Target Destination Research Articles

Concirrus Quest Marine's Insurance Business Model: The Role of AI and Big Data

The size of the global marine insurance market in 2018 was approximately $30 billion, but low levels of profitability are common due to intense competition and complex risk assessment problems. Concirrus, an Insurance Technology (InsurTech) disruptor, is transforming the assessment of marine risk through the novel use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data analytics, to develop behavioural risk models. This is part of a broader market trend in insurance, in which traditional underwriting is being replaced by new modes of risk analysis, often based on behavioural risk. In the marine insurance market, the vessel Automatic Identification System can be used as an Internet-connected data source, to provide real-time telematic information regarding the activity of insured vessels. For example, this data includes vessel identification codes, positional information, course, speed and heading, target destination, estimated time of arrival, navigation status, and off-ship calculations. Other market information such as weather data, shipping route data, geographic knowledge, vessel records and insurance records can also be incorporated into sophisticated data analytics to model and better understand risk at a highly granular level. This rich digital and data ecosystem makes it possible to dynamically build and test novel, statistical approaches to model risk and develop new analytics that can be used to mitigate risk by pro-actively influencing business customers. Concirrus is an established marine and automotive InsurTech firm that was founded to capitalise on new behavioural risk modelling techniques and apply them in insurance markets. InsurTech companies disrupt markets by implementing new business models that exploit advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), high-performance digital technology accessed through cloud computing at relatively low cost, and big data analytics capabilities. Concirrus is an example of an Insurance technology leader, who are taking a digital first approach that avoids legacy system issues such as high maintenance costs, lack of integration and siloed business processes. This case study focuses on Concirrus’ business model and describes the operations of its Quest Marine Insurance Product. The Quest insurance product is an insurance risk analytics platform that combines a wealth of data sets, including complex, longitudinal, and behavioural data so that marine insurers can gain a much more nuanced and detailed understanding of a fleet’s risk profile and can offer connected policies that encourage and reward safer behaviour, which results in lower risk of loss and damage to ships, their contents and crew members. A detailed description and analysis of Concirrus’ value creation process is presented, which is based on Abassi’s model of big data value chains. The business model description identifies several areas of information and analytical competitive advantages, which create business benefits for each of the stakeholders involved in marine insurance: fleet operators; insurance brokers; insurers and reinsurers. More generally, the case study is an exemplar of a technology leader that is disrupting a market through the novel application of AI and digital transformation. The implementation challenges and future trajectory of behavioural insurance are outlined.

Research on Key Technology of Water Robot Avoiding Collision Based on Improved VFH Algorithm

For water robots in the intelligent operations meet to collision problems, a key collision avoidance algorithm based on VFH is developed, and the algorithm is improved and optimized, with a laser radar to launch the electromagnetic wave at a certain period Finally water robot controller was used to deal with data so as to analyze and process the data. Based on this, the histogram of obstacle vector field is established to judge the feasible and infeasible regions of the robot on water. Compared with the direction of the target destinations in feasible region corresponding weighting function is designed so as to determine the feasible area with smaller weight. the simulation by MATLAB to water robot position point for data analysis, Thus the simulation of water robot collision avoidance path diagram.

Does Sustainable Tourism Development Enhance Destination Prosperity?

Prosperity is one of the five critical areas for Sustainable Development according to the 2030 Agenda. This research develops a prosperity model for a tourism destination and examines stakeholders’ perception of the role of sustainable tourism development in enhancing the prosperity. A set of 18 sustainability indicators were used and identified through a hybrid model that combines results from a systematic literature search and four-stage convergent interviews. Results from 171 participants from five different groups of stakeholders revealed that sustainable tourism development enhances the prosperity of the target destination in general. Sustainability was found to be a medium to strong predictor of key prosperity dimensions, particularly environmental quality and sociocultural empowerment. Finally, the level of relationships were quantified to assist destination managers in identifying where to expend effort and resources to improve the implementation of sustainable tourism while considering the key dimensions of prosperity.

