Beyond the Innovation: An Exploratory Study of Designing Web-based Self-services

AbstractCustomized web-based self-services play an important role in today's product/service innovation. Compared to traditional tangible services, helpful web-based self-services and off-line services may better facilitate creativity, accelerate value co-creation, and reduce the costs and risks of development and commercialization. Therefore, in order to offer a conceptual framework for a web-based self-service system that enhances the fuzzy-front end (FFE) of new product/service development, this study analyzed the needs and challenges found during the transition of the Dechnology (Design Thinking plus Technology Innovation) project at the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), the largest R&D organization in Taiwan. Through literature review, in-depth interviews, and participatory action research, we formalized five core system modules, including: 1) user behavior and lifestyle, 2) thematic trend analysis, 3) technology screening and translation, 4) idea visualization, and 5) O2O service connection, with corresponding design principles for supporting user creativity in a web-based self-services environment. Finally, this study proposes a conceptual framework integrated with service design to serve as an important reference for enterprises that undergo similar innovation projects in the future

An efficient surrogate model for emulation and physics extraction of large eddy simulations

In the quest for advanced propulsion and power-generation systems, high-fidelity simulations are too computationally expensive to survey the desired design space, and a new design methodology is needed that combines engineering physics, computer simulations and statistical modeling. In this paper, we propose a new surrogate model that provides efficient prediction and uncertainty quantification of turbulent flows in swirl injectors with varying geometries, devices commonly used in many engineering applications. The novelty of the proposed method lies in the incorporation of known physical properties of the fluid flow as {simplifying assumptions} for the statistical model. In view of the massive simulation data at hand, which is on the order of hundreds of gigabytes, these assumptions allow for accurate flow predictions in around an hour of computation time. To contrast, existing flow emulators which forgo such simplications may require more computation time for training and prediction than is needed for conducting the simulation itself. Moreover, by accounting for coupling mechanisms between flow variables, the proposed model can jointly reduce prediction uncertainty and extract useful flow physics, which can then be used to guide further investigations.Comment: Submitted to JASA A&C

Customer Behavior Survery for Cultural and Creative Park in Taiwan

Cultural and Creative Park is a recreational campus which usually consists of exhibition, gallery, show room, movie theater, and multi-function facilities to provide the cultural activities. Besides, in the Cultural and Creative Park, restaurants, coffee shops, bookstores, gift shops, and other business units are nearby. How to improve the customer experience in the Cultural and Creative Park is an important research question for the managerial division to promote culture industries. In this research, the questionnaires were developed and performed in one of creative park in Taipei, Taiwan to study customer behavior. This paper addresses the survey result and the insights revealed from the survey

Transcriptomic analyses of regenerating adult feathers in chicken

Transcriptome Expression Data. Table of mapped reads to Galgal4 transcripts for all 15 data sets. FPKM (Fragments per kilobase of exon per million fragments mapped): normalized transcript abundance values for each gene in the indicated tissues. (CSV 1314 kb

Anti-Neuroinflammatory Effects of the Calcium Channel Blocker Nicardipine on Microglial Cells: Implications for Neuroprotection

Background/Objective Nicardipine is a calcium channel blocker that has been widely used to control blood pressure in severe hypertension following events such as ischemic stroke, traumatic brain injury, and intracerebral hemorrhage. However, accumulating evidence suggests that inflammatory processes in the central nervous system that are mediated by microglial activation play important roles in neurodegeneration, and the effect of nicardipine on microglial activation remains unresolved. Methodology/Principal Findings In the present study, using murine BV-2 microglia, we demonstrated that nicardipine significantly inhibits microglia-related neuroinflammatory responses. Treatment with nicardipine inhibited microglial cell migration. Nicardipine also significantly inhibited LPS plus IFN-γ-induced release of nitric oxide (NO), and the expression of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) and cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2). Furthermore, nicardipine also inhibited microglial activation by peptidoglycan, the major component of the Gram-positive bacterium cell wall. Notably, nicardipine also showed significant anti-neuroinflammatory effects on microglial activation in mice in vivo. Conclusion/Significance The present study is the first to report a novel inhibitory role of nicardipine on neuroinflammation and provides a new candidate agent for the development of therapies for inflammation-related neurodegenerative diseases

Progress with the Prime Focus Spectrograph for the Subaru Telescope: a massively multiplexed optical and near-infrared fiber spectrograph

The Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) is an optical/near-infrared multi-fiber spectrograph with 2394 science fibers, which are distributed in 1.3 degree diameter field of view at Subaru 8.2-meter telescope. The simultaneous wide wavelength coverage from 0.38 um to 1.26 um, with the resolving power of 3000, strengthens its ability to target three main survey programs: cosmology, Galactic archaeology, and galaxy/AGN evolution. A medium resolution mode with resolving power of 5000 for 0.71 um to 0.89 um also will be available by simply exchanging dispersers. PFS takes the role for the spectroscopic part of the Subaru Measurement of Images and Redshifts project, while Hyper Suprime-Cam works on the imaging part. To transform the telescope plus WFC focal ratio, a 3-mm thick broad-band coated glass-molded microlens is glued to each fiber tip. A higher transmission fiber is selected for the longest part of cable system, while one with a better FRD performance is selected for the fiber-positioner and fiber-slit components, given the more frequent fiber movements and tightly curved structure. Each Fiber positioner consists of two stages of piezo-electric rotary motors. Its engineering model has been produced and tested. Fiber positioning will be performed iteratively by taking an image of artificially back-illuminated fibers with the Metrology camera located in the Cassegrain container. The camera is carefully designed so that fiber position measurements are unaffected by small amounts of high special-frequency inaccuracies in WFC lens surface shapes. Target light carried through the fiber system reaches one of four identical fast-Schmidt spectrograph modules, each with three arms. Prototype VPH gratings have been optically tested. CCD production is complete, with standard fully-depleted CCDs for red arms and more-challenging thinner fully-depleted CCDs with blue-optimized coating for blue arms.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, submitted to "Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V, Suzanne K. Ramsay, Ian S. McLean, Hideki Takami, Editors, Proc. SPIE 9147 (2014)