107,050 research outputs found
Measuring agricultural innovation system properties and performance: Illustrations from Ethiopia and Vietnam
"The rapidly changing nature of the global food and agriculture system suggests the need to rethink how innovation can contribute to developing-country agriculture. While scientific and technological changes in agriculture can help foster productivity growth and poverty reduction, their contributions are incomplete without commensurate changes in the wider system of which they are a part. A more systems-oriented understanding of how innovation occurs in a society and economy is critical to promoting dynamism, responsiveness, and competitiveness in developing-country agriculture and, ultimately, to enhancing productivity and reducing poverty. However, without adequate measures of the properties and performance of an agricultural innovation system, it is difficult for policymakers, investors, donors, and practitioners to promote policies and investments that foster greater innovativeness in agriculture. This suggests the need for a measure of agricultural innovativeness that preferably extends beyond the âblack boxâ approach of measuring only inputs and outputs, focusing on the underlying processes that contribute to building the capabilities needed to create an innovative agricultural sector. To this end, this paper attempts to provide a âproof of conceptâ that innovativeness in developing-country agriculture can be measured. It first identifies a set of indicators from secondary data sources that measure the key elements of an agricultural innovation system. Several hundred indicators are reviewed, validated, and aggregated into a unique Agriculture, Development, and Innovation Index (ADII). The paper then provides a toolkit for collecting and analyzing âsystems-orientedâ indicators that add more process-related nuances to the ADII with both attributional and relational data. This is illustrated with data collected in Ethiopia and Vietnam in 2007â08." from authors' abstractAgriculture, Developing countries, Innovation, Science and technology,
Semantic-based policy engineering for autonomic systems
This paper presents some important directions in the use of ontology-based semantics in achieving the vision of Autonomic Communications. We examine the requirements of Autonomic Communication with a focus on the demanding needs of ubiquitous computing environments, with an emphasis on the requirements shared with Autonomic Computing. We observe that ontologies provide a strong mechanism for addressing the heterogeneity in user task requirements, managed resources, services and context. We then present two complimentary approaches that exploit ontology-based knowledge in support of autonomic communications: service-oriented models for policy engineering and dynamic semantic queries using content-based networks. The paper concludes with a discussion of the major research challenges such approaches raise
Performance Measures Using Electronic Health Records: Five Case Studies
Presents the experiences of five provider organizations in developing, testing, and implementing four types of electronic quality-of-care indicators based on EHR data. Discusses challenges, and compares results with those from traditional indicators
Seeding Knowledge Solutions Before, During, and After
{Excerpt} In the age of competence, one must learn before, during, and after the event. Knowledge solutions lie in the areas of strategy development, management techniques, collaboration mechanisms, knowledge sharing and learning, and knowledge capture and storage.
Competence is the state or quality of being adequately or well qualified to deliver a specific task, action, or function successfully. It is also a specific range of knowledge, skills, or behaviors utilized to improve performance.
Today, sustainable competitive advantage derives from strenuous efforts to identify, cultivate, and exploitan organizationâs core competencies, the tangible fruits of which are composite packages of products and services that anticipate and meet demand. (Yesteryear, instead of strengthening the roots of competitiveness, the accent was placed on business units. Innately, given their defining characteristics, business units under-invest in core competencies, incarcerate resources, and bind innovationâwhen they do not stifle it.)
Core competencies are integrated and harmonized abilities that provide potential access to markets; create and deliver value to audiences, clients, and partners there; and are difficult for competitors to imitate. They depend on relentless design of strategic architecture, deployment of competence carriers, and commitment to collaborate across silos. They are the product of collective learning
Stable Wireless Network Control Under Service Constraints
We consider the design of wireless queueing network control policies with
particular focus on combining stability with additional application-dependent
requirements. Thereby, we consequently pursue a cost function based approach
that provides the flexibility to incorporate constraints and requirements of
particular services or applications. As typical examples of such requirements,
we consider the reduction of buffer underflows in case of streaming traffic,
and energy efficiency in networks of battery powered nodes. Compared to the
classical throughput optimal control problem, such requirements significantly
complicate the control problem. We provide easily verifyable theoretical
conditions for stability, and, additionally, compare various candidate cost
functions applied to wireless networks with streaming media traffic. Moreover,
we demonstrate how the framework can be applied to the problem of energy
efficient routing, and we demonstrate the aplication of our framework in
cross-layer control problems for wireless multihop networks, using an advanced
power control scheme for interference mitigation, based on successive convex
approximation. In all scenarios, the performance of our control framework is
evaluated using extensive numerical simulations.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Control of Network
Systems. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1208.297
Average Rate of Downlink Heterogeneous Cellular Networks over Generalized Fading Channels - A Stochastic Geometry Approach
In this paper, we introduce an analytical framework to compute the average
rate of downlink heterogeneous cellular networks. The framework leverages
recent application of stochastic geometry to other-cell interference modeling
and analysis. The heterogeneous cellular network is modeled as the
superposition of many tiers of Base Stations (BSs) having different transmit
power, density, path-loss exponent, fading parameters and distribution, and
unequal biasing for flexible tier association. A long-term averaged maximum
biased-received-power tier association is considered. The positions of the BSs
in each tier are modeled as points of an independent Poisson Point Process
(PPP). Under these assumptions, we introduce a new analytical methodology to
evaluate the average rate, which avoids the computation of the Coverage
Probability (Pcov) and needs only the Moment Generating Function (MGF) of the
aggregate interference at the probe mobile terminal. The distinguishable
characteristic of our analytical methodology consists in providing a tractable
and numerically efficient framework that is applicable to general fading
distributions, including composite fading channels with small- and mid-scale
fluctuations. In addition, our method can efficiently handle correlated
Log-Normal shadowing with little increase of the computational complexity. The
proposed MGF-based approach needs the computation of either a single or a
two-fold numerical integral, thus reducing the complexity of Pcov-based
frameworks, which require, for general fading distributions, the computation of
a four-fold integral.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Communications, to
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