ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Performance implications of multi-channel strategic decisions by incumbent retailers: the role of order of entry and degree of inter-channel coordination
Authors: Ronald W. Hasty, Ted Farris
Venue:  (2008)

The rapidly intensifying adoption of the Internet channel for marketing and sales by incumbent bricks-and-mortar retailers underscores the importance of assessing the impact of the online channel strategies on firm performance in the dynamic competitive environment. At the time when store-based retailers increasingly dominate online sales the questions of when and how an incumbent retailer should adopt an online channel to achieve and sustain a competitive advantage are of utmost interest for both marketing scholars and practitioners.This dissertation investigates the role of two strategic decisions in affecting firm performance: (a) the order of adopting an online channel by incumbent retailers and (b) the degree of coordination between store and online sales channels. The resource-based view and the dynamic capabilities approach are used as theoretical foundations for the study. Following resource-based logic and applying a contingency perspective, this research proposes that firm-specific resource endowments determine the success of the order of online entry strategy for incumbent retailers. This dissertation utilizes the dynamic capabilities approach to propose that the strategy of inter-channel channel coordination leads to higher performance when core, unique dynamic capabilities pertaining to e-commerce are developed in-house, as opposed to being outsourced. By posing and answering the research questions regarding the role of strategic decisions of order of online entry and channel coordination in enhancing long-term financial and operational performance, this dissertation contributes to the development of strategic theory in the nascent areas of electronic commerce and multi-channel retailing, provides further empirical support to resource-based theory of competitive advantage, and assists managers in formulating more informed strategic objectives for achieving multi-channel competitive advantage.
Computing surface offsets and bisectors using a sampled constraint solver
Authors: David E. Johnson, Elaine Cohen
Venue: Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2009 (2009)

This paper describes SCSolver, a geometric constraint solver based on adaptive sampling of an underlying constraint space. The solver is demonstrated on the computation of the offset to a surface as well as the computation of the bisector between two surfaces. The adaptive constraint sampling generates a solution manifold through a generalized dual-contouring approach appropriate for higher-dimensional problems. Experimental results show that the SCSolver approach can compute solutions for complex input geometry at interactive rates for each example application.
Dynamic coupling haptic suturing based on orthogonal decomposition
Authors: G. Sepulveda-Cervantes, V. Parra-Vega, O. A. Dominguez-Ramirez
Venue: Proceedings of the World Haptics 2009 - Third Joint EuroHaptics conference and Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems (2009)

Suturing task is one of the apparently most common actions during any surgery, however this is a complex task since it involves precise force feedback with a needle and thread, interaction with deformable tissue and organs, puncturing and thread stretching. This is a type of complex constrained motion task due to at the piercing constraint points must be valid all time with a continuum thread. In this paper, a methodology for haptic rendering of suturing task over deformable objects is presented and experimentally illustrated in real time. To this end, an orthogonal decomposition at the contact piercing constraint point of the haptic device introduces a coupled dynamic model of suturing with flexible thread. The thread model is based on constrained Lagrangian splines, whose control points coincides with the contact piercing constraint point, so as to render a consistent differential algebraic system, with the tissue mesh modeled by a distributed dynamical inertial mass-spring-damper system. The methodology provides dynamic kinesthetic feedback for effective haptic rendering.
Use of Ontologies as Representation Support of Workflows Oriented to Administrative Management
Authors: Álvaro E. Prieto, Adolfo Lozano-Tello
Venue: Journal of Network and Systems Management (2009)

One of the applications of workflow systems is the management of administrative processes characterized by the transmission of information elements among users of an organization. Tasks contained in these processes are carried out by users responsible for confirming, modifying or adding information throughout. These processes need to be defined in workflow management systems in which all the elements are perfectly identified and are easily adaptable to changes that may arise in the sequences of tasks, in the users involved or in the data transmitted from one task to another. For this kind of processes is easier to reuse those represented in ontologies. On one hand, existing ontologies for representing some domain elements can be reused. At the same time, ontologies have an excellent expressive capacity to define tasks, their relationships and the flow control among them with precision. This paper proposes a complete model, together with the necessary software tools, for tackling this issue.
Personalized SCORM Learning Experience Based on Rating Scale Model
Authors: Ayad R. Abbas, Liu Juan
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Neural Networks on Advances in Neural Networks (2009)

Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is the most popular suite of technical standard among existing international standards for e-Learning; although it has been designed to provide accessibility, adaptability, interoperability, and reusability, it still suffers from lack of personalization, which may lead to inappropriate learning experience; In other words, learner may suffer from distraction or restriction, when it comes to interact with large or restricted amounts of information respectively, resulting in reduced learning efficiency and performance. However, this can be avoided by providing personalized services. In this paper, we propose a personalized SCORM learning experience based on Rating Scale Model (RSM), which takes into account both the difficulty of learning activity and the learner's ability considering responses from individual learner's understanding and characteristics. To obtain more accurate estimation of learner's ability, polytomous Item Response Model (IRT) is used rather than dichotomous IRT. Experimental results show that the proposed system can exactly provide the closer learning resource to the learner's ability, resulting in increased the learning efficiency and learning performance.
Orbital maneuvers using low-thrust
Authors: Vivian Martins Gomes, Antonio F. B. A. Prado, Hélio Koiti Kuga
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th WSEAS international conference on Signal processing, robotics and automation (2009)

To perform the orbital maneuvers, a software that calculates an optimal maneuver is developed. This method will be used as a reference for comparison and analises of the suboptimal methods to be used on board. This method id based on an analytical development that generate equations that can be computed in a shorter time, allowing real time applications.
ATG 2.0: the Platform for Automatic Generation of Training Simulations
Authors: Maciej Dorsz, Jerzy Nawrocki, Anna Demuth
Venue: Proceeding of the 2005 conference on Software Engineering: Evolution and Emerging Technologies (2005)

Automation based on code generation from diagrams, usage of advanced components, or automated testing based on the GUI is becoming a standard in the software production process. The next stage is an automatic generation of a training simulation. Thanks to it, the end-users participating in a training can work with their system version, and after finishing the course they may take such a simulator home or to their office and keep on practicing. Automatic Training Generations (ATG) system is designated for the automatic generation of the final system simulations. ATG allows to generate a training for the given client, regarding his/her particular system version and individual system settings. Moreover, ATG 2.0 makes possible to use differences mode, which presents only changed system features.
Using drawings to support learning from dynamic visualizations
Authors: Helen Zhihui Zhang, Marcia C. Linn
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on International conference for the learning sciences - Volume 3 (2008)

Dynamic visualizations can enhance science learning by making unseen processes visible. To study how drawing supports learning from visualizations, the drawing group illustrated their ideas after interacting with molecular visualizations and the interaction group had more time to explore the visualizations. The drawing group learned more and made more precise interpretations of the visualizations than the interaction group.
Synthesis of multi-level dual reed-muller expressions
Authors: Khalid Faraj
Venue: Proceedings of the 1st WSEAS international conference on Nanotechnology (2009)

This paper introduces the fundamental theory, algorithms, and terminology regarding synthesis of multi-level Dual Reed-Muller expressions. The increasing interest in using Dual Reed-Muller expressions as a way of representing and manipulating switching functions, and as a mean of designing circuits based on OR/XNOR gates has led to this research. Up to present there are only two-level Dual Reed-Muller minimization algorithms in use, although the need for multi-level minimization algorithms has been recognized. A new theory and algorithms for multi-level Dual Reed-Muller minimization have been developed. It introduces a Dual Reed-Muller factored form and uses algebraic algorithms for factorization decomposition, re-substitution, and extraction of common cubes and subexpressions.
Report Builder & Report Models in Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Authors: Gerald Schinagl
Venue:  (2007)

Report Models and Report Builder were introduced as a new piece of infrastructure in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for the first time. This Book digs deep into the guts of the Structure of a Report Model and lines out the possible parameters and their influence for the user of Report Builder. All objects and their properties are described and give the reader information how they can deliver a good and usable Report Model to the user. The limitations and shortcomings of the product are displayed in this book as well as scenarios how to come around some of these limitations. The handling and usage of the Report Builder client for an information worker is described. Besides the common usage scenarios special emphasis is put and the navigation paradigm as well as filtering and grouping functionalities. To make up the whole picture security and the background-information of Reporting Services is described. Finally tips and tricks for common problems and scenarios will also be covered. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player
Learning nonlinear dynamic models
Authors: John Langford, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Tong Zhang
Venue: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning (2009)

We present a novel approach for learning nonlinear dynamic models, which leads to a new set of tools capable of solving problems that are otherwise difficult. We provide theory showing this new approach is consistent for models with long range structure, and apply the approach to motion capture and high-dimensional video data, yielding results superior to standard alternatives.
A Non-local Approach to Shape from Ambient Shading
Authors: Emmanuel Prados, Nitin Jindal, Stefano Soatto
Venue: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Scale Space and Variational Methods in Computer Vision (2009)

