Individual Requests Research Articles

Uslovi za solemnizaciju ugovora o prodaji nepokretnosti zaključenog u vansudskom postupku namirenja

Public notaries act as holders of public authority and are obliged to protect the interest of legal certainty. The requirement of legal certainty is stronger than any individual request, and the public notary, as a holder of public authority, must uphold this. The public interest represents the gravitational field of any public notary operation. The legal rules governing the procedure of denying a public notary act determine the public law nature of the notary public service in a substantive manner. When assessing the fulfillment of the conditions for the solemnization of a document in each proceeding, the notary public must strictly apply the provisions of the law that prescribe the grounds for denial of an official act. The out-of-court mortgage settlement procedure is carried out without the involvement of public authorities. Such a regulated procedure is outside the logic of the execution procedure, and the notary public is the only public law entity before which a real estate sales contract concluded in an out-of-court settlement procedure is submitted for solemnization. Therefore, from the point of view of the protection of legal certainty, his role as the controller of the legality of the previously conducted out-of-court mortgage settlement procedure is further emphasized when he assesses the fulfillment of the conditions for the solemnization of a real estate sales contract concluded in an out-of-court settlement procedure. One of the conditions for the solemnization of a real estate sales contract is also the absence of a reason for denial of an official act, which the notary public must strictly examine in accordance with the rules of the law governing the public notary activity. When assessing that the aforementioned condition is not fulfilled, the public notary is required to refuse the solemnization of such real estate sales contract concluded in the out-of-court settlement procedure.

ВИКОРИСТАННЯ НОВИХ ІНФОРМАЦІЙНИХ ТЕХНОЛОГІЙ У ПЕРСОНАЛІЗАЦІЇ ВІДНОСИН З КЛІЄНТАМИ ТУРИСТИЧНИХ ПІДПРИЄМСТВ

Purpose: scientific substantiation of new ways to improve personalized interaction with tourist companies' clients based on the use of modern Internet technologies. Methods. A theoretical synthesis of scientific sources concerning of usage of Internet technologies in the framework of relations with clients (I. Reshetnikova, S. Ilyashenko, E. Pan, P. Gumble, R. Johnson and D. Ford, S. Melnichenko, M. Boyko, V. Lukyanov, G. Munin, Yu. Pravyk). An analysis of the activities of domestic and foreign tourist enterprises regarding the personalization of relations with clients shows that at the present stage there is a tendency to switch from a strategy of concentrated marketing to a strategy of personalization, where each client is offered an individualized service complex. Results. Personalizing relationships with clients for the tourism industry is an extremely important factor in the development and profit making, since communication in tourism involves close interaction with consumers and their individual requests and wishes. Ukrainian companies that implement the principles of personalization often face the lack of scientifically based methods for preparing and adopting managerial decisions using modern information technologies. As a result of the scientific search, there have been offered various innovative ways and means of optimizing the work of tourism company managers for personalized interaction with customers through Internet technologies, which include modern analytics services, information collection and processing, as well as tools that allow the creation of personalized emails, promotional advertisement, content, etc. The scientific novelty lies in the complexed integrated differentiated assessment of the use of IT-technologies for the formation of personalized relations of a tourism enterprise with customers. The practical significance. The integrated implementation of modern personalized marketing tools ensures effective and long-lasting relationships with customers, which is the key to the successful operation of the company's tour in the market.

Development of public services in the energy field in the age of digital economy

The development of the system of electronic public services, which is one of the directions of change in the digital economy, was the subject of the study in the present article. This system helps the state to interact with the population and organizations in such issues as providing information, particularly on individual requests, organizing public (municipal) procurements, in the matter of prices and tariffs in the energy sector, in providing public services and developing the feedback system (complaints institution), etc. The authors have concluded that a modern state should ensure the coherence between its citizens or business entities and institutions or public administrations on the basis of electronic access. Correct digitization of public administration contributes to the transparency of the public sector. Russia has enough prerequisites for the development of the electronic public services system, since Russia has traditionally established and maintained a high level of people’s education, and these days, the information technology sector develops rapidly. The study identified the main features of information and communication technologies and determined the impact of these technologies on the formation of a system of socio-economic relations and the institutional environment of modern society. The authors substantiated the necessity of a new technology package in Russia that will ensure the transition from analog to digital control methods in the energy industry and support the transformation of consumer behavior models, business practices of energy supply and service companies.

