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The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of CaCO₃ nanoparticles on the mechanical properties, and mixed-mode fracture behavior of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene 3D printed samples with different internal architectures.

The nanocomposite filaments have been fabricated by a melt-blending technique. The standard tensile, compact tension and special fracture test samples, named Arcan specimens, have been printed at constant extrusion parameters and at four different internal patterns. A special fixture was used to carry out the mixed-mode fracture tests of Arcan samples. Finite element analyses using the J-integral method were performed to calculate the fracture toughness of such samples. The fractographic observations were used to evaluate the mechanism of fracture at different concentrations of nanoparticles.

The addition of CaCO₃ nanoparticles has resulted in a significant increase in the fracture loading of the samples, although this increase was not consistent for all the filling patterns, being more significant for samples with linear and triangular structures. According to the fractographic observations, the creation of uniformly distributed microvoids due to the blunting effect of nanoparticles and 3D stress state at the crack tip in the samples with linear and triangular structures justify the enhancement in the fracture loading by the addition of CaCO₃ nanoparticles in the matrix.

There is a significant gap in the knowledge of the effects of different nanoparticles in the polymer samples produced by the fused filament fabrication process. One of such nanoparticles is an inorganic CaCO₃ nanoparticle that has been frequently used as nanofillers to improve the thermomechanical properties of thermoplastic polymers. Here, experimental and numerical studies have been conducted to investigate the effects of such nanoadditives on the mechanical and fracture behavior of 3D printed samples.

How organizations view, value and manage their place architecture in relation to identification and corporate identity has received little research attention. The main goal of this paper is to provide an integrative understanding of the relationships between corporate identity, place architecture, and identification from a multi-disciplinary approach. It is assumed that the characteristics of the organization and of the way a corporate identity and place architecture are managed will affect employees’ and consumers’ identification.

The paper uses a theory-building case study within the phenomenological/qualitative research tradition. The data were gathered through 15 in-depth interviews with top management who were working at a London-Based Business School. In addition, six focus groups were conducted with a total of 36 academics, and new empirical insights are offered. NVivo software was used to gain insight into the various influences and relationships.

Drawing on one case study, the findings confirm that firms are using the conceptualizations of corporate identity and place architecture, including the leveraging of tangible and intangible forms of consumers’/employees’ identification, toward a university business school. The insights from a single, exploratory, case study might not be generalizable.

The relationships between corporate identity, place architecture and identification have received little research attention and have hardly been studied at all from the perspective of this paper. This paper has value to researchers in the fields of marketing, corporate identity, place architecture, design, as well as professionals involved in managing a company’s architecture. Drawing on the marketing/management theory of identity and architecture alignment, managers and policy advisors should devote attention to each element of the corporate identity and place architecture and ensure that they are meaningful, as well as in dynamic alignment.

This paper aims to provide an introductory overview of internal business intelligence (BI) and the role that technology plays in its management and exploitation. BI represents the tools and systems that play a key role in the strategic planning process of a corporation, allowing the integration of applications, databases, software and hardware essential to users and enabling the analysis of information to optimise decision-making.

In reviewing the existing literature, this paper examines the core components, current trends and operational issues of a typical internal BI system architecture. The implications of these trends and their effects on business processes and culture are also explored.

The successful implementation of an internal BI system should include the core components and address operational issues, whilst also providing meaningful output to the organisation. It is contended, however, that to be truly successful, the internal BI system must be embedded within organisational processes and be adaptable to changing technologies, allowing the exploitation of the organisation’s internal BI.

This general review is the first to provide a high-level overview of internal BI and explores the role of technology in the management and exploitation of internal BI.

The purpose of this paper is to present a topology-based tissue scaffold design methodology to accurately represent the heterogeneous internal architecture of tissues/organs.

An image analysis technique is used that digitizes the topology information contained in medical images of tissues/organs. A weighted topology reconstruction algorithm is implemented to represent the heterogeneity with parametric functions. The parametric functions are then used to map the spatial material distribution following voxelization. The generated chronological information yields hierarchical tool-path points which are directly transferred to the three-dimensional (3D) bio-printer through a proposed generic platform called Application Program Interface (API). This seamless data corridor between design (virtual) and fabrication (physical) ensures the manufacturability of personalized heterogeneous porous scaffold structure without any CAD/STL file.

The proposed methodology is implemented to verify the effectiveness of the approach and the designed example structures are bio-fabricated with a deposition-based bio-additive manufacturing system. The designed and fabricated heterogeneous structures are evaluated which shows conforming porosity distribution compared to uniform method.

In bio-fabrication process, the generated bio-models with boundary representation (B-rep) or surface tessellation (mesh) do not capture the internal architectural information. This paper provides a design methodology for scaffold structure mimicking the native tissue/organ architecture and direct fabricating the structure without reconstructing the CAD model. Therefore, designing and direct bio-printing the heterogeneous topology of tissue scaffolds from medical images minimize the disparity between the internal architecture of target tissue and its scaffold.

