Digital Transformation in the Ornamental Stone Industry: Case Studies on Industry 4.0 and Digital Twins

Funding program "LISBOA-01-0247-FEDER-046083" for this R&D scholarship.The rapid evolution of Industry 4.0 technologies has ushered in a new era in manufacturing systems, with Digital Twins leading the way. These virtual replicas offer invaluable opportunities for simulating and optimizing new manufacturing processes, and their most transformative impact may lie in the creation of these digital models. This research unifies the main key concepts of four separate studies, all of which explore the application of Digital Twins in the ornamental stone industry. Industry 4.0 systems and their technologies have directly influenced the ornamental stone industry, addressing both the effects on mineral resources and energy consumption in daily operations. In addition, research and development initiatives seek to make this industry more efficient and sustainable, addressing crucial issues such as economic growth, environmental impact, and social welfare. The increasing digitization of manufacturing systems and their integration with digital models has played a key role in this process, enabling the replication of shop floor operations and the optimization of material use. The application of Digital Twins, which are virtual replicas of physical systems, has been explored in an ornamental stone manufacturing company. These digital models have demonstrated the ability to save time and resources during prototype design, as well as offering continuous diagnostics and optimization throughout production. It is important to note that the implementation of Digital Twins requires care due to technical challenges, but their adoption promises to significantly impact business value, despite the initial complexities. Managing stone cutting devices with Digital Twins presents real challenges in the ornamental stone industry, but it also paves the way for greater precision, efficiency, and cost savings. These digital models enable real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and virtual simulations. This study explores different approaches to connecting physical cutting machines to their respective Digital Twins, evaluating criteria such as communication speed, security, scalability, and cost. The results of this analysis provide valuable information for implementing Digital Twins in the stone cutting industry

Quality of Service Aware Data Stream Processing for Highly Dynamic and Scalable Applications

Huge amounts of georeferenced data streams are arriving daily to data stream management systems that are deployed for serving highly scalable and dynamic applications. There are innumerable ways at which those loads can be exploited to gain deep insights in various domains. Decision makers require an interactive visualization of such data in the form of maps and dashboards for decision making and strategic planning. Data streams normally exhibit fluctuation and oscillation in arrival rates and skewness. Those are the two predominant factors that greatly impact the overall quality of service. This requires data stream management systems to be attuned to those factors in addition to the spatial shape of the data that may exaggerate the negative impact of those factors. Current systems do not natively support services with quality guarantees for dynamic scenarios, leaving the handling of those logistics to the user which is challenging and cumbersome. Three workloads are predominant for any data stream, batch processing, scalable storage and stream processing. In this thesis, we have designed a quality of service aware system, SpatialDSMS, that constitutes several subsystems that are covering those loads and any mixed load that results from intermixing them. Most importantly, we natively have incorporated quality of service optimizations for processing avalanches of geo-referenced data streams in highly dynamic application scenarios. This has been achieved transparently on top of the codebases of emerging de facto standard best-in-class representatives, thus relieving the overburdened shoulders of the users in the presentation layer from having to reason about those services. Instead, users express their queries with quality goals and our system optimizers compiles that down into query plans with an embedded quality guarantee and leaves logistic handling to the underlying layers. We have developed standard compliant prototypes for all the subsystems that constitutes SpatialDSMS

Effective Strategies to Reduce Employee Turnover in the Retail Industry

Employee turnover negatively affects retail organizations and can lead to poor financial performance, a decrease in competitive advantage, loss of productivity, deficiencies in retaining external customers, and economic failures. The purpose of this single case study was to explore strategies that retail store leaders from the Illinois area of the United States use to reduce frontline employee turnover. Herzberg\u27s 2-factor theory provided the framework for the study. Data were collected from documents pertaining to retention methods and through face-to-face semistructured interviews with 7 leaders of a retail company in the Illinois area who had experience with effective employee retention strategies. Data were analyzed using manual coding methods, auto-coding features, and word frequency searches. Three themes emerged from the data analysis: (a) effective communication and transparency-improved employee retention, (b) competitive compensation and benefits-package-improved employee retention, and (c) training-and-development-improved employee retention. Organizational leaders mitigating employee turnover contribute to social change by creating initiatives focused on the recognition of value in people, the company, and the community

