Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An exploration of factors affecting the integration of in-house R&D with external technology acquisition strategies of a firm

Results of an empirical study of 31 cases of external technology acquisition are reported. A ten-stage framework of the external technology acquisition and implementation process is proposed, and the effect of a number of variables on the extent of research and development (R&D) involvement in each of these stages is explored. The relative importance of these variables in influencing R&D's involvement is also discussed. Having formal procedures to include in-house R&D in the process has an impact in the acquisition phase of the process, while in the implementation phase R&D's involvement seems more influenced by the possession of appropriate capabilities in-house. Maturity of the technology, urgency of its need and its importance to the firm are important variables which are found to be negatively correlated with the extent of R&D's involvement and are influential in a number of staged. This finding is discussed. >
Microwave measurement of the dielectric constant of high-density polyethylene

The method of using interference spectra for determining the dielectric constant, which previously has been developed for semiconductors with dielectric constants of 10-20, has been shown also to yield reliable data for a plastic material, polyethylene, with a dielectric constant of only about 2. Since, for most polymers, the dispersion is very small in the radio-frequency-to-microwave range and the microwave measurement is both very simple and accurate, the interference method may find technical application in material characterization. Prerequisites are a low loss tangent and, hence, good transmission through the thick sample. >
Mechanical design and Kinematics of an exoskeleton of 3 degrees of freedom for Forearms Rehabilitation

Nowadays the use of robotics systems to have a better quality of life is very common. An application is the use of exoskeleton for helping people in many areas for instance, to carry high loads or in the rehabilitation of people, who had an accident, helping them to recover the mobility. This paper shows the kinematics of an exoskeleton of 3 degrees of freedom for forearms rehabilitation. The kinematic study includes two parts: the direct kinematics and the inverse kinematics. The importance of this study is how the exoskeleton can reproduce the movements that medical therapies use for forearms rehabilitation. Finally we propose a design that can be used in the rehabilitation process with the goal of obtaining a good recuperation injured people.
A true-time-delay networks design technique

This paper proposes a technique to design wide band switched-line (SL) true-time-delay (TTD) networks, commonly used for phased array antenna (PAA) applications. This study investigates the constant-delay behavior of switched-line phase shifters based on single-pole double-throw (SPDT) switches. Circuit sizing starts by considering the effective S-parameters of the switches, to use their non-idealities as an integral part of the phase shift linearly dependent to the frequency and by considering, from the beginning, the possible spatial positioning of elements that allows the circuit feasibility as a design target. The aim of this study is to provide a technique suitable for the design of well-matched TTD networks with a flat delay in wide bandwidth. In this paper, we propose new design formulas for which we show a single-frequency implementation. A computational strategy is used to obtain numerical solutions of the derived equations with this study. Finally, a monolithic X-band TTD circuit example is shown.
Revenue Management: New Features and Models

Revenue management is the art of selling a fixed and perishable capacity of a product to those customers that generate the highest revenue. In recent years, revenue management has gained a lot of attention among both academics and practitioners and has grown into one of the most successful applications of operations research. This thesis provides an overview of revenue management techniques presented throughout the literature. More importantly, new techniques are constructed for hotel, airline and cargo revenue management problems to account for new features such as a rolling horizon, convertible seats and unique booking requests. Mathematical, stochastic and dynamic programming techniques are used to construct solution techniques which are evaluated in a simulated environment chosen in correspondence with practitioners. The results provide useful insights for practitioners and can be used to further develop and extend current revenue management techniques.
Advanced Technologies For E-manufacturing

The development of Information Technology (IT) has led to increased global competition and rapidly changing customer requirements in the manufacturing environment. It is thus forcing major changes in the production styles and configuration of manufacturing organizations. Increasingly, traditional centralized manufacturing applications, such as manufacturing engineering, design, planning, scheduling, control, etc., are proving to be inflexible and unable to respond to changing production styles and highly dynamic variations in product requirements. Moreover, manufacturing enterprises are experiencing the problem of information overload. Therefore, new techniques and tools are required to achieve new co-operation and applications as well as to extract useful knowledge from the rapidly growing volumes of databases in manufacturing systems. Recently, agent technology has emerged as an important approach for developing distributed intelligent manufacturing systems. It provides a natural way of overcoming the limited expandability, flexibility and reconfiguration capabilities in the centralized paradigm, and to design and implement distributed manufacturing systems. In addition, data mining techniques are used to discover hidden knowledge, unexpected patterns and information from large databases in order to assist efficient decision-making for manufacturing enterprises. This article, firstly, provides a general view of a manufacturing system particularly in the e-environment. Then, the article gives an overview of agents www.witpress. com, ISSN 1755-8336 (on-line) WIT Transactions on State of the Art in Science and Engineering, Vol 16, © 2005 WIT Press doi:10.2495/978-1-85312-998-8/03 and data mining – including their characteristics and applications in the emanufacturing environment.
Latching micromagnetic relays

