374 research outputs found
The Impact Of The Development Of ICT In Several Hungarian Economic Sectors
No full textAs the author could not find a reassuring mathematical and
statistical method in the literature for studying the effect of
information communication technology on enterprises, the author
suggested a new research and analysis method that he also used to study the Hungarian economic sectors. The question of what
factors have an effect on their net income is vital for enterprises. At first, the author studied some potential indicators related to economic sectors, then those indicators were compared to the net income of the surveyed enterprises. The resulting data showed that the growing penetration of electronic marketplaces contributed to the change of the net income of enterprises to the greatest extent.
Furthermore, among all the potential indicators, it was the only indicator directly influencing the net income of enterprises.
With the help of the compound indicator and the financial data
of the studied economic sectors, the author made an attempt to find a connection between the development level of ICT and
profitability. Profitability and productivity are influenced by a lot of other factors as well. As the effect of the other factors could not be measured, the results – shown in a coordinate system - are not full but informative.
The highest increment of specific Gross Value Added was
produced by the fields of ‘Manufacturing’, ‘Electricity, gas and water supply’, ‘Transport, storage and communication’ and
‘Financial intermediation’. With the exception of ‘Electricity, gas and water supply’, the other economic sectors belong to the group of underdeveloped branches (below 50 percent).
On the other hand, ‘Construction’, ‘Health and social work’ and
‘Hotels and restaurants’ can be seen as laggards, so they got into the lower left part of the coordinate system.
‘Agriculture, hunting and forestry’ can also be classified as a
laggard economic sector, but as the effect of the compound
indicator on the increment of Gross Value Added was less
significant, it can be found in the upper left part of the coordinate system. Drawing a trend line on the points, it can be made clear that it shows a positive gradient, that is, the higher the usage of ICT devices, the higher improvement can be detected in the specific Gross Value Added
Choosing the Right Kind of Accreditation for a Business School: A Comparison between AACSB, ACBSP, and IACBE
No full textThis paper offers a comparison of the accreditation standards of three CHEA and US Department of Education recognized business school program accreditation agencies – AACSB, ACBSP, and IACBE. It also discusses the relative challenges and benefits of achieving accreditation by these agencies. While the choice for business schools is often not very clear and is a long drawn negotiated process involving different interest groups, this paper will nevertheless offer some basis of comparison among the accreditation agencies. The author draws heavily from his own personal experiences leading accreditation efforts in various US based and international b-schools and proposes the merits and demerits of different alternatives
Synthesis of Heteroaryl Urea Derivatives as Antimicrobial Agents
No full textAzoles are prominent scaffolds in the pharmaceutical arena. In fact, medicinal properties of azole and benzazole containing compounds include anticancer, antimicrobial and antioxidant. Some of the drugs Inthomycin C, Oxaprozin, Tiazofurin, Dacarbazine, Tipifarnib, Albendazole, Febendazole, Omeprazole possess azole/benzazole moiety. Realizing the importance of azoles and benzazoles, it is planned to conjugate these two ligands as heteroaryl substituted urea derivatives and to study their antimicrobial activity. The results pertaining to these aspects will be discussed. © 2020 Author(s).The authors K. Narendra Babu and V. Padmavathi are grateful to CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), New Delhi for financial assistance under major research project
Karadi 2
No full textMusic, poetry, storytelling, and lively color come together to make each of these book/cassette sets attractive. Each tape starts with a song in which Karadi introduces himself as a teller of stories. Karadi's nephew cubs are arguing and fighting as he arrives on Sunday, story-telling day. Their squabbling evokes this good story of friendship. The story is told in traditional fashion, except that a mole replaces the usual rat. The tortoise wears spectacles. The visual of the hunter running from the scene includes a ghost that is only suggested in the text as a fear of that some strange spirit would follow him. Dondu is the donkey star of the second story. He likes to sing. He once grew fat on his favorite cucumbers. Contentment with his cucumbers led him one evening to sing out. The villagers came and beat him. This simple Panchatantra story is new to me. The books and audio cassette come together in a cardboard package. Though I will list each set under both books and audio cassettes, I will keep them together in their packages under books.Script & Direction by Shobha Viswanat
