Pyramid Strategies Research Articles

EAP: An effective black-box impersonation adversarial patch attack method on face recognition in the physical world

Face recognition models and systems based on deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples. However, existing attacks on face recognition are either impractical or ineffective for black-box impersonation attacks in the physical world. In this paper, we propose EAP, an effective black-box impersonation attack method on face recognition in the physical world. EAP generates adversarial patches that can be printed by mobile and compact printers and attached to the source face to fool face recognition models and systems. To improve the transferability of adversarial patches, our approach incorporates random similarity transformations and image pyramid strategies, increasing input diversity. Furthermore, we introduce a meta-ensemble attack strategy that harnesses multiple pre-trained face models to extract common gradient features. We evaluate the effectiveness of EAP on two face datasets, using 16 state-of-the-art face recognition backbones, 9 heads, and 5 commercial systems. Moreover, we conduct physical experiments to substantiate its practicality. Our results demonstrate that EAP is capable of effectively executing impersonation attacks against state-of-the-art face recognition models and systems in both digital and physical environments.

Analysis of Boarding Strategies on an Airbus A320 Using Discrete Event Simulation

Boarding time constitutes a critical element of turnaround time, which is used to measure the efficiency of airline operations. Therefore, to reduce boarding time, it is imperative to reconsider traditional passenger boarding strategies to make them more efficient. In this sense, this study seeks to analyze the impact of different strategies on boarding times using discrete event simulation on an Airbus 320. Seven boarding strategies have been identified and considered in our study, as follows: random, back-to-front, outside-in, reverse pyramid, blocks, Steffen, and modified optimal. The impact of carrying hand luggage and the presence of priority passengers has been considered, as well as the impact of having a continuous arrival of passengers during the boarding process versus having all passengers available at boarding time. In general, simulation results have pointed out that the outside-in and reverse pyramid strategies are the most effective, improving boarding time by up to 15%, when compared to the random strategy. Moreover, the back-to-front strategy, which is generally implemented by airline companies, has been shown to be the most inefficient strategy. Efficient boarding strategies are expected to contribute to the sustainability of air travel by minimizing the turnaround time, improving operational efficiency, and reducing emissions.

Improving Students’ Reading Comprehension by Using Story Pyramid and Plus Minus Interesting Strategy

This research shows that there were several problems faced by students at SMA Negeri 2 Alasa in learning English, especially learning reading comprehension. Therefore, researcher was interested in conducting research entitled " Improving Students’ Reading Comprehension by Using Story Pyramid and Plus Minus Interesting Strategy at the Tenth Grade of SMA Negeri 2 Alasa". This research aims to observe the learning difficulties of these students, whether using the Story Pyramid and Plus Minus Interesting strategies could improve reading comprehension skills of the tenth grade students at SMA Negeri 2 Alasa and find out which strategy was more effective in improving reading comprehension skills. In this research, the researcher used classroom action research (CAR). CAR is an examination of learning activities in the form of an action, which is carried out to improve the teaching and learning process so as to improve learning outcomes that are better than before. Based on the results of the analysis, the pre-test results in class X-IPS which used the Story Pyramid strategy obtained an average score of 61.05%, while in class X-IPA got 56,84%. After the students learned by using these two strategies, the average post-test score for class X-IPS was 73.68% and class X-IPA was 74.21%. From these calculations it was concluded that there was a significant improvement in students' scores in reading comprehension and the use of Plus Minus Interesting strategy was more effective in improving students' reading comprehension with an average score increase of 17.37% compared to Story Pyramid's 12.63%.

Pandian Pickles: value or volume?

