24 research outputs found
Geometric properties of random walk loop soups
Get PDFIn this thesis the author examines geometric properties of (Poisson) loop soups generated from loop measures with varying weights. The framework incorporates the Markovian loop measure, see [LJ11], as well as the Bosonic loop measure, see [AV20]. The author characterises certain geometric features of the loop soup, such as its percolative properties and correlation structure
Innovation Management in Manufacturing - A Study on Industrial Application, Deficits, and Opportunities
Get PDFManufacturing companies are constantly pressured to innovate in an increasingly complex and discontinuous environment. In addition to developing new products and product features, innovation management in manufacturing has become necessary to ensure the competitiveness of technologies and processes in the context of digitalization, human centricity, sustainability and resilience (Industry 5.0). In the study, presented in this paper, companies from various industries participated in an online survey on their approach to incremental and radical innovation in manufacturing and the associated innovation management. In the study, more than 50 participants provide insight into the innovation management of their manufacturing unit and identify concrete fields of action as well as challenges in the areas of technology, organization and people. The study results are intended to provide manufacturing innovation managers with an overview of the challenges, deficits and potentials of innovation management in manufacturing and to help them identify and describe challenges in their organization
Enantioselective synthesis of (-)-Paeonilide
No full textIt was aim of this work to synthesize the unnatural enantiomer (-)-Paeonilide in an enantioselective way. The natural counterpart of this monoterpenoid showed an inhibitory effect against the thrombozyte aggregation induced by PAF. Starting from the achiral 3-furoic acid, stereoinformation was introduced by a copper(I) catalyzed cyclopropanation, utilizing a chiral bis(oxazoline)-ligand. This precursor was transformed to the furo-lactone core skeleton of the target molecule. Subsequent transformations led to (-)-Paeonilide
Approach To Tactical Planning For Manufacturing Innovation Projects
Get PDFRapid technological developments, shortened product life cycles, and constant competitive pressure require continuous efficiency improvements in producing material goods. Innovation is necessary to achieve these
efficiency gains in manufacturing. Therefore, companies generate manufacturing innovation as part of the continuous improvement process or by absorbing external stimuli. As a result, tactical planning of innovation
projects in manufacturing must be carried out regularly to enable resource planning and operative project implementation. The use of planning methods helps to increase the planning quality and reduce the complexity in the planning process. However, only a few approaches methodically support this tactical planning for manufacturing innovation. Therefore, an approach is developed using literature- and expertbased methods to systematically describe an innovation project in manufacturing, to identify and specify the relevant work contents, and finally to bring them into a defined processing sequence. In addition, the possibilities of individual planning steps being supported using tools and methods are shown. Finally, an industrial application of the approach is carried out, and a critical reflection on the results is presented. In summary, the systematic structuring of the planning process and the identification of available methods and tools improve the tactical planning of innovation projects in manufacturing
Development of an Approach for the Holistic Assessment of Innovation Projects in Manufacturing Including Potential, Effort, and Risk Using a Systematic Literature Review and Expert Interviews
No full textManufacturing companies face severe challenges from rapid technological developments. Industry 5.0 indicates the need for a sustainable, human-centered, and resilient industry. In striving for transformation, innovation becomes critical. However, a careful allocation of resources implies the evaluation of innovation projects. Moreover, diverse types of innovation and limited amounts of information represent a significant challenge. Therefore, this contribution presents an approach for holistically assessing innovation in manufacturing. First, a systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted to frame the current research state and identify assessment criteria. Second, a multiple-attribute decision-making method (MADM) was developed using the findings of the SLR and expert interviews. Finally, the criteria and the assessment approach were verified and validated by expert interviews, a workshop, and an industrial use case application. As the main findings, three criteria groups were derived and detailed: potentials, efforts, and risks. These criteria groups were used in a MADM approach incorporating Fuzzy set theory within a hybrid technique, combining the Analytical Hierarchical Process with the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solutions. In conclusion, an enhancement of innovation assessment in manufacturing was achieved through the integration of different criteria and the balance between complexity and industrial applicability
Combining the analytical hierarchy process, fuzzy expert systems, and the exponential risk priority number for the holistic evaluation of innovation projects in manufacturing
No full textManufacturing companies operate in a complex environment and need efficient manufacturing processes to remain competitive. Therefore, evaluation methods are essential for decision makers when selecting manufacturing innovation projects (MIPs). However, most approaches are not suitable for strategic use and do not consider all relevant evaluation dimensions. To address this issue, this work presents an approach to evaluate and select MIPs holistically, considering potential, effort, and risk. The approach enables the analysis of the strategic impact of an MIP using a fuzzy expert system, and further evaluates the implementation effort and risk using a combination of the Analytical Hierarchy Process and the Exponential Risk Priority Number. The approach was developed using the results of a systematic literature review and expert-based methods. Finally, the approach was validated in an industrial case study and enabled a transparent evaluation of the strategic potential, effort, and risk of two MIPs, leading to informed project selection