Operational Design for a Real-Time Flexible Transit System Considering Passenger Demand and Willingness to Pay

Internet-based transit services have the potential to enable fully connected, safe, reliable, efficient, and flexible service in the public transit system. The flexible transit system (FTS) allows passengers to make individual travel requests and receive customized door-to-door service by specifying their origins and destinations (OD), departure time range, and willingness to pay (WTP). Unlike the uniform and stable WTP in our previous paper, we consider an exponential decay function for the real pickup locations of passengers, and we proposed a joint design of two-level bus stops in temporal and spatial variations of travel demands. To ensure practical applications of this real-time FTS model, we combine the traversing method and the improved tabu search algorithm. A numerical example from Guangzhou is conducted to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model and its effectiveness in reducing system cost.

Agile Product Development—coupling explorative and established CAx methods in Early Stages of Virtual Product Development

Companies are reacting to shorter development cycles and individual customer requests by implementing agile project management such as Design Thinking, Scrum or Lean Startup. They assume that this leads to early customer feedback, prompt response to changes and collaboration across departments for efficient product success through continuous cooperation of all participants. But how can classical development processes be adapted or redesigned to become (more) agile? Which possibilities are available to product developers and designers to use methods - especially regarding CAx - in a useful and agile way? Over the past decades, numerous tools have been developed and are used by experts for specific problems. In the meantime, products can be represented as digital twins at a very high level. Currently, coupling or even merging of specific methods and tools is recognizable and necessary so that further potentials can be tapped. In many cases, this means that non-experts may come into contact with very special and complex methods and tools, which brings intuitive handling and validation of results into focus. This paper focuses on the following questions: What are suitable methods, tools and procedures, especially in agile development environments, and how can they be used? Different agile and explorative methods, tools and procedures within the CAx domain are coupled on selected scientific and industrial use cases. The process chain is then applied in the early phase of product development, in which requirements and boundary conditions are still vague, but initial knowledge about the later product already needs to be gainedif possible directly with the customer. The aim is to generate stimulating insights and iteratively generate validated models even when the product is not yet fully specified. For an agile and explorative process chain, we use 3d scanning for generating patient specific exoskeletons, hybrid CAD software for bionic and efficient modeling for Additive Manufacturing, 3d sketching for rough DMU sketches and prototype tooling to produce prototype series. The findings are then prepared for further use in common environments such as CAD for finalizing the product.

The Responsibility to Protect, the Right to Assist and the Right to Resist

The Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) has come under heavy criticism following its invocation during the 2011 intervention in the Libyan conϐlict. The perceived unworkability of RtoP for future intervention to prevent atrocity crimes has formed the basis of continued development of the concept of the 'right to assist', which has emerged in the nonviolence literature as a means of responding to the needs and requests of individuals engaged in campaigns of nonviolent resistance. Although couched in the language of a need to respect bottom-up actors engaged in nonviolent resistance, the nonviolence literature from which RtoA has emerged indicates reasons to be cautious. Drawing on the developing critical nonviolent resistance literature, this study suggests that efforts to discipline and restrict resistance to nonviolent forms of conϐlict, and indeed to limit conϐlict to the terms established by external actors, seem to inherently afϐlict the concept of RtoA.

Real World Data on the Efficacy and Safety of Daratumumab in Relapsed/Refractory Multiple Myeloma: Data Collected from the Hungarian Hematology Centers

