A PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE TO KNOWLEDGE ADAPTION: BOUNDARY OBJECTS IN IT OUTSOURCING1

Based on a multi-case study from a pragmatic perspective to knowledge adaption, this research plans to analyse the processes of knowledge codification, transfer and integration in the context of IT outsourcing. It plans to address the following research question: how do IT service vendors successfully adapt their knowledge to new businesses. We plan to collect data from vendors both in China and New Zealand. Our findings will uncover the mechanisms and rationales underlying the processes of IT service vendors’ knowledge adaption. Our contributions may be threefold. First, from the pragmatic perspective to knowledge adaption, we develop a new theory to address the conflicts about whether existing knowledge in organizations can improve performance of new businesses. Second, we contribute to the literature of organizational learning, especially to studies on learning in communities of practice. We plan to provide new a theoretical lens to explaining how organizations can adapt different knowledge to new businesses by using appropriate boundary objects, and to uncover what specific conditions can make such knowledge adaption successful. Lastly, this study plans to shed new light on how IT service vendors adapt to turbulent markets

Highly sensitive transient absorption imaging of graphene and graphene oxide in living cells and circulating blood

We report a transient absorption (TA) imaging method for fast visualization and quantitative layer analysis of graphene and GO. Forward and backward imaging of graphene on various substrates under ambient condition was imaged with a speed of 2 μs per pixel. The TA intensity linearly increased with the layer number of graphene. Real-time TA imaging of GO in vitro with capability of quantitative analysis of intracellular concentration and ex vivo in circulating blood were demonstrated. These results suggest that TA microscopy is a valid tool for the study of graphene based materials

Class Gradient Projection For Continual Learning

Catastrophic forgetting is one of the most critical challenges in Continual Learning (CL). Recent approaches tackle this problem by projecting the gradient update orthogonal to the gradient subspace of existing tasks. While the results are remarkable, those approaches ignore the fact that these calculated gradients are not guaranteed to be orthogonal to the gradient subspace of each class due to the class deviation in tasks, e.g., distinguishing "Man" from "Sea" v.s. differentiating "Boy" from "Girl". Therefore, this strategy may still cause catastrophic forgetting for some classes. In this paper, we propose Class Gradient Projection (CGP), which calculates the gradient subspace from individual classes rather than tasks. Gradient update orthogonal to the gradient subspace of existing classes can be effectively utilized to minimize interference from other classes. To improve the generalization and efficiency, we further design a Base Refining (BR) algorithm to combine similar classes and refine class bases dynamically. Moreover, we leverage a contrastive learning method to improve the model's ability to handle unseen tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. It improves the previous methods by 2.0% on the CIFAR-100 dataset.Comment: MM '22: Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedi

A regioselectivity switch in Pd-catalyzed hydroallylation of alkynes.

By exploiting the reactivity of a vinyl-Pd species, we control the regioselectivity in hydroallylation of alkynes under Pd-hydride catalysis. A monophosphine ligand and carboxylic acid combination promotes 1,5-dienes through a pathway involving isomerization of alkynes to allenes. In contrast, a bisphosphine ligand and copper cocatalyst favor 1,4-dienes via a mechanism that involves transmetalation. Our study highlights how to access different isomers by diverting a common organometallic intermediate

Improving Antigenicity of the Recombinant Hepatitis C Virus Core Protein via Random Mutagenesis

In order to enhance the sensitivity of diagnosis, a recombinant clone containing domain I of HCV core (amino acid residues 1 to 123) was subjected to random mutagenesis. Five mutants with higher sensitivity were obtained by colony screening of 616 mutants using reverse ELISA. Sequence analysis of these mutants revealed alterations focusing on W84, P95, P110, or V129. The inclusion bodies of these recombinant proteins overexpressed in E. coli BL21(DE3) were subsequently dissolved using 6 M urea and then refolded by stepwise dialysis. Compared to the unfolded wild-type antigen, the refolded M3b antigen (W84S, P110S and V129L) exhibited an increase of 66% antigenicity with binding capacity of 0.96 and affinity of 113 μM−1. Moreover, the 33% decrease of the production demand suggests that M3b is a potential substitute for anti-HCV antibody detection