Nation branding – what is it? Remarks on the ongoing discussion
No full textArtykuł stanowi krytyczny przegląd podejść teoretycznych do fenomenu brandingu narodowego. Rozważania otwiera omówienie idei przewodniej oraz podstawowych założeń, na których opiera się branding narodowy, wraz z próbą odpowiedzi na pytanie o przyczyny jego aktualnej popularności. Następnie są prezentowane dominujące podejścia teoretyczne oraz omawiane najważniejsze definicje. Celem nadrzędnym poniższego artykułu jest sprawdzenie, czy można mówić o jednej, spójnej, powszechnie akceptowanej koncepcji brandingu narodowego. Autorka artykułu konkluduje, że raczej mamy do czynienia z wieloma odmiennymi koncepcjami, które łączą wspólne elementy.The article gives a critical overview of theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of nation branding. It begins with an explanation of the core idea and main assumptions, which nation branding is based on, combined with a trial of giving an answer to a question of reasons of its current popularity. After that, it presents dominant theoretical approaches to nation branding and discusses the most significant definitions. The prime goal of the article is to prove whether we can speak of one, coherent, generally accepted concept of nation branding or not. The author of the article concludes that we rather have to deal with many different concepts, which are connected by common elements
Artistic Research = Poetics? A Study of the First Dissertations in Literary Composition in Relation to Poetics as a Literary Tradition and a Modern Genre
Get PDFIn an article published in the Swedish Research Council’s Artistic Research Yearbook from 2004, the author and
literary scholar Gunnar D Hansson indicated that artistic research in literary composition is comparable to or even
synonymous with poetics. In light of such a comparison, this essay seeks to examine how the first four Swedish
dissertations in literary composition can be said to practice poetics. Poetics, understood as both a discipline and a
genre, has been subject to literary scientific research in Denmark in ways that have not occurred either in Sweden
or internationally. A recent dissertation, published by the Danish literary scholar Michael Kallesøe Schmidt,
extensively discusses modern, self-reflexive poetological texts by Danish authors with the ambition of coining a
new genre: “authors’ poetics”. Since the literary dissertations are situated on the border between composition and
reflection in ways similar to the Danish authors’ poetics, this essay examines the dissertations in relation to
Schmidt’s genre-defining criteria, as well as the broader discussions surrounding poetics in both a Danish and a
Swedish context. Just as for the younger, modern, poetological texts that Schmidt addresses, the dissertations are
definable by their rhetorical characteristics – i.e., their self-reflexive speech act – their oscillation between artistic
practice and theoretical reflection, their intertextual relations which transcend borders between aesthetic epochs
and contexts, and their hybrid compositions. The dissertations also share semantic characteristics with the authors’
poetics by discussing similar poetological questions originating from a romantic and/or modernist aesthetic
discourse. But unlike the authors’ poetics, the dissertations are academic products, and they share connections
with disciplinary poetics and traditional academic writings that poetological texts situated outside the institutional
realm of artistic research do not. I therefore argue that the first four literary dissertations can be said to create a
new poetological spectrum, describes as a disciplinary form of authors’ poetics
Analyzing Polemics Evolution from Twitter Streams Using Author-based Social Networks
Get PDFThe construction of social network graphs from online networks data has become nowadays a common track to analyze these data. Typical research questions in this domain are related to profile building, interest’s recommendation, and trending topics prediction. However, few work has been devoted to the analysis of the evolution of very short and unpredictable events, called polemics. Also, experts do not use tools coming from social network graphs analysis and classical graph theory for this analysis. In this way, this article shows that such analysis lead to a colossal amount of data collected from public social sources like Twitter. The main problem is collecting enough evidences about a non-predictable event, which requires capturing a complete history before and during the course of this event, and processing them. To cope with this problem, while waiting for an event, we captured social data without filtering it, which required more than a TB of disk space. Then, we conduct a time-related social network analysis. The first one is dedicated to the study of the evolution of the actor interactions, using time-series built from a total of 33 graph theory metrics. A Big Data pipeline allows us to validate these techniques on a complex dataset of 284 millions of tweets, analyzing 56 days of the Volkswagen scandal
Cerebral Asymmetries, Motivation, and Cognitive Processing: An Analysis of Individual Differences
Get PDFEveryday life experience tells us that individual differences apparently matter. Although confronted with the same situation, individuals seem to act and react in different ways. On a behavioral and self-report level, individual differences are well documented. Over the past decades, they have been systematically assessed and embedded in complex theories of personality. On the other hand, the influence of personality differences on cognitive processes and their cerebral substrate is far from being entirely understood. Especially the complex interplay of two or more aspects, like individual differences (e.g., in motivational processes), cognitive functions (e.g., intuition), cerebral activation and lateralization, and humoral processes (e.g., cortisol), are seldom aim of psychological research.