Dark-Side of Exosomes.

Exosomes are nanoscale extracellular vesicles that can transport cargos of proteins, lipids, DNA, various RNA species and microRNAs (miRNAs). Exosomes can enter cells and deliver their contents to recipient cell. Owing to their cargo exosomes can transfer different molecules to the target cells and change the phenotype of these cells. The fate of the contents of an exosome depends on its target destination. Various mechanisms for exosome uptake by target cells have been proposed, but the mechanisms responsible for exosomes internalization into cells are still debated. Exosomes exposed cells produce labeled protein kinases, which are expressed by other cells. This means that these kinases are internalized by exosomes, and transported into the cytoplasm of recipient cells. Many studies have confirmed that exosomes are not only secreted by living cells, but also internalized or accumulated by the other cells. The "next cell hypothesis" supports the notion that exosomes constitute communication vehicles between neighboring cells. By this mechanism, exosomes participate in the development of diabetes and its associated complications, critically contribute to the spreading of neuronal damage in Alzheimer's disease, and non-proteolysed form of Fas ligand (mFasL)-bearing exosomes trigger the apoptosis of T lymphocytes. Furthermore, exosomes derived from human B lymphocytes induce antigen-specific major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II-restricted T cell responses. Interestingly, exosomes secreted by cancer cells have been demonstrated to express tumor antigens, as well as immune suppressive molecules. This process is defined as "exosome-immune suppression" concept. The interplay via the exchange of exosomes between cancer cells and between cancer cells and the tumor stroma promote the transfer of oncogenes and onco-miRNAs from one cell to other. Circulating exosomes that are released from hypertrophic adipocytes are effective in obesity-related complications. On the other hand, the "inflammasome-induced" exosomes can activate inflammatory responses in recipient cells. In this chapter protein kinases-related checkpoints are emphasized considering the regulation of exosome biogenesis, secretory traffic, and their impacts on cell death, tumor growth, immune system, and obesity.

Przemiany międzynarodowej mobilności Polaków = Changes in Poles’ level of international mobility

Until very recently at least, modern society has been characterised by its increased mobility in both the short and long terms. Furthermore, this has been true of both domestic and international trips. The latter kind of mobility is addressed in the present article, which aims to cover relevant changes as they affected Polish people through the 2007‑2017 period. Against that background, particular attention has been paid to modal split in border traffic, with the changes involved presented in relation to supply with infrastructure and transport services. The article uses author’s own data, from research taking in a representative group of 1000 Polish adults (with the sample adjusted appropriately in relation to gender, and membership of the 18‑29, 30‑44, 45‑59 and 60 and over age groups, as well as place of residence: be that village, town of up to 50,000 inhabitants, city of 50‑200,000 inhabitants, city of more than 200,000 inhabitants, and Warsaw). The analysis did not encompass border areas, given the specific nature of the traffic there (and in this way it was possible to eliminate a large part of the daily movement taking place internationally (for the purposes of work, shopping, etc.), but in truth now representing short-term mobility within a region resided in (or else daily mobility using the classification after Kaufmann, 2005). At the same time, by imposing no distance limitations except those relating to border areas, the study retained a capacity to approximate the international part of genuine short-term mobility beyond the region inhabited. Nevertheless, most of the flows under analysis can be regarded as corresponding with the long-distance travel documented in the subject literature. However, the limit value for this kind of journey is set variously, e.g. at 50 miles one-way (Dargay and Clark, 2012), 100 km (Nordenholz et al., 2017), or 100 miles (Mokhtarian et. al., 2001). The configuration of near-border units in Poland is such that the research detailed also takes in slightly shorter transfers, given a limit values of around 30‑50 km in one direction. The aforementioned consideration of changes affecting Poles’ international mobility took in: frequency of travel, target destination (direction), place of crossing of the state border (section of border crossed), modes of transport, motivation, and duration. The work took account of a few basic categories of motivations for travel, i.e. on business (in relation to both hired labour and work on a person’s own account), for the purposes of education, tourism and holiday-related, visits to family and friends (thus treated as a motivation distinct from tourism) and shopping-related (usually in connection with small-scale border trade based around single-day visits). The work was carried out in 2018, but in relation to the years 2007 and 2017. 2007 is a targeted choice, with this being the last year before Poland’s Schengen Zone accession, hence a likely influence on both the dimensions and structure characterising international mobility. Research was done using the CATI method. The subjects of analysis were numbers of instances of international travel engaged in (as opposed to the numbers of people participating in transboundary flows). The work revealed an increase in the foreign mobility of Poles. The main motivator here was tourist travel and visits, as followed by goals associated with professional work and the visiting of family and friends. The modes of transport utilised most frequently were the aeroplane or private car, albeit with the former the subject of a major increase in share, even as the latter declined slightly in proportionate terms. There was a considerable reduction in the amount of travel achieved by coach (bus). At the time of study, Poles’ main destination countries for trips taken (under all motivations combined) were Germany, Czechia and Spain. Travel by Poles to eastern neighbour countries accounts for a very small share of all movement.

