170 research outputs found
Supplemantry_Information-Multiple_damage_detections_in_plate-like_structures_using_GSM – Supplemental material for Multiple damage detections in plate-like structures using curvature mode shapes and gapped smoothing method
No full textSupplemental material, Supplemantry_Information-Multiple_damage_detections_in_plate-like_structures_using_GSM for Multiple damage detections in plate-like structures using curvature mode shapes and gapped smoothing method by Saeed Ahmad, Aashir Waleed, Umar Siddique Virk, Muhammad Tanveer Riaz, Aamish Sharjeel and Nasir Ahmad in Advances in Mechanical Engineering</p
The construction of a model for lean product development
No full text‘Lean’ or ‘lean thinking’ refers to an improvement philosophy which focuses on the fulfilment of customer value and the reduction of waste. This philosophy is credited with the extraordinary rise of Toyota, one of the largest and most profitable automotive companies in the world. This thesis presents a pioneering study investigating how lean thinking should be applied to product development (PD).
The aim of the research was to construct an innovative model which supports the implementation of lean thinking in PD. This was achieved through progressive collaboration with practitioners from European manufacturing companies. The model provides a process for the conceptual development of an engineering project, and is composed of phases and activities for which methodologies have been defined.
The construction of the lean PD model was preceded by a systematic literature review and an industrial field study, wherein 36 semi-structured interviews were conducted in five manufacturing companies in Europe. The constructed model was later implemented on two real-life case studies via action research. The two conducted case studies involved the product architecture design for a car audio head unit and the development of a helicopter engine.
It was concluded that the lean PD model addresses various industrial challenges including customer value, communication, and innovation. Furthermore, by focusing on conceptual design, the lean PD model is expected to reduce design rework. As a result of the positive effects of the model, one of the companies involved intends to implement the lean PD model further, and wishes to extend the model to the rest of the organisation.
This research makes four main contributions: (1) a novel lean PD model; (2) a number of tools developed to support the model; (3) a framework for lean PD enablers; and (4) a categorisation of challenges faced by PD in industry used to verify the relevance of the lean PD model
Advanced endoscopic ultrasound management techniques for preneoplastic pancreatic cystic lesions
No full textPancreatic cystic lesions can be benign, premalignant or malignant. The recent increase in detection and tremendous clinical variability of pancreatic cysts has presented a significant therapeutic challenge to physicians. Mucinous cystic neoplasms are of particular interest given their known malignant potential. This review article provides a brief but comprehensive review of premalignant pancreatic cystic lesions with advanced endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) management approaches. A comprehensive literature search was performed using PubMed, Cochrane, OVID and EMBASE databases. Preneoplastic pancreatic cystic lesions include mucinous cystadenoma and intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasm. The 2012 International Sendai Guidelines guide physicians in their management of pancreatic cystic lesions. Some of the advanced EUS management techniques include ethanol ablation, chemotherapeutic (paclitaxel) ablation, radiofrequency ablation and cryotherapy. In future, EUS-guided injections of drug-eluting beads and neodymium:yttrium aluminum agent laser ablation is predicted to be an integral part of EUS-guided management techniques. In summary, International Sendai Consensus Guidelines should be used to make a decision regarding management of pancreatic cystic lesions. Advanced EUS techniques are proving extremely beneficial in management, especially in those patients who are at high surgical risk
Consumer Perception towards Brand Slogans:An investigative study towards Consumer Perception in the Malaysian Automobile Industry
No full textThis dissertation focuses on the concerned attribute of brand which would be the primary investigative entity of this dissertation; brand expression/ brand message/ brand tagline/brand slogan. Brand slogans are exploited as a marketing tool to facilitate message diffusion among the consumer market, as well as a powerful tool for targeted segment’s brand positioning (Cheng et al, 2006). In our every day lives, we come across hundreds of brands with several brand slogans targeting at different level of positioning towards the consumer mind. Having this in mind, this dissertation is motivated by a series of inquiries; have we ever critically analyzed these brand slogans? Are they just complimentary to a powerful brand? Do they enable the company to communicate with the consumer? Is it a viable form of marketing communications? All these questions lead to our discussion of what do these brand slogans mean to a consumer and how consumers perceive them. In this research, the previewed agenda’s will be incorporated from the perspective of the automobile industry in Malaysia. Brand slogan awareness, brand personality and consumer perceived value were tested for the brand Proton and Honda. Results achieve show significant discrepancies for the brand Proton, where as favorable and fulfilling perception towards Honda. The second phase of this dissertation tested the three constructs for the significant relationship to general consumer perception. The results state perceived social value statistically significant in impacting consumer’s perception towards brand slogan
Design and Implementation of aHeterogeneous Multicore Architectureusing Field Programmable Technology
