Knowledge and strategy in technology alliances

Programa de Doctorado en Administración y Dirección de EmpresasAs the title of the dissertation -Knowledge and Strategy in Technology Alliances- suggests, this work draws on the intersection of two main disciplines of management: knowledge management and strategic management, and then it further applies the theories developed in these two disciplines to study technology alliances as an increasingly important phenomenon in today's business world. The three main chapters of the dissertation each deal with aspects of knowledge structuration and how it plays a role in different types of alliances (e.g. alliances upstream versus downstream to the focal technology firm). In the first chapter, we take the first step by identifying strategic groups of biotechnology firms according to the way they structure their knowledge-bases; and then we ask and try to answer the question: ¿How does these strategies relate to the firm¿s collaborative activities with other organizations?¿ We distinguish between different types of alliances and suggest research propositions that pave the way for the next two chapters. Chapters 2 and 3 are therefore empirical investigations of the theoretical discussion developed in Chapter 1. In chapter 2, we address the following question: ¿How can biotech firms leverage their knowledge resources to retain control in alliance with pharma partners considerably larger than them? How do depth and breadth of the technological resources of the biotech firm affect the alliance governance structure?¿ Finally, in chapter 3, we shift our attention to alliances between the focal biotech firm and universities, and we address the following research question: ¿How does the focal firm's orientation towards allying with universities, as opposed to allying with other firms, combines with its knowledge structuration to affect overall innovative outputs from collaborations? The contributions of this dissertation are not limited to explaining inconsistent findings of past research, but also include highlighting the importance of paying attention to knowledge structuration both for researchers and practitioners. Researchers can investigate many types of associations between knowledge structuration and firm and alliance-level variables in different settings, while managers find theoretically developed and empirically proven support for the idea that it is not only the quantity and magnitude of technological resources that matter. What matters more for alliance and firm success, is how the managers structure those resources and how they further exploit them in combination with other resources and capabilities.Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla. Departamento de Organización de Empresas y MarketingPostprin

TetCNN: Convolutional Neural Networks on Tetrahedral Meshes

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been broadly studied on images, videos, graphs, and triangular meshes. However, it has seldom been studied on tetrahedral meshes. Given the merits of using volumetric meshes in applications like brain image analysis, we introduce a novel interpretable graph CNN framework for the tetrahedral mesh structure. Inspired by ChebyNet, our model exploits the volumetric Laplace-Beltrami Operator (LBO) to define filters over commonly used graph Laplacian which lacks the Riemannian metric information of 3D manifolds. For pooling adaptation, we introduce new objective functions for localized minimum cuts in the Graclus algorithm based on the LBO. We employ a piece-wise constant approximation scheme that uses the clustering assignment matrix to estimate the LBO on sampled meshes after each pooling. Finally, adapting the Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping algorithm for tetrahedral meshes, we use the obtained heatmaps to visualize discovered regions-of-interest as biomarkers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on cortical tetrahedral meshes from patients with Alzheimer's disease, as there is scientific evidence showing the correlation of cortical thickness to neurodegenerative disease progression. Our results show the superiority of our LBO-based convolution layer and adapted pooling over the conventionally used unitary cortical thickness, graph Laplacian, and point cloud representation.Comment: Accepted as a conference paper to Information Processing in Medical Imaging (IPMI 2023) conferenc

Barriers of Colorectal Cancer Screening in Rural USA: A Systematic Review

INTRODUCTION: Colorectal cancer (CRC) screening rates are lower in rural areas in the USA. To guide the design of interventions to improve CRC screening, a systematic review was conducted to identify CRC screening barriers for rural populations. METHODS: A search was conducted in four literature databases - Medline, CINAHL, Embase, and Scopus - for articles from 1998 to 2017 that examine CRC screening barriers in rural areas. This review included a total of 27 articles reporting perceived CRC screening barriers by rural residents or providers or examining factors associated with CRC screening of rural populations in the USA. RESULTS: The most frequently reported barriers were high screening cost and lack of insurance coverage, embarrassment or discomfort undergoing screening, lack of knowledge or perceived need on CRC screening, and lack of physician recommendation. These barriers were confirmed in quantitative studies examining their association with CRC screening status. Age, marital status, and race/ethnicity were the most frequently reported factors associated with CRC screening in rural areas. Lack of prevention attitude toward cancer, perceived lack of privacy, shortage of specialists, and distance to test facilities were reported as rural-specific barriers for CRC screening. CONCLUSIONS: Main barriers for CRC screening at both the individual and healthcare system level are identified in rural areas and they are in line with those found in urban areas in general. In particular, lack of prevention attitude toward cancer, perceived lack of privacy, shortage of specialists, and distance to test facilities disproportionately hamper CRC screening for rural Americans