Background: Daratumumab is one of the most effective new myeloma drugs recently approved for relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma (MM), first in monotherapy in heavily pretreated patients, later in triplet combinations from first relapse, based on the results of the SIRIUS, POLLUX and CASTOR trials that showed good tolerability and high effectivity of daratumumab both in monotherapy and combined with lenalidomide or bortezomib. However, clinical trials are different from real world use for many reasons including less rigorous patient selection, greater flexibility with dosing and country specific funding restrictions making real world data very important for clinicians. Real world data regarding daratumumab use is currently very limited. In the Hungarian system, funding of daratumumab was initiated in December 2016, and required individual preapproved funding requests. Initially only monotherapy was reimbursed in double-refractory patients, but from 2018 triplet combination in earlier lines could start as well.Aims and Methods: The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy and safety of daratumumab in the real world practice. We approached all centers in Hungary where daratumumab was used, in a retrospective analysis. The scope of this study was to analyze response rate, progression free survival (PFS), treatment duration, and adverse events (AEs). Statistical analyses were performed using the SPSS (version 20.0) software package.Results: 8 centers responded with 75 patients altogether. Patients were heavily pretreated, the median number of prior lines was 3 (1-12). All patients had prior bortezomib, and most had lenalidomide (82.6%) and thalidomide (86.6%), all but one had one of the two IMiDs. 62.6% of the patients had prior autologous transplantation, with two having prior allograft, as well. Pre-daratumumab cytogenetic FISH tests of 57 patients were available, here 33/57 had high risk cytogenetics. The majority had high international staging system (ISS) score: 8, 16 and 48 were in the ISS 1, 2 and 3 groups respectively. Treatment usually continued until progression, unacceptable toxicity or death, the mean number of cycles was 6. AEs over grade 3 were uncommon, the most frequent AEs were mild infusion associated reactions (IARs, grade 1-2) and infections (Table 1). There were 7 fatal infections, other fatal AEs were absent. Infusion related toxicities were manageable in all cases. The majority of patients (41) had monotherapy with dexamethasone only, but 17 had bortezomib and another 17 lenalidomide combination. Overall response rate was assessable in 66 patients with 7 complete, 8 very good partial, 24 partial, 5 minor responses. 14 showed stable disease, 8 progressive disease. 9 patients had no formal disease reassessment due to either early death or short follow up. There was no clear connection between the number of prior lines and the quality of the response, however those who had either bortezomib or lenalidomid combinations showed better overall response rate (p=0.045).With 43 events so far the estimated PFS and OS were 151 and 260 days, but it was much better in those who showed at least a partial response (PFS 400 days, OS nor reached; Figure 1). The only other factor that significantly affected the PFS was ISS (p=0.039), we could not demonstrate a significant connection between cytogenetics, the number of prior lines, combination therapy and survival.Conclusion: Our results highlight the differences between patients treated in routine practice and those treated in clinical trials. Here treatment protocols were dictated by funding rules, and therefore similar patients were treated with doublets and triplets. The results of the POLLUX and CASTOR trials were superior in comparison to the SIRIUS study with monotherapy, but our results do not reflect this marked difference, probably due to the almost complete absence of 2nd and 3rd line patients who dominated the Pollux and Castor trials. Importantly these heavily pretreated patients tolerated daratumumab well, IARs over grade 2 were absent. Based on our results, daratumumab is an effective treatment option for relapsed/refractory MM with good safety profile. [Display omitted] DisclosuresMasszi:Janssen-Cilag: Consultancy; Takeda: Consultancy; AbbVie: Consultancy; Pfizer: Consultancy; Novartis: Consultancy; BMS: Consultancy. Illés:Takeda: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Roche: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Novartis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Janssen: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees.

Non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation for treatment of cluster headache: early UK clinical experience

BackgroundEvidence supports the use of non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation (nVNS; gammaCore®) as a promising therapeutic option for patients with cluster headache (CH). We conducted this audit of real-world data from patients with CH, the majority of whom were treatment refractory, to explore early UK clinical experience with nVNS used acutely, preventively, or both.MethodsWe retrospectively analysed data from 30 patients with CH (29 chronic, 1 episodic) who submitted individual funding requests for nVNS to the National Health Service. All patients had responded to adjunctive nVNS therapy during an evaluation period (typical duration, 3–6 months). Data collected from patient interviews, treatment diaries, and physician notes were summarised with descriptive statistics. Paired t tests were used to examine statistical significance.ResultsThe mean (SD) CH attack frequency decreased from 26.6 (17.1) attacks/wk. before initiation of nVNS therapy to 9.5 (11.0) attacks/wk. (P < 0.01) afterward. Mean (SD) attack duration decreased from 51.9 (36.7) minutes to 29.4 (28.5) minutes (P < 0.01), and mean (SD) attack severity (rated on a 10-point scale) decreased from 7.8 (2.3) to 6.0 (2.6) (P < 0.01). Use of abortive treatments also decreased. Favourable changes in the use of preventive medication were also observed. No serious device-related adverse events were reported.ConclusionsSignificant decreases in attack frequency, severity, and duration were observed in these patients with CH who did not respond to or were intolerant of multiple preventive and/or acute treatments. These real-world findings complement evidence from clinical trials demonstrating the efficacy and safety of nVNS in CH.