The Porto European Cancer Research Summit 2021

Key stakeholders from the cancer research continuum met in May 2021 at the European Cancer Research Summit in Porto to discuss priorities and specific action points required for the successful implementation of the European Cancer Mission and Europe's Beating Cancer Plan (EBCP). Speakers presented a unified view about the need to establish high-quality, networked infrastructures to decrease cancer incidence, increase the cure rate, improve patient's survival and quality of life, and deal with research and care inequalities across the European Union (EU). These infrastructures, featuring Comprehensive Cancer Centres (CCCs) as key components, will integrate care, prevention and research across the entire cancer continuum to support the development of personalized/precision cancer medicine in Europe. The three pillars of the recommended European infrastructures – namely translational research, clinical/prevention trials and outcomes research – were pondered at length. Speakers addressing the future needs of translational research focused on the prospects of multiomics assisted preclinical research, progress in Molecular and Digital Pathology, immunotherapy, liquid biopsy and science data. The clinical/prevention trial session presented the requirements for next-generation, multicentric trials entailing unified strategies for patient stratification, imaging, and biospecimen acquisition and storage. The third session highlighted the need for establishing outcomes research infrastructures to cover primary prevention, early detection, clinical effectiveness of innovations, health-related quality-of-life assessment, survivorship research and health economics. An important outcome of the Summit was the presentation of the Porto Declaration, which called for a collective and committed action throughout Europe to develop the cancer research infrastructures indispensable for fostering innovation and decreasing inequalities within and between member states. Moreover, the Summit guidelines will assist decision making in the context of a unique EU-wide cancer initiative that, if expertly implemented, will decrease the cancer death toll and improve the quality of life of those confronted with cancer, and this is carried out at an affordable cost.Where authors are identified as personnel of the International Agency for Research on Cancer/World Health Organization, the authors alone are responsible for the views expressed in this article and they do not necessarily represent the decisions, policy or views of the International Agency for Research on Cancer/World Health Organization. JT reports personal financial interest in form of scientific consultancy role for Array Biopharma, AstraZeneca, Avvinity, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Chugai, DaiichiSankyo, F. Hoffmann‐La Roche Ltd, Genentech Inc, HalioDX SAS, Hutchison MediPharma International, Ikena Oncology, IQVIA, Lilly, Menarini, Merck Serono, Merus, MSD, Mirati, Neophore, Novartis, Orion Biotechnology, Peptomyc, Pfizer, Pierre Fabre, Samsung Bioepis, Sanofi, Seattle Genetics, Servier, Taiho, Tessa Therapeutics and TheraMyc. And also educational collaboration with Imedex, Medscape Education, MJH Life Sciences, PeerView Institute for Medical Education and Physicians Education Resource (PER). JT also declares institutional financial interest in form of financial support for clinical trials or contracted research for Amgen Inc, Array Biopharma Inc, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP, BeiGene, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Celgene, Debiopharm International SA, F. Hoffmann‐La Roche Ltd, Genentech Inc, HalioDX SAS, Hutchison MediPharma International, Janssen‐Cilag SA, MedImmune, Menarini, Merck Health KGAA, Merck Sharp & Dohme, Merus NV, Mirati, Novartis Farmacéutica SA, Pfizer, Pharma Mar, Sanofi Aventis Recherche & Développement, Servier, Taiho Pharma USA Inc, Spanish Association Against Cancer Scientific Foundation and Cancer Research UK. MB has received funding for his research projects and for educational grants to the University of Dresden by Bayer AG (2016‐2018), Merck KGaA (2014‐open) and Medipan GmbH (2014‐2018). He is on the supervisory board of HI‐STEM GmbH (Heidelberg) for the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ, Heidelberg) and also member of the supervisory body of the Charité University Hospital, Berlin. As former chair of OncoRay (Dresden) and present CEO and Scientific Chair of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ, Heidelberg), he