1,777 research outputs found
A sector analysis for RFID technologies: fundamental and technical analysis for financial decision making problems
Automatic identification technologies have been used in a wide range of applications for reducing the amount of time and labor needed to input data and improving data accuracy. As an important automatic identification technology, radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies allow contactless reading and these technologies are particularly successful in manufacturing and other environments where traditional identification technologies such as bar codes can not perform well. By integrating the RFID technology into their business models, companies may save time, lower labor cost, improve products quality and provide better service. RFID is the wireless technology that uses RF communication to identify, track and manage objects and collect and store data. RFID technology enables companies to develop applications that create value by tracking and identifying objects, animals or people. Business applications of RFID technology can be seen in areas such as manufacturing, supply chain management, software integration, security systems, asset tracking and many others.
RFID technology was predicted to be one of the “top ten” technologies in 2004 by CNN. Although, the RFID market is less than five years old, it has been applied to many different industries, from retail industry to logistics, or from healthcare to service business industry – and it is still growing. Particularly, RFID has fundamental influences on today's retailing and supply chain management for applications like asset tracking the inventory control and management. RFID technology also finds major application in mobile phones and is widely used in toll collection of highways, for payments in restaurants, vending machines, retail and parking lots. There are a wide range of RFID systems currently being used or being developed. Examples to these systems include but not limited to the following; automatic vehicle and personnel access control for security (Simpson, 2006), airport passenger and baggage tracking (Ferguson, 2006), tracing blood for cutting down errors such as giving patients wrong blood types (Ranger, 2006), payment process systems (Ramachandran, 2006), production control in manufacturing (Liu & Miao, 2006), transfusion medicine (Knels, 2006) real-time inventory control by automated identification of items in warehouses, tracking and management of physical files, tracking of books in the libraries (Shadid, 2005). For some other applications, interested reader is referred to (Finkenzeller, 2003; Smith, 2004).
RFID solution providers claim that their technology and solutions bring significant benefits and have valuable advantages in practice. As new RFID solutions being developed and more RFID tags and equipments being used, these solutions will become more cost effective and RFID businesses are expected to grow rapidly. Since RFID is fairly new, it’s difficult to measure resulting sales increases or heightened customer satisfaction quotients. On the other hand, according to IDC estimation (IDC is a subsidiary of International Data Group, a leading technology media, research, and events company and provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets), companies in the retail sector will spend nearly 91.5 million in 2003 which corresponds to annual growth rate of 70 percent. In a similar look; the Wireless Data Research Group projected that the global market for RFID increased from 3 billion in 2007 (Asif & Mandviwalla, 2005). There are two major drivers of this growth. The first one is the adoption of RFID technology by major retailers and government agencies. The second one is the reduction in the price of RFID tags, readers, and IT systems required to deploy RFID.
Given the huge potential of RFID technology, there has been a huge emergence of RFID specialty companies and the development of RFID practices within many market-leading companies. Due to huge emergence, it is desirable to make a sector analysis. In this study, we perform a sector analysis for RFID technologies for researchers and analysts. We investigate public RFID companies traded on the stock exchange markets, summarize their financial performance, describe their RF products, services, and applications, and perform fundamental and technical analysis
Intravitreal Bevacizumab Followed by Ranibizumab for Neovascular Age Related Macular Degeneratıon
Purpose: To compare the outcomes after switching from intravitreal bevacizumab (IVB) to intravitreal ranibizumab (IVR) in patients with neovascular age related macular degeneration (ARMD).
Material and Methods: A retrospective review of patients with neovascular ARMD, who were switched from treatment with Pro Re Nata (PRN) IVB to PRN IVR, was conducted in a university clinic. IVB (1.25 mg/0.05 ml) and IVR (0.5 mg/0.05 ml) were used. Retreatment criteria were defined based on an activity scoring (AS) system developed in our clinic. An AS was calculated for each lesion at each visit. AS results and the number of injections before and after switching treatment to IVR were compared.
Results: 32 eyes of 31 patients with neovascular ARMD were included in the study. The mean follow-up period was 12.3±4.7 months. The mean duration of IVB treatment was 8.1±3.1 months followed by 4.2±1.6 months with IVR. At the beginning of the study the mean AS was 8.9, (Visual Acuity) VA : 0.99 logMAR, and Central Foveal Thickness (CFT): 312.7±81.1μ. A month after the last IVB injection, AS became 5.1, VA: 0.69 logMAR, and CFT: 210.4±80.4μ (p<0.05). Likewise, a month after the last IVR injection, AS, VA and CFT were 5.8, 0.78 logMAR, and 199.9±60.9μ, respectively. Comparison of post-injection results of IVB and IVR treatments did not reveal a statistically significant difference. Mean injection rates per patient while receiving IVB and IVR treatments were 0.46/month and 0.44/ month, respectively (p>0.05).
