Key to Success of Offshore Outsourcing

With the proliferating growth in technology and Innovation and the necessity to use new technology skills, outsourcing has become a notable trend in the IT industry. Characterized by USP\u27s like cost-effectiveness and timeliness, outsourcing companies has surged tremendously in the last decade. However, amidst the entire buzz, outsourcing has contributed to some major failures at recent times (A & M, 2016). That has even made organizations to critically think before going forward with an off-shore outsourcing company. A substantial issue on organizational capability and on-time delivery has questioned the very foundation of its efficiency. This has now leaded to surface some very extreme opinions about outsourcing, with rave reviews on good/ bad. Software Development outsourcing encompasses a contract based voluntary relationship between vendors and clients, wherein a client outsources a part or all the business activities to the concerned vendor. However, an offshore outsourcing demands completely different capabilities as against a domestic outsourcing. To begin with, firms associating with off-shore outsourcing must need to compete against language constraints, cultural differences, contrasts in time zones and also the organizational structures. Next, an off-shore outsourcing has a far greater impact than a domestic outsourcing with the above constraints introduced before. With regards to the core knowledge capabilities, there calls for probable risks so as to understand the level of efficiency of the outsourcing companies (A & M, 2016). Together with the differences in legal laws, risks related to data security, privacy and intellectual property can be critical too. Such disadvantages in outsourcing can be a high limiting factor to the growth of these offshore outsourcing, hence it must, therefore, be necessary to understand the level of efficiency of an offshore outsourcing team before relying on them

Congestion Control By Using Adaptive Data Rate Technique with High Bandwidth in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network one of the most favourite topic for researcher to explore. Wireless sensor networks is very useful so more number of sensor nodes are deploying and large number of data being sensed and collected. To meet the expectations of demands networks should be in safe and good state. Problems in wireless sensor networks are congestion and wastage of energy. So it's necessary to control the congestion and minimize the energy consumption. Congestion causes heavy data loss and unnecessary retransmission of data. Congestion causes by many reasons. There are some techniques and algorithms which can control the congestion at some degree. Here we have suggested technique which can do a Congestion Control with High bandwidth in networks. Amount of congestion in network can be decided by maximum and minimum threshold values that can assign in initial phase of algorithm

ORIF of Radius and Ulna Video Demonstration

Video is an emerging medium that has become an invaluable resource within education. It allows for a multisensory, both visual and auditory, means for students to learn quickly and effectively. We hope to contribute to a growing peer-reviewed video library using this technology

Evaluating the effectiveness of the pedestrian safety intervention program: Behavioral and observational approach

Pedestrians are considered as the most vulnerable road users. On a nationwide scale, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there were 6,075 pedestrian fatalities and more than 85,000 pedestrian injuries as a result of traffic crashes in 2017. This study provides national and state pedestrian fatality statistics, a systematic literature review of pedestrian injury severity, observational (video-based) & behavioral (survey-based) evaluation of the Street-Smart NJ pedestrian safety intervention campaign. Street-Smart NJ is a public education, awareness, and behavioral change campaign program that aims to improve pedestrian safety by increasing awareness of pedestrian safety risks and improving compliance with pedestrian and motorist laws. To do so, before and after campaign data was collected, and several statistical analyses were performed accordingly. In terms of the behavioral study, significant improvements in terms of pedestrian behaviors (i.e., crossing against the signal or outside the crosswalk) and driver behaviors (e.g., drivers not stopping for pedestrians in crosswalk) after the Street-Smart NJ campaign was reported. The observational study also showed significant improvements in pedestrian behaviors (i.e., crossing against the signal or outside the crosswalk) and driver behaviors (e.g., drivers not stopping for pedestrians in crosswalk) in most of the study communities following the Street-Smart NJ campaign

Robots at Work: How will Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace affect Higher Education?