Research methodology This study adopted interview methods and field visits to collect the data. An audio recording was done for the whole interview and presented as facts in this case. Field visits were done to see the packs and understand the consumers and their purchase habits of pickles. Case overview/synopsis Pandian Pickles is a pickle manufacturer located in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, a state in the southern part of India. Mr Kandasamy, one of the partner of the Pandian pickle, had been thinking of ways to grow the business. Pandian Pickles dominated the low-price unit (LPU) market with a unique packing of pickles done in “arecanut” leaf. This added a unique flavour to their pickles. Mr Kandasamy envisioned to grow the business by introducing higher stock-keeping units in the form of jars and tap the middle class and the upper-middle-class segments in the market. In this category, there were much more prominent and branded players. Being a small regional player, Govindan wondered how Pandian Pickles would take these more prominent players in the industry head-on. Complexity academic level The case is ideally suited for discussing the concept of product line stretching, particularly in the product mix strategies of a small and medium enterprise (SME). The case can best fit into the courses such as Entrepreneurship Development, Product and Brand Management, Marketing Management for the Undergraduate levels and in the courses such as Strategic Marketing, Bottom of the Pyramid Markets and Strategies Management of SMEs in the postgraduate levels.

New Perspectives on Base of the Pyramid Strategies

The early literature on base of the pyramid (BOP) strategies argued that multinational enterprises can contribute significantly to poverty alleviation of the poorest population in the world. An emergent perspective suggests that the solution to poverty lies within the BOP itself. Here, entrepreneurship within the BOP population is seen as the more credible solution to poverty. In this Special Issue introduction, we briefly present how the literature has further shifted the discussion of BOP strategies toward issues such as innovation, networks, business models, and sustainability at the BOP. This analysis signals a gap in our knowledge related to the success factors in business models of BOP entrepreneurs, with attention to economic, social, and environmental impacts. We present the five articles accepted for publication in this Special Issue, of which three contribute to our knowledge of BOP business models and two to our knowledge of sustainability at the BOP. In conclusion, we propose several avenues for future research.

Global context aware RCNN for object detection

RoIPool/RoIAlign is an indispensable process for the typical two-stage object detection algorithm, it is used to rescale the object proposal cropped from the feature pyramid to generate a fixed size feature map. However, these cropped feature maps of local receptive fields will heavily lose global context information. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end trainable framework, called global context aware (GCA) RCNN, aiming at assisting the neural network in strengthening the spatial correlation between the background and the foreground by fusing global context information. The core component of our GCA framework is a context aware mechanism, in which both global feature pyramid and attention strategies are used for feature extraction and feature refinement, respectively. Specifically, we leverage the dense connection to improve the information flow of the global context at different stages in the top-down process of FPN, and further use the attention mechanism to refine the global context at each level in the feature pyramid. In the end, we also present a lightweight version of our method, which only slightly increases model complexity and computational burden. Experimental results on COCO benchmark dataset demonstrate the significant advantages of our approach.

Social Value Creation in Institutional Voids: A Business Model Perspective

The literature on Base of the Pyramid (BoP) strategies emphasizes that creating social value requires collaborative, multi-stakeholder business approaches. However, there is limited understanding of how businesses can successfully coordinate such value creation processes in the developing economies that face significant institutional voids. This study adopts a business model perspective for analyzing social value creation processes that span organizational boundaries. We introduce a novel, theoretically grounded business model framework that helps conceptualize social value by locating the various loci of value creation, and the stakeholders that partake in creating and capturing this value. We subsequently analyze the mechanisms of social value creation in M-Pesa, a renowned boundary-spanning mobile money system that has advanced financial inclusion among tens of millions of users in Kenya. The results show that information and communications technology can help advance social value creation by reducing the cost of coordinating boundary-spanning business models that integrate diverse societal stakeholders. The results further point to uneven distributional outcomes in self-governing social value creation strategies where the focal firm plays a coordinating role.

Sustainable supply chain models for base of the pyramid

Institutional barriers and constraints in developing countries require new supply chain models where economic, social and ecological aspects are integrated. Sustainable supply chain management discourse has focused on ecological aspects and neglected social issues, while Base of the Pyramid studies have neglected ecological considerations. This study links the sustainable supply chain management discourse with insights from Base of the Pyramid studies in order to suggest an integrated sustainability perspective. This work adopts a multiple case study design based on secondary data analysis in order to investigate supply chain concepts of 18 successful products and develop sustainable supply chain models in the areas of sourcing, making and delivering. Findings suggest that by employing localized and simplified approaches, companies targeting low-income markets can overcome existing local institutional barriers. We conclude that employing simplified and localized approaches to supply chains and simultaneously integrating local communities in the value creation activities can serve as success factors. Therefore, by linking sustainable supply chain with the Base of the Pyramid strategies discourse, we fill an important research gap in the literature. From a practitioner's perspective, the derived supply chain models serve as best practices for managers of multi-national companies, local entrepreneurs, non-governmental organizations and political institutions designing, operating and regulating supply chains for low-income markets.

