FERRMED global study: FERRMED great axis rail freight network and its area of influence: Scandinavia - Rhein - Rhone - Western Mediterranean: feasibility, conclusions and recommendations

Postprint (published version

Medida de la congestión del tráfico en ciudades

La congestión del tráfico en entornos urbanos y metropolitanos perturba la eficiencia de la logística de la ciudad contemplada como “fábrica de movilidad”, afectando a todos los colectivos sociales de forma directa e indirecta, empeorando la calidad de vida y penalizando las actividades comerciales y el acceso y entrega de productos en “la última milla”. Esta investigación define indicadores objetivos simples y sus homólogos subjetivos (a partir de la percepción de los usuarios) de forma genérica, lo que permite comparar distintos escenarios temporales y territoriales, y extender el análisis a distintas ciudades. Los indicadores definidos incorporan la distribución espacial de la congestión (para una franja horaria definida) y la distribución temporal a lo largo del día (para una zona concreta) dentro de un indicador global de congestión

Existencia, descubrimiento y explotación de oportunidades tecnológicas

The central topic in the field of research on entrepreneurship is to identify and to select the right opportunities for the creation of new companies. The aim of this work is to improve the comprehension of the process of the discovery and exploitation of technological opportunities, through the creation of new ventures in the specific area of knowledge creation, like in the universities. In this regard, a methodological post-positivist proposal was followed. The result is a model that is supported in the evidence of the cases and shows the process of development of the technological opportunity.Oportunidades tecnológicas, empresas derivadas de la universidad, teoría fundada, estudio del caso

Night deliveries and carrier-led consolidation strategies to improve urban goods distribution

Night distribution and consolidation strategies have been proposed in many cities to increase the efficiency of the urban goods distribution system and to reduce the external effects that it causes in terms of emissions. However, the deployment of these initiatives presents a new reallocation of costs and incomes among collaborative stakeholders that take part in. In this paper, an analytical model to estimate the new economic effects caused by these strategies on the involved agents is presented, based on continuous approximations. This model allows decision makers to estimate the transportation cost and emissions savings that will be obtained by each strategy as well as the range of retailer demand in which these strategies are not economically feasible. The results show that night distribution generally outperforms the carrier cost reduction and emissions savings, especially when large vehicles are used in night periods.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

The Entrepreneurial Orientation-Dominant Logic-Performance Relationship in New Ventures: an Exploratory Quantitative Study

Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) has received substantial conceptual and empirical attention, representing one ofthe few areas in entrepreneurship research in which a cumulative body of knowledge is developing. Nonetheless,an important message from past research is that simply examining the direct effect of EO on firm performanceprovides an incomplete picture, especially in the case of new ventures. This study examined the influence ofDominant Logic (DL) on the relationship between EO and firm performance. Results based on a sample of 149new manufacturing ventures indicated that DL mediates the EO-performance relationship, and risk taking,aggressiveness and innovativeness had the highest correlations with the internal and external conceptualizationof DL. The empirical evidence suggests that new ventures must foster DL implementing appropriate strategicprocesses in order to maximize the effect of EO on performance

Scaling a convolutional neural network for classification of adjective noun pairs with TensorFlow on GPU clusters

Deep neural networks have gained popularity in recent years, obtaining outstanding results in a wide range of applications such as computer vision in both academia and multiple industry areas. The progress made in recent years cannot be understood without taking into account the technological advancements seen in key domains such as High Performance Computing, more specifically in the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) domain. These kind of deep neural networks need massive amounts of data to effectively train the millions of parameters they contain, and this training can take up to days or weeks depending on the computer hardware we are using. In this work, we present how the training of a deep neural network can be parallelized on a distributed GPU cluster. The effect of distributing the training process is addressed from two different points of view. First, the scalability of the task and its performance in the distributed setting are analyzed. Second, the impact of distributed training methods on the training times and final accuracy of the models is studied. We used TensorFlow on top of the GPU cluster of servers with 2 K80 GPU cards, at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The results show an improvement for both focused areas. On one hand, the experiments show promising results in order to train a neural network faster. The training time is decreased from 106 hours to 16 hours in our experiments. On the other hand we can observe how increasing the numbers of GPUs in one node rises the throughput, images per second, in a near-linear way. Morever an additional distributed speedup of 10.3 is achieved with 16 nodes taking as baseline the speedup of one node.This work is partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity under contract TIN2012-34557, by the BSC-CNS Severo Ochoa program (SEV-2011-00067), by the SGR programmes (2014-SGR-1051 and 2014-SGR-1421 ) of the Catalan Government and by the framework of the project BigGraph TEC2013-43935-R, funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). We also would like to thank the technical support team at the Barcelona Supercomputing center (BSC) especially to Carlos Tripiana.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

STRATEGIC DECISION MAKING, ENTREPRENEURIAL ORIENTATION AND PERFORMANCE: AN ORGANIZATIONAL LIFE CYCLE APPROACH

EntrepreneurialOrientation (EO) and Strategic Decision Making (SDM) have been studied in awide variety of settings. However, there is not enough research available thatcombines both topics and studies the ways in which entrepreneurs make strategicdecisions in early stages of organizational life cycle. The purpose of thisresearch was therefore to examine the effects of the factors associated withthe decision maker influencing EO and performance for two categories of firms.The results were achieved by using empirical data from two independent samplesof firms in different stages of organizational life cycle: start-up stage (n=133) and growth stage (n=173). The results show that SDM andcontrol variables have different effects in the two samples; however, for bothsamples there is significant relation between EO and performance. The paperconcludes with a discussion about the results and suggestions for futureresearch

Estudios sobre la prensa digital iberoamericana

Cuando en 1994/95 la World Wide Web dejó el mero ambiente académico para abrirse a todos, la prensa fue uno de los primeros sectores en adoptar esta tecnología aunque, hasta el día de doy, sigue buscando la mejor forma de hacerlo y de superar las dificultades financieras que esta nueva vía de difusión de noticias trajo consigo. Los diarios han debido adaptarse tanto a un nuevo formato (las páginas web y su “multimedialidad”) como a un nuevo ritmo de difusión, antes más bien propio de la radio, y al surgimiento de sistemas complementarios -a veces competidores- como las redes sociales. En la presente obra, hemos reunido varios trabajos que abordan distintos aspectos de la problemática actual, sin pretender en absoluto abarcarlos todos ni asegurar que abordamos los más importantes, ya que el contenido reunido ha dependido en gran parte de las respuestas al Call for papers de Revista Mediterránea de Comunicación