Centric Model Research Articles

MRNA-centric semantic modeling for finding molecular signature of trace chemical in human blood

The vast quantities of information on toxicogenomics such as genome sequence, genotype, gene expression, phenotype, disease information, etc. are reflected in scientific literature. However, these various and heterogeneous data has to be reconstructed by proper data model to enhance our understanding. This study suggests a semantic modeling to organize heterogeneous data types and introduces techniques and concepts such as ontologies, semantic objects, typed relationships, contexts, graphs, and information layers. These concepts were used to represent complex biochemical networks relationship. The semantic modeling tool is used as an example to demonstrate how a domain such as risk assessment is represented and how this representation is utilized for research. In this work, we show focusing on mRNA centric semantic model as a representative. From experimental data, text-mining results and public databases we generate mRNA-centric semantic modeling and demonstrate its use by mining specific molecular networks together. Application of semantic modeling: 1. Common DEGs which are differentially expressed mRNA by VOCs are identified. 2. Diseases and biological processes associated with common DEGs are identified. 3. Finally subjects associated with common disease, biological process and DEGs are identified.

Growing Cloud Computing Efficiency

Cloud computing is basically altering the expectation for how and when computing, storage and networking assets should be allocated, managed and devoted. End-users are progressively more sensitive in response time of services they ingest. Service Developers wish for the Service Providers to make sure or give the ability for dynamically assigning and managing resources in respond to alter the demand patterns in real-time. Ultimately, Service Providers are under anxiety to build their infrastructure to facilitate real-time end-to-end visibility and energetic resource management with well grained control to decrease total cost of tenure for improving quickness. What is required to rethink of the underlying operating system and management infrastructure to put up the on-going renovation of data centre from the traditional server-centric architecture model to a cloud or network centric model? This paper projects and describes a indication model for a network centric data centre infrastructure management heap that make use of it and validates key ideas that have enabled dynamism, the quality of being scalable, reliability and security in the telecommunication industry to the computing engineering. Finally, the paper will explain a proof of concept classification that was implemented to show how dynamic resource management can be enforced to enable real-time service guarantee for network centric data centre architecture.

An Anonymous Secure Payment Protocol in a Payment Gateway Centric Model

In the last few years, a significant number of mobile payment systems have been proposed. Most of them have been based on a scenario where all the entities are directly connected to each other (formally called Full connectivity scenario). Although these scenarios offer advantages to protocol designers in terms of design simplicity and the development of payment protocols without losing security capabilities, the full connectivity scenario does not consider those situations where the client cannot directly communicate with the merchant. We present the design of an anonymous secure Payment protocol based on the Payment Gateway Centric scenario for those scenarios in mobile environments where the Client cannot communicate directly with the Merchant to process the Payment Request. Our proposed protocol uses symmetric-key operations which require low computational power and can be processed faster than asymmetric ones.

Organized Retail in the Rural Markets in India

Retail is a buzz word in today’s changing business environment. Different industrial sectors are in the phase of transition from conventional business models to innovative, market driven and consumer centric models. In India retail is not a new word, however the emerging formats of retailing are changing the entire scenario and posing tough challenges in front of Indian retailers. They are now designing customized retail products and services and targeting the untapped segment of the market. Presently, nearly 60% of the population resides in rural India and their retail requirements are partially met by the unorganized retail stores. This study is an attempt to explore the potential of rural retail market of India, accessing their needs for products and brands. The study also aims at developing a business model for the rural retail market in India.

