Embedding Diversity: Communication and Label Concept for Underutilized Crops – Checklist for your First Evaluation

There are some very successful cases of marketing of underutilized crops in European countries. Examples are the marketing of rare varieties in Austrian and Swiss supermarkets. Other examples are market initiatives in Spain, France, or Italy, selling local produces and processed foods in specialised shops, at farmers markets, or directly at the farm. A consumer survey was conducted in 2017 in France, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland during DIVERSIFOOD project in order to gain additional data on such examples; and Rossi et al. (2016)1 developed the DIVERSIFOOD Case Study Framework. Among others an objective of these studies was to identify some best-case examples for the use of a trademark, label or logo and the related communication strategies. Then a flagship approach to communicate the benefits of underutilized crops by means of a label should be developed. The studies identified many individual approaches of the various marketing initiatives, each based on slightly different secrets of success. Within the DIVERSIFOOD consortium it was concluded that there’s no sense in defining a single best-label flagship approach; instead, a concept should give an idea of the possibilities to communicate the value of agrobiodiversity to consumers. This concept is the resulting outcome. It provides a structured approach for networks an market initiatives to evaluate whether a label for underutilized crops is feasible, and wheter it is in line with theire values and aims or not, and what the premises for the communication strategy are for those underutilized crops. This concept provides a general idea about topics that should be considered. The result could be the introduction of a label or the abandonment of introducing a label. In the beginning of such an evaluation there are most likely existing underutilized crops, that is, genetic resources, such as old, locally, and newly bred underutilized varieties, as well as some products or product ideas derived from these crops. The main target groups of this concept are farmers involved in participatory breeding, seed savers, seed networks and communities, foundations, and breeders of underutilized crops, as well as partners of such genetic resources. Moreover, the concept could be interesting for initiatives and organizations that consider the integration of underutilized crops in their existing label; however there is no specific treatment of this topic in the concept. The concept should be considered as the first step in the evaluation of a new label. The treated topics might also hint on further considerations when developing a successful marketing initiative. However, the concept focuses mainly on two points: 1. Introduction of a label2, a logo, a trademark or similar and some implications 2. Communication tools and communication contents for products of underutilized crop

Automatic LQR Tuning Based on Gaussian Process Global Optimization

This paper proposes an automatic controller tuning framework based on linear optimal control combined with Bayesian optimization. With this framework, an initial set of controller gains is automatically improved according to a pre-defined performance objective evaluated from experimental data. The underlying Bayesian optimization algorithm is Entropy Search, which represents the latent objective as a Gaussian process and constructs an explicit belief over the location of the objective minimum. This is used to maximize the information gain from each experimental evaluation. Thus, this framework shall yield improved controllers with fewer evaluations compared to alternative approaches. A seven-degree-of-freedom robot arm balancing an inverted pole is used as the experimental demonstrator. Results of a two- and four-dimensional tuning problems highlight the method's potential for automatic controller tuning on robotic platforms.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, to appear in IEEE 2016 International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Video demonstration of the experiments available at https://am.is.tuebingen.mpg.de/publications/marco_icra_201

Modelling, Monitoring, Control and Optimization for Complex Industrial Processes

This reprint includes 22 research papers and an editorial, collected from the Special Issue "Modelling, Monitoring, Control and Optimization for Complex Industrial Processes", highlighting recent research advances and emerging research directions in complex industrial processes. This reprint aims to promote the research field and benefit the readers from both academic communities and industrial sectors

Does Information Technology Investment Influences Firm’s Market Value? The Case of Non-Publicly Traded Healthcare Firms

Managers make informed information technology investment decisions when they are able to quantify how IT contributes to firm performance. While financial accounting measures inform IT’s influence on retrospective firm performance, senior managers expect evidence of how IT influences prospective measures such as the firm’s market value. We examine the efficacy of IT’s influence on firm value combined with measures of financial performance for non-publicly traded (NPT) hospitals that lack conventional market-based measures. We gathered actual sale transactions for NPT hospitals in the United States to derive the q ratio, a measure of market value. Our findings indicate that the influence of IT investment on the firm is more pronounced and statistically significant on firm value than exclusively on the accounting performance measures. Specifically, we find that the impact of IT investment is not significant on return on assets (ROA) and operating income for the same set of hospitals. This research note contributes to research and practice by demonstrating that the overall impact of IT is better understood when accounting measures are complemented with the firm’s market value. Such market valuation is also critical in merger and acquisition decisions, an activity that is likely to accelerate in the healthcare industry. Our findings provide hospitals, as well as other NPT firms, with insights into the impact of IT investment and a pragmatic approach to demonstrating IT’s contribution to firm value

Chatham House Report: Changing Climate, Changing Diets: Pathways to Lower Meat Consumption

No abstract available

Online Active Linear Regression via Thresholding

We consider the problem of online active learning to collect data for regression modeling. Specifically, we consider a decision maker with a limited experimentation budget who must efficiently learn an underlying linear population model. Our main contribution is a novel threshold-based algorithm for selection of most informative observations; we characterize its performance and fundamental lower bounds. We extend the algorithm and its guarantees to sparse linear regression in high-dimensional settings. Simulations suggest the algorithm is remarkably robust: it provides significant benefits over passive random sampling in real-world datasets that exhibit high nonlinearity and high dimensionality --- significantly reducing both the mean and variance of the squared error.Comment: Published in AAAI 201