How Should Mydbots Manage Innovations in Consumer Robotics?

A Malaysia-based firm Mydbots entered the high-technology market with its digital innovations in consumer robotics space. The impending challenges the firm faced included making the technology ready for the market, developing consumers’ mindset to adopt the technology, and planning the vision and diffusion of future product innovation. By meeting these challenges, it planned to emerge as a leader in consumer robotics. The case expects students to critically analyze the firm’s background and the prevailing market conditions to propose a comprehensive approach that can help the firm convert its innovation vision to innovation diffusion in the high-technology space. The case study intends to initiate a meaningful discussion among students about how to manage robotic innovations in consumer markets by overcoming the associated technological and marketing challenges

Dependence of acoustic surface gravity on disc thickness for accreting astrophysical black holes

For axially symmetric accretion maintained in hydrostatic equilibrium along the vertical direction, we investigate how the characteristic features of the embedded acoustic geometry depends on the background Kerr metric, and how such dependence is governed by three different expressions of the thickness of the matter flow. We first obtain the location of the sonic points and stationary shock between the sonic points. We then linearly perturb the flow to obtain the corresponding metric elements of the acoustic space-time. We thus construct the causal structure to establish that the sonic points and the shocks are actually the analogue black hole type and white hole type horizons, respectively. We finally compute the value of the acoustic surface gravity as a function of the spin angular momentum of the rotating black hole for three different flow thicknesses considered in the present work. We find that for some flow models, the intrinsic acoustic geometry, although in principle may be extended up to the outer gravitational horizon of the astrophysical black hole, cannot be constructed beyond a certain truncation radius as imposed by the expressions of the thickness function of the corresponding flow.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figure

Can Touch Interaction Predict Product-Related Emotion? A Study on Mobile Augmented Reality

The advancement in immersive technologies provides online retailers the opportunity to integrate augmented reality (AR) experience for their customers. Using AR, the online product presentation is transformed from the pictorial representation to virtual interaction with the products. The virtual product interaction facilitates online retailers to detect product-related emotion through affective computing. For mobile AR, customers use touch gestures for virtual interaction. Using the theories related to immersive media and affective computing, we hypothesize that the touch movements and touch pressure in AR-based mobile applications are related to positive emotion during product interaction. Moreover, we describe a methodology to establish our hypotheses and to show that these variables can predict the product-related emotion. We expect our research findings to have both theoretical and practical implications. It will explain why touch behavior can predict product-related emotion, and it will also demonstrate online retailers how to implement emotion analytics in AR shopping applications

Carter-Penrose diagrams for emergent spacetime in axisymmetrically accreting black hole systems

For general relativistic, inviscid, axisymmetric flow around Kerr black hole one may choose different flow thickness. The stationary flow equations can be solved using methods of dynamical system to get transonic accretion flows , i.e, flow infalling in the blackhole that turns supersonic from subsonic with decreasing radial distance, or vice versa. This transonic flows are obtained by choosing the particular flow passing through critical points of phase portrait. For certain flow thickness like the one maintaining conical shape, the sonic point coincide with the critical point. But there are certain flows maintaining hydrostatic equilibrium, such as the one described by Novikov-Thorne, where the sonic point is not same as the critical point. We perturb the flow for both kind of flow and study the behaviour of linear perturbation which behaves like massless scalar field in some curved spacetime, known as, analogue space time. We draw the compactified causal structure, i.e, Penrose Carter diagram for both kind of analogue metric and prove that for both cases critical points are the acoustic horizons, whereas in the case where sonic points do not coincide with critical points, the sonic points are not the acoustic horizon, as one may expect from the definition of sound speed.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1811.0497

Multi-band Extension of the Wideband Timing Technique

The wideband timing technique enables the high-precision simultaneous estimation of Times of Arrival (ToAs) and Dispersion Measures (DMs) while effectively modeling frequency-dependent profile evolution. We present two novel independent methods that extend the standard wideband technique to handle simultaneous multi-band pulsar data incorporating profile evolution over a larger frequency span to estimate DMs and ToAs with enhanced precision. We implement the wideband likelihood using the libstempo python interface to perform wideband timing in the tempo2 framework. We present the application of these techniques to the dataset of fourteen millisecond pulsars observed simultaneously in Band 3 (300 - 500 MHz) and Band 5 (1260 - 1460 MHz) of the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) as a part of the Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) campaign. We achieve increased ToA and DM precision and sub-microsecond root mean square post-fit timing residuals by combining simultaneous multi-band pulsar observations done in non-contiguous bands for the first time using our novel techniques.Comment: Submitted to MNRA

Noise analysis of the Indian Pulsar Timing Array data release I

The Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) collaboration has recently made its first official data release (DR1) for a sample of 14 pulsars using 3.5 years of uGMRT observations. We present the results of single-pulsar noise analysis for each of these 14 pulsars using the InPTA DR1. For this purpose, we consider white noise, achromatic red noise, dispersion measure (DM) variations, and scattering variations in our analysis. We apply Bayesian model selection to obtain the preferred noise models among these for each pulsar. For PSR J1600$-$3053, we find no evidence of DM and scattering variations, while for PSR J1909$-$3744, we find no significant scattering variations. Properties vary dramatically among pulsars. For example, we find a strong chromatic noise with chromatic index $\sim$ 2.9 for PSR J1939+2134, indicating the possibility of a scattering index that doesn't agree with that expected for a Kolmogorov scattering medium consistent with similar results for millisecond pulsars in past studies. Despite the relatively short time baseline, the noise models broadly agree with the other PTAs and provide, at the same time, well-constrained DM and scattering variations.Comment: Accepted for publication in PRD, 30 pages, 17 figures, 4 table