DIGITAL FUNCTIONALITY OF COMPLEMENTATION OF BUSINESS PROCESSES OF THE HOTEL INDUSTRY

It has been determined that intensive digitalization of service processes is a condition for the effective functioning of the hotel industry under the influence of the COVID-19 pan­demic. One of its important directions, namely the use of a process approach to management, has been specified. The article proves that the improvement of business processes on the basis of their complementation and defining its digital functionality will enable to improve the quantitative and qualitative performance, will help to increase competitiveness and to maintain market share.

Immunizing with information – Inoculation messages against conversational agents’ response failures

Conversational agents (CAs) are often unable to provide meaningful responses to user requests, thereby triggering user resistance and impairing the successful diffusion of CAs. Literature mostly focuses on improving CA responses but fails to address user resistance in the event of further response failures. Drawing on inoculation theory and the elaboration likelihood model, we examine how inoculation messages, as communication that seeks to prepare users for a possible response failure, can be used as an alleviation mechanism. We conducted a randomized experiment with 558 users, investigating how the performance level (high or low) and the linguistic form of the performance information (qualitative or quantitative) affected users’ decision to discontinue CA usage after a response failure. We found that inoculation messages indicating a low performance level alleviate the negative effects of CA response failures on discontinuance. However, quantitative performance level information exhibits this moderating effect on users’ central processing, while qualitative performance level information affected users’ peripheral processing. Extending studies that primarily discuss ex-post strategies, our results provide meaningful insights for practitioners.

Upland rice intercropped with green manures and its impact on the succession with common bean

The aim of this work was to verify the possibility of intercropping rice with green manures, as well as the impact of the dry biomass yield of these intercropping systems on common bean in succession, evaluating the agronomic and qualitative performance of grains from both crops. The experiment was conducted in Southeastern Brazil in the years 2018 and 2019, with succession of rice (spring/summer) and common bean (autumn/winter). The treatments were composed of cropping systems with rice as a sole crop and intercropped with forage peanut, calopo, Crotalaria breviflora, Crotalaria spectabilis, stylo, jack bean and dwarf pigeon pea. No intercropping increased the system's yield compared to sole-crop rice, but intercropping of rice with forage peanut and stylo promoted grain yield and quality similar to those of sole-crop rice. Intercropping with C. breviflora affected the agronomic and qualitative performance of rice. Common bean yield after rice intercropped with dwarf pigeon pea, C. spectabilis and C. breviflora was similar in yield after sole-crop rice, while the other intercrops reduced common bean yield. Common bean grain quality was not affected by the cultivation of rice as sole crop and intercropped with green manures. Although none of the intercropping systems increased yield compared to sole-crop rice (control), it can be concluded that the intercropping of upland rice is viable depending on the green manure species, allowing greater biomass production per area that can help long-term soil conservation and increase the system's yield.

Large scale similarity search across digital reconstructions of neural morphology

Most functions of the nervous system depend on neuronal and glial morphology. Continuous advances in microscopic imaging and tracing software have provided an increasingly abundant availability of 3D reconstructions of arborizing dendrites, axons, and processes, allowing their detailed study. However, efficient, large-scale methods to rank neural morphologies by similarity to an archetype are still lacking. Using the NeuroMorpho.Org database, we present a similarity search software enabling fast morphological comparison of hundreds of thousands of neural reconstructions from any species, brain regions, cell types, and preparation protocols. We compared the performance of different morphological measurements: 1) summary morphometrics calculated by L-Measure, 2) persistence vectors, a vectorized descriptor of branching structure, 3) the combination of the two. In all cases, we also investigated the impact of applying dimensionality reduction using principal component analysis (PCA). We assessed qualitative performance by gauging the ability to rank neurons in order of visual similarity. Moreover, we quantified information content by examining explained variance and benchmarked the ability to identify occasional duplicate reconstructions of the same specimen. The results indicate that combining summary morphometrics and persistence vectors with applied PCA provides an information rich characterization that enables efficient and precise comparison of neural morphology. The execution time scaled linearly with data set size, allowing seamless live searching through the entire NeuroMorpho.Org content in fractions of a second. We have deployed the similarity search function as an open-source online software tool both through a user-friendly graphical interface and as an API for programmatic access.