We study the mathematical and numerical aspects of the estimation of the 3-D shape of a Lambertian scene seen under diffuse illumination. This problem is known as "shape from ambient shading" (SFAS), and its solution consists of integrating a strongly non-local and non-linear Integro-Partial Differential Equation (I-PDE). We provide a first analysis of this global I-PDE, whereas previous work had focused on a local version that ignored effects such as occlusion of the light field. We also design an original approximation scheme which, following Barles and Souganidis' theory, ensures the correctness of the numerical approximations, and discuss about some numerical issues.
An agent oriented hotel information system
Authors: Armando Robles, Pablo Noriega, Francisco Cantú
Venue: Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2 (2009)

The vertical industry software market (for hotels, hospitals, convenience store chains, ...) is highly competitive. To better compete in this environment, Tecnolog&iacute;a Computacional Aplicada (TCA) ---a mid size vertical market IS development company--- decided four years ago to explore agent technologies as a key component for a new business strategy. As a result of this exercise TCA converted its legacy INNSIST hotel information system ---with 1.2 million lines of code developed over 22 years and a solid customer base--- into the fully deployed agent-intensive system whose main features we present here. A previous stage of this project was presented in [2].
Joint optimization algorithm for network reconfiguration and reactive power control of wind farm in distribution system
Authors: Jingjing Zhao, Xin Li, Jiping Lu, Congli Zhang
Venue: WSEAS Transactions on Circuits and Systems (2009)

In recent years, the number of small size wind farms used as DG sources located within the distribution system are rapidly increasing. Wind farm made up with doubly fed induction generators (DFIG) is proposed in this paper as the continuous reactive power source to support system voltage control due to the reactive power control capability of DFIG. In the distribution system, considering network reconfiguration and wind farm reactive power control are both used to improve power profile and they have an inherent coupling relationship, in this paper, a joint optimization algorithm of combining reactive power control of wind farm and network reconfiguration is proposed. In the proposed joint optimization algorithm, an improved hybrid particle swarm optimization with wavelet mutation algorithm (HPSOWM) is developed for voltage profile improvement which utilized reactive power output of wind farm as the control variable. In each particle updating instance at each iteration of reactive power output optimization algorithm, a binary particle swarm optimization algorithm (BPSO) is utilized to find the optimal network structure. Finally, classical 16-node feeder is used as a test case to evaluate the algorithm. The experimental result demonstrates the correctness of the algorithm.
Outlier exploration and diagnostic classification of a multi-centre 1H-MRS brain tumour database
Authors: Alfredo Vellido, Enrique Romero, Félix F. González-Navarro, Lluís A. Belanche-Muñoz, Margarida Julií-Sapé, Carles Arús
Venue: Neurocomputing (2009)

Non-invasive techniques such as magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) are often required for assisting the diagnosis of tumours. Radiologists are not always accustomed to make sense of the biochemical information provided by MRS and they may benefit from computer-based support in their decision making. The high dimensionality of the MR spectra obscures atypical aspects of the data that may jeopardize their classification. In this study, we describe a method to overcome this problem that combines nonlinear dimensionality reduction, outlier detection, and expert opinion. MR spectra subsequently undergo a feature selection process followed by classification. The impact of outlier removal on classification performance is assessed.
IPAS ontology development
Authors: David W. Fowler, Quentin Reul, Derek Sleeman
Venue: Proceeding of the 2008 conference on Formal Ontologies Meet Industry (2008)

There is a trend in some manufacturing industries to move from selling products to providing services. As a result, designers must consider the life-cycle costs. In the aero industry, for example, this must be considered as well as weight, performance and manufacturing cost. The IPAS (Integrated Products and Services) project is intended to utilise Semantic Web technologies in order to provide feedback of information/knowledge acquired during operation of a product to the product's designers, and also to reuse knowledge from previous product designs. As part of IPAS, ontologies describing the products and processes have been created in order to allow service knowledge to be represented and shared. The design and implementation of these ontologies, and their planned future evolution, is described here. We also try to draw some lessons from our experiences.
A case for Predictive DiffServ on mobile networks
Authors: Nadia Shalaby, John Zinky
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (2008)

