Panel Analysis of Relationship between Supply Chain Strategy in Competitive Area and Economic Growth in the European Union

Theoretically, the supply chain competitiveness is conclusively believed to be positively related with economic growth. While empirically, this relationship does not always hold in many countries for several reasons. In the empirical literature, the link between economic growth and competitiveness has been highly debated. Thus, the main purpose of current article is to examine the link between economic growth and competitiveness in European Union (EU-28 countries) over period from 2007 to 2017. Using Panel Models (Fixed and random effects models). In conclusion, the findings suggest that competitiveness is robustly and positively associated with real GDP per capita, if we make a policy to increase the GDP per capita, it included rise in competitiveness score for the country

Learning With Imbalanced Data in Smart Manufacturing: A Comparative Analysis

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is revolutionising the world of manufacturing into what is known as Smart Manufacturing or Industry 4.0. The main pillar in smart manufacturing looks at harnessing IoT data and leveraging machine learning (ML) to automate the prediction of faults, thus cutting maintenance time and cost and improving the product quality. However, faults in real industries are overwhelmingly outweighed by instances of good performance (faultless samples); this bias is reflected in the data captured by IoT devices. Imbalanced data limits the success of ML in predicting faults, thus presents a significant hindrance in the progress of smart manufacturing. Although various techniques have been proposed to tackle this challenge in general, this work is the first to present a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of these remedies in the context of manufacturing. We present a comprehensive comparative analysis in which we apply our proposed framework to benchmark the performance of different combinations of algorithm components using a real-world manufacturing dataset. We draw key insights into the effectiveness of each component and inter-relatedness between the dataset, the application context, and the design of the ML algorithm

Bayesian Autoencoders for Drift Detection in Industrial Environments

Autoencoders are unsupervised models which have been used for detecting anomalies in multi-sensor environments. A typical use includes training a predictive model with data from sensors operating under normal conditions and using the model to detect anomalies. Anomalies can come either from real changes in the environment (real drift) or from faulty sensory devices (virtual drift); however, the use of Autoencoders to distinguish between different anomalies has not yet been considered. To this end, we first propose the development of Bayesian Autoencoders to quantify epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties. We then test the Bayesian Autoencoder using a real-world industrial dataset for hydraulic condition monitoring. The system is injected with noise and drifts, and we have found the epistemic uncertainty to be less sensitive to sensor perturbations as compared to the reconstruction loss. By observing the reconstructed signals with the uncertainties, we gain interpretable insights, and these uncertainties offer a potential avenue for distinguishing real and virtual drifts

Large-Scale Indexing, Discovery, and Ranking for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Network-enabled sensing and actuation devices are key enablers to connect real-world objects to the cyber world. The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of the network-enabled devices and communication technologies that allow connectivity and integration of physical objects (Things) into the digital world (Internet). Enormous amounts of dynamic IoT data are collected from Internet-connected devices. IoT data are usually multi-variant streams that are heterogeneous, sporadic, multi-modal, and spatio-temporal. IoT data can be disseminated with different granularities and have diverse structures, types, and qualities. Dealing with the data deluge from heterogeneous IoT resources and services imposes new challenges on indexing, discovery, and ranking mechanisms that will allow building applications that require on-line access and retrieval of ad-hoc IoT data. However, the existing IoT data indexing and discovery approaches are complex or centralised, which hinders their scalability. The primary objective of this article is to provide a holistic overview of the state-of-the-art on indexing, discovery, and ranking of IoT data. The article aims to pave the way for researchers to design, develop, implement, and evaluate techniques and approaches for on-line large-scale distributed IoT applications and services

An Online Adaptive Algorithm for Change Detection in Streaming Sensory Data

There has been a keen interest in detecting abrupt sequential changes in streaming data obtained from sensors in wireless sensor networks for Internet of Things applications, such as fire/fault detection, activity recognition, and environmental monitoring. Such applications require (near) online detection of instantaneous changes. This paper proposes an online, adaptive filtering-based change detection (OFCD) algorithm. Our method is based on a convex combination of two decoupled least mean square windowed filters with differing sizes. Both filters are applied independently on data streams obtained from sensor nodes such that their convex combination parameter is employed as an indicator of abrupt changes in mean values. An extension of our method (OFCD) based on a cooperative scheme between multiple sensors (COFCD) is also presented. It provides an enhancement of both convergence and steady-state accuracy of the convex weight parameter. Our conducted experiments show that our approach can be applied in distributed networks in an online fashion. It also provides better performance and less complexity compared with the state-of-the-art on both of single and multiple sensors

