Product data management practices in a Bangladeshi agrochemical company

Abstract. As businesses are relying more on information systems to carry out their processes, data is becoming an increasingly important factor for success. In particular, product data is necessary for tasks such as producing, selling, delivering, and invoicing a product within these systems. In the past, studies on product data and product data management management have primarily focused on product development and related activities, with little emphasis on PDM in other stages of a product’s lifecycle. The aim of this Master’s thesis is to explain the contribution of PDM in enhancing a company’s performance by improving its operational and business processes as well as the difficulties and requirements involved in implementing Product Data Management (PDM) practices in a Bangladeshi agrochemical company. The research encompasses overall comprehension of PDM as a company-wide initiative and suggests possible strategies for establishing company-wide PDM practices. To improve their data management practices for handling a broad range of varying products, the case company was surveyed and analyzed in this study. The author utilized a case study approach and conducted interviews to gather data from practitioners with firsthand experience and perspectives. This empirical data has contributed to a better understanding of company-wide PDM. The findings of this research suggest that standardized understanding of products throughout a company is necessary to facilitate effective management of product data. To establish effective PDM practices throughout a company, it is crucial to have a comprehensive understanding of the nature of product data, which encompasses both product master data and general product data from different stakeholder viewpoints. When dealing with a wide range of products that need to be effectively managed, higher level product decisions have a considerable influence on product data management, and general guidelines may be vital for ease of management. The study emphasizes the significance of adopting a top-down approach for creating effective PDM practices, and the need for a generic product structure to facilitate consistent product management. The main contribution of this research is its guidance for managers in establishing true company-wide practices for managing product data

Indirect Estimation of Pre-Census Baseline In the Aftermath of a War

Pre-censal estimates help in proper planning for the execution of a census. After the end of a destabilizing war, these pre-censal estimates cannot be easily obtained. The paper proposes how pre-censal estimates can be obtained in the aftermath of a war using indirect estimation techniques. This involves the estimation of probabilities of mortality and of emigration obtained from survival models and multiple decrement life tables

COLT: Cyclic Overlapping Lottery Tickets for Faster Pruning of Convolutional Neural Networks

Pruning refers to the elimination of trivial weights from neural networks. The sub-networks within an overparameterized model produced after pruning are often called Lottery tickets. This research aims to generate winning lottery tickets from a set of lottery tickets that can achieve similar accuracy to the original unpruned network. We introduce a novel winning ticket called Cyclic Overlapping Lottery Ticket (COLT) by data splitting and cyclic retraining of the pruned network from scratch. We apply a cyclic pruning algorithm that keeps only the overlapping weights of different pruned models trained on different data segments. Our results demonstrate that COLT can achieve similar accuracies (obtained by the unpruned model) while maintaining high sparsities. We show that the accuracy of COLT is on par with the winning tickets of Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) and, at times, is better. Moreover, COLTs can be generated using fewer iterations than tickets generated by the popular Iterative Magnitude Pruning (IMP) method. In addition, we also notice COLTs generated on large datasets can be transferred to small ones without compromising performance, demonstrating its generalizing capability. We conduct all our experiments on Cifar-10, Cifar-100 & TinyImageNet datasets and report superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods

FACTORS INFLUENCING THE PREFERENCE OF PRIVATE HOSPITALS TO PUBLIC HOSPITALS IN OMAN

Purpose: The objectives of the study are to analyze the factors which influence patients to go to private hospitals against public hospitals of Oman and to analyze the expectations of patients from the integrated public hospitals in Oman.Design/methodology/approach: The study was carried out with a well-defined questionnaire through which 251 survey samples were collected on a random sampling basis.Findings: The results of the study reveal that there is an association between the selection of hospital and services and the cost of the services offered in the hospital and it is found that the cost of services incurred makes an impact in the selection of hospital for medical treatment. The study also revealed that in private hospitals patients could easily approach anyone including the reception staff and all are helpful, and the private hospitals are equipped with modern equipment, and doctors treat patients in a friendly manner.Research limitations/Implications: The majority of the population taken for the study are aged above 20 years, and the samples were collected from selected regions of Oman, and wide range collection of samples from all the regions will help to improve the solution.Social implications: The study suggests that sufficient medicines should be provided in all the public health centers and periodic inspection should be conducted at regular intervals to improve the standards of the public health Centers and Government Hospitals concerning cleanliness, treatments and the front line services.Originality/Value: No study has examined the causes for the hospital selection delay in the construction projects of Oman, and it is a first-hand study of its kind and the results will be useful to the stakeholders

