Management Control and Business Model Innovation in the Context of a Circular Economy in the Dutch Construction Industry

This study explores how different forms of management control support and enable business model innovation in the context of the principles of the circular economy. Following a qualitative research approach, empirical data is collected from construction companies and governmental organizations in the Netherlands. Building on Simons’ four levers of control. This paper illustrates how to balance the intended and emergent strategies via the organization’s management control system. According to Simons, the four levers encompass the beliefs systems, the interactive control systems, the diagnostic control systems, and the boundary controls. The empirical findings uncover the beliefs systems and the interactive control systems to be the most relevant levers that enable and drive business model innovation striving for the effective use of materials. Rather than measuring the output with predefined performance indicators, business model innovation in this context is better served by diagnostic controls which evaluate how innovative business models contribute to the organization’s mission.

Research on Human-Computer Interaction Control Method in the Background of Internet of Things

Against the background of the growing development of the Internet of Things, this article conducts research on more efficient methods for controlling the interconnection of all things, and proposes that smart devices use the same operating platform, and the human-computer interface presents universal modular controls for manipulation, it can satisfy the requirement that one device controls several different types of controlled device simultaneously. At the same time, the interactive method uses the controlled device to actively submit control content to the control device, and discusses the human-computer interactive control method applicable to the Internet of Everything, and strives to achieve a convenient and easy-to-use human-computer control experience.

Reducing Loneliness with an Interactive Live Video Intervention: Experiment (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Loneliness, especially when chronic, can substantially reduce one’s quality of life. Positive social experiences might help to break cycles of loneliness by promoting more prosocial cognitions and behaviors. Internet-mediated live video communication platforms (eg, Zoom and Twitch) may offer an engaging and accessible medium to deliver such positive social experiences to people at scale. Despite their widespread use, there is a lack of research into how these newer platforms’ socially interactive elements affect loneliness-related aspects of users’ psychosocial well-being. OBJECTIVE We aimed to experimentally evaluate whether a socially interactive live video experience improved loneliness-related outcomes to a greater extent than a non-interactive control experience. METHODS We recruited participants from an online survey recruitment platform and assigned half to participate in a socially interactive live video experience with strangers and the other half to a non-interactive control experience that was designed to be identical in all other regards. Participants completed several baseline measures of psychosocial wellbeing, participated in an hour-long live video experience, and then completed some of the baseline measures again. Four weeks later, we followed up with participants to evaluate their change in trait loneliness since baseline. We pre-registered our hypotheses and analysis plan and provide our data, analysis code, and study materials online. RESULTS 249 participants completed the initial study and met inclusion criteria, 199 of whom also completed the 4-week follow-up. Consistent with our predictions, we found that directly after the more socially interactive experience, participants’ feelings of connectedness increased more (p<.001), positive affect increased more (p=.002), feelings of loneliness decreased more (p<.001), social threat decreased more (p=.006), and negative affect decreased more (p=.003) than they did after the less interactive experience. However, the extent of change in trait loneliness between baseline and 4 weeks later did not differ between conditions (p=.853). Future research is needed to examine how these effects might generalize across different contexts and populations, particularly in instances where participants have an expectation of future interaction. CONCLUSIONS Including socially interactive components in live video experiences can improve loneliness-related psychosocial outcomes for a short time. Future work should explore how these benefits can be leveraged towards longer-term prosociality.

Advanced research directions in gravitational wave detectors

The general principles of gravitational waves detection are considered in this paper. Current gravitational wave detectors represent modernized Michelson interferometer LIGO-detector. Reduction of vibrations in the system and high stabilization of the reflective mirrors is one of the technical problem of the LIGO. It is proposed to study the features of the LIGO-detector with movable mirrors. The software simulating the operation of the LIGO and providing an opportunity to study its characteristics and capacity is developed and named LIGO-RM. The primary goal of the modelling is to study the signal of the gravitational waves detector with oscillating mirrors. The LIGO-RM contains graphic user interface (GUI) that provides interactive control of mirrors movement nature and monitoring of detector signal change. The software simulates the presence of gravitational wave of a requested type and makes it able to monitor its effect on the operation results of the LIGO interferometer in interactive mode or as a numerical outcome. A range of numerical experiments is conducted and the signals on the detector with and without mirrors oscillations are shown. The results of calculations and a possibility of the registration of the gravitational waves using the LIGO-detector with movable mirrors are discussed.

Simplifying the OpenFlexure microscope software with the web of things

We present the OpenFlexure Microscope software stack which provides computer control of our open source motorised microscope. Our diverse community of users needs both graphical and script-based interfaces. We split the control code into client and server applications interfaced via a web API conforming to the W3C Web of Things standard. A graphical interface is viewed either in a web browser or in our cross-platform Electron application, and gives basic interactive control including common operations such as Z stack acquisition and tiled scanning. Automated control is possible from Python and M atlab , or any language that supports HTTP requests. Network control makes the software stack more robust, allows multiple microscopes to be controlled by one computer, and facilitates sharing of equipment. Graphical and script-based clients can run simultaneously, making it easier to monitor ongoing experiments. We have included an extension mechanism to add functionality, for example controlling additional hardware components or adding automation routines. Using a Web of Things approach has resulted in a user-friendly and extremely versatile software control solution for the OpenFlexure Microscope, and we believe this approach could be generalized in the future to make automated experiments involving several instruments much easier to implement.

Improved interactive color visualization approach for hyperspectral images

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) have become increasingly prominent as they can maintain the subtle spectral differences of the imaged objects. Designing approaches and tools for analyzing HSIs presents a unique set of challenges due to their high-dimensional characteristics. An improved color visualization approach is proposed in this article to achieve communication between users and HSIs in the field of remote sensing. Under the real-time interactive control and color visualization, this approach can help users intuitively obtain the rich information hidden in original HSIs. Using the dimensionality reduction (DR) method based on band selection, high-dimensional HSIs are reduced to low-dimensional images. Through drop-down boxes, users can freely specify images that participate in the combination of RGB channels of the output image. Users can then interactively and independently set the fusion coefficient of each image within an interface based on concentric circles. At the same time, the output image will be calculated and visualized in real time, and the information it reflects will also be different. In this approach, channel combination and fusion coefficient setting are two independent processes, which allows users to interact more flexibly according to their needs. Furthermore, this approach is also applicable for interactive visualization of other types of multi-layer data.

A GAN-Like Approach for Physics-Based Imitation Learning and Interactive Control

We present a simple and intuitive approach for interactive control of physically simulated characters. Our work builds upon generative adversarial networks (GAN) and reinforcement learning, and introduces an imitation learning framework where an ensemble of classifiers and an imitation policy are trained in tandem given pre-processed reference clips. The classifiers are trained to discriminate the reference motion from the motion generated by the imitation policy, while the policy is rewarded for fooling the discriminators. Using our GAN-like approach, multiple motor control policies can be trained separately to imitate different behaviors. In runtime, our system can respond to external control signal provided by the user and interactively switch between different policies. Compared to existing method, our proposed approach has the following attractive properties: 1) achieves state-of-the-art imitation performance without manually designing and fine tuning a reward function; 2) directly controls the character without having to track any target reference pose explicitly or implicitly through a phase state; and 3) supports interactive policy switching without requiring any motion generation or motion matching mechanism. We highlight the applicability of our approach in a range of imitation and interactive control tasks, while also demonstrating its ability to withstand external perturbations as well as to recover balance. Overall, our approach has low runtime cost and can be easily integrated into interactive applications and games.