Multiplexed, affordable, and portable platform for real time quantification of counterfeit and substandard medicines

The World Health Organization estimates that about 10-30% of pharmaceuticals in the world are either substandard or counterfeit. The number is even higher in the developing countries. From a public health perspective, a key contributor to the development and proliferation drug resistant strains of infections, including tuberculosis (TB), malaria and other infections that are leading killers in resource limited settings is poor quality medicines. Most of the main causes are profit driven corruption in many pharmaceutical companies, the poor manufacture and quality control, and/or the inappropriate storage conditions. Poor quality drugs lead to loss of life, create morbidity, strain the financial structure of the health system and lead to long-term drug resistance that affects us all. The current technology for screening poor quality drugs can be divided into 2 categories: the high end, precise and high cost technologies (such as High Performance Liquid Chromatography) and lower cost and qualitative technologies (such as Thin-Layered Chromatography). The high-end methods can give a precise measurement of active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) concentration and the presence of impurities in the tablets, but require trained personnel, advanced machine and lab set up, not suitable for field testing where most of poor quality pharmaceuticals have been found. The lower cost techniques require little training and simple equipment to operate at a relatively inexpensive price, but only gives qualitative results. In addition, most of current methods do not look at the dissolution profile of the tablets simultaneously with the concentration of API. Therefore, we propose to develop an assay that can quantify the concentrations of multiple APIs simultaneously and measure dissolution rates. In order to address current gaps in knowledge, my research proposal has three main parts in the assay development: 1) Development of an fluorescent/luminescent assay for detection of counterfeit/substandard antimalarial using small-molecules-based methods and field testing in Ghana; 2) Development of a fluorescent assay for detection of water-soluble pharmaceuticals using SELEX; and 3) Design a detection platform using microfluidic chips for real time quantification of multiple active pharmaceutical ingredients. For proof-of-concept, an antimalarial drug (artesunate and amodiaquine) and antibacterial antibiotics (sulfamethoxazole and trimethoprim) are selected to demonstrate the probe development and test the chip performance. Overall, the assay will be rapid, robust, portable, inexpensive, multiplexed, quantitative, specific, and sensitive. At a big picture level, emphasizing drug quality and creating robust mechanisms of drug testing will improve health outcomes and enhance treatment efficacy in resource limited settings

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationExtant studies have been showing that online user generated content (UGC) plays an important role in product adoption. I expand this research by considering the roles of online UGC in both product development and product adoption processes. Moreover, the interrelationship between these two processes is investigated under a theoretical framework of double-sided adverse selection in which both developers and users are uncertain about the future of a product. I model product development and adoption processes over the product lifecycle, capturing the direct and indirect effects of online UGC on both processes. Data for the study are taken from a longitudinal dataset covering 63 months for 11,648 open source projects registered on Sourceforge.net, one of the largest open source software development platforms. The results of this study reveal that online UGC has a positive effect on both the initiation and the completion of product development activities. Moreover, product adoption helps amplify that positive effect. Those results are consistent with the theory that online UGC can provide ideas and solutions for development activities and that developers capitalize on those ideas and solutions to initiate and to complete development activities. In addition, the results also show that product development and product adoption affect each other positively. Those results are consistent with the theory that product development and adoption signal developers' commitment in developing the product and users' interest in the product, respectively. Hence, it is suggested that transparency between developers and users creates a positive feedback loop between product development and product adoption. Since this study investigates the behaviors of both developers and users, it implies applications for users, developers, as well as platform owners who want to design a competitive ecosystem to attract and satisfy both users and developers

Transcreation in marketing:A corpus-based study of persuasion in optional shifts from English to Chinese

This study proposes that creation in transcreation involves optional shifts, shifts made to achieve intended effects in translation. Drawing on Martin and White’s Appraisal framework to address a parallel corpus of English marketing texts and Chinese translation, this study identifies the translation patterns of optional shifts in the form of evaluative epithets and compares the way the intended effect – persuasion – is achieved between the source text (ST) and the target text (TT). Although both the ST and the TT share the same intended effect, persuasion in the Chinese translation is shown to differ significantly in three ways: 1) it is more noticeable because it has many more explicit epithets; 2) the level of persuasiveness is higher because, in the same category of epithets (e.g. newness, amount, time, quality and infinity), the TT relies more on maximally upscaled epithets and; 3) a more emotive approach is taken to persuasion because the TT relies more on Reaction epithets, the only type related to emotion. It is suggested that these results inform and reflect transcreation practice between English and Chinese in the genre of marketing

Social Media Listening: Revealing the Indirect Effects of User Generated Content (UGC) on Product Adoption

Industry studies suggest social media listening espouses several advantages. Evidence from academic research however is lacking and the need to investigate its impact especially in the context of product development is needed. This research explores how UGC influences market outcomes indirectly via its impact on product development. Building on current findings from empowerment-product demand and new product adoption research, we propose that product improvements building on consumer social media conversations are more likely to succeed. Using a system of equations modeling in the open source software context, we verify that increasing forum posts lead to a greater number of codes added to the software as well as more versions released which, in turn, influence product adoption positively. Interestingly, the impact of the number of codes on software download follows an inverted-U relationship. This relationship is consistent with previous findings on the diminishing impact of the empowerment effects. Our findings extend current understanding of the value of end-user contributions. Whereas previous research focuses on information voluntarily provided by users to product development team, our research suggests that even C2C communications provide insights to the development team and can influence market outcomes indirectly via product improvement. Our results suggest that there is value in investing in social media listening tools. While social media is currently utilized for marketing communications, our research provides evidence for its potential to contribute to the development of products that may have a greater chance of success

