Brinkman–Forchheimer and local thermal non-equilibrium models were adopted for the momentum and energy equations, respectively while in the two-phase simulations, the two-phase mixture model was used. Comparisons between the experimental and numerical results show reasonable agreement.     

Ground surface integrity of granite by using dry electro-contact discharge dressing of #600 diamond grinding wheel

Dry electro-contact discharge (ECD) dressing of metal-bonded #600 diamond grinding wheel is proposed for grinding of various granites. As compared to mechanical GC dressing, Dry ECD dressing can not only protrude fine diamond grains from wheel metal-bond without any damage, but also eliminate bond-tail behind the protruded grain. The objective is to understand how the synthetic factors including granite structure, grinding parameters and dressing method influence the ground surface integrity of multi-crystal granite such as surface roughness and surface crack appearance in contrast to homogeneous optic glass. First a micron-scale indentation experiment was carried out to display the growth mechanism of micro-cracks on polished surface, then Dry ECD dressing and mechanical GC dressing were carried out in grinding experiment, respectively, finally surface roughness and micro-surface crack were investigated in connection with granite crystal size, work speed and dressing method. It is found that in almost all cases the multi-crystal granite has always worse ground surface than homogeneous optic glass even if grinding parameter is changed. Moreover, the improvement of ground surface for granite is more sensitive to grain protrusion feature than that for optic glass. Although it is very difficult to find out obvious relationship between surface roughness and grinding parameter such as work speed, it has a good correlation with granite structure such as granite crystal size: it decreases with the increase of the granite crystal size. It is concluded that Dry ECD dressing may more greatly improve the ground surface integrity of various granites than mechanical GC dressing.     

An iterative multi-scale tensor voting scheme for perceptual grouping of natural shapes in cluttered backgrounds

Grouping processes, which “organize” a given data by eliminating the irrelevant items and sorting the rest into groups, each corresponding to a particular object, can provide reliable pre-processed information to higher level computer vision functions, such as object detection and recognition. In this paper, we consider the problem of grouping oriented segments in highly cluttered images. In this context, we have developed a general and powerful method based on an iterative, multiscale tensor voting approach. Segments are represented as second-order tensors and communicate with each other through a voting scheme that incorporates the Gestalt principles of visual perception. The key idea of our approach is removing background segments conservatively on an iterative fashion, using multi-scale analysis, and re-voting on the retained segments. We have performed extensive experiments to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of our approach using both synthetic and real images from publicly available datasets including the Williams and Thornber’s fruit-texture dataset [L. Williams, Fruit and texture images. Available from: <http://www.cs.unm.edu/~williams/saliency.html>, 2008 (last viewed in July 2008)] and the Berkeley segmentation dataset [C.F.P. Arbelaez, D. Martin, The berkeley segmentation dataset and benchmark. Available from: <http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/vision/grouping/segbench/>, 2008 (last viewed in July 2008)]. Our results and comparisons indicate that the proposed method improves segmentation results considerably, especially under severe background clutter. In particular, we show that using the iterative multiscale tensor voting approach to post-process the posterior probability map, produced by segmentation methods, improves boundary detection results in 84% of the grayscale test images in the Berkeley segmentation benchmark.