Modeling and control principles for a tentacle-like surgical instrument
No full textIn this project a challenge in the field of minimally invasive surgery is addressed. Contemporary minimally invasive instruments usually consist of a rigid beam with an end effector on one side and a controlling mechanism on the other. These instruments work well for cases when the body can be entered in such a way that the target, on which to operate, is reachable in a straight line. When it is not possible to reach the target in a straight line, a new solution is necessary. This thesis proposes to replace the rigid beam with a robotic tentacle. The tentacle considered in this thesis is modeled after an Ionic Polymer-Metal Composite (IPMC) which is an Electro-Active Polymer (EAP), a material which mechanically deforms once put in an electric field. Electromechanical properties of the IPMC are combined with a layered geometric configuration of strips of IPMC to construct the tentacle. An electromechanical simulation model is constructed followed by the design of a curvature controller. The performance of the controller is analyzed in simulation. The results obtained from the simulation prove the concept of the robotic tentacle made of strips of IPMC as a possible solution to improve reaching capabilities of contemporary minimally invasive surgical instruments.Delft Centre for Systems and ControlMechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineerin
Assessing patterns of authorship of low- and middle-income countries in global commercial clinical trials in oncology
No full textPoor authorship practices in global health research may be a sign of unequal partnerships. Previous studies have shown that authors from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are frequently underrepresented in publications from global research collaborations between LMICs and high-income countries (HICs). To the best of our knowledge, the patterns of authorship from LMICs in international industry-sponsored clinical research on breast, lung and colon cancer have not yet been investigated. Therefore, as a spin-off to broader research on globalization of commercial clinical trials in oncology, we conducted an analysis of authorship in the publications from completed industry-sponsored therapeutic trials in breast, lung and colon cancer (from phase I to IV) that involved LMICs. Only articles published in a peer-reviewed journal in English by March 30, 2024 were included. A total of 302 publications from 173 trials were analysed. 63% (n = 191) of them have at least one author from a middle-income country (MIC); 14% (n = 42) articles have the first author from a MIC; and 13% (n = 39) articles have the last author from a MIC. Conversely, 37% (n = 111) of articles had no author from MIC, including two trials conducted only in MICs. In conclusion, our study found an imbalance in authorship, suggestive of significant inequalities, in collaborative research in industry-sponsored clinical trials for breast, lung and colon cancer. Industry sponsors need to work towards greater equity in authorship when collaborating with researchers in (L)MICs, and oncology researchers and opinion leaders in HICs should actively advocate for greater fairness to their colleagues in (L)MICs
Vacuum stability and Higgs diphoton decay rate in the Zee-Babu model
No full textAlthough recent Higgs data from ATLAS and CMS are compatible with a Standard Model (SM) signal at 2 sigma level, both experiments see indications for an excess in the diphoton decay channel, which points to now physics beyond the SM. Given such a low Higgs mass m(H) similar to 125 GeV, another sign indicating the existence of new physics beyond the SM is the vacuum stability problem, i.e., the SM liggs quartic coupling may run to negative values at a scale below the Planck scale. In this paper, we study the vacuum stability and enhanced Higgs diphoton decay rate in the Zee-Babu model, which was used to generate tiny Majorana neutrino masses at two-loop level. We find that it is rather difficult to find overlapping regions allowed by the vacuum stability and diphoton enhancement constraints. As a consequence, it is almost inevitable to introduce new ingredients into the model, in order to resolve these two issues simultaneously.Physics, Particles & FieldsSCI(E)7ARTICLE6nul
Multi-Agent Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Tasks
