Challenging the exploration and exploitation dichotomy: towards theory building in innovation management

The conceptual dichotomy between exploration and exploitation, importantly highlighted in March’s (1991) seminal paper, has been widely employed to study innovation management processes and resource allocation decisions in organisations. Despite its extensive usage, the validity of this dichotomy has not been subjected to adequate theoretical scrutiny and empirical support. Therefore, this thesis provides a critical examination of the origins and consequences of exploration and exploitation, and questions this dichotomy especially as pertaining to its application in innovation management. It challenges the taken-for-granted assumption that these two concepts refer to distinct and observable decision-making processes and concludes that this is an assumption largely unwarranted. A systematic literature review about the use of this dichotomy was conducted in the context of innovation management and the findings confirmed that although studies have proposed related notions, such as ambidexterity, as a way to overcome the supposed trade-off between exploration and exploitation. It is confirmed that there has been no attempt hitherto to question the validity of this dichotomy. Also, little empirical evidence was found to suggest that the understanding of managing innovation can be enhanced through a reliance on this dichotomy. Thus, it is argued that the employment of this dichotomy in practices for managing innovation has not been justified and should be investigated directly through empirical evidence. To investigate exploration and exploitation both as performance criteria and internal processes, a mixed-method design that utilises data envelopment analysis (DEA) as quantitative method, and a focus group supplemented by interviews as the qualitative method was relied on. Findings from DEA indicated that exploration and exploitation can be used as criteria for performance evaluation in innovation. However, findings from the qualitative part of the study suggested that in practices for innovation management, exploration and exploitation are not viewed as separated internal processes; hence, this distinction is not featured in decision-making during innovation processes. This means that the classification based on exploration and exploitation is not used for appraisal of activities or projects in managing innovation. It is therefore concluded that the dichotomy of exploration and exploitation is not valid in practices for innovation management and thus its application in theorising innovation should be reconsidered; thus, studies of innovation management should not unquestioningly rely on this dichotomy, because it does not reflect organisational reality. Consequently, this study contributed to innovation management literature by pointing to alternative possible directions, such as ‘problem-solving’, in theorising the processes of innovation management for future studies

Reconsidering Diasporic Literature: Homeland and Otherness in The Lost Daughter of Happiness

This thesis examines the transformation of “homeland” and “otherness” as well as the relationship between each other in The Lost Daughter of Happiness （扶桑 Fusang). I begin by exploring how the migration of Chinese to the United States is depicted as an endless trajectory in the story through a historical engagement and a dialogue between two generations. From there, I plan to point out that the story complicates the meaning of diaspora as it can not only represent a spatial dislocation, but also a temporal dislocation. Thus, I argue that it destabilizes the conventional ideology which refers “homeland” to a singular location. Contrary to “settle land”, the earlier conceptualization of “homeland” is translated by some scholars into a felicitous space of living for migrants. Reading The Lost Daughter of Happiness, we can find new dimensions and transformations of home. The old conceptualization of “homeland” is reversed not as a singular location, but rather as a process of (be-)coming a felicitous space of living for diasporic subjects: it is not a fixed location anymore. Next, I explore how the out-of-border movement breeds a process of foreignization According to Kristeva, diasporans who bear foreignness must learn how to “live with the others, to live as others.”[1] I will analyze how Yan Geling invokes the portrayal of a Chinese prostitute as representative of “other” in order to deliver the philosophy of survival of diasporic Chinese females. I argue that it is the marginality of prostitute in a society-as an outsider from the mainstream culture, that builds up Fusang’s transgressive ability to survive. Being a cultural outsider, or “live as others”, according to Kristeva, is “a foreigner’s shield” for one’s cultural identity. As an outsider, Fusang is able to cross over any given borders, simultaneously being inside and outside of the culture. Thus, the story denies any inherited modes of diasporic Chinese prostitutes for the articulation of their identities, which challenges the pure culturalism and nationalism. Last, the presence of outsider in this story becomes a tool for Yan Geling to deliberately illustrate the cultural difference through her protagonists. I argue that Yan Geling has a straightforward recognition of “otherness” and an explicit awareness of “foreignness” in this story, so she uses some Orientalist gestures to demonstrate the cultural difference. I examine an example about the technology of human disposal mentioned in the plot and analyze how it is used to highlight the cultural difference of diasporic subjects. My goal is to seek a better understanding of the construction of home identity in The Lost Daughter of Happiness by examining the recognition and representation of culture particularities and difference within the story. Also, I attempt to provide a new interpretation of Fusang by analyzing her identity not only as a prostitute but also as a diasporic Chinese

E3CM: Epipolar-Constrained Cascade Correspondence Matching

Accurate and robust correspondence matching is of utmost importance for various 3D computer vision tasks. However, traditional explicit programming-based methods often struggle to handle challenging scenarios, and deep learning-based methods require large well-labeled datasets for network training. In this article, we introduce Epipolar-Constrained Cascade Correspondence (E3CM), a novel approach that addresses these limitations. Unlike traditional methods, E3CM leverages pre-trained convolutional neural networks to match correspondence, without requiring annotated data for any network training or fine-tuning. Our method utilizes epipolar constraints to guide the matching process and incorporates a cascade structure for progressive refinement of matches. We extensively evaluate the performance of E3CM through comprehensive experiments and demonstrate its superiority over existing methods. To promote further research and facilitate reproducibility, we make our source code publicly available at https://mias.group/E3CM.Comment: accepted to Neurocomputin

