Valuing Theory and Practice: Using a Portfolio Lens to Publish Research on Projects

This article maps the contributions project scholars can make in management journals. Research on projects cuts across disciplinary boundaries, with scholars working in institutions with different norms, epistemologies, rewards, and selection environments. But this diversity can make it hard to know where to publish. We hope our map of the publication landscape—the “V diagram”—will help project scholars better understand and respect one another’s diverse contributions and make conversations across the field flourish

Five rules for managing large, complex projects

Large-scale, long-term projects are notoriously difficult to manage. But recent research on megaprojects — defined as projects costing more than $1 billion — reveals five lessons that can help executives manage any big, complex project more effectively

Automatic partitioning of database applications

Database-backed applications are nearly ubiquitous in our daily lives. Applications that make many small accesses to the database create two challenges for developers: increased latency and wasted resources from numerous network round trips. A well-known technique to improve transactional database application performance is to convert part of the application into stored procedures that are executed on the database server. Unfortunately, this conversion is often difficult. In this paper we describe Pyxis, a system that takes database-backed applications and automatically partitions their code into two pieces, one of which is executed on the application server and the other on the database server. Pyxis profiles the application and server loads, statically analyzes the code's dependencies, and produces a partitioning that minimizes the number of control transfers as well as the amount of data sent during each transfer. Our experiments using TPC-C and TPC-W show that Pyxis is able to generate partitions with up to 3x reduction in latency and 1.7x improvement in throughput when compared to a traditional non-partitioned implementation and has comparable performance to that of a custom stored procedure implementation.National Science Foundation (U.S.). Graduate Research Fellowshi

Using historical tropical cyclone climate datasets to examine wind speed recurrence for coastal Australia

Likelihood estimates of extreme winds, including those from tropical cyclones (TCs) at certain locations are used to inform wind load standards for structural design. Here, wind speed average recurrence intervals (ARIs) determined from TC climate data dating back to the 1970s in two quantile–quantile adjusted reanalysis datasets (ERA5 and BARRA [1990]), and best-track observations for context, were compared with Standardized ARIs (AS/NZS) across seven tropical and two subtropical Australian inland coastal regions. The novelty of this work lies in determining TC-wind speed ARIs from a range of datasets that are not typically used to evaluate this metric. Inherent differences between the data used to determine the Standard ARIs (large sample size allow for larger extrapolations; GEV function) and TC data ARIs (smaller sample size and less certain data; the more asymptotic Lognormal/Weibull functions are used) led to the use of different extreme value functions. Results indicated that although these are two distinct ways of determining design wind speeds, when they are considered equivalent, there was a moderate reproduction of the ARI curves with respect to the Standard in both reanalysis datasets, suggesting that similar analyses using climate model products can provide useful information on these types of metrics with some caveats. Trends in TC wind strength affecting coastal Australia were also analyzed, indicating a potential slight downtrend in tropical West coast TC wind strength and slight uptrend for tropical East coast TC wind strength, noting considerable uncertainty given the short time period and limitations of data quality including over longer time periods. Such trends are not only limited to the relationship between TC intensity and anthropogenic warming, but also to regional changes in TC frequency and track direction. This could lead to significant trends emerging in regional Australian TC wind gust strength before several decades of warming have occurred. It is hoped that climate models can provide both longer-term and a more homogenous base for these types of evaluations and subsequent projections with respect to climate change simulations. © 2022, Crown

Spectral Characterization and Unmixing of Intrinsic Contrast in Intact Normal and Diseased Gastric Tissues Using Hyperspectral Two-Photon Microscopy

Living tissues contain a range of intrinsic fluorophores and sources of second harmonic generation which provide contrast that can be exploited for fresh tissue imaging. Microscopic imaging of fresh tissue samples can circumvent the cost and time associated with conventional histology. Further, intrinsic contrast can provide rich information about a tissue's composition, structure and function, and opens the potential for in-vivo imaging without the need for contrast agents.In this study, we used hyperspectral two-photon microscopy to explore the characteristics of both normal and diseased gastrointestinal (GI) tissues, relying only on their endogenous fluorescence and second harmonic generation to provide contrast. We obtained hyperspectral data at subcellular resolution by acquiring images over a range of two-photon excitation wavelengths, and found excitation spectral signatures of specific tissue types based on our ability to clearly visualize morphology. We present the two-photon excitation spectral properties of four major tissue types that are present throughout the GI tract: epithelium, lamina propria, collagen, and lymphatic tissue. Using these four excitation signatures as basis spectra, linear unmixing strategies were applied to hyperspectral data sets of both normal and neoplastic tissue acquired in the colon and small intestine. Our results show that hyperspectral unmixing with excitation spectra allows segmentation, showing promise for blind identification of tissue types within a field of view, analogous to specific staining in conventional histology. The intrinsic spectral signatures of these tissue types provide information relating to their biochemical composition.These results suggest hyperspectral two-photon microscopy could provide an alternative to conventional histology either for in-situ imaging, or intraoperative 'instant histology' of fresh tissue biopsies