The Role of Guanxi in Information Technology Enabled Organizations: A Structuration Theory Perspective

Firms in China, and in Asia-Pacific countries to a certain degree, cannot escape from two institutional characteristics of modern organizations: the uniquely Eastern practice of guanxi and the uniquely Western artifact of information technology. While both constructs have been extensively studied in organizational contexts, few have examined how these two constructs interact with each other and how such interaction impact organizational processes, norms, and other institutional properties. From the lens of structuration theory, we attempt to understand this interesting and important phenomenon. We submit that guanxi is neither a cultural artifact of the Chinese society, nor a product of weak institutions in shortage economies; rather, it is an outcome of structuration between the human agents who enact it and the institutional environment in which it is enacted, enabled or constrained by information technology. This structuration view of guanxi does not predict its ever lasting effect on Chinese business and society, nor does it foretell its demise in the global economy. However, it does provide a better explanation to the critical questions why guanxi is significant in certain firms but insignificant in others and how information technology enables and constrains the enactment of guanxi in organizational life

A Spatiotemporal-chaos-based Encryption Having Overall Properties Considerably Better Than Advanced Encryption Standard

Spatiotemporal chaos of a two-dimensional one-way coupled map lattice is used for chaotic cryptography. The chaotic outputs of many space units are used for encryption simultaneously. This system shows satisfactory cryptographic properties of high security; fast encryption (decryption) speed; and robustness against noise disturbances in communication channel. The overall features of this spatiotemporal-chaos-based cryptosystem are better than chaotic cryptosystems known so far, and also than currently used conventional cryptosystems, such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure

RISE-Based Integrated Motion Control of Autonomous Ground Vehicles With Asymptotic Prescribed Performance

This article investigates the integrated lane-keeping and roll control for autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs) considering the transient performance and system disturbances. The robust integral of the sign of error (RISE) control strategy is proposed to achieve the lane-keeping control purpose with rollover prevention, by guaranteeing the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system, attenuating systematic disturbances, and maintaining the controlled states within the prescribed performance boundaries. Three contributions have been made in this article: 1) a new prescribed performance function (PPF) that does not require accurate initial errors is proposed to guarantee the tracking errors restricted within the predefined asymptotic boundaries; 2) a modified neural network (NN) estimator which requires fewer adaptively updated parameters is proposed to approximate the unknown vertical dynamics; and 3) the improved RISE control based on PPF is proposed to achieve the integrated control objective, which analytically guarantees both the controller continuity and closed-loop system asymptotic stability by integrating the signum error function. The overall system stability is proved with the Lyapunov function. The controller effectiveness and robustness are finally verified by comparative simulations using two representative driving maneuvers, based on the high-fidelity CarSim-Simulink simulation

ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF TRUST IN SUPPLY CHAIN: THE ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Trust has been a central construct in studies of inter-firm relationships. Many operational, organizational, social, and cultural factors have been identified to have significant impact on inter-firm trust. In this study, we investigate the role of information technology in generating inter-firm trust and the consequences of this trust in the context of supply networks. Using structural equation modeling techniques, our data show that the level of information systems integration among the partner firms in a supply network significantly impacts the trust among the firms which, together with the integrated information systems, explains more than half of the variances in information sharing and business process coupling in the network. Given the substantial evidence in the literature on the impact of information sharing and process coupling on supply chain performance, we conclude that information systems integration among the partners is critical to supply network performance. We also confirm that information systems flexibility and use of standards in information systems significantly contribute to the level of systems integration among the partners in supply networks as suggested in prior studies. Our findings extend the current literature on inter-firm trust by considering the role of information technology in addition to other important factors already identified

A Chebyshev Confidence Guided Source-Free Domain Adaptation Framework for Medical Image Segmentation