TransPose: 6D Object Pose Estimation with Geometry-Aware Transformer

Estimating the 6D object pose is an essential task in many applications. Due to the lack of depth information, existing RGB-based methods are sensitive to occlusion and illumination changes. How to extract and utilize the geometry features in depth information is crucial to achieve accurate predictions. To this end, we propose TransPose, a novel 6D pose framework that exploits Transformer Encoder with geometry-aware module to develop better learning of point cloud feature representations. Specifically, we first uniformly sample point cloud and extract local geometry features with the designed local feature extractor base on graph convolution network. To improve robustness to occlusion, we adopt Transformer to perform the exchange of global information, making each local feature contains global information. Finally, we introduce geometry-aware module in Transformer Encoder, which to form an effective constrain for point cloud feature learning and makes the global information exchange more tightly coupled with point cloud tasks. Extensive experiments indicate the effectiveness of TransPose, our pose estimation pipeline achieves competitive results on three benchmark datasets.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, IEEE Journa

Myocardial Stunning-Induced Left Ventricular Dyssynchrony On Gated Single-Photon Emission Computed Tomography Myocardial Perfusion Imaging

Objectives Myocardial stunning provides additional nonperfusion markers of coronary artery disease (CAD), especially for severe multivessel CAD. The purpose of this study is to assess the influence of myocardial stunning to the changes of left ventricular mechanical dyssynchrony (LVMD) parameters between stress and rest gated single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI). Patients and methods A total of 113 consecutive patients (88 males and 25 females) who had undergone both stress and rest 99mTc-sestamibi gated SPECT MPI were retrospectively enrolled. Suspected or known patients with CAD were included if they had exercise stress MPI and moderate to severe myocardial ischemia. Segmental scores were summed for the three main coronary arteries according to standard myocardial perfusion territories, and then regional perfusion, wall motion, and wall thickening scores were measured. Myocardial stunning was defined as both ischemia and wall dysfunction within the same coronary artery territory. Patients were divided into the stunning group (n=58) and nonstunning group (n=55). Results There was no significant difference of LVMD parameters between stress and rest in the nonstunning group. In the stunning group, phase SD and phase histogram bandwidth of contraction were significantly larger during stress than during rest (15.05±10.70 vs. 13.23±9.01 and 46.07±34.29 vs. 41.02±32.16, PP\u3c0.05). Conclusion Both systolic and diastolic LVMD parameters deteriorate with myocardial stunning. This kind of change may have incremental values to diagnose CAD

MicroRNA-155 Regulates MAIT1 and MAIT17 Cell Differentiation

Mucosal-associated invariant T (MAIT) cells are innate-like T cells that develop in the thymus through three maturation stages to acquire effector function and differentiate into MAIT1 (T-bet(+)) and MAIT17 (RORγt(+)) subsets. Upon activation, MAIT cells release IFN-γ and IL-17, which modulate a broad spectrum of diseases. Recent studies indicate defective MAIT cell development in microRNA deficient mice, however, few individual miRNAs have been identified to regulate MAIT cells. MicroRNA-155 (miR-155) is a key regulator of numerous cellular processes that affect some immune cell development, but its role in MAIT cell development remains unclear. To address whether miR-155 is required for MAIT cell development, we performed gain-of-function and loss-of-function studies. We first generated a CD4Cre.miR-155 knock-in mouse model, in which miR-155 is over-expressed in the T cell lineage. We found that overexpression of miR-155 significantly reduced numbers and frequencies of MAIT cells in all immune organs and lungs and blocked thymic MAIT cell maturation through downregulating PLZF expression. Strikingly, upregulated miR-155 promoted MAIT1 differentiation and blocked MAIT17 differentiation, and timely inducible expression of miR-155 functionally inhibited peripheral MAIT cells secreting IL-17. miR-155 overexpression also increased CD4(-)CD8(+) subset and decreased CD4(-)CD8(-) subset of MAIT cells. We further analyzed MAIT cells in conventional miR-155 knockout mice and found that lack of miR-155 also promoted MAIT1 differentiation and blocked MAIT17 differentiation but without alteration of their overall frequency, maturation and function. Overall, our results indicate that adequate miR-155 expression is required for normal MAIT1 and MAIT17 cell development and function

Light Field Salient Object Detection: A Review and Benchmark

Salient object detection (SOD) is a long-standing research topic in computer vision and has drawn an increasing amount of research interest in the past decade. This paper provides the first comprehensive review and benchmark for light field SOD, which has long been lacking in the saliency community. Firstly, we introduce preliminary knowledge on light fields, including theory and data forms, and then review existing studies on light field SOD, covering ten traditional models, seven deep learning-based models, one comparative study, and one brief review. Existing datasets for light field SOD are also summarized with detailed information and statistical analyses. Secondly, we benchmark nine representative light field SOD models together with several cutting-edge RGB-D SOD models on four widely used light field datasets, from which insightful discussions and analyses, including a comparison between light field SOD and RGB-D SOD models, are achieved. Besides, due to the inconsistency of datasets in their current forms, we further generate complete data and supplement focal stacks, depth maps and multi-view images for the inconsistent datasets, making them consistent and unified. Our supplemental data makes a universal benchmark possible. Lastly, because light field SOD is quite a special problem attributed to its diverse data representations and high dependency on acquisition hardware, making it differ greatly from other saliency detection tasks, we provide nine hints into the challenges and future directions, and outline several open issues. We hope our review and benchmarking could help advance research in this field. All the materials including collected models, datasets, benchmarking results, and supplemented light field datasets will be publicly available on our project site https://github.com/kerenfu/LFSOD-Survey