ОГЛЯД ПІДХОДІВ ОПТИМІЗАЦІЇ ОБМІНУ ДАНИМИ У МЕРЕЖІ МУЛЬТИСЕРВЕРНОЇ ІНФРАСТРУКТУРИ З ВИКОРИСТАННЯМ ШИФРУВАННЯ, КОМПРЕСУВАННЯ ТА ПРИСКОРЕНОЇ МАРШРУТИЗАЦІЇ

In this article is being reviewed different approaches to optimize data exchange in a network using cryptography - to make any date secure, compression - to make any data smaller and accelerated routing, which is based on meta information about target destination: how far they are, how loaded they are. The object of research is the process of data exchange in the network. The purpose of the study is to optimize the process of data exchange in the network in order to improve the security and speed of data transfer. Research methods - statistical analysis of data transmission efficiency indicators. When transmitting data, cryptographic algorithms are used to ensure integrity and security, these algorithms allow the exchange of data using public and private key technology. But now this may not be enough to complicate the process of decrypting the data, it is advisable to make the messages transmitted between nodes as similar as possible to each other, for example, the same length. This solution will minimize the possibility of revealing the cipher by analysis for the attacker, but at the same time significantly increases the volume of transmitted messages due to the additional «masking» amount of data. To compensate for this effect in high-load networks, it is proposed to use a smart routing algorithm, which allows you to choose the optimal route for messages, taking into account the load of routers and channels between them. KEY WORDS: REQUEST, DATA EXCHANGE, ENCODINGS, ROUTING, CRYPTOGRAPHY

Climate finance and deforestation: an empirical analysis of the forest transition curve in sub-Sahara Africa

The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of climate finance on deforestation among 44 sub-Sahara African countries for the period of 2006-2017 and testing whether Forest Transition Curve (FTC) exists in the region. System-GMM is employed as the main estimation technique and panel quantile regressions are employed to test sensitivity of the results. Overall, our findings do not offer support for the conventional FTC, but indicated that forest transition curve is rather U-shaped for all countries in sub-Sahara Africa in support of the climate finance effect (i.e. climfin effect). Population growth and agricultural land use have been found to be the major drivers of deforestation whilst most governance indicators showed adverse impact on deforestation. Consequentially, the study recommends the need to strengthen governance indicators such as control of corruption and regulatory quality to ensure that climate finance reaches target destination of environmental conservation.

