Free composition instead of language dictatorship

Historically, programming languages have been—benevolent—dictators: reducing all possible semantics to specific ones offered by a few built-in language constructs. Over the years, some programming languages have freed the programmers from the restrictions to use only built-in libraries, built-in data types, and builtin type-checking rules. Even though—arguably—such freedom could lead to anarchy, or people shooting themselves in the foot, the contrary tends to be the case: a language that does not allow for extensibility is depriving software engineers of the ability to construct proper abstractions and to structure software in the most optimal way. Therefore the software becomes less structured and maintainable than would be possible if the software engineer could express the behavior of the program with the most appropriate abstractions. The idea proposed by this paper is to move composition from built-in language constructs to programmable, first-class abstractions in a language. We discuss several prototypes of the Co-op language, which show that it is possible, with a relatively simple model, to express a wide range of compositions as first-class concepts

Observation of topologically protected helical edge modes in Kagome elastic plates

The investigation of topologically protected waves in classical media has opened unique opportunities to achieve exotic properties like one-way phonon transport, protection from backscattering and immunity to imperfections. Contrary to acoustic and electromagnetic domains, their observation in elastic solids has so far been elusive due to the presence of both shear and longitudinal modes and their modal conversion at interfaces and free surfaces. Here we report the experimental observation of topologically protected helical edge waves in elastic media. The considered structure consists of an elastic plate patterned according to a Kagome architecture with an accidental degeneracy of two Dirac cones induced by drilling through holes. The careful breaking of symmetries couples the corresponding elastic modes which effectively emulates spin orbital coupling in the quantum spin Hall effect. The results shed light on the topological properties of the proposed plate waveguide and opens avenues for the practical realization of compact, passive and cost-effective elastic topological waveguides

Redefining Industrial Maintenance Activity in the Modern Organization of Industrial Companies

The maintenance activity isn’t a purpose in itself, it’s a necessity of which “the production suffers” and the financial agent “considers too expensive”. It often exists a conflict between the production units and the maintenance department, not only for a short term, but, sometimes, for a long term, imposing a rigorous definition of each person’s responsibilities. Considering the mutations in the industrial equipments’ technical complexity and the accidental failures’ catastrophic consequences from the economic and/or social point of view, it should be assigned a new dimension to the maintenance activity. One of the imperatives imposed to this action is represented by modern means of informing through the maintenance’s operational computerization.maintenance’s progress; total productive maintenance; cooperation in maintenance; the maintenance’s costs minimization; maintenance’s operational computerization.

The Modern Approach to Industrial Maintenance Management

The maintenance activity isn’t a purpose in itself, it’s a necessity of which "the production suffers" and the financial agent “considers too expensiveâ€. It often exists a conflict between the production units and the maintenance department, not only for a short term, but, sometimes, for a long term, imposing a rigorous definition of each person’s responsibilities. Considering the mutations in the industrial equipments’ technical complexity and the accidental failures’ catastrophic consequences from the economic and/or social point of view, it should be assigned a new dimension to the maintenance activity. One of the imperatives imposed to this action is represented by modern means of informing through the maintenance’s operational computerization.Maintenance’s Progress, Total Productive Maintenance, Cooperation In Maintenance, The Maintenance’s Costs Minimization, Maintenance’s Operational Computerization

New Organizational Challenges in a Digital World: Securing Cloud Computing Usage and Reacting to Asset-Sharing Platform Disruptions

Information technology (IT) and IT-enabled business models are transforming the business ecosystem and posing new challenges for existing companies. This two-essay dissertation examines two such challenges: cloud security and the disruption of asset-sharing business models.The first essay examines how an organizations usage of cloud storage affects its likelihood of accidental breaches. The quasi-experiment in the U.S. healthcare sector reveals that organizations with higher levels of digitalization (i.e., Electronic Health Records levels) or those with more IT applications running on their internal data center are less likely to experience accidental breaches after using public cloud storage. We argue that digitalization and operational control over IT applications increase organizations awareness and capabilities of establishing a company-wide security culture, thereby reducing negligence related to physical devices and unintended disclosure after adopting cloud storage. The usage of cloud storage is more likely to cause accidental breaches for organizations contracting to more reputable or domain expert vendors. We explain this result as the consequence of less attention being focused on securing personally accessible data and physical devices given high reliance on reputed and knowledgeable cloud providers. This research is among the first to empirically examine the actual security impacts of organizations cloud storage usage and offers practical insights for cloud security management.The second essay examines how Asset-Sharing Business Model Prevalence (ASBMP) affects the performance implications of industry incumbent firms competitive actions when faced with entrants with asset-sharing business models, like Airbnb. ASBMP represents the amount of third-party products and services that originally were unavailable inside the traditional business model but now are orchestrated by asset-sharing companies in an industry. We use texting mining and econometrics approaches to analyze a longitudinal dataset in the accommodation industry. Our results demonstrate that incumbents competitive action repertoires (i.e., action volume, complexity, and heterogeneity) increase their performance when the ASBMP is high but decrease incumbents performance when the ASBMP is low. Practically, incumbents who are facing greater threat from asset-sharing firms can implement more aggressive competitive action repertoires and strategically focus on new product and M&A strategies. This research contributes to the literature of both competitive dynamics and asset-sharing business models

On the design of an ECOC-compliant genetic algorithm

Genetic Algorithms (GA) have been previously applied to Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) in state-of-the-art works in order to find a suitable coding matrix. Nevertheless, none of the presented techniques directly take into account the properties of the ECOC matrix. As a result the considered search space is unnecessarily large. In this paper, a novel Genetic strategy to optimize the ECOC coding step is presented. This novel strategy redefines the usual crossover and mutation operators in order to take into account the theoretical properties of the ECOC framework. Thus, it reduces the search space and lets the algorithm to converge faster. In addition, a novel operator that is able to enlarge the code in a smart way is introduced. The novel methodology is tested on several UCI datasets and four challenging computer vision problems. Furthermore, the analysis of the results done in terms of performance, code length and number of Support Vectors shows that the optimization process is able to find very efficient codes, in terms of the trade-off between classification performance and the number of classifiers. Finally, classification performance per dichotomizer results shows that the novel proposal is able to obtain similar or even better results while defining a more compact number of dichotomies and SVs compared to state-of-the-art approaches