Conclusions: This study shows that the improvement in AS, CFT, and VA, achieved with the PRN IVB treatment, seems to be maintained after switching to IVR
Genetic characterization and relatedness among autochthonous grapevine cultivars from Northeast Turkey by Simple Sequence Repeats (SSR)
25 autochthonous grapevine cultivars from Northeast Anatolia in Turkey together with two well-known standard cultivars, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot were fi ngerprinted using six pairs of SSR primers to assess their genetic diversity and relatedness. All six SSR primers produced successful amplifi cations and revealed DNA polymorphisms that were subsequently used to assess genetic relatedness of the cultivars. A total of 52 alleles were detected with a mean value of 8.67 alleles per locus indicating allele richness. The average expected heterozygosity (He) and observed heterozygosity (Ho) were 0.759 and 0.809, respectively. Considering the number of alleles generated, the highest number was observed in VVS2 loci (14 alleles/locus), while the lowest in VrZAG83 loci (5 alleles/locus). The Unweighted Pair-Group Method with Arithmetic mean (UPGMA) dendrogram constructed based on the SSR data yielded two main clusters. First cluster included only cv. Kibris and the second cluster included rest of the cultivars including Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. The results showed that SSR markers have proved to be an effi cient tool for fi ngerprinting grapevine cultivars and conducting genetic diversity studies in grapevine
A Survey About Nothing: Monitoring a Million Supergiants for Failed Supernovae
Extragalactic transient searches have historically been limited to looking
for the appearance of new sources such as supernovae. It is now possible to
carry out a new kind of survey that will do the opposite, that is, search for
the disappearance of massive stars. This will entail the systematic observation
of galaxies within a distance of 10 Mpc in order to watch ~10^6 supergiants.
Reaching this critical number ensures that something will occur yearly, since
these massive stars must end their lives with a core collapse within ~10^6
years. Using deep imaging and image subtraction it is possible to determine the
fates of these stars whether they end with a bang (supernova) or a whimper
(fall out of sight). Such a survey would place completely new limits on the
total rate of all core collapses, which is critical for determining the
validity of supernova models. It would also determine the properties of
supernova progenitors, better characterize poorly understood optical
transients, such as eta Carina-like mass ejections, find and characterize large
numbers of Cepheids, luminous blue variables and eclipsing binaries, and allow
the discovery of any new phenomena that inhabit this relatively unexplored
parameter space.Comment: final version, 7 pages, 5 figures, ApJ in pres
Intra-lid multi-core vapor chamber architecture for heterogeneous electronic packages: technology concept to prototype evaluation
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Strength–dilatancy and critical state behaviours of binary mixtures of graded sands influenced by particle size ratio and fines content
Binary granular soil mixtures, as common heterogeneous soils, are ubiquitous in nature and man-made deposits. Fines content and particle size ratio are two important gradation parameters for a binary mixture, which have potential influences on mechanical behaviours. However, experimental studies on drained shear behaviour considering the whole range of fines content and different particle size ratios are scarce in the literature. For this purpose, a series of drained triaxial compression tests was performed on dense binary silica sand mixtures with four different particle size ratios to investigate systematically the effects of fines content and particle size ratio on the drained shear behaviours. Based on these tests, the strength-dilation behaviour and critical state behaviour were examined. It was observed that both fines content and particle size ratio have significant influence on the stress–strain response, the critical state void ratio, the critical state friction angle, the maximum dilation angle, the peak friction angle and the stress–dilatancy relation. The underlying mechanism for the effects of fines content and particle size ratio was discussed from the perspective of the kinematic movements at particle level
An Experimental Study of Reduced-Voltage Operation in Modern FPGAs for Neural Network Acceleration
We empirically evaluate an undervolting technique, i.e., underscaling the
circuit supply voltage below the nominal level, to improve the power-efficiency
of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) accelerators mapped to Field Programmable
Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Undervolting below a safe voltage level can lead to timing
faults due to excessive circuit latency increase. We evaluate the
reliability-power trade-off for such accelerators. Specifically, we
experimentally study the reduced-voltage operation of multiple components of
real FPGAs, characterize the corresponding reliability behavior of CNN
