You Hacked and Now What? Nolte, Alexander; Pe-Than, Ei Pa Pa; Filippova, Anna ...
Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction,
11/2018, Volume:
2, Issue:
CSCW
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Time bounded events such as hackathons, data dives, codefests, hack-days, sprints or edit-a-thons have increasingly gained attention from practitioners and researchers. Existing research, however, ...has mainly focused on the event itself, while potential outcomes of hackathons have received limited attention. Furthermore, most research around hackathons focuses on collegiate or civic events. Research around hackathons internal to tech companies, which are nearly ubiquitous, and present significant organizational, cultural, and managerial challenges, remains scarce. In this paper we address this gap by presenting findings from a case study of five teams which participated in a large scale corporate hackathon. Most team members voiced their intentions to continue the projects their worked on during the hackathon, but those whose projects did get continued were characterized by meticulous preparation, a focus on executing a shared vision during the hackathon, extended dissemination activities afterwards and a fit to existing product lines. Such teams were led by individuals who perceived the hackathon as an opportunity to bring their idea to life and advance their careers, and who recruited teams who had a strong interest in the idea and in learning the skills necessary to contribute efficiently. Our analysis also revealed that individual team members perceived hackathon participation to have positive effects on their career parts, networks and skill development.
We are rapidly approaching an inflection point in the adoption of electric vehicles on the roads. All major automotive companies are having well-funded plans for mass market affordable branded EV ...product line models, which can open the floodgates. A rapid growth of battery energy density, accompanied by an aggressive progress of reduction of costs of lithium-ion batteries, brings safety concerns. While more energy stored in the battery pack of an EV translates to a longer range, the downside is that accidents will be more violent due to battery inevitable explosion. With today's technology, severe crashes involving intrusion into the battery pack will potentially result in a thermal runaway, fire, and explosion.
Most of research on lithium-ion batteries have been concerned with the electrochemistry of cells. However, in most cases failure and thermal runaway is caused by mechanical loading due to crash events. There is a growing need to summarize the already published results on mechanical loading and response of batteries and offer a critical evaluation of work in progress. The objective of this paper is to present such review with a discussion of many outstanding issues and outline of a roadmap for future research.
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•Recent progresses in the safety-focused mechanical modeling of LIBs are reviewed.•Multi-scales: micro/meso (material), macro (cell), and macro-system (module, pack).•Reviewing detailed/homogenized/RVE FE models, material models, & analytical models.•Experiments at component/cell/module levels are summarized.
•Highlighting supply abundance enhances attraction to small-assortment retailers.•Assortment curation attenuates the effect of highlighting supply abundance.•Sense of personal control underlies the ...effect of perceived supply abundance.
Over the past few years, traditional big-box retailers such as Walmart and Target have increasingly opened small-format stores. Venturing into small-format retailing requires a rethink of product assortment, as this strategy involves truncating assortment variety. Literature suggests that consumers are less attracted by retailers that offer a small variety of product options, as small assortments are associated with the fear of not having much choice, which threatens consumers’ need for personal control. The present paper provides small-size retailers or service providers with an approach to enhance the attractiveness of their assortments. With six studies the authors show that highlighting supply abundance—by creating a sense of abundant availability of each product option within an assortment—compensates for the lowered sense of personal control that consumers may experience with a small assortment. Consequently, it enhances consumers’ evaluation of small assortments. The positive effect of supply abundance is mitigated when consumers review a large assortment or when product options are highly curated, as sense of personal control has likely been satisfied in those cases.
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We document how demand shocks in export markets lead French multiproduct exporters to reallocate the mix of products sold in those destinations. In response to positive demand shocks, French firms ...skew their export sales toward their best-performing products. We develop a theoretical model of multiproduct firms and derive the specific demand conditions (with endogenous price elasticities) needed to generate these product-mix reallocations. Under those demand conditions, the increased competition from demand shocks in export markets also induces productivity changes within the firm. We empirically test for this connection between demand shocks and the productivity of multiproduct firms. We find that this connection is economically substantial.
Harvesting energy from natural resources is of significant interest because of their abundance and sustainability. Seawater is the most abundant natural resource on earth, covering two‐thirds of the ...surface. The rechargeable seawater battery is a new energy storage platform that enables interconversion of electrical energy and chemical energy by tapping into seawater as an infinite medium. Here, an overview of the research and development activities of seawater batteries toward practical applications is presented. Seawater batteries consist of anode and cathode compartments that are separated by a Na‐ion conducting membrane, which allows only Na+ ion transport between the two electrodes. The roles and drawbacks of the three key components, as well as the development concept and operation principles of the batteries on the basis of previous reports are covered. Moreover, the prototype manufacturing lines for mass production and automation, and potential applications, particularly in marine environments are introduced. Highlighting the importance of engineering the cell components, as well as optimizing the system level for a particular application and thereby successful market entry, the key issues to be resolved are discussed, so that the seawater battery can emerge as a promising alternative to existing rechargeable batteries.