This paper describes the underlying principles, design and operation of a new type of latching micromagnetic relay. The device is based on preferential magnetization of a soft magnetic cantilever in a permanent external magnetic field. Switching between two stable states is accomplished by momentarily changing the direction of the cantilever's magnetization by passing a short current pulse through a planar coil situated under the cantilever. Once the relay is switched, it is held in this nonvolatile state by the permanent external magnetic field. Latching operation has been demonstrated for devices having two different cantilever geometries and a variety of sizes. Characterization has been performed under dc and ac conditions. The minimum (lead-to-lead) resistance through the switch is approximately 50 m/spl Omega/. The switching current and minimum switching pulse width are 79 mA and 0.2 ms, respectively. The operating voltage is about 5 V. The switching energy consumption is <9.3 /spl mu/J.
A new direct digital PWM technique for microprocessor-based PWM inverters

This paper describes a new pulse width modulation (PWM) scheme suitable for a microprocessor-based PWM inverter. Optimal switching patterns (i.e., width and position of the pulses) minimizing a performance index can be generated in real time by numerical calculation using the microprocessor-based control system. The switching patterns and harmonics of the output waveforms have been investigated by simulation. This PWM method is compared with conventional methods, such as the natural PWM and the direct PWM. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme has much less low-order harmonics than the other methods. Finally, the microprocessor-based implementation of the scheme is presented. The validity of the proposed method is verified by experiments using a microprocessor-based control system.
Self-Adaptive Particle Swarm Mutation Rate of Genetic Algorithm in the Link Optimization of Network Coding

Considering a multicast scenario, we want to minimize the coding links used for network coding while achieving the desired throughput. This article solves the optimization of the network coding to get with the lowest coding link scheme by using APGA. According to the simulation results, it can be concluded that the better performance of APGA than the previous algorithms.
Tapping the Sentiment of the Customers through Association Rule Mining for the Products Endorsed by Celebrities

: The impact of customers sentiment in the current era is unmatched. Not only celebrities but the customers too are influencers in the revenue growth of a brand. Efficient Marketing analytics in terms of sentiment analysis is required for which association rule mining could be utilized as a prominent model. The current work explored the Predictive Apriori Algorithm to understand the sentiment of the Varanasi customers. The algorithm has performed with an accuracy of 99.34 % which proved that they stop purchasing the products once the celebrity has had negative publicity or is involved in anti-national activities. The work has also explored the correlation between the questions being asked in the survey and found that they strongly agree that the brand is effective if it is endorsed by several celebrities over a while.
Subjective and interactive duration estimation

Scheduling of construction projects with an uncertainty content requires that the scheduler's subjective knowledge of various factors that might influence the duration of the activities comprising the project is incorporated. Depending on the participating factors and their significance, a different duration outcome is often observed for each activity. To include this uncertainty in the schedule, a statistical distribution is frequently used. This paper presents a system based on the premise that part of the information available, when duration distribution is being estimated, exists in a subjective form. We present an automated system that requires the modeler to specify the activity's minimum and maximum times and a set of linguistic descriptors of the external factors that are suspect of influencing the duration. The lower and upper end point estimates are often available from familiarity with the technology used, physical and logical constraints, or a combination of these situations. The subjective in.
Intelligent control for human-machine systems

In this article we try to summarize the field of intelligent control (IC) for human-machine systems (HMS) from a subjective point of view. Mechatronic components have become intelligent from integrating mechanical, electrical and software intelligence in minimum space, certainly an important step in building IC systems. Because of this, and of successes using artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms, so called soft computing, the field of IC is exciting with a bright future. This article attempts to anticipate this future and discusses directions of research to approach the realization of more intelligent systems. Human inclusion in such IC systems is as important as to increase autonomy, flexibility, and fault tolerance. Iterative improvement over trials and optimal system design are important issues. The authors' research to realize IC of dextrous manipulation is briefly reviewed discussing the key results and lessons.
Security Analysis and Improvement of Secure and Dynamic Clustering Protocol

In this paper, we analyze a secure and dynamic clustering protocol SecDEACH. Through analysis, we show that the protocol is vulnerable to the wormhole attack since it does not consider the verification of the neighbor nodes within its radio range. We give a wormhole attack to the protocol and propose an improved version which can keep the frame of the SecDEACH protocol and overcome the security shortages. Finally, we make an analysis of the improved protocol and conclude the paper.
Sustainable use of groundwater for irrigation: a numerical analysis of the subsoil water fluxes