Study on the determinants of decision-making in peer-to-peer lending in South Korea

ABSTRACT In order to investigate the influences of borrower information on the decision-making, we collected data for 35,485 individual loan requests from Moneyauction, the largest P2P lending platform in South Korea, and analyzed the determinants of borrower and lender decision-making, adopting a logistic regression model. Specifically, we included various linguistic variables, generated by Korean Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software, in order to analyze the effect of language use. Our research findings show that while a borrower’s demographic traits and linguistic style do have influential effects on participants’ decision-making, their relative importance is much lower than that of financial and loan request profiles.

Caching at Base Stations With Heterogeneous User Demands and Spatial Locality

The existing proactive caching policies are designed by assuming that all users request contents with identical activity level at uniformly distributed or known locations, among which most of the policies are optimized by assuming that user preference is identical to content popularity. However, these assumptions are not true based on the recent data analysis. In this paper, we investigate what happens without these assumptions. To this end, we establish a framework to optimize caching policy for base stations exploiting heterogeneous user preference, activity level, and spatial locality. We derive success probability and average rate of each user as utility function, respectively, and obtain the optimal caching policy maximizing a weighted sum of average utility (reflecting network performance) and minimal utility of users (reflecting user fairness). To investigate the intertwined impact of individual user request behavior on caching, we provide an algorithm to synthesize user preference from given content popularity and activity level with controlled preference similarity and validate the algorithm with the real datasets. Analysis and simulation results show that exploiting individual user behavior can improve both network performance and user fairness, and the gain increases with the skewness of spatial locality, and the heterogeneity of user preference and activity level.

Production as a Service: A Digital Manufacturing Framework for Optimizing Utilization

In current practice, product developers with customized small batch production needs come across the problem of finding capable and flexible manufacturers, whereas manufacturers face underutilization due to inconsistent demand. This paper presents a Production as a Service (PaaS) framework to connect users (consumers or product developers) who have customized small batch manufacturing needs with manufacturers who have existing underutilized resources. PaaS is a cloud-based, centralized framework based on a service-oriented architecture that abstracts the manufacturing steps of a product as individual (production) service requests. Using PaaS, the user is able to reach many capable manufacturers at once and receive quotations for the production request. On the other end, PaaS reduces the effort required to find new customers and enables the manufacturers to easily submit quotations to increase the utilization of their resources. The functionalities and concepts defined in this paper are illustrated through case studies. Note to Practitioners-In order to transition product fabrication from the design phase to manufacturing, there is a need for identifying capable manufacturers with available resources that could be paired with user requirements. We propose Production as a Service (PaaS) in this paper and present initial implementations of the front-end and back-end components with a customizable optimization algorithm. Proposed abstractions and data structures make PaaS a unique, efficient, and intellectual property preserving framework. The current implementation of the framework has been tested with new designs. The PaaS framework has the potential to scale over a large network of manufacturers to effectively coordinate geo-distributed manufacturers for custom manufacturing needs.