An adaptive method for data reduction in the Internet of Things

Enormous amounts of dynamic observation and measurement data are collected from sensors in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as environmental monitoring. However, continuous transmission of the sensed data requires high energy consumption. Data transmission between sensor nodes and cluster heads (sink nodes) consumes much higher energy than data sensing in WSNs. One way of reducing such energy consumption is to minimise the number of data transmissions. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Method for Data Reduction (AM-DR). Our method is based on a convex combination of two decoupled Least-Mean-Square (LMS) windowed filters with differing sizes for estimating the next measured values both at the source and the sink node such that sensor nodes have to transmit only their immediate sensed values that deviate significantly (with a pre-defined threshold) from the predicted values. The conducted experiments on a real-world data show that our approach has been able to achieve up to 95% communication reduction while retaining a high accuracy (i.e. predicted values have a deviation of ±0.5 from real data values)

Distributed spatial indexing for the Internet of Things data management

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a new enabler for collecting real-world observation and measurement data from the physical world. The IoT allows objects with sensing and network capabilities (i.e. Things and devices) to communicate with one another and with other resources (e.g. services) on the digital world. The heterogeneity, dynamicity and ad-hoc nature of underlying data, and services published by most of IoT resources make accessing and processing the data and services a challenging task. The IoT demands distributed, scalable, and efficient indexing solutions for large-scale distributed IoT networks. We describe a novel distributed indexing approach for IoT resources and their published data. The index structure is constructed by encoding the locations of IoT resources into geohashes and then building a quadtree on the minimum bounding box of the geohash representations. This allows to aggregate resources with similar geohashes and reduce the size of the index. We have evaluated our proposed solution on a large-scale dataset and our results show that the proposed approach can efficiently index and enable discovery of the IoT resources with 65% better response time than a centralised approach and with a high success rate (around 90% in the first few attempts)

Theory of photoionization-induced blueshift of ultrashort solitons in gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fibers

We show theoretically that the photoionization process in a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber filled with a Raman-inactive noble gas leads to a constant acceleration of solitons in the time domain with a continuous shift to higher frequencies, limited only by ionization loss. This phenomenon is opposite to the well-known Raman self-frequency redshift of solitons in solid-core glass fibers. We also predict the existence of unconventional long-range nonlocal soliton interactions leading to spectral and temporal soliton clustering. Furthermore, if the core is filled with a Raman-active molecular gas, spectral transformations between redshifted, blueshifted, and stabilized solitons can take place in the same fiber

Advancements in tetronic acid chemistry. Part 1: Synthesis and reactions

AbstractThe preparation and the properties of the elusive tetronic acid are reviewed, including its synthesis, chemical reactivity and reactions

Ethnicity, consanguinity, and genetic architecture of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy

AIMS: Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is characterized by phenotypic heterogeneity that is partly explained by the diversity of genetic variants contributing to disease. Accurate interpretation of these variants constitutes a major challenge for diagnosis and implementing precision medicine, especially in understudied populations. The aim is to define the genetic architecture of HCM in North African cohorts with high consanguinity using ancestry-matched cases and controls. METHODS AND RESULTS: Prospective Egyptian patients (n = 514) and controls (n = 400) underwent clinical phenotyping and genetic testing. Rare variants in 13 validated HCM genes were classified according to standard clinical guidelines and compared with a prospective HCM cohort of majority European ancestry (n = 684). A higher prevalence of homozygous variants was observed in Egyptian patients (4.1% vs. 0.1%, P = 2 × 10-7), with variants in the minor HCM genes MYL2, MYL3, and CSRP3 more likely to present in homozygosity than the major genes, suggesting these variants are less penetrant in heterozygosity. Biallelic variants in the recessive HCM gene TRIM63 were detected in 2.1% of patients (five-fold greater than European patients), highlighting the importance of recessive inheritance in consanguineous populations. Finally, rare variants in Egyptian HCM patients were less likely to be classified as (likely) pathogenic compared with Europeans (40.8% vs. 61.6%, P = 1.6 × 10-5) due to the underrepresentation of Middle Eastern populations in current reference resources. This proportion increased to 53.3% after incorporating methods that leverage new ancestry-matched controls presented here. CONCLUSION: Studying consanguineous populations reveals novel insights with relevance to genetic testing and our understanding of the genetic architecture of HCM