The food‐producing regions of the world increasingly rely on irrigation from groundwater resources. Further increases of groundwater use can adversely affect the sustainability of irrigated agriculture and put food security at risk. Sustainability of irrigation at field scale with groundwater is obtained if groundwater recharge is in equilibrium with tubewell extractions and capillary rise. Traditional information on phreatic surface behaviour does not explain the processes causing a phreatic surface to decline or incline. In this study, the physically based numerical model Soil–Water–Atmosphere–Plant (SWAP) was applied to compute soil moisture content and vertical soil water fluxes in the unsaturated zone for the cotton–wheat and rice–wheat cropping system of Punjab, Pakistan. SWAP has been calibrated and verified with in situ measurements of soil moisture content and evapotranspiration fluxes measured by means of the Bowen ratio surface energy balance technique. Accurate data of the soil hydraulic properties are critical for the calibration of the soil moisture distribution. With knowledge of the van Genuchten–Mualem parameters available, SWAP could be applied to assess recharge and capillary rise for most field conditions, including basin irrigation. The results under Pakistani conditions show that deep percolation cannot always be estimated from root zone water balances. An annual recharge of 23.3 cm was computed for the cotton–wheat area. Sustainability of irrigation with groundwater is obtained if a reduction in irrigation with groundwater by 36% is obtained. An annual recharge of 38.9 cm is estimated in rice–wheat systems, and a reduction of 62% in groundwater extraction is required to reach sustainability of groundwater use at field scale. Such information cannot be obtained from classical phreatic surface fluctuation data, and unsaturated zone modelling therefore provides additional insights for groundwater policy making. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
All digital pulsewidth control loop

This work presents an all-digital pulsewidth control loop (ADPWCL). The proposed system accepts a wide range of input duty cycles and performs a fast correction to the target output pulsewidth. An all-digital delay-locked loop (DLL) with fast locking time using a simplified time to digital converter and a new differential two-step delay element is proposed. The area of the delay element is much smaller than that in conventional designs, while having the same delay range. A test chip is verified in a 0.18-µm CMOS process. The measured duty cycle ranges from 4% to 98% with 7-bit resolution.
Low-Complexity Algorithm for Full-Array Antenna Selection based on Matching Pursuit

—Massive MIMO systems have received a growing interest since the apogee of 5G and the perspective of 6G. Massive MIMO allows an efﬁcient usage of spectral resources and provides higher data rates. When the number of antennas increases, the energy consumption and the hardware cost in the base station also increase. The high energy consumption and processing may be addressed through the selection of antennas. Among various possible structures in the literature, the present work proposes the combination of full-array architecture to make a virtual sectorization and antenna selection using matching pursuit. The algorithm was tested in different channels with complexity reduction in our tests while maintaining bit-error rate in most scenarios.
INVESTIGATION OF THE EFFECT OF THE DISCONTINUITY DIRECTION ON FLUID FLOW IN POROUS ROCK MASSES ON A LARGE-SCALE USING HYBRID FVM-DFN AND STREAMLINE SIMULATION

Understanding the fluid behaviour in rock masses is of great importance in various rock mass-related engineering projects, such as seepage in tunnels, geothermal reservoirs, and hazardous waste disposal. Different approaches have been implemented to study the flow pattern in fractured porous rock masses. Laboratory experiments can provide good information regarding this issue, but high expenses aside, they are time-consuming and suffer the lack of ability to study field scale mediums. Numerical methods are beneficial in simulating such mediums with the Discrete Fracture Network (DFN) method in terms of costs and time as they offer sufficient flexibility and creativity. In this paper, a Matlab code was extended to study the flow regime in a Dual Permeability Media (DPM) with two point sources in the right and left side of the model as an injector and a producer well, respectively. A high permeability discontinuity with different angles was embedded in a very low-permeability limestone matrix. Pressure equations were solved implicitly with a two-point flux approximation scheme of the Finite Volume Method (FVM). Streamlines were traced in the medium and used to analyse the model’s hydraulic behaviour with the aid of Time Of Flight (TOF) for each point. The results show that the FVM-DFN hybrid method can be used as a fast method for fluid flow in DPM with the aid of streamline simulation to study the fluid flow in a large model with discontinuity.
On the Prevention of Cache-Based Side-Channel Attacks in a Cloud Environment