Scheduling Solution for Space Debris Observations

The scheduling model of orbital debris can be considered as composed by a set of optical ground station which move with the surface of the Earth, a set of space situation awareness centre which can be assumed connected to ground station, and orbital debris travelling through different kind of orbit generating visibility windows when the line of sight (LOS) to ground station exists. To solve this, scheduling problem can be considered as the allocation of observing time of the telescope to collect measurements of the debris (i.e., to improve orbit or attitude determination, spin rate evolution, etc.). The increasing number of space debris to be observed with optical ground station has caused the combinatorial explosion in the number of intervals to be scheduled. Therefore, new scheduling approach to provide a solution to the new requests is needed. In the framework of the Agreement between Italian Space Agency (ASI) and National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) “Supporto alle attivita IADC e validazione pre-operativa per SST” (N.2015-028-R.0), S5Lab research group has developed a network of observatory fully dedicated for space debris observations. Moreover, a scheduler called NICO (Networked Instrument Coordinator for debris Observations) has been developed specifically designed for the harmonization of individual user requests by considering meteorological and astronomical constraints. This paper outlines the advantages of the developed custom solution based on modular architecture. NICO’s architecture is based on a multilayer system: the front end is designed to allow external registered users to specify their observing requests and to assign specific scientific priority; the back-end is changed for the business logic by determining the visibility windows for each request and to solve the conflict. The implemented conflict solver solution is based on genetic algorithms. This paper outlines the results of the application of NICO scheduler to the 2018-IADC (Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee) international optical observing campaigns.

Dynamic Pricing Mechanism in Smart Grid Communications Is Shaping Up

An efficient smart grid communication system is a key enabling technology for modernized utility that can adjust electricity usage to balance generation and demand in real time. However, the utility industry is not able to meet the power demand for the wholesale market during overloading or emergency situations. To mitigate power shortage pressures, utility providers need to employ a dynamic pricing policy to enforce higher pricing than pre-estimated statistic pricing to motivate consumers to reduce their power consumption. In this letter, the time of use (TOU) approach is proposed to regulate price variances considering desired power demand. In this mechanism, the consumers deliver their TOU electricity demands and subsequent control signals to utility providers through communication network infrastructure. The utility provider creates an hourly demand profile for each consumer by predicating individual requests over short- and long-time frames. The control signaling exchanged and prior arrangement of services enable utility providers to evaluate the status of wholesale market demand and assign prices considering dynamic changes in electricity demand. Numerical analysis study was carried out to validate the advantages of the proposed mechanism.

Individual Funding Requests: A flawed process.

Individual Funding Requests: A flawed process.

Challenging NHS England's individual funding request policy

Challenging NHS England's individual funding request policy

Smart Multi-RAT Access Based on Multiagent Reinforcement Learning

The ongoing increasing traffic in the era of big data yields unprecedented demands in user experience and network capacity expansion. The users of next generation mobile networks (5 G) should be able to use 3GPP, IEEE, and other technologies simultaneously. The integration of multiple radio access technologies (RATs) of licensed or unlicensed bands has been widely deemed as a cost-efficient way to greatly increase the network capacity. In this paper, we propose a smart aggregated RAT access (SARA) strategy with aim of maximizing the long-term network throughput while meeting diverse traffic quality of service (QoS) requirements. We consider the scenario that users with different QoS requirements access to a heterogeneous network with coexisting cellular-WiFi. In order to maximize system throughput while meeting diverse traffic QoS requirements in such a complex and dynamic environment, we exploit multiagent reinforcement learning to perform RAT selection in conjunction with resource allocation for individual user access requests, through sensing dynamic channel states and traffic QoS requirements. In SARA, we first use Nash Q-learning to provide a set of feasible RAT selection strategies while decreasing the strategy space in learning process, and then employ Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) based Q-learning to perform resource allocation. Numerical results reveal that the network throughput can be maximized while meeting various traffic QoS requirements with limited number of searches by using our proposed SARA algorithm. For bulk arrival access requests, a suboptimal solution can be obtained as high computational complexity is incurred for achieving global optimality. Another attractive feature of SARA is that a tradeoff between the solution optimality and learning time can be readily made by terminating the search of MCTS according to the time constraint. Compared with traditional WiFi offloading schemes, SARA can significantly improve network throughput while guaranteeing traffic QoS requirements.