The Personality Systems Interaction (PSI) theory (Kuhl, 2000, 2001) provides a theoretical framework, which tries to incorporate the above-mentioned aspects. On the background of PSI theory, the aim of the present work was to investigate differences in motivational processing and how they are related to hemispherical asymmetries, cognitive processing, and humoral reactivity. Each of the three research articles presented throughout the present work tackles different aspects of this general research question. For this, a variety of different methodological techniques were used (e.g., questionnaires, implicit measures, electroencephalography, etc.) to approach the aforementioned goal.
The first research paper presented in the current work examines the relationship between the implicit affiliation motive and intuition, as a form cognitive processing. Previous research already demonstrated that affiliation-laden primes facilitate intuitive thought (Kuhl & Kazén, 2008). Therefore, it could be expected that trait affiliation motive would also be correlated with intuition. Intuition in turn is thought to be a function of right hemispheric processes. An association between trait affiliation and intuition could therefore indirectly indicate a lateralization to the right side for affiliation. With the first study of the present work, the author tested this association. Thirty-nine students filled in the Operant Motive Test for the assessment of implicit affiliation, a variant of the Thematic Apperception Test. Then, 9 months later, participants engaged in a Remote Associates Test in which they intuitively had to indicate whether three words are semantically related. As expected, the implicit affiliation motive significantly predicted the accuracy of identifying related word triads. No other implicit or explicit measure, nor state or trait positive affect was associated with intuition.
With the second research article, the aforementioned indirect association between affiliation and lateralized processing was investigated more directly. Previous research on relationships between personality and EEG resting state frontal asymmetries mainly focused on individual differences with respect to motivational direction (i.e., approach vs. withdrawal). By contrast, the second article investigated frontal asymmetries as a function of individual differences in implicit affiliation motive. The goal was not only to contribute to the validation of PSI theory and to the investigation of the laterality of the affiliation motive, but also to disentangle the contribution of different social motives to frontal EEG asymmetries. The consideration of social motives, such as the affiliation motive, seemed to be necessary, because a recent meta-analysis showed that the association between approach motivation and frontal asymmetries is negligible or that unidentified moderators drive this association. From previous research and the results from the first paper presented in the current work, an association between affiliation motive and right frontal activity was predicted. Additionally, to control for possible associations with motivational direction, trait behavioral inhibition, behavioral activation, and anger were assessed and correlated with frontal asymmetries. Seventy-two right-handed students were tested. As expected and in accordance with the findings from the first paper, the author found that relative right frontal activity (indicated by low alpha frequency power) was associated with the affiliation motive. To explore brain regions responsible for this association at scalp sites, a source localization algorithm was applied. Intracranial distribution of primary current densities for the alpha band spectrum in source space was estimated and correlated with implicit affiliation scores. A significantly correlating area could be identified in the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex (Brodmann Area 10). No other associations at scalp sites or in source space could be found for motivational direction.
The third research article presented in the current work highlights motivational differences slightly different from those presented above. It deals with dynamic motivational processes, such as action orientation, and how they moderate the association between cerebral asymmetries and the physiological stress reaction. Hypothalamus pituitary adrenocortical (HPA) system activity and frontal brain asymmetries have both been linked to stress and emotion but their relationship remains unclear, especially when additionally considering individual differences. Therefore, participants were exposed to public speaking stress while salivary cortisol levels (as a marker of HPA activity) and resting frontal EEG alpha asymmetries were assessed before and after stress induction. The results indicate that higher post stressor cortisol levels were associated with higher relative left frontal activity. State oriented participants showed a stronger association between cortisol response and left frontal activity than action oriented participants.
The above-mentioned findings are discussed referring to PSI theory and their possible implications. Additionally, shortcomings of the present research and possible remedies will be presented