“Allorestriction” should be distinguished from “alloreactivity”

Whether or not allorestriction should be distinguished from alloreactivity depends on one's model of the TCR–ligand interaction. If the ligand is viewed as a determinant formed by a meld between peptide and the MHC-encoded restricting element, then the TCR, like the BCR, has a single combining site specific for the composite epitope (the Centric Model). If, however, one views the recognition of peptide and the MHC-encoded restricting element as independent, then interactions at two sites of the TCR must be integrated to signal the T cell (the Tritope Model). As TCR recognition of the MHC-encoded restricting element is, by definition, restricted (allele-specific), then under the Centric Model, all TCR signaling interactions with the composite epitope are due to allorestriction, which is peptide-specific. In contrast, under the Tritope Model, there are two classes of signaling interaction, allorestriction and alloreactivity. Alloreactivity is peptide-unspecific and is triggered by recognition of the allo-MHC-encoded restricting element allele. Alloreactivity is incompatible with the Centric Model, under which one would predict that it does not exist. Selected data are analyzed to illustrate the importance of this distinction.

Leadership Development and Succession Planning at ICICI Bank

On 19 December 2008, ICICI bank named joint managing director Chanda Kochhar as its new CEO from May 2009 to lead India's second-largest lender at a time of declining market share, soaring bad debts and a tough global environment. She would be the successor of the 61-year-old visionary banker K. V. Kamath, MD and CEO of ICICI Bank who was to retire on 30 April 2009 after completing his successful tenure of 11 years. ICICI bank with a network of 1,456 branches and 4,721 ATMs in India and presence in 18 countries, is India's second-largest bank with total assets of Rs. 3,793.01 billion (US$75 billion) and profit after tax of Rs. 37.58 billion for the year ending March 31, 2009. It offers a wide range of banking products and financial services to corporate and retail customers. The need for succession planning arose at ICICI as the term of one top level executive ended, one other retired and two left the company. This case has been developed to provide understanding on how leaders are identified, nurtured and developed at ICICI bank, the strengths and weaknesses of CEO centric model of leadership development being followed by Kamath and the new institutionalized process of leadership development. It also provides the scope for discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of hiring an insider or outsider for the position of a CEO and the role of outgoing CEO in the development and selection of his/her successor.

Event Centric Modeling Approach in Colocation Pattern Analysis From Spatial Data

Spatial co-location patterns are the subsets of Boolean spatial features whose instances are often located in close geographic proximity. Co-location rules can be identified by spatial statistics or data mining approaches. In data mining method, Association rule-based approaches can be used which are further divided into transaction-based approaches and distance-based approaches. Transaction-based approaches focus on defining transactions over space so that an Apriori algorithm can be used. The natural notion of transactions is absent in spatial data sets which are embedded in continuous geographic space. A new distance -based approach is developed to mine co-location patterns from spatial data by using the concept of proximity neighborhood. A new interest measure, a participation index, is used for spatial co-location patterns as it possesses an anti-monotone property. An algorithm to discover co-location patterns are designed which generates candidate locations and their table instances. Finally the co-location rules are generated to identify the patterns.

A user centric service-oriented modeling approach

With rapid development of service-oriented architecture and cloud computing, web services have been widely employed on the Internet. Quality of Service (QoS) is a very important criterion for service consumers to measure and select services. The selection of web services with respect to non-functional QoS criteria can be considered as a Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem when multiple consumers need to share a number of services. This paper describes a new user centric service-oriented modeling approach which is featured by integrating fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and Service Component Architecture (SCA) to facilitate web service selection and composition and to effectively satisfy a group of service consumers' subjective requirements and preferences in the dynamic environment. The main contribution of this method is able to translate a group of users' fuzzy requirements to services as well as model different levels of hardware and software as services to meet the requirements. We also design a simulated environment that includes 8*8 LED matrix on a circuit board that corresponds to an office with different appliances to demonstrate the dynamic service selection and binding. The simulation is used to assess the computational efficiency of the fuzzy TOPSIS method and the effectiveness of the proposed system.

Current-density centric logical effort delay model for high-speed current-mode logic circuits

A simple yet accurate delay model based on the method of logical effort is presented for the analysis of high-speed current-mode logic (CML) circuits. The model describes the logical effort of a CML gate in terms of its operating current density normalised to the characteristic current density that yields peak transistor cutoff frequency (fT). Since the latter remains largely invariant over technology nodes as a result of constant-field scaling, the proposed logical effort model quantifies the effect of gate sizing, biasing and loading to simplify delay analysis for CML gates.