As Cloud services become more commonplace, recent works have uncovered vulnerabilities unique to such systems. Specifically, the paradigm promotes a risk of information leakage across virtual machine isolation via side-channels. Unlike conventional computing, the infrastructure supporting a Cloud environment allows mutually distrusting clients simultaneous access to the underlying hardware, a seldom met requirement for a side-channel attack. This thesis investigates the current state of side-channel vulnerabilities involving the CPU cache, and identifies the shortcomings of traditional defences in a Cloud environment. It explores why solutions to nonCloud cache-based side-channels cease to work in Cloud environments, and describes new mitigation techniques applicable for Cloud security. Specifically, it separates canonical cache-based side-channel attacks into two categories, Sequential and Parallel attacks, based on their implementation and devises a unique mitigation technique for each. Applying these solutions to a canonical Cloud environment, this thesis demonstrates the validity of these Cloud-specific, cache-based side-channel mitigation techniques. Furthermore, it shows that they can be implemented, together, as a server-side approach to improve security without inconveniencing the client. Finally, it conducts a comparison of our solutions to the current state-of-the-art.
Direct composite versus glass-ceramic endocrowns for mechanically compromised molar teeth

Objectives: The objective of this study was to investigate the mechanical behavior of severely compromised endodontically treated molars restored by means of various types of composite buildups, full contour lithium disilicate crowns (with or without post) or a lithium disilicate endocrown. Materials and methods: One hundred five sound molars were endodontically treated and randomly assigned to 1 control group (endodontic access cavity only) and 6 experimental groups (n=15): glass fiber-reinforced composite (GFRC group), direct microhybrid composite resin (C group), direct microhybrid composite restoration with glass fiber post (CP group), composite buildup and full contour lithium disilicate crown (LDS group), additional glass fiber post (P-LDS group) and endocrown (EC group). Molar crowns in the treatment groups were removed 1mm above the cementoenamel junction and restored. All specimens were thermomechanically aged (1.2x106 cycles at 1.7 Hz/50N, 8000 cycles 5°C to 55°C) and axially loaded until failure. Data were analyzed using analysis of variance and Tukey post hoc test (a=0.05). Results: Fracture strength was significantly affected by the type of restoration (p=0.00; statistically similar groups identified with superscript letters): LDSB (3217±1052 N), PLDSAB (2697±665 N), ECAB (2425±993 N), CA (2192±752), controlA (1890±774 N), CPA (1830±590 N) and GFRCA (1823±911 N). Group GFRC exhibited significantly more repairable fractures than the other groups. Conclusions: Significant differences in fracture strength were obtained between LDS, the composite resin restorations and control group. Direct composite resin restorations showed similar fracture strength as P-LDS and EC. Incorporating a glass fiber-reinforced composite resulted in significantly more repairable failures.
Water/Methanol-Repellency and Wetting Mechanism of Moth Wing Surface

The water-and methanol-repellent properties of moth wing surfaces were determined by a contact angle (CA) meter, the chemical composition and microstructures of moth wing surfaces were investigated by a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer (FT-IR) and a scanning electron microscope (SEM). The wing surface is composed of naturally hydrophobic material and possesses hierarchical rough structures. The wing surface exhibits high repellency against water (CA 139.2~155.6°) and methanol solution. The critical concentrations for wetting and spreading-wetting of methanol solution on the wing surfaces are 60% and 80%, respectively. The complex wettability of the wing surface ascribes to the coupling effect of chemical composition and micro/nanostructure. Moth wing can be used as a template for bionic design of special functional surface.
Cross-licensing, Cumulative Inventions and Strategic Patenting

This paper focuses on cross-licensing, a strategy which earlier studies have found to be adopted especially by holders of large patent portfolios operating in complex products industries like computers and semiconductors (Cohen, Nelson and Walsh, 2000; Grindley and Teece 1997). We analyze the association between the importance of cross-licensing as a motivation for patenting and key characteristics of the patent, the patent holder and the technology. More precisely, we hypothesize that cross-licensing is associated with the cumulativeness of patented inventions and the number of overlapping claims with other patents. Moreover, we expect that cross licensing is positively associated with concentration and complexity of the main technological field of the patent. Finally, we test the hypothesis that intensity of competition in the technological space is positively associated with cross-licensing. We test these hypotheses by using the PatVal-EU survey data on European inventors of 7,052 patents granted by the EPO with priority dates between 1993 and 1998. We focus our analysis on patents held by firms. We complement the survey data with additional variables at the patent, company and technology level drawn various datasets (EPO-Epasys, Who Owns Whom, Amadeus and Compustat). Our ordered probit estimations provide support to the hypotheses.