has been or is responsible for collaborations with a multitude of companies and institutions, worldwide. In this capacity, he has discussed potential projects and signed contracts for research funding and/or collaborations with industry and academia for his institute(s) and staff, including but not limited to pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bosch, Roche and other companies such as Siemens, IBA, Varian, Elekta, Bruker, etc. In this role, he was/is also responsible for the commercial technology transfer activities of his institute(s), including the creation of start‐ups and licensing. This includes the DKFZ‐PSMA617 related patent portfolio [WO2015055318 (A1), ANTIGEN (PSMA)] and similar IP portfolios. MB confirms that, to the best of his knowledge, none of the above funding sources were involved in the preparation of this paper. BB has received research funding from 4D Pharma, Abbvie, Amgen, Aptitude Health, AstraZeneca, BeiGene, Blueprint Medicines, BMS, Boehringer Ingelheim, Celgene, Cergentis, Cristal Therapeutics, Daiichi‐Sankyo, Eli Lilly, GSK, Inivata, Janssen, Onxeo, OSE immunotherapeutics, Pfizer, Roche‐Genentech, Sanofi, Takeda, Tolero Pharmaceuticals. FC declares consultancy role for: Amgen, Astellas/Medivation, AstraZeneca, Celgene, Daiichi‐Sankyo, Eisai, GE Oncology, Genentech, GlaxoSmithKline, Macrogenics, Medscape, Merck‐Sharp, Merus BV, Mylan, Mundipharma, Novartis, Pfizer, Pierre‐Fabre, prIME Oncology, Roche, Sanofi, Samsung Bioepis, Seagen, Teva. SF is a consulting or advisory board member at Bayer, Illumina, Roche; has received honoraria from Amgen, Eli Lilly, PharmaMar, Roche; has received research funding from AstraZeneca, Pfizer, PharmaMar, Roche; has received sponsorship of travel or accommodation expenses by Amgen, Eli Lilly, Illumina, PharmaMar, Roche. SG owns AstraZeneca stock and is a full‐time employee of AstraZeneca. PN has had an advisory role at Bayer, MSD Oncology, has received honoraria from Bayer, Novartis and MSD Oncology, and has had travel expenses paid by Novartis. JO has been an advisory board member at Roche, Novartis, Bayer, Merck, Eisai, Astrazeneca, Pierre Fabre Medicament and Bristol‐Myers Squibb. He has also received research funding by IPO Porto, Astrazeneca, Fundação para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) and Liga Portuguesa Contra o Cancro (LPCC). AR is an employee of European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, Brussels, MSD International Business GmbH, Kriens, Switzerland[CvG1], and Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp., a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ USA, who may own stock and/or hold stock options in the Company.RS serves as principal investigator of the ASCO TAPUR study. ASCO receives research grants from the following companies in support of the study: Astra‐Zeneca, Bayer, Boehringer‐Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Genentech, Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, Seattle Genetics. Dr. Schilsky serves as a member of the managing board of Clariifi and as a consultant to Bryologyx, Cellworks Group, EQRx, and Scandion Oncology. The Netherlands Cancer Institute receives research support via EV from Roche, Astrazeneca, Eisai, Novartis, GSK, Clovis, BMS, MSD, Pfizer, Amgen, Bayer, Lilly, Janssen and Seagen. LZ is founder of everImmune, member of the board of directors of Transgene, member of the scientific advisory board of Transgene, EpiVax, Lytix Biopharma. LZ has also had research contracts with: Merus, Roche, Tusk, Kaleido, GSK, BMS, Incyte, Pileje, Innovate Pharma, and Transgene and has received honoraria by Transgene. All other authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. Regarding the design of innovative and adaptive clinical trials, two examples were illustrated: the first European multimodular, two‐part academic CCE‐endorsed Basket of Baskets (BoB) study, and the recently launched CCE Building Data Rich Clinical Trials (DART) Consortium, which is supported by EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Box 13 ). We are grateful for the support by Carolina Espina, International Agency for Research on Cancer; Christina von Gertten, European Academy of Cancer Sciences; Ana Augusta Silva, Portuguese Oncology Institute of Porto; and Teresa Tavares, Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, Portugal for their excellent cooperation. Carmen Jeronimo, Portuguese Oncology Institute of Porto, collaborated in the presentation of Porto Comprehensive Cancer Center by Raquel Seruca