Differentiated Service is intended to achieve scalable service differentiation within the network. A protocol with its QoS semantics left up to off-line service level agreements (SLAs) between the network and application, it is inapplicable to mobile environments: (1) lacks real-time QoS feedback from the network to the application; (2) cannot guarantee SLAs under dynamically changing network conditions; (3) forces the application to actively probe the network for QoS measurements thereby needlessly consuming bandwidth; and (4) can only provide network conditions information in the near past, thereby diminishing its utility. We introduce Predictive DiffServ, a novel missing design point in the space of QoS network services, as an adaptable mechanism intended to provide the application with real-time, in-band predictions of network conditions, and enable the application to autonomously reconfigure its requirements in response to these conditions. Contributions include the concept, properties, architecture and API of Predictive DiffServ. Additionally, we identify newly enabled application services, and portray quantitative results.
Explanation-Based Object Recognition
Authors: Geoffrey Levine, Gerald DeJong
Venue: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (2008)

Many of today's visual scene and object categorization systems learn to classify using a statistical profile over a large number of small-scale local features sampled from the image. While some application systems have been constructed, this technology has enjoyed far more success in the research setting. The approach is best suited to tasks where within-class variability is small compared to between-class variability. This condition holds for large diverse artificial collections such as CalTech 101 where most categories have little to do with each other, but it often does not hold among naturalistic application-driven categories. Here, category distinctions are more likely to be conceptual or functional, and within-class differences can rival or exceed betweenclass differences. In this paper, we show how the local feature approach can be extended using explanation-based learning (EBL). The EBL approach makes use of readily available prior domain knowledge assembled into plausible explanations for why a training example's observable features might merit its assigned training label. Explanations expose additional semantic features and suggest how those hidden features may be estimated from observable features. We exhibit our approach on two CalTech 101 dataset tasks that we argue are emblematic of applied domains: Ketch vs. Schooner and Airplane vs. Background. In both cases classification accuracy is significantly improved.
Automatic Surveillance and Analysis of Snow and Ice Coverage on Electrical Insulators of Power Transmission Lines
Authors: Irene Y. Gu, Unai Sistiaga, Sonja M. Berlijn, Anders Fahlström
Venue: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision and Graphics: Revised Papers (2008)

One of the large problems for electrical power delivery through power lines in the Northern countries is when snow or ice accumulates on electrical insulators. This could lead to snow or ice-induced outages and voltage collapse, causing huge economic loss. This paper proposes a novel real-time automatic surveillance and image analysis system for detecting and estimating the snow and ice coverage on electric insulators using images captured from an outdoor 420 kV power transmission line. In addition, the swing angle of insulators is estimated, as large swing angles due to wind cause short circuits. Hybrid techniques by combining histogram, edges, boundaries and cross-correlations are employed for handling a broad range of scenarios caused by changing weather and lighting conditions. Experiments have been conducted on the captured images over several month periods. Results have shown that the proposed system has provided valuable estimation results. For image pixels related to snows on the insulator, the current system has yielded an average detection rate of 93% for good quality images, and 67.6% for images containing large amount of poor quality ones, and the corresponding average false alarm ranges from 9% to 18.1%. Further improvement may be achieved by using video-based analysis and improved camera settings.
Polarization Effects in Semiconductors: From Ab Initio Theory to Device Applications, 1st edition
Authors: Colin Wood, Debdeep Jena
Venue:  (2007)

Polarization Effects in Semiconductors: From Ab Initio Theory to Device Applications presents the latest understanding of the solid state physics, electronic implications and practical applications of the unique spontaneous or pyro-electric polarization charge of wurtzite compound semiconductors, and associated piezo-electric effects in strained thin film heterostructures. These heterostructures are used in wide band gap semiconductor based sensors, in addition to various electronic and opto-electronic semiconductor devices. The book covers the ab initio theory of polarization in cubic and hexagonal semiconductors, growth of thin film GaN, GaN/AlGaN GaAlN/ AlGaInN, and other nitrides, and SiC heterostructures. It discusses the effects of spontaneous and piezoelectric polarization on band diagrams and electronic properties of abrupt and compositionally graded heterostructures, electronic characterization of polarization-induced charge distributions by scanning-probe spectroscopies, and gauge factors and strain effects. In addition, polarization in extended defects, piezo-electric strain/charge engineering, and application to device design and processing are covered. The effects of polarization on the fundamental electron transport properties, and on the basic optical transitions are described. The crucial role of polarization in devices such as high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) is covered. The chapters are authored by professors and researchers in the fields of physics, applied physics and electrical engineering, who worked for 5 years under the "Polarization Effects in Semiconductors" DOD funded Multi Disciplinary University Research Initiative. This book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers working in the field of wide-bandgap semiconductor physics and their device applications. It will also be useful for practicing engineers in the field of wide-bandgap semiconductor device research and development.