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt models trained on a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain without the access to source data. In medical imaging scenarios, the practical significance of SFDA methods has been emphasized due to privacy concerns. Recent State-of-the-art SFDA methods primarily rely on self-training based on pseudo-labels (PLs). Unfortunately, PLs suffer from accuracy deterioration caused by domain shift, and thus limit the effectiveness of the adaptation process. To address this issue, we propose a Chebyshev confidence guided SFDA framework to accurately assess the reliability of PLs and generate self-improving PLs for self-training. The Chebyshev confidence is estimated by calculating probability lower bound of the PL confidence, given the prediction and the corresponding uncertainty. Leveraging the Chebyshev confidence, we introduce two confidence-guided denoising methods: direct denoising and prototypical denoising. Additionally, we propose a novel teacher-student joint training scheme (TJTS) that incorporates a confidence weighting module to improve PLs iteratively. The TJTS, in collaboration with the denoising methods, effectively prevents the propagation of noise and enhances the accuracy of PLs. Extensive experiments in diverse domain scenarios validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework and establish its superiority over state-of-the-art SFDA methods. Our paper contributes to the field of SFDA by providing a novel approach for precisely estimating the reliability of pseudo-labels and a framework for obtaining high-quality PLs, resulting in improved adaptation performance

Few-shot Class-incremental Learning: A Survey

Few-shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) presents a unique challenge in machine learning, as it necessitates the continuous learning of new classes from sparse labeled training samples without forgetting previous knowledge. While this field has seen recent progress, it remains an active area of exploration. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of FSCIL. In our in-depth examination, we delve into various facets of FSCIL, encompassing the problem definition, the discussion of primary challenges of unreliable empirical risk minimization and the stability-plasticity dilemma, general schemes, and relevant problems of incremental learning and few-shot learning. Besides, we offer an overview of benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we introduce the classification methods in FSCIL from data-based, structure-based, and optimization-based approaches and the object detection methods in FSCIL from anchor-free and anchor-based approaches. Beyond these, we illuminate several promising research directions within FSCIL that merit further investigation

Why Is Web-based Supply Chain Management Popular in China? A Factor Endowment’s Perspective

Web-based system-to-human integration and direct system-to-system integration are alternative information technologies for supply chain management. Although the system-to-system mode is known to be more effective than the Web-based mode for data sharing, the web-based mode is dominant in the supply chain of Chinese firms. Is it a suboptimal or the most appropriate choice? We develop an analytical model to investigate how a manufacturer selects an optimal mode from competing technologies, including manual mode, Web-based mode and system-to-system mode. The contribution of this study is three-fold. First, the expected degree of information sharing influences the manufacturer’s selection. Manual mode is the optimal selection when the expected degree of information sharing is low, whereas system-to-system mode is the optimal choice when the expected degree is high. When the expected degree of information sharing is intermediate, Web-based mode is the optimal choice. Second, based on factor endowment theory, we find that labor endowment and technology endowment can influence the adoption intervals of these three modes. And third, when labor endowment is on the decline and technology endowment is on the rise in the early stage, the Web-based mode is the optimal choice than manual mode or system-to-system mode. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed

Genetic Engineering of Starch Biosynthesis in Maize Seeds for Efficient Enzymatic Digestion of Starch during Bioethanol Production

Maize accumulates large amounts of starch in seeds which have been used as food for human and animals. Maize starch is an importantly industrial raw material for bioethanol production. One critical step in bioethanol production is degrading starch to oligosaccharides and glucose by alpha-amylase and glucoamylase. This step usually requires high temperature and additional equipment, leading to an increased production cost. Currently, there remains a lack of specially designed maize cultivars with optimized starch (amylose and amylopectin) compositions for bioethanol production. We discussed the features of starch granules suitable for efficient enzymatic digestion. Thus far, great advances have been made in molecular characterization of the key proteins involved in starch metabolism in maize seeds. The review explores how these proteins affect starch metabolism pathway, especially in controlling the composition, size and features of starch. We highlight the roles of key enzymes in controlling amylose/amylopectin ratio and granules architecture. Based on current technological process of bioethanol production using maize starch, we propose that several key enzymes can be modified in abundance or activities via genetic engineering to synthesize easily degraded starch granules in maize seeds. The review provides a clue for developing special maize cultivars as raw material in the bioethanol industry