SEARCH: An SDN-Enabled Approach for Vehicle Path-Planning

With increasing vehicle density and the growth of accidents in urban areas, navigation management becomes a serious problem. Even though there is a multitude of navigation systems, ambulances, taxis, or even ordinary vehicles, sometimes find it challenging to reach their destinations on time. There are two main reasons for this difficulty: (i) lack of local knowledge of the area of navigation solutions and (ii) their inflexibility against unforeseeable situations that may occur on the roads. Indeed, the majority of navigation solutions are based only on the distance, the journey time, or even statistics related to the density of vehicles to plan the full paths, while neglecting the dynamic nature of the vehicle traffic. Also, their respective centralized architectures are unable to monitor both the traffic and unexpected events continuously and in real-time without not being overloaded by the flow of message exchanges between the road entities and the central processing entity. To address these issues, we propose in this paper a novel three-tier architecture, called SDN-enabled Approach for Vehicle Path-Planning (SEARCH), to enhance the situation awareness on urban roads, efficiently collect traffic information in real-time, and decide the best navigation strategy. The proposed architecture exploits Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), 5G based cellular systems, and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to provide better and faster communication to changing road conditions. Based on these technologies, some parameters related to vehicles and driving environments, such as speed, distance, traffic jams, incidents, and travel flow, are efficiently collected and dynamically exploited to achieve faster paths between any existing pairs of locations. Furthermore, the deployed architecture of SEARCH can provide sufficient bandwidth to support all data traffic needs to update vehicles during their journey efficiently and in real-time. To evaluate the performance of our architecture, we conduct a series of simulations and perform a set of comparisons with relevant route planning algorithms. We found that the proposed architecture works effectively in terms of saving on driving time to reach any target destinations.

A new method to measure the rationalities of transit route layouts

Public transport routes (especially urban bus routes) may become tedious and lengthy due to undesired deviations from the target destination directions. This makes public transport less attractive compared to other modes. Optimization of bus route layouts (under the name of rationalisation) ought to concentrate on, primarily, the quantification of the shape (geometric) features of these routes. The present paper has therefore developed a numerical method for measuring the benefits of improving these route layouts. Using the method developed, over one million public transport journeys on 1242 bus lines in Istanbul Metropolitan City have been analysed. For each bus route, rationality values have been calculated and geocoded on GIS to produce a “digital rationality map” of the whole city. In addition, to be able to see the rationality changes by region, the map has been broken into municipal districts. As a result, particularly irrational bus routes were easily identified. The findings have already been taken on board by the National Research Council for immediate consideration of potential improvements and further research directions.

ESPADE: An Efficient and Semantically Secure Shortest Path Discovery for Outsourced Location-Based Services

With the rapid growth of smart devices and technological advancements in tracking geospatial data, the demand for Location-Based Services (LBS) is facing a constant rise in several domains, including military, healthcare and transportation. It is a natural step to migrate LBS to a cloud environment to achieve on-demand scalability and increased resiliency. Nonetheless, outsourcing sensitive location data to a third-party cloud provider raises a host of privacy concerns as the data owners have reduced visibility and control over the outsourced data. In this paper, we consider outsourced LBS where users want to retrieve map directions without disclosing their location information. Specifically, our paper aims to address the following problem: Given a user’s location s, a target destination t, and a graph G stored in a cloud, can users retrieve the shortest path route from s to t in a privacy-preserving manner? Although there exist a few solutions to this problem, they are either inefficient or insecure. For example, existing solutions either leak intermediate results to untrusted cloud providers or incur significant costs on the end-user. To address this gap, we propose an efficient and secure solution based on homomorphic encryption properties combined with a novel data aggregation technique. We formally show that our solution achieves semantic security guarantees under the semi-honest model. Additionally, we provide complexity analysis and experimental results to demonstrate that the proposed protocol is significantly more efficient than the current state-of-the-art techniques.