Effect of Channel Equalization Schemes in Performance Evaluation of a Secured Convolutional Encoded DWT Based MIMO MC-CDMA System

In this research work, performance of different channel equalization techniques and various M-ary modulation schemes (MPSK, MQAM and DPSK) for DWT based MIMO Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) wireless communication system has been analyzed through simulation. We propose this system using convolutional coding scheme over AWGN and Rayleigh fading channel with implementation of Walsh Hadamard code as orthogonal spreading code. In this paper, we derive a generalized analytical framework to evaluate the Bit Error rate (BER) with respect to Signal-to Noise Ratio (SNR) and also use Electronic Codebook (ECB) mode as cryptographic algorithm to encrypt the actual data for security issues

Development of electro-hydro automatic parking braking system for automotive system

A parking brake is an important tool of any automotive system. Conventional parking brake systems requires the driver to manually pull the lever if the brakes are to be applied. To some extent, the vehicle is left without applying the parking brake due to the insensibility, which could make the vehicle in danger if there any gradient of the road and strong wind. The aim of this manuscript is to present an automatic electro-hydro parking braking system which brakes once the vehicle park. This is developed by associating the wheel speed sensors, accelerator proximity sensors, controller, and a linear actuator. This electro-hydro automatic parking braking system automatically brakes the vehicle when it parks. It ensures the vehicle to remain stationary when it is parked and prevents vehicle rollaway or any unwanted movement that might occur. It increases the safety of the vehicle as well as others around it. The linear actuator displacement is controlled in this study by the auto-clamping system when the vehicle park. The model has been tested considering the road gradient 2-25%. The automatic parking braking system requires hydraulic pressure 383.66 kPa to ensure the vehicle park on 25% gradient, which is 11% less than the vehicle to brake from speed of 35 km/h

Study of Fuzzy Controller to control vertical position of an air-cushion tracked vehicle

This paper presents the fuzzy logic control system of an air-cushion tracked vehicle (ACTV) operating on swamp peat terrain. Vehicle vertical position is maintained by using an inflated air-cushion system attached with the vehicle. It is desired that the vehicle vertical position be maintained at a desired position so that vehicle obtains sufficient traction control and to propel the driving system. To accomplish this task, it is required that the error between the actual position and the desired position equal to zero, and the differential position rate also be equal to zero. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to develop an appropriate control strategy for an air-cushion system by using fuzzy logic expert system. Air-cushion system is controlled by the electronic proportional control valve and fuzzy logic controller (FLC) with associating the output signal of the distance (height) measuring sensor attached with the vehicle. In this control scheme the fundamental goal is to employ the fuzzy logic expert system to set the fuzzy rules and to actuate the electronic proportional valve in order to obtain appropriate valve control actions. Experimental values are taken in the laboratory for control system testing to investigate the relationship between vehicle vertical position and air-cushion system

LumiNet: The Bright Side of Perceptual Knowledge Distillation

In knowledge distillation literature, feature-based methods have dominated due to their ability to effectively tap into extensive teacher models. In contrast, logit-based approaches, which aim to distill `dark knowledge' from teachers, typically exhibit inferior performance compared to feature-based methods. To bridge this gap, we present LumiNet, a novel knowledge distillation algorithm designed to enhance logit-based distillation. We introduce the concept of 'perception', aiming to calibrate logits based on the model's representation capability. This concept addresses overconfidence issues in logit-based distillation method while also introducing a novel method to distill knowledge from the teacher. It reconstructs the logits of a sample/instances by considering relationships with other samples in the batch. LumiNet excels on benchmarks like CIFAR-100, ImageNet, and MSCOCO, outperforming leading feature-based methods, e.g., compared to KD with ResNet18 and MobileNetV2 on ImageNet, it shows improvements of 1.5% and 2.05%, respectively

Design and Characterization of Porous Core Polarization Maintaining Photonic Crystal Fiber for THz Guidance

An improved design of Teflon photonic crystal fiber with a porous air-core is presented for low-loss terahertz guidance. Optimization of total power confinement in the air-holes, together both in the cladding and core regions, is carried out for both quasi-TE and quasi-TM polarizations by using a full-vectorial finite element method. To achieve the polarization maintenance, modal birefringence is enhanced by destroying the circular symmetry with the introduction of unequal size air-holes in the first ring