We examine the impact of automation technology on the labor market and assess how this affects higher education. To do so, we begin by analyzing automation in the past and how it affected the labor market. In the second section, we analyze the state of the upcoming automation technology and the “human skills” it has acquired. We then analyze the education and skills relating to various occupations and link it to the data on occupational probabilities of automation. To gauge the automation probability of these skills, we assess their category based on 18 key human competencies which have been studied and have associated rates of automation potentials from a study by McKinsey Global Institute, 2017. Findings show that nearly 42% of Canadian labor is at high risk of being affected by automation and about 18% of the labor has at least 70% of their work activities that can be automated

Economic and social sustainability of sidewalk infrastructure

The presence of sidewalks and quality of sidewalk infrastructure are important indicators of perceived pedestrian safety and the walkability of neighborhoods. However, a wide gap exists between the accessibility and quality of infrastructure provided for pedestrians compared to the infrastructure provided for motorized vehicles. While there may be numerous reasons for poor quality of pedestrian infrastructure across cities and neighborhoods, one of the main reasons is the lack of sustained operation and maintenance programs among these local government agencies. This study outlines an approach to quantify sidewalk infrastructure costs over an 80-year life cycle period. Equivalent annual costs for three different scenarios are allocated in part directly to property owners, with the remaining costs in each scenario recovered over time through an equivalent increase in property tax millage rates. The four sidewalk management scenarios are then examined in more detail to assess how implementation may differentially impact Atlanta’s 244 neighborhoods and their residents across income and ethnicity groups. The two somewhat surprising findings of the study are: 1) even though sidewalk infrastructure may have a lifespan of more than 40-years, the costs of owning and operating this infrastructure over an 80-year period with replacement are high; and 2) low income neighborhoods are negatively impacted when portions of sidewalk infrastructure management costs are allocated directly to property owners, rather than handling sustainable management through traditional property tax assessment methods.M.S

Analysis of plasma chemokines and circulating tumour cells in colorectal and breast cancer patient peripheral blood

Circulating tumour cells (CTCs) provide a prognostic value in solid tumours including colorectal and breast. Enumeration of tumour cells from blood is becoming a common practice in informing prognosis and may guide therapy decisions. Enumeration alone does not capture heterogeneity of tumours and varying functional abilities of the CTCs to interact with the secondary microenvironment. Characterizing the isolated CTCs and assessing their functional abilities can track molecular changes in the disease progress. As a step toward identifying functional features of CTCs that could aid in clinical decisions, this study was aimed at analyzing chemokine release profile in drug resistance and developing a CTC isolation technique based on extracellular matrix interactions. Cancer cells release different chemokines and express chemokine receptors which together work to direct cell infiltrates in the tumour microenvironment. This work examined changes in the profile of chemokine release using a model of drug resistance based on the colorectal cancer cell line HT29 and its counterpart HT29-R that is resistant to the late-stage chemotherapy drug irinotecan (SN-38). Following an initial screening of mRNA expression through PCR and qPCR, five of the chemokines (CCL2, CCL15, CXCL8, CXCL12, and CCL20) were analyzed further for their release patterns amongst cell lines and peripheral blood of healthy volunteers and stage IV colorectal and breast cancer patients. The release pattern of chemokines in patient samples differed from the results of the in vitro drug-resistance model. Specific tumour location, previous therapies, and genetic variability are all examples of the factors that may provide unique patterns and complicate modelling for chemokine release in late-stage cancer. A detailed analysis revealed an upward trend for midkine (NEGF2) when baseline and 12 months plasma samples were compared. Migration studies may further reveal the consequences of this expression profile. Migration assays were carried out with Transwell® chambers and HepG2 cells to partially mimic the hepatic microenvironment. Such studies can guide future functional studies for isolated CTCs. We next sought to investigate extracellular matrix protein interactions, which might depend on a changing chemokine milieu. We utilized cancer cells’ ability to adhere to extracellular matrix and created a platform to isolate CTCs from the peripheral blood samples. A total of 14 colorectal and 7 breast cancer patients donated blood samples. Adhesion assays were performed with a range of different ECM proteins. We identified an optimal ECM substratum composed of collagen and fibronectin at a mass coating ratio of 2:1. The isolated CTCs were identified through immunofluorescence with epithelial marker antibodies (EpCAM and pan-cytokeratin). Identification of CTCs was further confirmed by exclusion with a hematopoietic origin marker CD45. The captured number of cells ranged from 0 to 296, whereas the mean number was 26 and the median was 22 per patient sample (~8mL). This technique not only allows enumeration, but also isolates cells based on a functional approach. The isolated cells are successful in adhering to extracellular matrix proteins and can be further characterized through functional markers. Overall, this study addresses two unique functional features of CTCs – their expression of certain chemokines and their ability to interact with both fibronectin and collagen - that form the basis to provide future clinical utility. Such an approach will help to inform clinicians about the aggressive nature of an individual tumour and guide treatment decisions toward best prognostic outcomes