Symmetrical design of strategy-pairs for enplaning and deplaning an airplane

Enplaning and deplaning processes are two main activities that passengers experience in an airplane. They are also the main factors contributing to the airplane turn time. Thus, both processes need to be carefully considered when designing a new strategy. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we propose a symmetrical design of deplaning strategies to match three typical grouped enplaning strategies (back-to-front, windows-to-aisle and reverse pyramid), in which the groups are organized in a LIFO (Last In First Out) manner. Secondly, we present an integrated cellular automaton model to describe the dynamic characteristics of passengers in the enplaning and deplaning processes. Numerical evaluation results indicate that the proposed windows-to-aisle and reverse pyramid strategies perform better in the following aspects: (i) the total operation time decreases; (ii) the two strategies are less sensitive to the load condition, e.g., luggage distribution and cabin occupancy rate; (iii) passengers’ satisfaction is enhanced since both individual waiting time and processing time lower down; (iv) the two strategies are fairer for the passengers since the difference among the groups remarkably shrinks.

Practical Implementation of Evidence-Based Dentistry Into Daily Dental Practice Through a Short Time Dependent Searching Method

IntroductionDespite the fact that the benefits of implementation of Evidence-Based Dentistry (EBD) into clinical practice is increasingly being highlighted, there are still clear limitations in its implementation into daily dental practice. One potentially important barrier to effective implementation into practice is the perception of EBD as a time-consuming process. The aim of the present study is to increase the familiarity of dental practitioners with the benefits of different time-dependent ‘practical’ search strategies important to EBD using a clinical question from the field of dental implantology as an example. Materials and MethodsThe PICO (population, intervention, comparison, outcome) question used in this study was: “In young adults with anterior single-tooth implant what is the effect of immediate or delayed loading on success?” A bibliographic search according to the Haynes 5S pyramid, together with 3 different time-dependent strategies (5-min, 30-min and more than 60-min), were applied. ResultsBoth the Haynes 5S Pyramid and time-dependent search strategies revealed promising results for enhancing decision-making for determining the feasibility of immediate or conventional loading of anterior single dental implants. Results clearly showed that selection of the loading protocol would be case (patient)-specific and also indicated high primary implant stability and bone quality as the most important prerequisites for a successful immediate/early loading. From among the 3 different time-dependent strategies (5 min, 30 min and more than 60 min), the 60+ min search results were quite comparable with the Haynes pyramid search results. ConclusionIt is likely that the different time-dependent search strategies may have the potential to support the clinical decision making process and may improve the implementation of EBD into daily dental practice. Increased time spent searching naturally seems to increase the extent of this support. However, even with short time-dependent searches, busy dental clinicians may get an improved idea/opinion regarding a clinical question.

Defining a base of the pyramid strategy

Base (or bottom) of the pyramid (BoP) strategies are often erroneously understood as multinational corporations’ strategies for competing in emerging economies while trying to tap unserved customers in those markets. In response, this manuscript seeks to inform readers of the necessary inclusion of sustainability as a cornerstone of the BoP strategic approach and to point out the critical differences between international strategies in emerging markets and sustainability-focused base of the pyramid strategies. These two approaches are distinct in terms of goal, or anticipated outcomes and performance measurement, as well as implementation through various components of a company strategy, such as target market, business model, partnerships and alliances, products and services, cost structures, and access and distribution. Through a point-by-point discussion of these differences, this manuscript clarifies the characteristics that define a BoP strategic approach. Armed with this knowledge, corporations and executives can more aptly pursue BoP strategies.

