Ranking Anti-Agglomerant Efficiency for Gas Hydrates Through Molecular Dynamic Simulations

Computational and experimental methods were employed to assess the capacity of four surfactant molecules to inhibit the agglomeration of sII hydrate particles. Using both steered and non-steered Molecular Dynamics (MD), the coalescence process of a hydrate slab and a water droplet, both covered with surfactant molecules, was computationally simulated. The experimental assessment was based on rocking cell measurements, determining the minimum effective dose necessary to inhibit agglomeration. Overall, the performance ranking obtained by the simulations and the experimental measurements agreed very well. Moreover, the simulations gave additional insights that are not directly accessible via experiments, such as an analysis of the mass density profiles or the orientations of the surfactant tails. The possibility to perform systematic computational high-throughput screenings of many molecules allows an efficient funnel approach for molecular optimization and customization.

Influencing Factors of Institutional Investors Shareholding Stability

The premise for institutional investors to participate in firm innovation governance and promote firm innovation’s positive role is that institutional investors have specific decision-making power and are willing to participate in firm innovation governance. Therefore, the influencing factors of institutional investment shareholding stability are an important issue. This study investigates the impact of business connection, risk preference, policy factors, market factors, and firm factors on institutional investors’ shareholding stability using regressional analysis based on the samples of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2014 to 2017. The main findings show that institutional investors with higher business connections, risk preferences, and performance ranking intensity have poor shareholding stability. The reform has significant investment constraints on non-risk preference institutional investors but has insufficient investment constraints on risk preference institutional investors. The substitution and interaction between firm factors and the natural endowment of institutional investors occur alternately. This study’s results provide important policy implications to strengthen related business supervision between institutional investors and shareholding firms. The policy implications include relaxing the investment proportion restriction and establishing a market-oriented performance ranking and institutional investors’ evaluation mechanism.

Performance evaluation of automotive product development team members based on a PLM system: A case study of M Automotive Products Company

Based on product lifecycle management (PLM) theory and social comparison theory, this paper constructs a performance ranking model of automobile product development project team members, uses an active server provider (ASP) to develop the system, realizes the online operation and real-time analysis of the performance management system, and solves the problems of the low efficiency, low morale and unfair assessment of product development team members caused by traditional performance assessment. The performance management platform for the team members of the automotive product development project uses a PLM system to realize a systematic and standardized list of project functions and provide a performance appraisal management system that can be evaluated and fairly compared for project team members. Based on the performance appraisal practice of automotive product development project team members of M Automotive Products Company, this study verified the feasibility of the ranking model’s transformation to work habits based on the predetermined and result data of the mission completion rate, the punctuality rate and the degree of improvement of the management level of product development project team. Through the tracking of the team performance ranking function, it is found that the model can solve the problems of untimely assessment and insufficient incentives in the current traditional performance appraisal, enhance the overall enthusiasm of the team, and give full play to the subjective initiative of the team.

Themis: A Fair Evaluation Platform for Computer Vision Competitions

It has become increasingly thorny for computer vision competitions to preserve fairness when participants intentionally fine-tune their models against the test datasets to improve their performance. To mitigate such unfairness, competition organizers restrict the training and evaluation process of participants' models. However, such restrictions introduce massive computation overheads for organizers and potential intellectual property leakage for participants. Thus, we propose Themis, a framework that trains a noise generator jointly with organizers and participants to prevent intentional fine-tuning by protecting test datasets from surreptitious manual labeling. Specifically, with the carefully designed noise generator, Themis adds noise to perturb test sets without twisting the performance ranking of participants' models. We evaluate the validity of Themis with a wide spectrum of real-world models and datasets. Our experimental results show that Themis effectively enforces competition fairness by precluding manual labeling of test sets and preserving the performance ranking of participants' models.

Utility Benchmarking And Potential Savings of Multi-Unit Residential Buildings (MURBs) In Toronto

Building energy, water and solid waste benchmarking and developing meaningful performance indicators can help government and building owners to make effective decisions on improving their buildings' efficiency. For this study, information on 120 Multi-Unit Residential Buildings (MURBs) has been provided. The study entails the following steps: performing energy (weather normalized using the Princeton Scorekeeping Method (PRISM)), water, and solid waste benchmarking for the 120 MURBs, developing meaningful performance indicators; determining performance ranking; and estimating different levels of savings (energy, water, solid waste, cost, and GHG emissions). The most appropriate performance indicator and the benchmarking range for energy, water, and solid waste are as follows, energy consumption normalized by square metre, 141-580 kWh/m