Modelling the Product Development performance of Colombian Companies

Organised by: Cranfield UniversityThis paper presents the general model of the Product Development Process (PDP) in the Metal mechanics Industry in Barranquilla-Colombia, since this sector contributes significantly to the productivity of this industrial city. This case study counted on a five-company sample. The main goal was to model the current conditions of the PDP according to the Concurrent Engineering philosophy. The companies were selected according to their productive profile, in order to contrast differences regarding the structure of their productive processes, conformation of multidisciplinary teams, integration of different areas, customers and suppliers to the PDP; human resources, information, technology and marketing constraints.Mori Seiki – The Machine Tool Compan

Incorporating Flood Vulnerability to the Water Poverty Index in the Juarez Municipality

The objective of this study is to incorporate the concept of flood risk vulnerability as a variable into the Water Poverty Index (WPI), developed by Lawrence et al (2002). The distribution and availability of water resources vary considerably from region to region due to geographical, hydrological and socioeconomic factors. The WPI integrates information from parameters applied to a country, these parameters include: water volume per capita of surface and groundwater resources; capacity of the country to accomplish its agricultural, industrial, and urban water demands; the potential for buying, managing and treating this resource; efficiency in domestic, agricultural and industrial water use without wasting it; and also an environmental factor which provides a measure for water sustainability by including water quality records, environmental regulation strategies, and number of species in danger of extinction. The aim is to evaluate the WPI for the municipality of Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. In this analysis the region is considered as a country and the numbers obtained for each of the parameters mentioned are those related to this particular study area. Each index and a diagnosis of the prevailing water resources situation with regard to flood hazard in the region are evaluated. The assessment of the flood control infrastructure and related contingency prevention measures to avoid flood damage in Ciudad Juarez is incorporated as part of the WPI. This allowed a better understanding of the overall effect of flood risk on this index

Course Recommendation based on Sequences: An Evolutionary Search of Emerging Sequential Patterns

Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, project PID2020-115832GBI00, and the University of Cordoba, project UCO-FEDER 18 REF.1263116 MOD.A. Both projects were also supported by the European Fund of Regional Development.To provide a good study plan is key to avoid students’ failure. Academic advising based on student’s preferences, complexity of the semester, or even background knowledge is usually considered to reduce the dropout rate. This article aims to provide a good course index to recommend courses to students based on the sequence of courses already taken by each student. Hence, unlike existing long-term course planning methods, it is based on graduate students to model the course and not on external factors that might introduce some bias in the process. The proposal includes a novel sequential pattern mining algorithm, called (ES)2 P (Evolutionary Search of Emerging Sequential Patterns), that properly identifies paths followed by good students and not followed by not so good students, as a long-term course planning approach. A major feature of the proposed (ES)2 P algorithm is its ability to extract the best k solutions, that is, those with a best recommendation index score instead of returning the whole set of solutions above a predefined threshold. A real study case is performed including more than 13,000 students belonging to 13 faculties to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposal not only to recommend study plans but also to give advices at different stages of the students’ learning process.CRUE-CSICSpringer NatureSpanish Government PID2020-115832GBI00University of Cordoba UCO-FEDER 18 REF.1263116 MOD.

Course Recommendation based on Sequences: An Evolutionary Search of Emerging Sequential Patterns

To provide a good study plan is key to avoid students’ failure. Academic advising based on student’s preferences, complexity of the semester, or even background knowledge is usually considered to reduce the dropout rate. This article aims to provide a good course index to recommend courses to students based on the sequence of courses already taken by each student. Hence, unlike existing long-term course planning methods, it is based on graduate students to model the course and not on external factors that might introduce some bias in the process. The proposal includes a novel sequential pattern mining algorithm, called (ES)2P (Evolutionary Search of Emerging Sequential Patterns), that properly identifies paths followed by good students and not followed by not so good students, as a long-term course planning approach. A major feature of the proposed (ES)2P algorithm is its ability to extract the best k solutions, that is, those with a best recommendation index score instead of returning the whole set of solutions above a predefined threshold. A real study case is performed including more than 13,000 students belonging to 13 faculties to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposal not only to recommend study plans but also to give advices at different stages of the students’ learning process