Solution of Physics-based Bayesian Inverse Problems with Deep Generative Priors

Inverse problems are notoriously difficult to solve because they can have no solutions, multiple solutions, or have solutions that vary significantly in response to small perturbations in measurements. Bayesian inference, which poses an inverse problem as a stochastic inference problem, addresses these difficulties and provides quantitative estimates of the inferred field and the associated uncertainty. However, it is difficult to employ when inferring vectors of large dimensions, and/or when prior information is available through previously acquired samples. In this paper, we describe how deep generative adversarial networks can be used to represent the prior distribution in Bayesian inference and overcome these challenges. We apply these ideas to inverse problems that are diverse in terms of the governing physical principles, sources of prior knowledge, type of measurement, and the extent of available information about measurement noise. In each case we apply the proposed approach to infer the most likely solution and quantitative estimates of uncertainty.Comment: Paper: 18 pages, 5 figures. Supplementary: 9 pages, 6 Figures, 2 Table

Differentiable JPEG: The Devil is in the Details

JPEG remains one of the most widespread lossy image coding methods. However, the non-differentiable nature of JPEG restricts the application in deep learning pipelines. Several differentiable approximations of JPEG have recently been proposed to address this issue. This paper conducts a comprehensive review of existing diff. JPEG approaches and identifies critical details that have been missed by previous methods. To this end, we propose a novel diff. JPEG approach, overcoming previous limitations. Our approach is differentiable w.r.t. the input image, the JPEG quality, the quantization tables, and the color conversion parameters. We evaluate the forward and backward performance of our diff. JPEG approach against existing methods. Additionally, extensive ablations are performed to evaluate crucial design choices. Our proposed diff. JPEG resembles the (non-diff.) reference implementation best, significantly surpassing the recent-best diff. approach by $3.47$dB (PSNR) on average. For strong compression rates, we can even improve PSNR by $9.51$dB. Strong adversarial attack results are yielded by our diff. JPEG, demonstrating the effective gradient approximation. Our code is available at https://github.com/necla-ml/Diff-JPEG.Comment: Accepted at WACV 2024. Project page: https://christophreich1996.github.io/differentiable_jpeg

GSU Event Portal

GSU Event Portal focuses on providing an ease to people who wish to attend new events in a specific area of interest, where the events that are uploaded to the portal will be managed by the Event Organizers who are part of the portal. Portal provides free as well as paid events, so that people can choose events as per their interest. The portal provides Organizers the flexibility to create, manage, edit and remove events of any type and size. On the other side, Visitors can lookup events, they can save an event for their future interest and also pay for an event where applicable. The application provides a user-friendly interface so that the Organizers and the Visitors can get the benefits of the service provided by the event without any trouble. The application helps users to find an event they wish to attend with ease. They can browse events according to location, date and type. The main objective of the portal is advertising which helps the organizers to advertise their events and grab as much attention of the people to make their event more successful. This age is the age of technology and online advertising of event can help the organizers to attract more people in an easy way compared to paper advertisement. The people interested in an event, can even buy tickets of that event through this portal