Integration of Shading Device and Semi-Circle Horizontal Light Pipe Transporter for High-Rise Office Building in Tropical Climate

The blooming of a deep open plan in office buildings is accelerated due to economic profit reasons. This hinders the utilisation of daylight despite having abundance of daylight in tropical climate. Although a light pipe (LP) provides a means to illuminate the deep interior of the space, non-uniform daylight distribution still occurs due to the high illumination contrast across the room. The integration of a shading device (SD) in a room with an LP offers a solution to create a uniform daylight distribution. In this study, daylighting performances of 5 different types of an SD with different angles were analysed through a computer simulation software, namely Integrated Environment Solution Virtual Environment. The simulation was done using overcast and intermediate sky with sun conditions. The results showed that all SD cases improved the daylight uniformity across the room. A horizontal Venetian blind with an angle of +45o and −45o showed the best qualitative performance among all the cases. However, further shading and illumination are needed respectively to increase the potential daylight utilisation in an open plan office room. This study also concluded that a vertical Venetian blind did not provide a good daylight uniformity due to the vertical nature of the SD. A design recommendation guide for building designers is proposed at the end of this study to promote the integration of an SD and an LP in deep open plan high-rise office building.

Performance-Based Rank and Remuneration University Policy for Increased Motivation and Quality

Motivation plays an immense role and is one of the key factors for successful and qualitative performance in all spheres of personal and professional engagement of individuals. Therefore, educational institutions, including academia, pay special attention to finding tools for motivating students, but also for motivation of their academic staff. Increased motivation has shown to lead to better performance and better performance inevitably contributes to quality enhancement at both individual and institutional level. The aim of this paper is to present an institutional Ranking and Remuneration (R&R) Policy based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in four areas identified as the most crucial for successful operation of a higher education institution: teaching and learning, research, staff digital profile, service to society and project-based activities. Southeast European University (SEEU) in North Macedonia has developed KPIs in these four areas through an inclusive and transparent process based on its unique Total Quality Management (TQM) approach. The policy has been created after many consultations, trials and simulations and its main objective is to enhance institutional academic productivity and effectiveness through a human resource vibration that starts from individual evaluation, motivation and performance differentiation and leads to stimulation for achieving excellence. It is at an initial stage and if tested well in practice, it can serve as a model for other higher education institutions in the country and wider.

DSTnet: Deformable Spatio-Temporal Convolutional Residual Network for Video Super-Resolution

Video super-resolution (VSR) aims at generating high-resolution (HR) video frames with plausible and temporally consistent details using their low-resolution (LR) counterparts, and neighboring frames. The key challenge for VSR lies in the effective exploitation of intra-frame spatial relation and temporal dependency between consecutive frames. Many existing techniques utilize spatial and temporal information separately and compensate motion via alignment. These methods cannot fully exploit the spatio-temporal information that significantly affects the quality of resultant HR videos. In this work, a novel deformable spatio-temporal convolutional residual network (DSTnet) is proposed to overcome the issues of separate motion estimation and compensation methods for VSR. The proposed framework consists of 3D convolutional residual blocks decomposed into spatial and temporal (2+1) D streams. This decomposition can simultaneously utilize input video’s spatial and temporal features without a separate motion estimation and compensation module. Furthermore, the deformable convolution layers have been used in the proposed model that enhances its motion-awareness capability. Our contribution is twofold; firstly, the proposed approach can overcome the challenges in modeling complex motions by efficiently using spatio-temporal information. Secondly, the proposed model has fewer parameters to learn than state-of-the-art methods, making it a computationally lean and efficient framework for VSR. Experiments are conducted on a benchmark Vid4 dataset to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed approach. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves superior quantitative and qualitative performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

SOME ASPECTS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONTEMPORARY LATVIAN TERMINOGRAPHY: CHALLENGES, SOLUTIONS, OPPORTUNITIES

While studying the state of contemporary Latvian terminography, it must be acknowledged that terminological dictionaries are issued very often. The present research examines 450 Latvian terminological dictionaries that have been published in the last 30 years. Terminological dictionaries represent 30–40 % of the entire Latvian lexicography. Their characterization has a wide variety, both in terms of the authors and publishers, in terms of language selection and in terms of target audience. In addition, there are dictionaries approved by the Terminology Commission and dictionaries that are not approved by any official institutions. There is a lack of studies on the habits and needs of term dictionary users. In addition, publications of criticism or analysis about the qualitative performance of such dictionaries are also rare and no criteria has been developed to fully analyse and evaluate the development of terminology’s theory and practice. In this article, the authors have focused on exploring the situation in order to clarify the main trends in the characteristics of the terminography of Latvia. This was done through interviews with representatives of leading publishers who confirmed that the publishing houses are losing interest in issuing terminological dictionaries and discussion with the Chairman of the Terminology Commission of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. The authors have identified the main issues in organising the terminology process and determined answers to specific questions: what determines the dictionaries’ choice and credibility factor; how is feedback sought after a new dictionary is issued; what alternatives exist in areas where terminological dictionaries have been missing for decades, etc. Finally, the study analyses the new Latvian National Terminology Portal, which has been in operation for two years, with an aim to provide information on terms and to allow everyone to participate in the process of creating new terms.