An experiment in managing language diversity across cultures

Developing ontologies from scratch appears to be very expensive in terms of cost and time required and often such efforts remain unfinished for decades. Ontology localization through translation seems to be a promising approach towards addressing this issue as it enables the greater reuse of the ontological (backbone) structure. However, during ontology localization, managing language diversity across cultures remains as a challenge that has to be taken into account and dealt with the right level of attention and expertise. In this paper, we report the result of our experiment, performed on approximately 1000 concepts taken from the space ontology originally developed in English, consisted in providing their translation into Mongolian

Ontology-based faceted semantic search with automatic sense disambiguation for bioenergy domain

WordNet is a lexicon widely known and used as an ontological resource hosting comparatively large collection of semantically interconnected words. Use of such resources produces meaningful results and improves users’ search experience through the increased precision and recall. This paper presents our facet-enabled WordNet powered semantic search work done in the context of the bioenergy domain. The main hurdle to achieving the expected result was sense disambiguation further complicated by the occasional fine-grained distinction of meanings of the terms in WordNet. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a sense disambiguation methodology that uses bioenergy domain related ontologies (extracted from WordNet automatically), WordNet concept hierarchy and term sense rank

Model-based documentation

Knowledge acquisition is becoming an integral part of the manufacturing industries, which rely on domain experts in various phases of product life cycle including design, analysis, manufacturing, operation and maintenance. It has the potential to enable knowledge reuse, however, poorly managed knowledge can cause information loss and inefficiency. If technical documentation is managed well in the manufacturing industries, intended piece of knowledge can easily be located, used and reused for purpose and as a result, the corresponding industry can be benefited. Some examples of technical documentation are design specification, operating manual and maintenance manual. Model-based Documentation (MBD) is a documentation approach that uses model to provide structure to the data of the documents. MBD can be thought of as a way to better organize knowledge thereby knowledge identification and retrieval become easier, faster and efficient. In this paper, we propose MBD and its extension as a potential solution to overcome the issues involved in the typical technical documentation approaches

OTRE: Where Optimal Transport Guided Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation Meets Regularization by Enhancing

Non-mydriatic retinal color fundus photography (CFP) is widely available due to the advantage of not requiring pupillary dilation, however, is prone to poor quality due to operators, systemic imperfections, or patient-related causes. Optimal retinal image quality is mandated for accurate medical diagnoses and automated analyses. Herein, we leveraged the Optimal Transport (OT) theory to propose an unpaired image-to-image translation scheme for mapping low-quality retinal CFPs to high-quality counterparts. Furthermore, to improve the flexibility, robustness, and applicability of our image enhancement pipeline in the clinical practice, we generalized a state-of-the-art model-based image reconstruction method, regularization by denoising, by plugging in priors learned by our OT-guided image-to-image translation network. We named it as regularization by enhancing (RE). We validated the integrated framework, OTRE, on three publicly available retinal image datasets by assessing the quality after enhancement and their performance on various downstream tasks, including diabetic retinopathy grading, vessel segmentation, and diabetic lesion segmentation. The experimental results demonstrated the superiority of our proposed framework over some state-of-the-art unsupervised competitors and a state-of-the-art supervised method.Comment: Accepted as a conference paper to The 28th biennial international conference on Information Processing in Medical Imaging (IPMI 2023

Effects of Professional Vocal Hygiene Education on Vocal Hygiene Knowledge of Actors

Background: Voice production is a complex mechanism, and the primary tool of the population of professional voice users requires special care. Hence, one area of learning provided by speech and language pathologists to this population is vocal hygiene. The current study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of vocal hygiene education on actors' knowledge. Method: In this semi-experimental study of one-group clinical trials, 50 actors (29 males and 21 females aged 18-50 years) were selected based on available sampling. Participants were asked to complete the "assessment of actors' vocal knowledge" questionnaire. During 4 sessions lasting 60 minutes each, the participating actors were trained on the vocal hygiene package. One week after the last training session, participants were again asked to complete the questionnaire. Data was analyzed using SPSS software version 21, and indicators of descriptive statistics were analyzed. Results: The mean score of voice abuse and non-abusive behaviors, which was 23.34 before training with the vocal hygiene package increased to 28.56 after education, a statistically significant change (p <0.001). The level of knowledge of participants on the mechanism of phonation increased after education from an average score of 10.12 to an average score of 11.21 (p <0.001). The mean score of knowledge of larynx pathology after education rose from 16.58 to 21.44, a significant change (p <0.001). Conclusion: The provided vocal hygiene educational package increased the actors' knowledge of the mechanism of phonation, voice abuse and non-abusive behaviors, and the functional and structural disorders of the voice