816 research outputs found
The Impact of Aligning Business, IT, and Marketing Strategies on Firm Performance
In order to succeed in today's competitive business environment, a firm should have a clear business strategy that is supported by other organizational strategies. While prior studies argue that strategic alignment enhances firm performance, either strategic alignment including multiple factors or strategic orientation of firms has received little attention. This study, drawing on contingency theory and configuration theory, investigates the performance impact of triadic strategic alignment among business, IT, and marketing strategies while simultaneously considers strategic orientation of firms. A research model is tested through SEM and MANOVA using data collected in a questionnaire survey of 242 Yemen managers. The findings indicate that (1) triadic strategic alignment has a positive impact on firm performance and (2) there is an ideal triadic strategic alignment for prospectors and defenders. This research contributes to strategic alignment literature and managers' understanding of how to align business, IT and marketing strategies to improve firm performance
Deep Neural Networks - A Brief History
Introduction to deep neural networks and their history.Comment: 14 pages, 14 figure
Compositional Falsification of Cyber-Physical Systems with Machine Learning Components
Cyber-physical systems (CPS), such as automotive systems, are starting to
include sophisticated machine learning (ML) components. Their correctness,
therefore, depends on properties of the inner ML modules. While learning
algorithms aim to generalize from examples, they are only as good as the
examples provided, and recent efforts have shown that they can produce
inconsistent output under small adversarial perturbations. This raises the
question: can the output from learning components can lead to a failure of the
entire CPS? In this work, we address this question by formulating it as a
problem of falsifying signal temporal logic (STL) specifications for CPS with
ML components. We propose a compositional falsification framework where a
temporal logic falsifier and a machine learning analyzer cooperate with the aim
of finding falsifying executions of the considered model. The efficacy of the
proposed technique is shown on an automatic emergency braking system model with
a perception component based on deep neural networks
Design and evaluation of a directional antenna for ocean buoys
A system concept has been developed by Viasat, Inc. and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for improving the data
telemetry bandwidth available on ocean buoys. This concept utilizes existing communications satellites as data relay
stations and mechanically steered antenna arrays to achieve increased data rates and improved power efficiency needed for
ocean applications.
This report describes an initial feasibility and design study to determine if a mechanically steered antenna array can
meet the requirements of open ocean buoy applications. To meet the system requirements, an 18-element microstrip
antenna (9-element transmit, 9-element receive) was designed and fabricated under subcontract by Seavey Engineering
Associates, Inc. It operates in the 4-6GHz frequency band (C-band) and provides 14 dB of gain. The 1/2 power beamwidth
is +-t5° in azimuth and elevation. This antenna design, in conjunction with a simple rotating mount, was used to evaluate
the potential of this approach to keep a geostationary satellite in view when mounted on an ocean buoy. The evaluation is
based on laboratory measurements using a magnetic compass and a small stepper motor to maintain antenna orientation
while the complete assembly was rotated and tilted at speeds similar to what would be expected on an offshore buoy
equipped with a stabilizing wind vane.
The results are promising, but less than conclusive because of limitations in the experimental test setup. The recent
introduction of several commercially available mechanically steered antennas designed for use on small boats may provide
a viable alternative to the approach described here with appropriate modification to operate at C-band.Funding was provided by Viasat, Inc., under subcontract No. SC95001 and by a
Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Technology Innovation Award
Comparison of Fermi-LAT and CTA in the region between 10-100 GeV
The past decade has seen a dramatic improvement in the quality of data
available at both high (HE: 100 MeV to 100 GeV) and very high (VHE: 100 GeV to
100 TeV) gamma-ray energies. With three years of data from the Fermi Large Area
Telescope (LAT) and deep pointed observations with arrays of Cherenkov
telescope, continuous spectral coverage from 100 MeV to TeV exists for
the first time for the brightest gamma-ray sources. The Fermi-LAT is likely to
continue for several years, resulting in significant improvements in high
energy sensitivity. On the same timescale, the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA)
will be constructed providing unprecedented VHE capabilities. The optimisation
of CTA must take into account competition and complementarity with Fermi, in
particularly in the overlapping energy range 10100 GeV. Here we compare the
performance of Fermi-LAT and the current baseline CTA design for steady and
transient, point-like and extended sources.Comment: Accepted for Publication in Astroparticle Physic
DeepWalk: Online Learning of Social Representations
We present DeepWalk, a novel approach for learning latent representations of
vertices in a network. These latent representations encode social relations in
a continuous vector space, which is easily exploited by statistical models.
DeepWalk generalizes recent advancements in language modeling and unsupervised
feature learning (or deep learning) from sequences of words to graphs. DeepWalk
uses local information obtained from truncated random walks to learn latent
representations by treating walks as the equivalent of sentences. We
demonstrate DeepWalk's latent representations on several multi-label network
classification tasks for social networks such as BlogCatalog, Flickr, and
YouTube. Our results show that DeepWalk outperforms challenging baselines which
are allowed a global view of the network, especially in the presence of missing
information. DeepWalk's representations can provide scores up to 10%
higher than competing methods when labeled data is sparse. In some experiments,
DeepWalk's representations are able to outperform all baseline methods while
using 60% less training data. DeepWalk is also scalable. It is an online
learning algorithm which builds useful incremental results, and is trivially
parallelizable. These qualities make it suitable for a broad class of real
world applications such as network classification, and anomaly detection.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 4 table
Time-Changed Fast Mean-Reverting Stochastic Volatility Models
We introduce a class of randomly time-changed fast mean-reverting stochastic
volatility models and, using spectral theory and singular perturbation
techniques, we derive an approximation for the prices of European options in
this setting. Three examples of random time-changes are provided and the
implied volatility surfaces induced by these time-changes are examined as a
function of the model parameters. Three key features of our framework are that
we are able to incorporate jumps into the price process of the underlying
asset, allow for the leverage effect, and accommodate multiple factors of
volatility, which operate on different time-scales
Multiclass Semi-Supervised Learning on Graphs using Ginzburg-Landau Functional Minimization
We present a graph-based variational algorithm for classification of
high-dimensional data, generalizing the binary diffuse interface model to the
case of multiple classes. Motivated by total variation techniques, the method
involves minimizing an energy functional made up of three terms. The first two
terms promote a stepwise continuous classification function with sharp
transitions between classes, while preserving symmetry among the class labels.
The third term is a data fidelity term, allowing us to incorporate prior
information into the model in a semi-supervised framework. The performance of
the algorithm on synthetic data, as well as on the COIL and MNIST benchmark
datasets, is competitive with state-of-the-art graph-based multiclass
segmentation methods.Comment: 16 pages, to appear in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science
volume "Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods 2013", part of series on
Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computin
Seeing the big PICTURE: A framework for improving the communication of requirements within the Business-IT relationship
The relationship between the business and IT departments in the context of the organisation has been characterised as highly divisive. Contributing problems appear to revolve around the failure to adequately communicate and understand the required information for the alignment of business and IT strategies and infrastructures. This study takes a communication-based view on the concept of alignment, in terms of the relationship between the retail business and IT within a major high street UK bank. A research framework (PICTURE) is used to provide insight into this relationship and guide the analysis of interviews with 29 individuals on mid-high management level for their thematic content. The paper highlights the lessons that can be derived from the study of the BIT relationship and how possible improvements could be made
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