Early Purchaser Involvement in Open Innovation- the case of an advanced purchasing function triggering the absorption of external knowledge in the French automotive industry

International audienceThis paper investigates the mechanisms that trigger the absorption of external knowledge in an innovative French automotive firm. An ethnographic-inspired study conducted by an academic embedded within the Innovation Purchasing Department has enable us to present a rare and new function of Purchasing that plays an important role between potential new suppliers and Research and Development personnel

Methods for the extraction and classification of transient signals from noisy data - A case study in classifying sounds from the thorax.

The physiological origins and physical characteristics of sounds from the thorax have been reviewed briefly. This thesis presents some signal processing algorithms and classification techniques which have been developed for the extraction and classification of those sounds. In order to evaluate the recording equipment and signal processing algorithms two simulators were constructed: a laboratory simulator generating lung sounds in a variable background noise environment and a heart sound simulator written such that the generated sound was defined by a set of variables. Four conventional transformation algorithms for the transient extraction process were evaluated. Their considerable user intervention and inconsistent transformed signal led to the development of the "signal's envelope" algorithm. The signal's envelope method was used to extract transients of interest which were then used for the classification stage. It is shown that, due to the numerical nature of the features used for the classification process, the nearest neighbour clustering algorithm could not correctly classify all the extracted transients. The numerical features were therefore converted into linguistic terms and a fuzzy logic technique was developed to classify the transients. The fuzzy inference engine was robust enough to cope with the small numerical variation in features such that the correct classification was achieved. The other classification method tried was the fuzzy "min-max" clustering algorithm. This also used numerical features for the classification process and was therefore not able to classify all of the extracted transients correctly. A lung sound analyser was constructed using the signal's envelope and fuzzy inference engine. The system was able to extract and classify individual heart sounds, crackles and wheezes from recorded phonograms. In about 4% of cases, the heart sounds were so indistinct that only a partial classification was achieved. It was concluded that by using simple transducers and sophisticated signal processing and classification algorithms it was possible to construct a chest sound classifier which may be of use in a clinical environment

Vapor-Induced Attraction of Floating Droplets

Droplets partially submersed in an immiscible liquid pool attract each other. We experimentally study the interaction of floating droplets containing aqueous solution of a volatile liquid. A droplet affects its neighbors by generating a vapor gradient to the surroundings and responds by evaporating asymmetrically over its exposed cap. We show that the induced asymmetric temperature distribution causes a surface tension gradient driving the attracting motion. We highlight that the attracting dynamics starts with an accelerating stage, followed by a decelerating stage. We finally provide a theoretical model that quantitatively captures the interactive forces between droplets and predicts essential features of the attracting motion

Distributions of infant haemoglobin at 6 months of age by studies.

<p>Distributions of infant haemoglobin at 6 months of age by studies.</p

Characteristics of infants.

<p>⁽¹⁾Anaemia defined as haemoglobin < 11 g/dL;</p><p>⁽²⁾Significant tests include one-way ANOVA, nonparametric k-sample test on the equality of medians, and chi-square test, where appropriate.</p><p>Characteristics of infants.</p

Baseline characteristics of the participants.

<p>⁽¹⁾Anaemia defined as haemoglobin < 11 g/dL;</p><p>⁽²⁾Significant tests include one-way ANOVA, nonparametric k-sample test on the equality of medians, and chi-square test, where appropriate.</p><p>Baseline characteristics of the participants.</p

Numbers of participants and attrition by studies.

<p>Numbers of participants and attrition by studies.</p

Significant pathways of the factors of infant Bayley Cognitive scores at 6 months of age.

<p>Single-headed arrows represent statistically significant directional paths (only significant paths were presented, for more details see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0074876#pone-0074876-t003" target="_blank">Table 3</a>). Path coefficients are interpreted as regression coefficients. <i>IDA: iron deficiency anemia; CMD: common mental disorders; WAZ: infant weight-for-age Z-score.</i></p

Paper/Carbon Nanotube-Based Wearable Pressure Sensor for Physiological Signal Acquisition and Soft Robotic Skin

A wearable and flexible pressure sensor is essential to the realization of personalized medicine through continuously monitoring an individual’s state of health and also the development of a highly intelligent robot. A flexible, wearable pressure sensor is fabricated based on novel single-wall carbon nanotube /tissue paper through a low-cost and scalable approach. The flexible, wearable sensor showed superior performance with concurrence of several merits, including high sensitivity for a broad pressure range and an ultralow energy consumption level of 10^–6 W. Benefited from the excellent performance and the ultraconformal contact of the sensor with an uneven surface, vital human physiological signals (such as radial arterial pulse and muscle activity at various positions) can be monitored in real time and in situ. In addition, the pressure sensors could also be integrated onto robots as the artificial skin that could sense the force/pressure and also the distribution of force/pressure on the artificial skin

Micrographs of main olfactory tissue from Chat-GFP mice show diffuse labeling throughout the bulb with some regions of high labeling in the GL.

<p><b><i>A–C</i></b><b>.</b> High-resolution composite micrographs (shown for visualization only) of MOB tissue. Plane orientation: Sg - sagittal, Cr - coronal, Hz - horizontal; a = anterior, p = posterior, d = dorsal, v = ventral, l = lateral, m = medial. Layer labels: <i>nl -</i> nerve; <i>gl -</i> glomerular; <i>epl</i> - external plexiform; <i>gr</i> - granule cell; <i>ml</i> - mitral cell; <i>ipl</i> - internal plexiform. Scale bar indicates 500 µm. <b><i>A.</i></b> Parasagittal section. <i>Arrow</i> points to region of relatively heavy GFP labeling in the anterior region of the bulb. <i>Arrow head</i> indicates region where relatively little labeling is found. <b><i>B.</i></b> Coronal section. <i>oc -</i> orbital cortex. <i>aob</i> - accessory olfactory bulb. <i>aon -</i> anterior olfactory nucleus. <b><i>C.</i></b> Micrograph of a coronal cross-section of the MOB and AOB. Arrow points to heavily staining glomeruli shown in inset. <b><i>C inset</i></b><b>.</b> High-resolution micrograph of glomeruli with a relatively high amount of GFP staining. <b><i>D</i></b><b>.</b> High-resolution micrograph of the AOB showing that the relatively light GFP staining in the anterior portion of the structure did not co-label with G_oα labeled in red. <b><i>E–F</i></b><b>.</b> Heavily-stained GFP glomeruli do not co-label with PDE 2A (<b>E</b>) or PDE 4A (<b>F</b>). Red = PDE#A, Green = GFP. Scale bar = 100 µm.</p