Low-Cost Broadband Connections: A Key Factor for SME Virtual Organizations

In an open global market, SMEs are facing new challenges while trying to compete with large worldwide corporations. The forming of innovative alliances, known as virtual organizations (VO), is one of the most interesting proposals to achieve competitiveness and exploit strategic advantages. However, besides the obvious positive potential of innovative actions like VOs, there are several drawbacks, especially when SMEs are involved in such projects. VOs have very high needs for IT and communications; in fact they rely so much on them that the forming of a VO is only possible with the development of an extensive information and communication infrastructure. A lot of innovating management, re-forming and re-structuring is involved in joining several independent companies into a new virtual schema and several cultural, economical and legislative problems must also be overcome. In this paper we focus on the technological needs, and in particular, the need for an organization-wide data sharing and communication network. The high cost involved with the investments necessary in IT and communications technology make the effort harder for SMEs, even if it was to be assumed that they could manage the other important aspects of forming a VO. Along with the cost of computer equipment and specialized software, networking cost has until recently been a particularly prohibiting factor for SMEs even on the most advanced business sectors. A new term, the “virtual organization technology threshold†is introduced, defined as the minimum of IT and communication technologies necessary to form a “true†virtual organization, in its pure and functional form described and widely adopted by the scientific community. The investments needed for IT and communications to form a VO are analyzed and compared to the related investments of conventional SMEs in EU. The evolution in the cost, focused around the networking tools, is then examined to extract useful information about the feasibility of such specialized investments compared to the overall investment and turnovers of typical SMEs. We then argue that a recent development, the price drop and wide spread of broadband connections can act as a “key factor†that could make the difference in lowering the “threshold†and increasing the possibilities for SMEs to compete successfully by utilizing technological advantages and innovations that have until now considered to be more suitable for larger enterprises.

The Initiative of the Hellenic Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering to Support the Development of Case Studies Suitable for Instruction & a Slope Stability Example

The ultimate goal of this article is to promote the collection of case studies suitable for geotechnical instruction by (a) proposing a way of supporting development of such cases through incentives and (b) providing an example of a suitable case study and the necessary accompanying material. The support structure proposed is the initiative of the Hellenic Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (HSSMGE) to establish a competition for case studies appropriate for geotechnical instruction and award a prize at its Geotechnical Conference. The paper includes the evaluation criteria and case study specifications of the competition, which highlight the characteristics of case study material suitable for use in instruction. As an example of such a case study, the paper presents a fictionalized narrative related to the design and construction of highway earthworks in Greece and discusses alternative ways in which the case material can be used in instruction

Progressive failure in embankment dams.

Imperial Users onl

Introduction: special issue on intelligent technologies in medicine and bioinformatics

The adoption of powerful and sophisticated Intelligent Technologies (IT), such as neural networks, support vector machines, evolutionary algorithms, clustering methods, and decision trees, has led to advances to several challenging real-world medical and bioinformatics problems during the last few years. Applications of these technologies include tumour classification, gene function analysis and prediction, protein modelling and prediction, pathway analysis, complex clinical data analysis, processing and visualization, medical and biomedical information extraction, knowledge discovery and management, intelligent retrieval and integration of biological and medical information and processing, analysis and interpretation of medical and microarrays images

Nature-inspired Intelligent Techniques for Pap Smear Diagnosis: Ant Colony Optimization for Cell Classification

ABSTRACT: During the last years, Nature Inspired Intelligent Techniques have been very attractive. In this paper, one of the most important Nature Inspired Intelligent Techniques, the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), is presented for the solution of the Pap Smear Cell Classification problem. ACO is derived from the foraging behaviour of real ants in nature. The main idea of ACO is to model the problem as the search for a minimum cost path in a graph. Artificial ants walk through this graph, looking for good paths. Each ant has a rather simple behaviour so that it will typically only find rather poor-quality paths on its own. Better paths are found as the emergent result of the global cooperation among ants in the colony. This algorithm is combined with a number of nearest neighbor based classifiers. The algorithm is tested in two sets of data. The first one consists of 917 images of Pap smear cells and the second set consists of 500 images, classified carefully by cyto-technicians and doctors. Each cell is described by 20 features, and the cells fall into 7 classes but a minimal requirement is to separate normal from abnormal cells, which is a 2 class problem