Digitising the Industry Internet of Things Connecting the Physical, Digital and VirtualWorlds

This book provides an overview of the current Internet of Things (IoT) landscape, ranging from the research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies in a global context. A successful deployment of IoT technologies requires integration on all layers, be it cognitive and semantic aspects, middleware components, services, edge devices/machines and infrastructures. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC - Internet of Things European Research Cluster from research to technological innovation, validation and deployment. The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European Research Cluster and the IoT European Platform Initiative (IoT-EPI) and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, innovation, development and deployment of IoT in the next years. The IoT is bridging the physical world with virtual world and requires sound information processing capabilities for the "digital shadows" of these real things. The research and innovation in nanoelectronics, semiconductor, sensors/actuators, communication, analytics technologies, cyber-physical systems, software, swarm intelligent and deep learning systems are essential for the successful deployment of IoT applications. The emergence of IoT platforms with multiple functionalities enables rapid development and lower costs by offering standardised components that can be shared across multiple solutions in many industry verticals. The IoT applications will gradually move from vertical, single purpose solutions to multi-purpose and collaborative applications interacting across industry verticals, organisations and people, being one of the essential paradigms of the digital economy. Many of those applications still have to be identified and involvement of end-users including the creative sector in this innovation is crucial. The IoT applications and deployments as integrated building blocks of the new digital economy are part of the accompanying IoT policy framework to address issues of horizontal nature and common interest (i.e. privacy, end-to-end security, user acceptance, societal, ethical aspects and legal issues) for providing trusted IoT solutions in a coordinated and consolidated manner across the IoT activities and pilots. In this, context IoT ecosystems offer solutions beyond a platform and solve important technical challenges in the different verticals and across verticals. These IoT technology ecosystems are instrumental for the deployment of large pilots and can easily be connected to or build upon the core IoT solutions for different applications in order to expand the system of use and allow new and even unanticipated IoT end uses. Technical topics discussed in the book include: • Introduction• Digitising industry and IoT as key enabler in the new era of Digital Economy• IoT Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda• IoT in the digital industrial context: Digital Single Market• Integration of heterogeneous systems and bridging the virtual, digital and physical worlds• Federated IoT platforms and interoperability• Evolution from intelligent devices to connected systems of systems by adding new layers of cognitive behaviour, artificial intelligence and user interfaces.• Innovation through IoT ecosystems• Trust-based IoT end-to-end security, privacy framework• User acceptance, societal, ethical aspects and legal issues• Internet of Things Application

Conceptual aspects management of competitiveness the economic entities: collective monograph

The authors of the book have come to the conclusion that it is necessary to effectively use modern approaches the management of competitiveness the economic entities in order to increase the efficiency of using the resource potential, formation of competitive advantages and development strategies. Basic research focuses on economic diagnostics of ensuring the competitiveness of economic entities, marketing and logistics, analysis of energy-efficient potential, assessment of development potential. The research results have been implemented in the different models of inventory management, corporate social responsibility management, business process management and project management. The results of the study can be used in decision-making at the level the economic entities in different areas of activity and organizational-legal forms of ownership, ministries and departments that promote of development the economic entities and increase their competitiveness. The results can also be used by students and young scientists in modern concepts and mechanisms for management of competitiveness the economic entities in the context of efficient use the resource potential and introduction of modern innovations