Firms' Choice of a Social Impact Measurement Method to Evaluate Base of the Pyramid Strategies: A Decision Support Framework

The need to measure the social impact of Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) strategies has become a consensus in the field, but identifying how to approach such an undertaking remains a challenge for firms. This paper builds on a research collaboration with a Multinational Corporation (MNC) engaged in housing programs at the BOP. This paper proposes a framework to assist in the firm’s choice of a social impact assessment method according to its objectives. Three categories of social impact evaluation methods are identified: ready-to-use tools, in-house methods and statistical methods. The different objectives that a firm may set for its impact assessment are accountability and communication, program improvement in the short run, and innovation in the long run. We propose to link each of the objectives to one method category and thereby facilitate the MNC’s choice of a social impact assessment method.

Design tools for base of the pyramid strategies

Design tools for base of the pyramid strategies

Evolutionary ecology of insect adaptation to Bt crops.

Transgenic crops producing Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxins are used worldwide to control major pests of corn and cotton. Development of strategies to delay the evolution of pest resistance to Bt crops requires an understanding of factors affecting responses to natural selection, which include variation in survival on Bt crops, heritability of resistance, and fitness advantages associated with resistance mutations. The two main strategies adopted for delaying resistance are the refuge and pyramid strategies. Both can reduce heritability of resistance, but pyramids can also delay resistance by reducing genetic variation for resistance. Seasonal declines in the concentration of Bt toxins in transgenic cultivars, however, can increase the heritability of resistance. The fitness advantages associated with resistance mutations can be reduced by agronomic practices, including increasing refuge size, manipulating refuges to increase fitness costs, and manipulating Bt cultivars to reduce fitness of resistant individuals. Manipulating costs and fitness of resistant individuals on transgenic insecticidal crops may be especially important for thwarting evolution of resistance in haplodiploid and parthenogenetic pests. Field-evolved resistance to Bt crops in only five pests during the last 14 years suggests that the refuge strategy has successfully delayed resistance, but the accumulation of resistant pests could accelerate.

Multinational Firm Strategy and Global Poverty Alleviation

Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) strategies recognize for the first time that global companies can contribute to the alleviation of worldwide poverty by adopting non-traditional and mostly non-Western models of business involvement. It is now widely accepted that poverty and hunger arise not because there are no goods or food, but because billions of people lack income to purchase them. It is also a common belief that the private sector can play a significant role in lifting the poor from the margins of the market system. This would require strategic and mindset shifts in global companies leading to a very different path where their operations intersect with the greater good of communities, societies, and nations. Successful engagement in the untapped market space at the base of the global income pyramid calls for completely new capabilities, responsibilities, and values. Alliance building with local and non-traditional partners, promoting bottom-up solutions and understanding social sustainability are some of these new managerial challenges. This article reflects on some of the critical challenges of global companies and global managers in their strategic engagement at the BOP and explores how large firms can become involved in the pursuit of social capital acquisition and how new approaches of public–private partnerships in reformulating the profit-performance links, the downscaling of products or services without compromising their quality and integrity, the bridging of the information and infrastructure gap, educating, and empowering the poor, together with innovations through technological adaptations can be managed through the embracing of new mindsets. A number of frameworks are presented with a view to contributing to the debate and outlining new value objectives for global companies.

The development of corporate responsibility/corporate citizenship

This paper outlines the emergence of corporate responsibility/corporate citizenship as part of corporate practice. The paper first defines the terms, then briefly focuses on the history of corporate citizenship and its evolution over time, highlighting the current popularity of the term both in academic and practice-based work. It turns next to an assessment of the current pressures and dynamics facing major corporations, highlighting the internalization of corporate responsibility practices into companies' business models, and a growing infrastructure that involves new standards and principles, the social investment movement, NGO pressures, multi-sector collaborations particularly around so-called bottom-of the pyramid strategies, internal and external responsibility management approaches, and stakeholder engagement, as well as transparency and reporting. Finally, the paper addresses how some of the current pressures are likely to evolve in the future, noting the emergence of new conversations like Corpo...