The purpose of this work is to bridge FL and blockchain technology through designing a blockchain-based smart agent system architecture and applying in FL. and blockchain technology through designing a blockchain-based smart agent system architecture and applying in FL. FL is an emerging collaborative machine learning technique that trains a model across multiple devices or servers holding private data samples without exchanging their data. The locally trained results are aggregated by a centralized server in a privacy-preserving way. However, there is an assumption where the centralized server is trustworthy, which is impractical. Fortunately, blockchain technology has opened a new era of data exchange among trustless strangers because of its decentralized architecture and cryptography-supported techniques.

In this study, the author proposes a novel design of a smart agent inspired by the smart contract concept. Specifically, based on the proposed smart agent, a fully decentralized, privacy-preserving and fair deep learning blockchain-FL framework is designed, where the agent network is consistent with the blockchain network and each smart agent is a participant in the FL task. During the whole training process, both the data and the model are not at the risk of leakage.

A demonstration of the proposed architecture is designed to train a neural network. Finally, the implementation of the proposed architecture is conducted in the Ethereum development, showing the effectiveness and applicability of the design.

The author aims to investigate the feasibility and practicality of linking the three areas together, namely, multi-agent system, FL and blockchain. A blockchain-FL framework, which is based on a smart agent system, has been proposed. The author has made several contributions to the state-of-the-art. First of all, a concrete design of a smart agent model is proposed, inspired by the smart contract concept in blockchain. The smart agent is autonomous and is able to disseminate, verify the information and execute the supported protocols. Based on the proposed smart agent model, a new architecture composed by these agents is formed, which is a blockchain network. Then, a fully decentralized, privacy-preserving and smart agent blockchain-FL framework has been proposed, where a smart agent acts as both a peer in a blockchain network and a participant in a FL task at the same time. Finally, a demonstration to train an artificial neural network is implemented to prove the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Digital technologies create myriad innovation opportunities and have inspired the establishment of many new start-ups in recent years. Despite the growing knowledge on digital entrepreneurship, few studies explore how start-ups exploit these opportunities to achieve entrepreneurial success. The purpose of this paper is to explore start-ups’ capabilities for successful delivery of digital artefacts in a cloud computing infrastructure.

Empirical data were collected during a qualitative case study of an established start-up in the Chinese market by interviewing 41 interviewees. Informed by the notion of dynamic capabilities and using the Gioia methodology, the case firm's life cycle was analysed in detail.

The study identifies start-ups’ ordinary and dynamic capabilities for successful development and delivery of digital services. The findings provide insights into a portfolio of start-ups’ capabilities, namely adaptation, networking, reengineering and refinement.

The study suggests that start-ups’ capabilities and underlying entrepreneurial actions determine the degree to which adoption of digital technologies create and transfer value to customers. The study offers specific insights into how start-ups successfully develop and deliver digital artefacts in a cloud infrastructure based on entrepreneurs' prior expertise, vision and accumulated experience.

Draws together a number of themes from mainstream strategy literature and synthesizes them into a new model of the comprehensively competent organization. Argues that it is a key role of the strategic leader to ensure that his/her organization possesses a wide range of generic competences (to an appropriate degree in each case) in order that the organization can develop and sustain more specific competences in learning, change management and product/service competitive competency. These “layers of competence” are illustrated in the form of an integrated web. While it is content competences which ultimately produce successful competitive outcomes, other competences in learning and change management are needed to support this. The competence implications of modern environments are discussed and, towards the end of the article, the generic competence argument is applied to the literature on business failure.

A consensus is emerging that the key to competitive success is becoming the ability to create, leverage, maintain and develop specialised knowledge, competencies and intellectual resources. However, little is actually known about the creation, management, utilisation and valuation of such resources. Although a concept such as intellectual capital cannot be precisely defined, this should not prevent us from employing it in an era where the intangible is rapidly assuming economic, social and psychological supremacy over the tangible. Moving beyond objectivist and purely systems theoretic approaches, our point of departure in exploring this emergent dynamic, with implications for people management and accountancy, is the set of symmetric and reciprocal relations presupposed in Habermas’ concept of communicative action.

The purpose of this work is to propose quad wheel robot with path navigation using an intelligent novel algorithm named as obstacle-avoiding intelligent algorithm (OAIA).

The paper proposes OAIA algorithm, which is used to minimize the path distance and elapsed time between source and goal.

The hardware implementation of the Quad Wheel Robot design includes a global positioning system (GPS) module for path navigation. An ultrasonic module (HC SR04) is mainly used as the sensing unit for the system. In the proposed scheme, the GPS locator (L80) is used to obtain the current location of the robot, and the ultrasonic sensor is utilized to avoid the obstacles. An ARM processor serves as the heart of the Quad Wheel Robot.

This paper includes real-time implementation of quad wheel robot for various coordinate values, and the movement of the robot is captured and analysed.

The proposed OAIA is capable of estimating the mobile robot position exactly under ideal circumstances. Simulation and hardware implementation are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed system.