Controlled course-keeping simulations of a ship under external disturbances

A Simulink code for numerical simulation of ship manoeuvring is developed based on the appropriate differential equations. Both the Abkowitz and MMG models are implemented as choices according to the available hydrodynamic particulars of a given ship. Reliability of the developed code is assessed by performing the turning and zigzag tests for two different ships, employing the Abkowitz and MMG models in turn according to the available characteristics. As a field study, real time records of the routes followed by a passenger ship crossing the Strait of Istanbul under the disturbing effect of a lateral current were made. One of the vessels tested was autopiloted by a classic PD and a fuzzy-like PD controller separately, guiding the ship to a target destination under cross-current as in the Strait of Istanbul. Performances of these controllers in comparison with the human piloting of the field observations reveal that under disturbing current effects both controllers provide relatively shorter travel paths and the fuzzy-like PD controller stands as a better choice between the two.

Mergers, executive compensation and firm performance: The case of Africa

This study examines the impact of executive compensation on firm performance after successful mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in Africa between 2005 and 2016. Using accounting and financial performance measures and controlling for firm, deal and corporate governance factors, we show that executive compensation induced by M&A in Africa negatively affect the performance of listed firms. There is also evidence to support the impact of firm size, deal size, target destination, foreign ownership, diversification, outside board representation and executive ownership on the pay‐performance nexus. Besides, corporate governance factors in Africa, generally, worsen firm performance, especially for cash and total pay.

Production of Baculovirus and Stem Cells for Baculovirus-Mediated Gene Transfer into Human Mesenchymal Stem Cells.

The discovery of the genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 is revolutionizing the world of gene therapy and will extend the gene therapy product pipeline. While applying gene therapy products, the main difficulty is an efficient and effective transfer of the nucleic acids carrying the relevant information to their target destination, the nucleus of the cells. Baculoviruses have shown to be very suitable transport vehicles for this task due to, inter alia, their ability to transduce mammalian/human cells without being pathogenic. This property allows the usage of baculovirus-transduced cells as cell therapy products, thus, combining the advantages of gene and cell therapy. To make such pharmaceuticals available for patients, a successful production and purification is necessary. In this chapter, we describe the generation of a pseudotyped baculovirus vector, followed by downstream processing using depth and tangential-flow filtration. This vector is used subsequently to transduce human mesenchymal stem cells. The production of the cells and the subsequent transduction process are illustrated.

A SPEA-Based Multimetric Routing Protocol for Intelligent Transportation Systems

For efficient communication among vehicles or infrastructure, an effective routing protocol for Intelligent Transportation Systems is profoundly required. Because of high mobility and recurrent topology deviations of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANets), finding a linked route with adequate delay is an important challenge with many limits and hitches. To overcome this, an efficient multimetric routing protocol is proposed here for Intelligent Transportation Systems. The proposed protocol considers five metrics - Link Capacity, Connectivity, Euclidean Distance, Relative Velocity and End-to-End Delay. The aim of the proposed method is maximizing the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) while minimizing the delay of the network. It tries to identify the path that has minimum delay, distance and relative velocity with maximum bandwidth and V2V connectivity. For this, the protocol adopts Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm (SPEA) to optimize the five metrics and calculate the fitness value. Then the fitness value is used to find out the optimal path using a novel path finding algorithm for efficient data delivery to the target destination. Extensive simulation outcomes disclose that the proposed strategy shows an improvement of 6% in PDR, 11% in end-to-end delay and 2% improvement in hop-count as compared to the recent similar method.

Development and first application of the athlete adaptation inventory: An exploratory study

Geographic mobility has become an essential part of athletes’ career development and athletic migration is rapidly increasing. However, research on psychological aspects of athletes’ transnational mobility is lacking in the literature. In this study we describe the development of the Athlete Adaptation Inventory (AAI) and examine its first application in a sample of 143 professional and amateur elite migrant athletes. In summary, results indicate that cultural adaptation challenges were perceived as slightly difficult. However, female athletes reported more difficulties than male athletes in the sport domain, whereas male and team sport athletes reported more challenges in the non-sport domain compared to female and individual sport athletes. Furthermore, difficulties encountered in everyday activities of the target destination significantly predicted challenges adapting to the sport environment, whereas gender contributed to a much lesser degree. To explore diverse ways in which cultural transitions are experienced and to provide adequate support, sport practitioners are encouraged to include this scale in their work with migrating athletes.