Institutional changes required to support CS in RPOs

To better support the adoption of Citizen Science (CS) as research methodology, institutional transformations in the majority of Research Performing Organizations (RPOs) are still required. The EU funded project TIME4CS aims at supporting such institutional transformations through the implementation of concrete actions triggering institutional changes and embedding, in turn, CS within research institutions. Here we present the concept of institutional roadmaps and the reflection tool designed to support RPOs in designing those concrete actions to stimulate institutional changes described in the personalized roadmaps

L2 English Pronunciation Assessment based on Social Network Analysis and the \u3ci\u3ei\u3c/i\u3e+1 Input Hypothesis

An individual’s social network is a very important source of linguistic of input. In this paper, we focus mainly on the linguistic input that students who are non-native speakers of English receive while studying at St. Cloud State University. The university has 15,092 students, including 1,374 internationals, from eighty-nine countries 2 . We investigate the social network of five international students to see how much linguistic input they receive outside of normal instructional hours and if this input has any impact whatsoever on their pronunciation of English vowels. The five interact with 20 people in their social networks, nine of whom are native speakers of English. Cumulatively, the live participants spend 224 hours a week with the friends in their social network. Forty-five hours of these interactional times (20.08%) are with native speakers of English, while 153 hours (68.30%) are spent with people who speak the same native languages as the participants. They also spend 26 hours (11.60%) speaking English with L2 speakers of English. The findings are discussed in light of the Social Network Analysis (SNA) framework and Krashen’s i+1 Input Hypothesis

Expression of the Aeluropus littoralis AlSAP gene enhances rice yield under field drought at the reproductive stage

We evaluated the yields of Oryza sativa L. 'Nipponbare' rice lines expressing a gene encoding an A20/AN1 domain stress-associated protein, AlSAP, from the halophyte grass Aeluropus littoralis under the control of different promoters. Three independent field trials were conducted, with drought imposed at the reproductive stage. In all trials, the two transgenic lines, RN5 and RN6, consistently out-performed non-transgenic (NT) and wild-type (WT) controls, providing 50–90% increases in grain yield (GY). Enhancement of tillering and panicle fertility contributed to this improved GY under drought. In contrast with physiological records collected during previous greenhouse dry-down experiments, where drought was imposed at the early tillering stage, we did not observe significant differences in photosynthetic parameters, leaf water potential, or accumulation of antioxidants in flag leaves of AlSAP-lines subjected to drought at flowering. However, AlSAP expression alleviated leaf rolling and leaf drying induced by drought, resulting in increased accumulation of green biomass. Therefore, the observed enhanced performance of the AlSAP-lines subjected to drought at the reproductive stage can be tentatively ascribed to a primed status of the transgenic plants, resulting from a higher accumulation of biomass during vegetative growth, allowing reserve remobilization and maintenance of productive tillering and grain filling. Under irrigated conditions, the overall performance of AlSAP-lines was comparable with, or even significantly better than, the NT and WT controls. Thus, AlSAP expression inflicted no penalty on rice yields under optimal growth conditions. Our results support the use of AlSAP transgenics to reduce rice GY losses under drought conditions. (Résumé d'auteur

Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Analytic Hierarchical Process With Prioritization, Consistency Checking, and Inconsistency Repairing

Analytic hierarchy process (AHP), as one of the most important methods to tackle multiple criteria decision-making problems, has achieved much success over the past several decades. Given that linguistic expressions are much closer than numerical values or single linguistic terms to a human way of thinking and cognition, this paper investigates the AHP with comparative linguistic expressions. After providing the snapshot of classical AHP and its fuzzy extensions, we propose the framework of hesitant fuzzy linguistic AHP, which shows how to yield a decision for qualitative decision-making problems with complex linguistic expressions. First, the comparative linguistic expressions over criteria or alternatives are transformed into hesitant fuzzy linguistic elements and then the hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations (HFLPRs) are constructed. Considering that HFLPRs may be inconsistent, we conduct consistency checking and improving processes after obtaining priorities from the HFLPRs based on a linear programming method. Regarding the consistency-improving process, we develop a new way to establish a perfectly consistent HFLPR. The procedure of the hesitant fuzzy linguistic AHP is given in stepwise. Finally, a numerical example concerning the used-car management in a lemon market is given to illustrate the ef ciency of the proposed hesitant fuzzy linguistic AHP method.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 71771156, in part by the 2019 Sichuan Planning Project of Social Science under Grant SC18A007, in part by the 2019 Soft Science Project of Sichuan Science and Technology Department under Grant 2019JDR0141, and in part by the Project of Innovation at Sichuan University under Grant 2018hhs-43