No full textFor single-agent problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms proved to be useful learning optimal control laws for nonlinear dynamic systems without relying on a mathematical model of the system to be controlled. With their ability to work on continuous action and state spaces, actor-critic RL algorithms are especially advantageous in that manner. So far, actor-critic methods have been applied to several single-agent control problems often with impressive results. A Multi-Agent System (MAS) distributes computational resources and capabilities across a network of interconnected agents. The main advantage of using such an approach is to distribute a globally complex problem to simpler sub-problems, which is a more natural way to address source allocation and team planning. Application of MAS to domains, such as robotics, distributed control and telecommunications, gained popularity in last two decades. From the control point of view, cooperative MAS have a special importance since agents in control problems frequently seek to achieve a joint goal. So far, a significant amount of research has been dedicated to Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) for both cooperative and non-cooperative tasks. Yet, the actor-critic methods in MARL context have not been examined in detailed. The aim of this project is to implement actor-critic RL methods to cooperative MAS to combine the advantages of these two approaches and apply the resulting methods to a real-life control problem as a proof of concept. To achieve such task Model Learning Actor-Critic (MLAC) algorithm is extended to two of the Independent Learners (IL) based methods: optimistic learners and lenient learners. The resulting algorithms are tested on 2-link manipulator problem. The results indicate that, the initial learning speed of the proposed multi-agent MLAC algorithms is similar or faster than the centralized MLAC at the start of learning experiments, and the end performance is acceptable compared to the centralized MLAC.Delft Center for Systems and ControlMechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineerin
Evolutionary Co-Optimisation of Control and System Parameters for a Resonating Robot Arm
No full textThis study investigates the evolutionary co-optimisation of fuzzy control and system parameters for the Resonating robot Arm (RA). The RA is a novel concept for a pick-and-place manipulator that uses a spring mechanism to reduce the required actuator torques. Since the performance of the total system depends on the combination of the spring mechanism and the controller it is difficult to find (near) optimal solutions using conventional design approaches in which the system and the controller are optimised separately. Therefore evolutionary cooptimisation is proposed in which Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are used to optimise the RA system as a whole. Three experiments were conducted in which the first experiment validated the use of fuzzy control and EAs to find near optimal control solutions, and the second and third experiment considered the co-optimisation of the RA with one and two degrees-of-freedom (DOF), respectively. Two types of EAs (CoSyNE and CMA-ES) and two types of fuzzy controllers (with fixed and free membership functions) were applied and their performances compared. The results revealed that evolutionary co-optimisation yields near optimal solutions for the 1-DOF RA, which require 43% less torque than the solution found through a separate optimisation of the system and control parameters. In case of the 2-DOF RA, evolutionary co-optimisation resulted in working solutions, however, no consistent convergence to near optimal solutions was found. Additionally, it was shown that for all experiments the best solutions came from the CMA-ES algorithm in combination with the fuzzy controller with free membership functions. The main conclusion drawn from this study is that evolutionary co-optimisation is an effective approach to find near optimal solutions for the 1-DOF RA, however more research is needed for it to be effectively applied to the 2-DOF RA.Delft Center for Systems and ControlMechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineerin
Future sea-level projections with a coupled atmosphere-ocean-ice-sheet model
No full textClimate-forced, offline ice-sheet model simulations have been used extensively in assessing how much ice-sheets can contribute to future global sea-level rise. Typically, these model projections do not account for the two-way interactions between ice-sheets and climate. To quantify the impact of ice-ocean-atmosphere feedbacks, here we conduct greenhouse warming simulations with a coupled global climate-ice-sheet model of intermediate complexity. Following the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) 1-1.9, 2-4.5, 5-8.5 emission scenarios, the model simulations ice-sheet contributions to global sea-level rise by 2150 of 0.2 ± 0.01, 0.5 ± 0.01 and 1.4 ± 0.1 m, respectively. Antarctic ocean-ice-sheet-ice-shelf interactions enhance future subsurface basal melting, while freshwater-induced atmospheric cooling reduces surface melting and iceberg calving. The combined effect is likely to decelerate global sea-level rise contributions from Antarctica relative to the uncoupled climate-forced ice-sheet model configuration. Our results demonstrate that estimates of future sea-level rise fundamentally depend on the complex interactions between ice-sheets, icebergs, ocean and the atmosphere. © 2023, The Author(s).11Ysciescopu
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