accelerators, propose techniques to minimize the drawbacks of reduced-voltage
operation, and combine undervolting with architectural CNN optimization
techniques, i.e., quantization and pruning. We investigate the effect of
environmental temperature on the reliability-power trade-off of such
accelerators. We perform experiments on three identical samples of modern
Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA platforms with five state-of-the-art image classification
CNN benchmarks. This approach allows us to study the effects of our
undervolting technique for both software and hardware variability. We achieve
more than 3X power-efficiency (GOPs/W) gain via undervolting. 2.6X of this gain
is the result of eliminating the voltage guardband region, i.e., the safe
voltage region below the nominal level that is set by FPGA vendor to ensure
correct functionality in worst-case environmental and circuit conditions. 43%
of the power-efficiency gain is due to further undervolting below the
guardband, which comes at the cost of accuracy loss in the CNN accelerator. We
evaluate an effective frequency underscaling technique that prevents this
accuracy loss, and find that it reduces the power-efficiency gain from 43% to
25%.Comment: To appear at the DSN 2020 conferenc
Quadratic multi-dimensional signaling games and affine equilibria
This paper studies the decentralized quadratic cheap talk and signaling game problems when an encoder and a decoder, viewed as two decision makers, have misaligned objective functions. The main contributions of this study are the extension of Crawford and Sobel's cheap talk formulation to multi-dimensional sources and to noisy channel setups. We consider both (simultaneous) Nash equilibria and (sequential) Stackelberg equilibria. We show that for arbitrary scalar sources, in the presence of misalignment, the quantized nature of all equilibrium policies holds for Nash equilibria in the sense that all Nash equilibria are equivalent to those achieved by quantized encoder policies. On the other hand, all Stackelberg equilibria policies are fully informative. For multi-dimensional setups, unlike the scalar case, Nash equilibrium policies may be of non-quantized nature, and even linear. In the noisy setup, a Gaussian source is to be transmitted over an additive Gaussian channel. The goals of the encoder and the decoder are misaligned by a bias term and encoder's cost also includes a penalty term on signal power. Conditions for the existence of affine Nash equilibria as well as general informative equilibria are presented. For the noisy setup, the only Stackelberg equilibrium is the linear equilibrium when the variables are scalar. Our findings provide further conditions on when affine policies may be optimal in decentralized multi-criteria control problems and lead to conditions for the presence of active information transmission in strategic environments. © 1963-2012 IEEE
Dynamic signaling games under Nash and Stackelberg equilibria
In this study, dynamic and repeated quadratic cheap talk and signaling game problems are investigated. These involve encoder and decoders with mismatched performance objectives, where the encoder has a bias term in the quadratic cost functional. We consider both Nash equilibria and Stackelberg equilibria as our solution concepts, under a perfect Bayesian formulation. These two lead to drastically different characteristics for the equilibria. For the cheap talk problem under Nash equilibria, we show that fully revealing equilibria cannot exist and the final state equilibria have to be quantized for a large class of source models; whereas, for the Stackelberg case, the equilibria must be fully revealing regardless of the source model. In the dynamic signaling game where the transmission of a Gaussian source over a Gaussian channel is considered, the equilibrium policies are always linear for scalar sources under Stackelberg equilibria, and affine policies constitute an invariant subspace under best response maps for Nash equilibria. © 2016 IEEE
Nash and Stackelberg equilibria for dynamic cheap talk and signaling games
Simultaneous (Nash) and sequential (Stackelberg) equilibria of two-player dynamic quadratic cheap talk and signaling game problems are investigated under a perfect Bayesian formulation. For the dynamic scalar and multi-dimensional cheap talk, the Nash equilibrium cannot be fully revealing whereas the Stackelberg equilibrium is always fully revealing. Further, the final state Nash equilibria have to be essentially quantized when the source is scalar and has a density, and non-revealing for the multi-dimensional case. In the dynamic signaling game where the transmission of a Gauss-Markov source over a memoryless Gaussian channel is considered, affine policies constitute an invariant subspace under best response maps for both scalar and multi-dimensional sources under Nash equilibria; however, the Stackelberg equilibrium policies are always linear for scalar sources but may be non-linear for multi-dimensional sources. Further, under the Stackelberg setup, the conditions under which the equilibrium is non-informative are derived for scalar sources. © 2017 American Automatic Control Council (AACC)
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