Designing a flexible supply chain for new product launch

Thesis (M. Eng. in Logistics)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-56).This thesis examines how companies tactically design flexible supply chains for new product launches. The research focus is on different strategies and tactics used by original equipment manufacturers to improve supply chain flexibility through their engagement with contract manufacturers. Five case studies regarding successful product launches were documented and analyzed, and the successful strategies and tactics were then categorized according to the characteristics of the situation. Finally, the findings from the analysis were applied to a startup company to develop its contract manufacturing engagement plan.by Wai-Kwan Benjamin Ha.M.Eng.in Logistic

Spectral classification of short numerical exon and intron sequences

This research presents three new numerical representations for classifying short exon and intron sequences using discrete Fourier transform period-3 value. Based on the human genome, results indicate that the Complex Twin-Pair representation is attractive compared with other numerical representations and the approach has potential applications in genome annotation and read mapping

A Strategic Analysis of Mobile Data Service Offerings for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games

This paper is a strategic analysis of the roles mobile services may play in the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games in Vancouver, British Columbia. The paper has two objectives. First, the paper outlines the projected, infrastructure landscape that vancouver2010.com may operate in during the Games. The paper identifies trends in a mobile-communication technology mix and mobile-user demographics that drive consumer demand. This research identifies the driving forces that will shape the competition for projected market share in the 2010 mobile phone market. The paper can thus help the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games(VANOC) identify the target segments for delivering value-added services in mobile communications. The second objective of this paper is to suggest a list of potential services, which will meet the goal of improving tourist ease of use in accessing mobile services while attending Olympic events. The paper utilizes extensive secondary market research to develop this list

Getting accepted – Successful writing for scientific publication: a Research Primer for low- and middle-income countries

Clear and precise writing is a vital skill for healthcare providers and those involved in global emergency care research. It allows one to publish in scientific literature and present oral and written summaries of their work. However, writing skills for publishing are rarely part of the curriculum in the healthcare education system. This review gives you a step-by-step guide on how to successfully write for scientific publication following the IMRaD principle (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) with every part supporting the key message. There are specific benefits of writing for publication that justify the extra work involved. Any lessons learned about improving global emergency care delivery can be useful to emergency clinicians. The end result can lead to changing others\u27 practice and pave the way for further research

Variational Information Pursuit for Interpretable Predictions

There is a growing interest in the machine learning community in developing predictive algorithms that are "interpretable by design". Towards this end, recent work proposes to make interpretable decisions by sequentially asking interpretable queries about data until a prediction can be made with high confidence based on the answers obtained (the history). To promote short query-answer chains, a greedy procedure called Information Pursuit (IP) is used, which adaptively chooses queries in order of information gain. Generative models are employed to learn the distribution of query-answers and labels, which is in turn used to estimate the most informative query. However, learning and inference with a full generative model of the data is often intractable for complex tasks. In this work, we propose Variational Information Pursuit (V-IP), a variational characterization of IP which bypasses the need for learning generative models. V-IP is based on finding a query selection strategy and a classifier that minimizes the expected cross-entropy between true and predicted labels. We then demonstrate that the IP strategy is the optimal solution to this problem. Therefore, instead of learning generative models, we can use our optimal strategy to directly pick the most informative query given any history. We then develop a practical algorithm by defining a finite-dimensional parameterization of our strategy and classifier using deep networks and train them end-to-end using our objective. Empirically, V-IP is 10-100x faster than IP on different Vision and NLP tasks with competitive performance. Moreover, V-IP finds much shorter query chains when compared to reinforcement learning which is typically used in sequential-decision-making problems. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of V-IP on challenging tasks like medical diagnosis where the performance is far superior to the generative modelling approach.Comment: Code is available at https://github.com/ryanchankh/VariationalInformationPursui