Generation of effective serious games with static and dynamic content

With video games being a huge market, attracting and engaging millions of players, it is tempting to use these motivational aspects not just for entertainment. After all, play as the basis of games has inherent learning aspects, for example seen at the way how children play and learn. The serious games movement that took off at the beginning of the 21st century wants to achieve exactly that: provide playful learning environments and utilize the motivational aspects of games to transport serious content to players. Getting from such an idea to an actual game, however, is far from trivial. A fundamental problem is how to integrate serious content and game parts. Finding ways how to improve the game creation process to produce applications that are both fun to play and effective in delivering a serious content is the main focus of this thesis. Therefore, the problem is approached in two ways: by providing best practice tips for the creators of serious games and by presenting results of different practical game implementations and studies. Two sets of serious games — seven in total — have been developed within the course of this thesis. The first set comprises games with static serious content. These games depict the regular development approach. Here, a static game concept is created and implemented by professional game developers. This approach allows for a high degree of freedom in the game creation process. Nevertheless, emphasis has to be put on combining serious content in the right way to produce effective and fun serious games. Best practice tips are given along with presenting results from user studies that are based on the implemented game prototypes. The second set of games features dynamic learning content. In contrast to static variants, these games support changing the learning content at runtime. This allows for more accessible creation methods: Once created, any domain expert can create own custom games without the need for expertise in game development. On the other hand, special emphasis has to be put on designing the frameworks in a manner that game scenario and learning content are well integrated, despite not having a thematic connection. Different approaches are examined by developing games with dynamic content. The games are evaluated in terms of their usefulness. Different user studies look at the motivational aspects as well as at the learning outcome. Furthermore, the effect of not having a connection between game scenario and learning content is examined to compare the effectiveness of static and dynamic variants

Digitising the Industry Internet of Things Connecting the Physical, Digital and VirtualWorlds

This book provides an overview of the current Internet of Things (IoT) landscape, ranging from the research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies in a global context. A successful deployment of IoT technologies requires integration on all layers, be it cognitive and semantic aspects, middleware components, services, edge devices/machines and infrastructures. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC - Internet of Things European Research Cluster from research to technological innovation, validation and deployment. The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European Research Cluster and the IoT European Platform Initiative (IoT-EPI) and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, innovation, development and deployment of IoT in the next years. The IoT is bridging the physical world with virtual world and requires sound information processing capabilities for the "digital shadows" of these real things. The research and innovation in nanoelectronics, semiconductor, sensors/actuators, communication, analytics technologies, cyber-physical systems, software, swarm intelligent and deep learning systems are essential for the successful deployment of IoT applications. The emergence of IoT platforms with multiple functionalities enables rapid development and lower costs by offering standardised components that can be shared across multiple solutions in many industry verticals. The IoT applications will gradually move from vertical, single purpose solutions to multi-purpose and collaborative applications interacting across industry verticals, organisations and people, being one of the essential paradigms of the digital economy. Many of those applications still have to be identified and involvement of end-users including the creative sector in this innovation is crucial. The IoT applications and deployments as integrated building blocks of the new digital economy are part of the accompanying IoT policy framework to address issues of horizontal nature and common interest (i.e. privacy, end-to-end security, user acceptance, societal, ethical aspects and legal issues) for providing trusted IoT solutions in a coordinated and consolidated manner across the IoT activities and pilots. In this, context IoT ecosystems offer solutions beyond a platform and solve important technical challenges in the different verticals and across verticals. These IoT technology ecosystems are instrumental for the deployment of large pilots and can easily be connected to or build upon the core IoT solutions for different applications in order to expand the system of use and allow new and even unanticipated IoT end uses. Technical topics discussed in the book include: • Introduction• Digitising industry and IoT as key enabler in the new era of Digital Economy• IoT Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda• IoT in the digital industrial context: Digital Single Market• Integration of heterogeneous systems and bridging the virtual, digital and physical worlds• Federated IoT platforms and interoperability• Evolution from intelligent devices to connected systems of systems by adding new layers of cognitive behaviour, artificial intelligence and user interfaces.• Innovation through IoT ecosystems• Trust-based IoT end-to-end security, privacy framework• User acceptance, societal, ethical aspects and legal issues• Internet of Things Application