Creating a Competitive Advantage by Developing an Innovative Tool to Assess Suppliers in Agri-Food Complex

The main aim of this paper is to introduce a new certified applied methodology for Assessing Suppliers in Agri-Food Complex as a tool for company competitiveness. The work is based on the results obtained in the research project NAZV QG60148/2005 funded by the Czech Ministry of Agriculture and on the requirements of agricultural practice. The novelty lies in the use of practices of the worldwide respected GLOBALG.A.P. standard (formerly EUREPGAP) as yet not well known in our country. Based on the practical experience of the authors with the application of food safety standards in the food manufacturing industry and application of GLOBALG. A.P. standard in agricultural primary production, risk and hazard analysis was developed for the product group of fruit and vegetables. Subsequently, a checklist was designed for the implementation of the suppliers’ audit. The result is a methodology for food manufacturers based on the identification of sources of risks in primary production, which can threaten food safety. As part of the introduced methodology are proposed methodological criteria for evaluating suppliers of fruit and vegetables, including rating scales and the possibilities of its implementation. Different variations of the introduction of this approach are discussed from the management, time, and financial viewpoints. The use of this procedure in practice aims to reduce the likelihood of hygiene and health hazards of the basic input raw material according to the principles of the certified standards and thus strengthen the competitiveness of a given manufacturer on the market

Introducing nativization to Spanish TTS systems

In the modern world, speech technologies must be flexible and adaptable to any framework. Mass media globalization introduces multilingualism as a challenge for the most popular speech applications such as text-to-speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition. Mixed-language texts vary in their nature and when processed, some essential characteristics must be considered. In Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries, the use of Anglicisms and other words of foreign origin is constantly growing. A particularity of peninsular Spanish is that there is a tendency to nativize the pronunciation of non-Spanish words so that they fit properly into Spanish phonetic patterns. In our previous work, we proposed to use hand-crafted nativization tables that were capable of nativizing correctly 24% of words from the test data. In this work, our goal was to approach the nativization challenge by data-driven methods, because they are transferable to other languages and do not drop in performance in comparison with explicit rules manually written by experts. Training and test corpora for nativization consisted of 1000 and 100 words respectively and were crafted manually. Different specifications of nativization by analogy and learning from errors focused on finding the best nativized pronunciation of foreign words. The best obtained objective nativization results showed an improvement from 24% to 64% in word accuracy in comparison to our previous work. Furthermore, a subjective evaluation of the synthesized speech allowed for the conclusion that nativization by analogy is clearly the preferred method among listeners of different backgrounds when comparing to previously proposed methods. These results were quite encouraging and proved that even a small training corpus is sufficient for achieving significant improvements in naturalness for English inclusions of variable length in Spanish utterances.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Breast cancer metastasis to gynaecological organs: a clinico-pathological and molecular profiling study

Breast cancer metastasis to gynaecological organs is an understudied pattern of tumour spread. We explored clinico-pathological and molecular features of these metastases to better understand whether this pattern of dissemination is organotropic or a consequence of wider metastatic dissemination. Primary and metastatic tumours from 54 breast cancer patients with gynaecological metastases were analysed using immunohistochemistry, DNA copy-number profiling, and targeted sequencing of 386 cancer-related genes. The median age of primary tumour diagnosis amongst patients with gynaecological metastases was significantly younger compared to a general breast cancer population (46.5 versus 60 years; p < 0.0001). Median age at metastatic diagnosis was 54.4, time to progression was 4.8 years (range 0-20 years), and survival following a diagnosis of metastasis was 1.95 years (range 0-18 years). Patients had an average of five involved sites (most frequently ovary, fallopian tube, omentum/peritoneum), with fewer instances of spread to the lungs, liver, or brain. Invasive lobular histology and luminal A-like phenotype were over-represented in this group (42.8 and 87.5%, respectively) and most patients had involved axillary lymph nodes (p < 0.001). Primary tumours frequently co-expressed oestrogen receptor cofactors (GATA3, FOXA1) and harboured amplifications at 8p12, 8q24, and 11q13. In terms of phenotype conversion, oestrogen receptor status was generally maintained in metastases, FOXA1 increased, and expression of progesterone receptor, androgen receptor, and GATA3 decreased. ESR1 and novel AR mutations were identified. Metastasis to gynaecological organs is a complication frequently affecting young women with invasive lobular carcinoma and luminal A-like breast cancer, and hence may be driven by sustained hormonal signalling. Molecular analyses reveal a spectrum of factors that could contribute to de novo or acquired resistance to therapy and disease progression.Jamie R Kutasovic, Amy E McCart Reed, Renique Males, Sarah Sim, Jodi M Saunus ... Liana Dedina ... et al