Consumers' Controversies about Consumption

This article introduces a preliminary model that conceptualizes the drivers, expressions, and consequences of consumers’ controversies about the limits of legitimate consumption within a social context. Drawing on qualitative data on the North American conflict over the cultural legitimacy of the Hummer brand of vehicles, the study documents that - contrary to the prevailing consumer-producer centric model - market-mediated social conflicts also emerge as immediate, interpersonal social practices through which consumers contest each others’ consumption choices, ideologies, and behaviors. The study reveals that consumer controversies often begin with violations of social expectations, manifest in vigilant justice, insult, discredit, ridicule, and instruction practices, and serve consumers to preserve, promote, and defend the consumption-related meanings, practices, objects, and identities that they consider sacrosanct for themselves and their social peers. The study suggests that consumer controversies affect consumer culture, identity projects, and marketing practices in important ways previously unrecognized by theories of consumer emancipation and resistance.

A unified design space simulation environment for network-on-chip: fuse-N

Current uni-processor centric modelling methodology does not address the new design challenges introduced by MPSoCs, thus, calling for efficient simulation frameworks capable of capturing the interplay between the application, the architecture, and the network. Addressing these new challenges requires a framework that assists the designer at different abstraction levels of system design. This paper concentrates on developing a framework for unified simulation environment for NoCs (fuse-N), which simplifies the design space exploration for NoCs by offering a comprehensive simulation support. The framework synthesises the network infrastructure and the communication model and optimises application mapping for design constraints. The paper also proposes an efficient traffic aware scheduling algorithm that optimises the mapping problem by dynamically determining the latency by considering the communication and execution costs. The framework follows a top-down paradigm, where each design space component is implemented as modular components and all design constraints are captured and evaluated coherently. The proposed framework is a hardware-software co-design implementation using SystemC 2.1 and C++. Simulation results show the various design space explorations that can be performed by our framework.

The impact of electronic medical record systems on outpatient workflows: A longitudinal evaluation of its workflow effects

Context The promise of the electronic medical record (EMR) 1 1 The electronic medical record (EMR) is defined as a type of clinical information system, which is dedicated to collecting, storing, manipulating, and making available clinical information important to the delivery of patient care. The central focus of such systems is clinical data and not financial or billing information. Such systems may be limited in their scope to a single area of clinical information (e.g., laboratory data), or they may be comprehensive and cover virtually every facet of clinical information pertinent to patient care (e.g., computer-based patient record systems). An ideal EMR's usually encompasses (i) a longitudinal collection of electronic health information for and about person; (ii) electronic access to person- and population-level information by authorized users. lies in its ability to reduce the costs of health care delivery and improve the overall quality of care – a promise that is realized through major changes in workflows within the health care organization. Yet little systematic information exists about the workflow effects of EMRs. Moreover, some of the research to-date points to reduced satisfaction among physicians after implementation of the EMR and increased time, i.e., negative workflow effects. A better understanding of the impact of the EMR on workflows is, hence, vital to understanding what the technology really does offer that is new and unique. Objective (i) To empirically develop a physician centric conceptual model of the workflow effects of EMRs; (ii) To use the model to understand the antecedents to the physicians’ workflow expectation from the new EMR; (iii) To track physicians’ satisfaction overtime, 3 months and 20 months after implementation of the EMR; (iv) To explore the impact of technology learning curves on physicians’ reported satisfaction levels. Design The current research uses the mixed-method technique of concept mapping to empirically develop the conceptual model of an EMR's workflow effects. The model is then used within a controlled study to track physician expectations from a new EMR system as well as their assessments of the EMR's performance 3 months and 20 months after implementation. Setting The research tracks the actual implementation of a new EMR within the outpatient clinics of a large northeastern research hospital. Participants The pre-implementation survey netted 20 physician responses; post-implementation Time 1 survey netted 22 responses, and Time 2 survey netted 26 physician responses. Intervention The implementation of the actual EMR served as the intervention. Since the study was conducted within the same setting and tracked a homogenous group of respondents, the overall study design ensured against extraneous influences on the results. Main outcome measures Outcome measures were derived empirically from the conceptual model. They included 85 items that measured physician perceptions of the EMR's workflow effect on the following eight issues: (1) administration, (2) efficiency in patient processing, (3) basic clinical processes, (4) documentation of patient encounter, (5) economic challenges and reimbursement, (6) technical issues, (7) patient safety and care, and (8) communication and confidentiality. The items were used to track expectations prior to implementation and they served as retrospective measures of satisfaction with the EMR in post-implementation Time 1 and Time 2. Results The findings suggest that physicians conceptualize EMRs as an incremental extension of older computerized provider order entries (CPOEs) rather than as a new innovation. The EMRs major functional advantages are seen to be very similar to, if not the same as, those of CPOEs. Technology learning curves play a statistically significant though minor role in shaping physician perceptions. Conclusions The physicians’ expectations from the EMR are based on their prior beliefs rather than on a rational evaluation of the EMR's fit, functionality, or performance. Their decision regarding the usefulness of the EMR is made very early, within the first few months of use of the EMR. These early perceptions then remain stable and become the lens through which subsequent experience with the EMR is interpreted. The findings suggest a need for communication based interventions aimed at explaining the value, fit, and usefulness of EMRs to physicians early in the pre- and immediate post-EMR implementation stages.