A GPU-Outperforming FPGA Accelerator Architecture for Binary Convolutional Neural Networks

FPGA-based hardware accelerators for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have received attention due to their higher energy efficiency than GPUs. However, it is challenging for FPGA-based solutions to achieve a higher throughput than GPU counterparts. In this article, we demonstrate that FPGA acceleration can be a superior solution in terms of both throughput and energy efficiency when a CNN is trained with binary constraints on weights and activations. Specifically, we propose an optimized fully mapped FPGA accelerator architecture tailored for bitwise convolution and normalization that features massive spatial parallelism with deep pipelines stages. A key advantage of the FPGA accelerator is that its performance is insensitive to data batch size, while the performance of GPU acceleration varies largely depending on the batch size of the data. Experiment results show that the proposed accelerator architecture for binary CNNs running on a Virtex-7 FPGA is 8.3× faster and 75× more energy-efficient than a Titan X GPU for processing online individual requests in small batch sizes. For processing static data in large batch sizes, the proposed solution is on a par with a Titan X GPU in terms of throughput while delivering 9.5× higher energy efficiency.

HOLISTIC CONSIDERATION OF IMPACTS THROUGH ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING ON THE PRODUCT LIFECYCLE

In theory, additive production processes enable companies to flexibly react on volatile markets, produce spare parts on demand and realize individual customer requests directly. For the future, a vast growth of the application of additive manufacturing (AM) is predicted. The technology is perceived to have the potential to reform current manufacturing fundamentally. The technological aspects of additive manufacturing are mostly explained in today’s literature, whereas impacts on the product lifecycle and different approaches in implementing AM are only covered superficially. Consequently, this paper shows the impact on essential divisions of an industrial company by implementing additive production technology. Therefore, a generalized product life cycle is evaluated under consideration of AM. This shows the complexity of the implementation progress of AM in companies and the related emerging requirements, reaching from changing infrastructural demands up to necessary changes in organizational issues.

PERSIST: Policy-Based Data Management Middleware for Multi-Tenant SaaS Leveraging Federated Cloud Storage

NoSQL data stores are often combined to address different requirements within the same application. The implication of this trend is particularly important and relevant in the context of multi-tenant SaaS applications where tenants commonly have different storage- and privacy-related requirements and thus they desire to customize the storage setup according to their specific needs. Consequently, application developers are increasingly combining storage resources: on-premise and public cloud resources in a hybrid cloud setup, different external public cloud storage resources and providers in a federated cloud storage setup, etc. The consequences of these trends are twofold: (i) application developers and SaaS providers have to deal with heterogeneous technologies, different APIs, and implement complex storage logic (to address different requirements of tenants), all within the application layer; and (ii) storage architectures have become less rigid, and techniques are required to flexibly change the storage configuration of running applications, up to the level of individual service requests. To address these challenges, we present PERSIST, a middleware architecture that (i) externalizes the complexity of a federated cloud storage architecture and the complex storage logic from the SaaS application to storage policies, allows tenants to enforce different storage- and privacy-related requirements at a fine-grained level; and (ii) supports the dynamic (re)configurability of the underlying federated cloud storage architecture. Application-specific policies can be customized by individual tenants at run time, and PERSIST offers support for run-time cross-provider polyglot persistence and the confidentiality of sensitive data through encryption. We have validated PERSIST in a working prototype implementation. Our extensive evaluation efforts show (i) the accomplished reduction in the required development effort to support complex storage policies, (ii) the reduction in cost/effort to change the data storage architecture itself, and finally (iii) the acceptability of the performance overhead (around 6% for insert, and 2% for read, update and delete transactions).

Human resource allocation or recommendation based on multi-factor criteria in on-demand and batch scenarios

Dynamic resource allocation is considered a major challenge in the context of business process management. At the operational level, flexible methods that support resource allocation and which consider different criteria at run-time are required. It is also important that these methods are able to support multiple allocations in a simultaneous manner. In this paper, we present a framework based on multi-factor criteria that proposes a recommender system which is capable of recommending the most suitable resources for executing a range of different activities, while also considering individual requests or requests made in blocks. To evaluate the proposed framework, a number of experiments were conducted using different test scenarios. These scenarios provide evidence that our approach based on multi-factor criteria successfully allocates the most suitable resources for executing a process in real and flexible environments. In order to demonstrate this assertion, we use a help-desk process as a real case study. [Received: 19 May 2017; Revised: 23 October 2017; Accepted: 31 January 2018]