No full textLatest trend in multi core architectures is to integrate heterogeneouscores on a single chip in order to achieve task and threadlevel parallelism, high performance and energy efficiency. Someexamples of heterogeneous multi cores processors include (Tegraby NVIDIA,Cell by IBM and Fusion by AMD). The goal of this thesis work is to design a heterogeneous (2x2)network on chip which can run different tasks in parallel on allthe four cores in the network. Development steps of heterogeneousnetwork on chip include integration of Leon3 -a soft core processorby AeroFlex Gaisler which conforms with IEEE 1754 (SPARCV8) architecture- at one of the nodes of a homogeneous networkon chip incorporating four NiosII/s cores -soft core processor byAltera.This integration involves replacing a NiosII/s processor fromone of the four nodes of the homogeneous network by Leon3 processor.To translate the signals between the resource to networkinterface of the node and the Leon3 processor an AMBA bus1 toAvalon bus2 signal translation wrapper was designed. All processorsin the network on chip communicate by message passing interface.To exploit the potential of heterogeneous network on chipthree applications including sparse LU factorization, nqueens andFibonacci numbers calculation were run on it. These applicationwere run on Leon3 SPARC which generated a number of tasks thatcan run in parallel on all cores of the network simultaneously. Thisparallel execution of nqueens and fibonacci numbers calculationhas resulted in speed up as compared to the serial execution ofthese applications on Leon3 SPARC only. Because of the limitedsize of the on chip memory available for the Leon3 processor, itwas not possible to run sparse LU factorization for bigger matrixsizes and this constraint has resulted in no speed up in case ofsparse LU factorization
Consumer Perception towards Brand Slogans:An investigative study towards Consumer Perception in the Malaysian Automobile Industry
No full textThis dissertation focuses on the concerned attribute of brand which would be the primary investigative entity of this dissertation; brand expression/ brand message/ brand tagline/brand slogan. Brand slogans are exploited as a marketing tool to facilitate message diffusion among the consumer market, as well as a powerful tool for targeted segment’s brand positioning (Cheng et al, 2006). In our every day lives, we come across hundreds of brands with several brand slogans targeting at different level of positioning towards the consumer mind. Having this in mind, this dissertation is motivated by a series of inquiries; have we ever critically analyzed these brand slogans? Are they just complimentary to a powerful brand? Do they enable the company to communicate with the consumer? Is it a viable form of marketing communications? All these questions lead to our discussion of what do these brand slogans mean to a consumer and how consumers perceive them. In this research, the previewed agenda’s will be incorporated from the perspective of the automobile industry in Malaysia. Brand slogan awareness, brand personality and consumer perceived value were tested for the brand Proton and Honda. Results achieve show significant discrepancies for the brand Proton, where as favorable and fulfilling perception towards Honda. The second phase of this dissertation tested the three constructs for the significant relationship to general consumer perception. The results state perceived social value statistically significant in impacting consumer’s perception towards brand slogan
Mono- and cross-lingual paraphrased text reuse and extrinsic plagiarism detection
No full textText reuse is the act of borrowing text (either verbatim or paraphrased) from an earlier written text. It could occur within the same language (mono-lingual) or across languages (cross-lingual) where the reused text is in a different language than the original text. Text reuse and its related problem, plagiarism (the unacknowledged reuse of text), are becoming serious issues in many fields and research shows that paraphrased and especially the cross-lingual cases of reuse are much harder to detect. Moreover, the recent rise in readily available multi-lingual content on the Web and social media has increased the problem to an unprecedented scale. To develop, compare, and evaluate automatic methods for mono- and crosslingual text reuse and extrinsic (finding portion(s) of text that is reused from the original text) plagiarism detection, standard evaluation resources are of utmost importance. However, previous efforts on developing such resources have mostly focused on English and some other languages. On the other hand, the Urdu language, which is widely spoken and has a large digital footprint, lacks resources in terms of core language processing tools and corpora. With this consideration in mind, this PhD research focuses on developing standard evaluation corpora, methods, and supporting resources to automatically detect mono-lingual (Urdu) and cross-lingual (English-Urdu) cases of text reuse and extrinsic plagiarism This thesis contributes a mono-lingual (Urdu) text reuse corpus (COUNTER Corpus) that contains real cases of Urdu text reuse at document-level. Another contribution is the development of a mono-lingual (Urdu) extrinsic plagiarism corpus (UPPC Corpus) that contains simulated cases of Urdu paraphrase plagiarism. Evaluation results, by applying a wide range of state-of-the-art mono-lingual methods on both corpora, shows that it is easier to detect verbatim cases than paraphrased ones. Moreover, the performance of these methods decreases considerably on real cases of reuse. A couple of supporting resources are also created to assist methods used in the cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse detection. A large-scale multi-domain English-Urdu parallel corpus (EUPC-20) that contains parallel sentences is mined from the Web and several bi-lingual (English-Urdu) dictionaries are compiled using multiple approaches from different sources. Another major contribution of this study is the development of a large benchmark cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse corpus (TREU Corpus). It contains English to Urdu real cases of text reuse at the document-level. A diversified range of methods are applied on the TREU Corpus to evaluate its usefulness and to show how it can be utilised in the development of automatic methods for measuring cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse. A new cross-lingual method is also proposed that uses bilingual word embeddings to estimate the degree of overlap amongst text documents by computing the maximum weighted cosine similarity between word pairs. The overall low evaluation results indicate that it is a challenging task to detect crosslingual real cases of text reuse, especially when the language pairs have unrelated scripts, i.e., English-Urdu. However, an improvement in the result is observed using a combination of methods used in the experiments. The research work undertaken in this PhD thesis contributes corpora, methods, and supporting resources for the mono- and cross-lingual text reuse and extrinsic plagiarism for a significantly under-resourced Urdu and English-Urdu language pair. It highlights that paraphrased and cross-lingual cross-script real cases of text reuse are harder to detect and are still an open issue. Moreover, it emphasises the need to develop standard evaluation and supporting resources for under-resourced languages to facilitate research in these languages. The resources that have been developed and methods proposed could serve as a framework for future research in other languages and language pairs
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