Discovering the competitors

This article reports on an experiment that tests whether a particular representation of robotic control processes is adequate for capturing significant variations in robot behavior. These variations can then be explored by a selectionist mechanism that generates and tests variations. An ecosystem modeled after a physical robotic ecosystem is introduced. The ecosystem contains a robot that occasionally has to recharge, as well as competitors that take away energy from the total system. The robot has to discover that its viability requires combating the competitors.This research has been carried out while visiting the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo. The agents group is nanced by the Belgian Federal government FKFO pro ject on emergent functionality (NFWO contract nr G.001 4.95) and the IUAP pro ject (nr. 20) CONSTRUCT.Peer Reviewe

The impact of service offering on business performance in electrical engineering companies

The article presents the results of a research investigating potential impact of service offering on business performance carried out among sixty electrical engineering companies in the Czech Republic. The main findings reveal the highest number of positive correlations between the items related to business performance, the item related to service offers to VIP customers, and the item focusing on monitoring the service offering of competitors. The paper discusses a new perspective of discovering whether and how service offering by electrical engineering companies in the Czech Republic influence business performance.peer-reviewe

Design of two-dimensional particle assemblies using isotropic pair interactions with an attractive well

Using ground-state and relative-entropy based inverse design strategies, isotropic interactions with an attractive well are determined to stabilize and promote as- sembly of particles into two-dimensional square, honeycomb, and kagome lattices. The design rules inferred from these results are discussed and validated in the dis- covery of interactions that favor assembly of the highly open truncated-square and truncated-hexagonal lattices.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures and supplemental materia

A Particle Swarm Optimization-based Flexible Convolutional Auto-Encoder for Image Classification

Convolutional auto-encoders have shown their remarkable performance in stacking to deep convolutional neural networks for classifying image data during past several years. However, they are unable to construct the state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks due to their intrinsic architectures. In this regard, we propose a flexible convolutional auto-encoder by eliminating the constraints on the numbers of convolutional layers and pooling layers from the traditional convolutional auto-encoder. We also design an architecture discovery method by using particle swarm optimization, which is capable of automatically searching for the optimal architectures of the proposed flexible convolutional auto-encoder with much less computational resource and without any manual intervention. We use the designed architecture optimization algorithm to test the proposed flexible convolutional auto-encoder through utilizing one graphic processing unit card on four extensively used image classification datasets. Experimental results show that our work in this paper significantly outperform the peer competitors including the state-of-the-art algorithm.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 201

The implications of WTO accession on the pharmaceutical industry in China

Given the limited capabilities of R&D and global distribution channels, and the virtual non-existence of patented drugs, the Chinese pharmaceutical industry has little chance to enter the global market of Western prescription drugs and compete with the established global giants head-on. The reality is that they are chasing a moving target and their competitors are becoming bigger and stronger day by day. The substantial reduction of import tariffs and the granting of comprehensive trading and distribution rights to foreign-financed firms following WTO accession, effectively tilted the level-playing field against the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. Given the short-term competitive advantages of the Chinese pharmaceutical industry on Chinese drugs, three development strategies are suggested: (1) consolidate the local market of herbal and generic drugs; (2) market Chinese drugs via the Internet; and (3) outsource R&D and collaborative marketing

Discovering and managing creativity in product development

Creativity is a result of brain activity which differentiates individuals from each other and could ensure an important competitive advantage for a person or for a company. For very innovative branches - like soft ware industry, computer industry, or for automotive industry - creativity is the key of business success. The students should learn that every person can develop basic creative activities, but professional creativity should be trained and it could be enhanced over the level of employees' natural possibilities. They should learn that neurological research still does not offer a scientific basis for understanding creativity but thousand years of creative behavior observations offer some guidelines and procedures which could be used successfully in product development.creativity, managing creativity, product development

Datamining for Web-Enabled Electronic Business Applications

Web-Enabled Electronic Business is generating massive amount of data on customer purchases, browsing patterns, usage times and preferences at an increasing rate. Data mining techniques can be applied to all the data being collected for obtaining useful information. This chapter attempts to present issues associated with data mining for web-enabled electronic-business

International Firm Activities and Innovation: Evidence from Knowledge Production Functions for German Firms

Using a knowledge production framework and a rich set of plant level data this study demonstrates that in Germany firms that are active on international markets as exporters or foreign direct investors do generate more new knowledge than firms which sell on the national market only. These differences are not only due to a larger firm size, or different industries, or the use of more researchers in these firms, but due to the fact these globally engaged firms learn more from external sources, too. The importance of these knowledge sources varies with the type of innovation. These results, which are broadly in line with the findings of a recent study using UK firm level data, can help to explain the strong positive correlation between productivity and international activities of firms. Firms that are active on markets beyond the national borders generate higher levels of new knowledge that feed into higher productivity.Exports, foreign direct investment, knowledge production function, Germany