Market research: Outsourcing companies' indirect procurements to a third party (Company X Ltd.)

This thesis examines the possible market interest in Finland towards outsourcing indirect procurement to a market entry level company (Company X Ltd). The objective of this study is to present the case company background of the current market situation and interest for its business plan. The study’s primary objective is to provide the case company with statistical knowledge that will give a competitive advantage in the Finnish market and detailed information of customer expectations on the indirect procurement service. In the theoretical section, the concepts and theories of purchasing, purchase management and outsourcing are defined. This section also explains the theoretical topics, such as supply chain, networks and partnership. The research approach of this thesis can be classified as the quantitative approach, since this research required acquiring statistical data. Data collection methods are questionnaires. The questionnaires were designed on the basic of the relative theoretical fields. The empirical section describes the background information of the case company and lists the data analysis details. The crucial information has been analyzed from the questionnaires’ responses and the important findings have been presented. In the conclusion section of the thesis, the research conclusion and recommendations have been presented for the case company.Market research: Outsourcing companies’ indirect procurements to a third party (Company X Ltd.) Opinnäytetyössä tutkitaan mahdollista markkina kiinnostusta Suomessa sijaitsevaan epäsuorien hankintojen ulkoistusta tarjoavaa yritystä kohtaan. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on esitellä tutkitun yrityksen markkinatilannetta ja liiketoimintasuunnitelman merkitystä. Tutkimuksessa tavoitteena oli myös esittää tilastollista tietoa yrityksen luomiseksi Suomen markkinoilla sekä havainnollistaa yksityiskohtaisesti kuluttajien odotuksiin kohdistuvaa tietoa epäsuorassa ostotoiminnassa. Opinnäytetyön teoriaosuudessa määritellään ostotoiminnan käsitteet ja teoriat, sekä oston hallinto ja ulkoistaminen. Lisäksi teoriaosuudessa käsitellään ostoketjun, verkoston ja osakkuuden teoreettiset taustat. Tutkimuksessa käytettiin kvantitatiivista, määrällistä, tutkimusta, koska kvantitatiivinen tutkimus vaatii tilastollista tarkastelua. Tilastollisen tiedon kerääminen toteutettiin kyselykaavakkeella, tutkimuksen perusteoriatietoon liittyvien kysymysten avulla. Opinnäytetyön empiirinen osuus kuvaa tutkitun yrityksen taustatietoa sekä analysoi yksityiskohtaisesti tutkittua tietoa.Kyselykaavakkeen vastausten perusteella on havainnollistettu ja analysoitu tutkimuksen kannalta oleva tärkein tieto. Opinnäytetyön johtopäätöksissä esitellään lopuksi tutkimuksen yhteenveto ja suositukset tutkitulle yrityksell

Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation with Enhanced Decoder Input

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models, which remove the dependence on previous target tokens from the inputs of the decoder, achieve significantly inference speedup but at the cost of inferior accuracy compared to autoregressive translation (AT) models. Previous work shows that the quality of the inputs of the decoder is important and largely impacts the model accuracy. In this paper, we propose two methods to enhance the decoder inputs so as to improve NAT models. The first one directly leverages a phrase table generated by conventional SMT approaches to translate source tokens to target tokens, which are then fed into the decoder as inputs. The second one transforms source-side word embeddings to target-side word embeddings through sentence-level alignment and word-level adversary learning, and then feeds the transformed word embeddings into the decoder as inputs. Experimental results show our method largely outperforms the NAT baseline~\citep{gu2017non} by $5.11$ BLEU scores on WMT14 English-German task and $4.72$ BLEU scores on WMT16 English-Romanian task.Comment: AAAI 201

Investigation of the Effect of Biodiesel Blends on Fuel Injection Pumps based on Vibration and Pressure Measurements

Amongst alternative fuels for diesel-engine application, biodiesel is very attractive because it is biodegradable, an environmentally-friendly and sustainable source that can meet future energy demands. However, there are few published studies of the impact of biodiesel fuel and its blends on fuel injection pumps (FIPs). This study will investigate the influence of biodiesels derived from waste cooking oils with incremental blends of B10, B20, B30, B40 and B100. The FIP in this study is a rotary type attached to a four-cylinder, four-stroke direct injection, turbocharged diesel engine. Vibration and pressure measurements were made on the FIP. The results show the peak pressure close to the pump increases slightly the higher the proportion of biodiesel because of increased viscosity, density and bulk modulus of the fuel. Low frequency vibration increased as the proportion of biodiesel increased. These results demonstrate an increase in dynamic load on the pump components. However, high frequency vibration levels are lowest for the blends B10, B20 and B30, which may be helpful for improving the service life of the delivery

Multipartite entanglement purification with quantum nondemolition detectors

We present a scheme for multipartite entanglement purification of quantum systems in a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state with quantum nondemolition detectors (QNDs). This scheme does not require the controlled-not gates which cannot be implemented perfectly with linear optical elements at present, but QNDs based on cross-Kerr nonlinearities. It works with two steps, i.e., the bit-flipping error correction and the phase-flipping error correction. These two steps can be iterated perfectly with parity checks and simple single-photon measurements. This scheme does not require the parties to possess sophisticated single photon detectors. These features maybe make this scheme more efficient and feasible than others in practical applications.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Meteorological drought analysis in the Lower Mekong Basin using satellite-based long-term CHIRPS product

Lower Mekong Basin (LMB) experiences a recurrent drought phenomenon. However, few studies have focused on drought monitoring in this region due to lack of ground observations. The newly released Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation with Station data (CHIRPS) with a long-term record and high resolution has a great potential for drought monitoring. Based on the assessment of CHIRPS for capturing precipitation and monitoring drought, this study aims to evaluate the drought condition in LMB by using satellite-based CHIRPS from January 1981 to July 2016. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) at various time scales (1-12-month) is computed to identify and describe drought events. Results suggest that CHIRPS can properly capture the drought characteristics at various time scales with the best performance at three-month time scale. Based on high-resolution long-term CHIRPS, it is found that LMB experienced four severe droughts during the last three decades with the longest one in 1991-1994 for 38 months and the driest one in 2015-2016 with drought affected area up to 75.6%. Droughts tend to occur over the north and south part of LMB with higher frequency, and Mekong Delta seems to experience more long-term and extreme drought events. Severe droughts have significant impacts on vegetation condition