Hybrid Model Incorporating Real Options with Process Centric and System Dynamics Modeling to Assess Value of Investments in Alternative Dispute Resolution Techniques

Project-specific dispute resolution ladders (DRLs) are typically implemented in construction projects to resolve issues arising between the project participants. The DRL typically consists of single or multiple alternative dispute resolution (ADR) techniques to address construction issues at the three levels of escalation: conflicts; disputes; and claims. However, a DRL requires significant investments to cover the direct costs incurred in-house by the project participants or, externally, if construction specialists and lawyers are recruited to assist in the resolution. Thus, the benefits of the DRL implementation in a construction project must outweigh its costs for the implementation to be worthwhile. This paper presents a methodology to study the effect of different resolution strategies on the value of the investment in a DRL using option/real option theories from financial engineering, process centric modeling, and system dynamics methodology. Of particular interest in this paper is the integration o...

The network as the target

The conventional target centric model of drug discovery is pinned under the weight of prior success and the traditional problems of safety and efficacy for new molecules. An alternative to target centric drug development is to shift focus to the pathways that mediate both biology and pathophysiology. This method has the advantage of not requiring a priori knowledge of the small molecule target, but also comes with it several challenges including target determination. We suggest extending this notion more broadly across the drug discovery process using quantitative network structure-activity relationships (QNSAR), and discuss the steps necessary to test the hypothesis that systems biology approaches can be used to improve the drug discovery process.

VENDOR'S PERSPECTIVE ON SOCIAL CAPITAL AND ABSORPTIVE CAPACITY FOR OFFSHORE CONTRACT PERFORMANCE.

Taking an offshore vendor's perspective, the paper develops and tests a 'knowledge management (KM) centric offshore contract performance model' examining whether the amount of social capital (SC) between the client and vendor and the vendor's absorptive capacity (AC), together affect knowledge transfer (KT) and knowledge combination (KC) processes. Further, the relationships of KM processes with the offshore contract performance are also explicated. Results provide insights into the relative importance of both SC and AC in affecting the extent of KT and KC in client-vendor relationships, providing a theoretically parsimonious reference 'offshore contract performance model' for future research.