RETRACTED: Path planning for unmanned wheeled robot based on improved ant colony optimization

This research presents a simple and novel improved ant colony optimization for path planning of unmanned wheeled robot. Our main concern is to avoid the random deadlock situation and to reach at the destination using the shortest path, to decrease lost ants and improve the efficiency of solutions. The aforementioned reasons, we design an adaptive heuristic function by adopting the Euclidean distance between the ant and the target destination, in order to avoid the initial blindness and later singleness of ant path searching. The historical best path when appropriate to retain the previous effort would supersede the current worst path. Simulation results under random maps show that the improved ant colony optimization considerably increases the number of effective ants. During the searching process, the probability to find the optimal path increases, as well as the search speed. Moreover, we also compare the improved ant colony optimization performance with the simple ant colony optimization.

Morphological evolution for pipe inspection using Robot Operating System (ROS)

ABSTRACT In many manufacturing processes, sensor agents specifically adapt to explore pipes and other constrained environments filled with fluid are usually needed for monitoring purposes. However, in some of these environments only miniaturized agents can be used. Furthermore, these agents might be kinetically passive, due to limited resources and size. Therefore, designing and using these agents can be difficult. One possible solution to this problem is to change the agents’ morphology, such that optimally shaped agents reach target destinations simply by passively moving through the fluid. Here, we propose an evolutionary scheme for evolving the agent’s morphology to reach a predefined desired point in a fluid environment. This scheme includes a genotype-phenotype mapping based on Lindenmayer-Systems, as well as custom reproduction operators, selection criterion, and fitness function. In order to allow the simulation of irregularly shaped bodies underwater, we develop a simulation framework based on the Robot Operating System and the Unmanned Underwater Vehicle package. We test the proposed method on a set of 10 target points in a pipe inspection scenario. Results show that the evolved agents reach the target points with a distance error smaller than 5% in the worst case, and a standard deviation of 1.1% over 10 repeated experiments.

Filter re‐start strategy for angle‐only tracking of a highly manoeuvrable target considering the target's destination information

This study handles the three-dimensional (3D) angle-only tracking (AOT) problem, which is calculating the target's location and velocity by measuring the target's elevation and azimuth angle. Nowadays, a non-civilian (unmanned) aircraft can accelerate in an unpredictable manner. This study presents a stochastic filter re-start strategy for tracking a target which can abruptly change its velocity in any 3D directions. Moreover, this study assumes that the target's destination information is known a priori. Using the target destination information, the authors can improve the filter accuracy as well as the time efficiency. As far as they know, this study is novel in using the target's destination information for manoeuvring target tracking in 3D AOT problem. The performance of the proposed stochastic filter re-start strategy based on the target's destination information is verified under MATLAB simulations.

A Clustering Based Routing Heuristic for Last-Mile Logistics in Fresh Food E-Commerce

This study considers the fresh food city logistics that involves the last-mile distribution of commodities to the customer locations from the local distribution centres (LDCs) established by the e-commerce firms. In this scenario, the last-mile logistics is crucial for its speed of response and the effectiveness in distribution of packages to the target destinations. We propose a clustering-based routing heuristic (CRH) to manage the vehicle routing for the last-mile logistic operations of fresh food in e-commerce. CRH is a clustering algorithm that performs repetitive clustering of demand nodes until the nodes within each cluster become serviceable by a single vehicle. The computational complexity of the algorithm is reduced due to the downsizing of the network through clustering and, hence, produces an optimum feasible solution in less computational time. The algorithm performance was analysed using various operating scenarios and satisfactory results were obtained.

Protein microswimmers capable of delivering cells for tissue engineering applications

The protein microswimmer, composed of serum albumin, magnetic nanoparticles, and cell-capturing parts, can capture cells, transport them towards target destinations, and release them at target sites in a controllable manner.