Prevalence of swallowing problems and related quality of life of geriatric population in care and attention homes in Hong Kong

Prevalence of dysphagia and related quality of life were commonly investigated in the USA, Australia and other countries while there had no similar studies in Hong Kong. Thus, the present study aimed to 1) examine the prevalence of dysphagia in the geriatric population in Hong Kong, 2) investigate the related quality of life of the dysphagic elderly using SAPP. Study 1 involved 234 participants while study 2 involved 80 participants including 31 dysphagic participants and 48 non-dysphagic participants. Results from study 1 showed a prevalence rate of 51.71% of dysphagia in the target subject group while study 2 showed significant differences in the quality of life between the dysphagic and non-dysphagic participants. The findings in the two studies highlighted the importance of management of dysphagia the future and the importance of quantifying the impact of dysphagia on the individual‟s quality of life in the management of dysphagia.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

Managing the re‐entry process of returnee government scholars in an emerging transition economy–an embeddedness perspective

This paper reports the findings of a study that investigates the factors affecting the re‐entry and readjustment process of returnee government scholars in Vietnam. These returnee scholars were originally sent overseas to study as part of changes introduced by the Vietnamese government to develop its domestic talent pool. Using the perspective of home country embeddedness, we find that career and community embeddedness factors, together with readjustment factors, have an effect on returnee scholars’ career and life satisfaction in their home country. These factors subsequently affected their intention to stay or re‐expatriate. The study contributes to public sector change management theory by examining factors affecting the re‐entry process of returnees within an emerging transition economy. It also adds to the limited studies on understanding and managing the re‐entry processes and state‐led diaspora strategies among returnee government scholars from emerging transition economies and their effectiveness

Predicting overall staffs' creativity and innovative work behavior in banking

This study focuses on the impact of empowering leadership and challenges work environment on both sale employee’s creativity and innovative work behavior in the Vietnamese banking industry. An empirical test, a structural equation model comprising a sample of 319 sale employees in 15 banks, indicates a strong relationship between sales staff creativity and innovative work behavior. Moreover, the findings indicate that both an empowering leadership and a challenging work environment can trigger sale employees’ creativity. Finally, innovative work behavior has a positive impact on innovative output. In general, this study contributes with some suggestions for bank managers to identify appropriate methods in order to stimulate the creativity and innovative work behavior of employees with the objective of achieving strong and sustainable business performance. © 2019, Sciendo. All rights reserved.Internal Grant Agency of FaME [IGA/FaME/2018/019

Punctuation Restoration for Singaporean Spoken Languages: English, Malay, and Mandarin

This paper presents the work of restoring punctuation for ASR transcripts generated by multilingual ASR systems. The focus languages are English, Mandarin, and Malay which are three of the most popular languages in Singapore. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system that can tackle punctuation restoration for these three languages simultaneously. Traditional approaches usually treat the task as a sequential labeling task, however, this work adopts a slot-filling approach that predicts the presence and type of punctuation marks at each word boundary. The approach is similar to the Masked-Language Model approach employed during the pre-training stages of BERT, but instead of predicting the masked word, our model predicts masked punctuation. Additionally, we find that using Jieba1 instead of only using the built-in SentencePiece tokenizer of XLM-R can significantly improve the performance of punctuating Mandarin transcripts. Experimental results on English and Mandarin IWSLT2022 datasets and Malay News show that the proposed approach achieved state-of-the-art results for Mandarin with 73.8% F1-score while maintaining a reasonable F1-score for English and Malay, i.e. 74.7% and 78% respectively. Our source code that allows reproducing the results and building a simple web-based application for demonstration purposes is available on Github

A major boost to the website performance of up-scale hotels in Vietnam

The study aims to enhance the customer experience on hotel websites in the context of venue's booking channels to others. The online filed survey is conducted with 321 internet bookers. The exploratory factor analysis is adopted to analyze the data. The progression of customer satisfaction proceeds in a linear fashion on luxury (ranking from 4-star to 5-star hotels) websites. Moreover, the study reveals how hotel website performance would affect the levels of customer attitude and its sustainable development in the context of perceived e-service quality. The exploratory results show that customer satisfaction in online environment has identical processes in the context of up-scale hotel industry. The female group compared to male group, has more sensitive to perceive the impact of functionality of lodging website in developing customer satisfaction. Caution is advised in generalizing findings of this study due to stratified sampling even though the study confirms results of previously conducted studies. This study provides practical tips for website sustainable progress especially for hotel management to pay more attention to the e-service formation process. Therefore, the appropriate marketing strategy can be established to fill gender specific expectations towards individual degree of customer satisfaction.Internal Grant Agency of Faculty of Management and Economics, Tomas Bata University in Zlin [IGA/FaME/2018/009