Putting Patients First

It is more than mere coincidence that the highest rates of HIV occur in the world’s poorest countries. Of the over forty million people currently living with HIV, 95 percent are in the developing world. The first part of this article explores the economics of HIV and treatment from a social marketing perspective. The second part of the article uses three specific case histories of successful social marketing organizations in Africa, Asia, and South America to inductively generate a consumer (patient)-centric marketing model. The focal organizations are unique in that they all identify patient needs first, then work backwards to develop economically viable solutions. Their solutions are not without flaws, and the future of these programs remains uncertain, but the authors hope that illuminating specific cases within the consumer-centric marketing paradigm will shed light on ways in which other organizations may be able to serve the poor profitably.

The Emergence and Evolution of the Multidimensional Organization

The M-form, in which a corporate parent manages relatively freestanding business units, was the most successful organizational design of the twentieth century. However, contemporary economic conditions call for designs that allow firms to exploit synergies across their business units and on this dimension the M-form is notoriously weak. We report on empirical research that highlights the fundamental tension between clear lines of authority and the exploitation of synergies that firms face as they move away from the M-form and implement shared service centers, corporate account management, and matrix organizations. However, we also found that a limited but substantial number of firms in our sample evolved organizational designs that signal a new way of resolving this tension. These firms are organized around multiple dimensions (e.g. region, product, and account) and are able to simultaneously hold different managers accountable for performance on these dimensions. We discuss the nature of this multidimensional organization form by contrasting it with the M-form and the matrix organization. The multidimensional organization is best understood as the next step in the evolution from a resource centric physical production model to a customer centric knowledge exploitation model. It is a way of organizing that seems particularly well adapted to stimulating the teamwork that is necessary to create economic value in complex markets on the basis of distributed knowledge and intangible resources.

Data analysis with the DIANA meta-scheduling approach

The concepts, design and evaluation of the Data Intensive and Network Aware (DIANA) meta-scheduling approach for solving the challenges of data analysis being faced by CERN experiments are discussed in this paper. Our results suggest that data analysis can be made robust by employing fault tolerant and decentralized meta-scheduling algorithms supported in our DIANA meta-scheduler. The DIANA meta-scheduler supports data intensive bulk scheduling, is network aware and follows a policy centric meta-scheduling. In this paper, we demonstrate that a decentralized and dynamic meta-scheduling approach is an effective strategy to cope with increasing numbers of users, jobs and datasets. We present ‘quality of service’ related statistics for physics analysis through the application of a policy centric fair-share scheduling model. The DIANA meta-schedulers create a peer-to-peer hierarchy of schedulers to accomplish resource management that changes with evolving loads and is dynamic and adapts to the volatile nature of the resources.

Modelling of Service-Oriented Architectures with UML

Nowadays, service-oriented architectures are becoming gradually more important. The vast diversity of implementation and support platforms for this kind of architectures (such as Web, Grid or even CORBA) increases the complexity of the development process of service-based systems. With the aim of facilitating the development of service oriented solutions, we propose the specification of an architecture centric model driven development method. To achieve this, we study the architectural properties of the SOA paradigm and follow a development approach based on the MDA proposal. MDA proposes a separation of the development process in abstraction levels. This makes MDA suitable to tackle the development of service-oriented systems. This paper describes a UML profile for the PIM-level service-oriented architectural modelling, as well as its corresponding metamodel. PIM (Platform Independent Model) level is chosen because it does not reflect constraints about any specific platform or implementation technology. To exemplify and validate the profile, a case study is presented in which the proposed profile is used.

Stability and Kinetic Properties of C5-Domain from Myosin Binding Protein C and its Mutants

The impact of three mutations of domain C5 from myosin binding protein C, correlated to Familial Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, has been assessed through molecular dynamics simulations based on a native centric protein modeling. The severity of the phenotype correlates with the shift in unfolding temperature determined by the mutations. A contact probability analysis reveals a folding process of the C5 domain originating in the region of DE and FG loops and propagating toward the area proximal to CD and EF loops. This suggests that mutation effects gain relevance in the proximity to the area where folding originates. The scenario is also confirmed by the analysis of the kinetics of 27 test mutations evenly distributed throughout the entire C5 domain.