Rechargeable seawater batteries tap into earth‐abundant natural seawater as the active material to transform between electrical energy and chemical energy. The progress, challenges, and prospects of seawater batteries for practical applications are summarized.
The “visual preference heuristic” suggests that consumers prefer visual to verbal depiction of information in a product assortment. Images produce greater perceptions of variety than text, which is ...appealing in assortment selection, but can result in choice complexity and overload when choice sets are large and preferences are unknown, suggesting a moderator for Iyengar and Lepper’s results. Eye-tracking results reveal that the natural gestalt processing of individual visual stimuli, as compared to the piecemeal processing of individual textual stimuli, affects the processing of the assortment as a whole with visual (compared to verbal) presentation facilitating a faster, though more haphazard, scanning of the assortment. While the less systematic processing that results from visual presentation feels easier, it is not ideal for larger assortments resulting in higher complexity ratings and choice overload than with text depiction. These findings reveal that, like many heuristics, preference for visual depiction may be overapplied.
•Clean meat is a novel cell culture application with high growth potential.•Technologies developed for cell-based therapy are highly applicable to clean meat.•Opportunities to address needs that are ...unique to clean meat are highlighted.•Concerted efforts to streamline R&D are needed to accelerate commercialization.
Clean meat (meat grown in cell culture rather than obtained from animal slaughter) is an emerging biotechnology industry that will ameliorate the serious environmental, sustainability, global public health, and animal welfare concerns of industrial animal agriculture. While many technologies and products developed for the cell therapy industry can already be applied to clean meat, significant opportunities exist to expand product lines to supply this emerging industry. Large-scale cell culture for clean meat production presents a number of unique requirements that are not currently met by existing products and processes from the biomedical industry − most notably related to cost constraints and scale requirements. Developing these tools for clean meat would simultaneously advance the technology and reduce costs for biomedical and therapeutic applications. We will discuss new applications of current biomedical products and manufacturing methods for clean meat, as well as opportunities for synergistic product development through partnerships between academic researchers, established industry players in cell-based therapeutics, and the emerging clean meat industry.
We study a class of assortment optimization problems where customers choose among the offered products according to the nested logit model. There is a fixed revenue associated with each product. The ...objective is to find an assortment of products to offer so as to maximize the expected revenue per customer. We show that the problem is polynomially solvable when the nest dissimilarity parameters of the choice model are less than one and the customers always make a purchase within the selected nest. Relaxing either of these assumptions renders the problem NP-hard. To deal with the NP-hard cases, we develop parsimonious collections of candidate assortments with worst-case performance guarantees. We also formulate a convex program whose optimal objective value is an upper bound on the optimal expected revenue. Thus, we can compare the expected revenue provided by an assortment with the upper bound on the optimal expected revenue to get a feel for the optimality gap of the assortment. By using this approach, our computational experiments test the performance of the parsimonious collections of candidate assortments that we develop.
We consider an online retailer facing heterogeneous customers with initially unknown product preferences. Customers are characterized by a diverse set of demographic and transactional attributes. The ...retailer can personalize the customers’ assortment offerings based on available profile information to maximize cumulative revenue. To that end, the retailer must estimate customer preferences by observing transaction data. This, however, may require a considerable amount of data and time given the broad range of customer profiles and large number of products available. At the same time, the retailer can aggregate (pool) purchasing information among customers with similar product preferences to expedite the learning process. We propose a
dynamic clustering
policy that estimates customer preferences by adaptively adjusting customer segments (clusters of customers with similar preferences) as more transaction information becomes available. We test the proposed approach with a case study based on a data set from a large Chilean retailer. The case study suggests that the benefits of the dynamic clustering policy under the MNL model can be substantial and result (on average) in more than 37% additional transactions compared to a
data-intensive
policy that treats customers independently and in more than 27% additional transactions compared to a
linear-utility
policy that assumes that product mean utilities are linear functions of available customer attributes. We support the insights derived from the numerical experiments by analytically characterizing settings in which pooling transaction information is beneficial for the retailer, in a simplified version of the problem. We also show that there are diminishing marginal returns to pooling information from an increasing number of customers.
The online appendix is available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2018.3031
.
This paper was accepted by Gad Allon, operations management.
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