Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2002.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-56).
This electronic version was submitted ...by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Local area networks (LANs) nowadays use optical fiber as the medium of communication. This fiber is used to connect a collection of electro-optic nodes which form network clouds. A network cloud is a distribution network that connects several external nodes to the backbone, and often takes the form of a star or tree. Optical stars and trees have expensive and inefficient recovery schemes, and as a result, are not attractive options when designing networks. In order to solve this problem, we introduce a virtual topology that makes use of the robustness that is inherently present in a metropolitan area network (MAN) or wide area network (WAN) (long haul network). The virtual topology uses a folded bus scheme and includes some of the elements of the real topology (architecture). By optically bypassing some of the router/switch nodes in the physical architecture, the virtual topology yields better recovery performance and more efficient systems (with respect to cost related to bandwidth and recoverability). We present a bus overlay which uses simple access nodes and is robust to single failures. Our architecture allows the use of existing optical backbone infrastructure. We consider a linear folded bus architecture and introduce a T-shaped folded bus. Although buses are generally not able to recover from failures, we propose a loopback approach. Our approach allows optical bypass of some routers during normal operation, thus reducing the load on routers, but makes use of routers in case of failures. We analyze the behavior of our linear and T-shaped systems under average use and failure conditions. We show that certain simple characteristics of the traffic matrix give meaningful performance characterization. We show that our architecture provides solutions which limit loads on the router.
by Ari Levon Libarikian.
S.M.
Driven by a combination of rapid development of technology and medical science, market demand, government policy, and financial pressures, the evolution toward new business models (for example, ...next-gen managed care, the simultaneous fragmentation of sites of care, integration of care around the patient, consolidation of care delivery institutions, technology-enabled healthcare services businesses) is already underway. ...the growth of managed care in Medicare (Medicare Advantage) and Medicaid has shifted the industry since the global financial crisis. About the authors Shubham Singhal, a senior partner in the Detroit office, is the global leader of the Healthcare, Public Sector and Social Sector practices.
...if a CEO isn’t ready to commit, it’s probably better for the company not to pursue a new business. sidebar 1 Competing priorities mean that CEOs need to be conscious of the unique aspects of their ...role as chief executive that allow them to have the greatest impact on building new businesses (see sidebar, “CEO traits and behaviors that support a new business”). ...business-as-usual protocols and processes can pose a significant danger to the new business and require the CEO’s active intervention. ...onboarding a vendor for the new business went from three and a half months to three and a half weeks. With that grounding, the CEO should work to mold a governance model that incorporates focused oversight aimed at enabling the new business, providing explicit authority for the new entity to make decisions (often through a venture board), and installing a funding mechanism in which the budget is released based on meeting specific KPIs. 3.
...it frees traditional companies from doing some of the most complicated technical work by themselves—they can partner with major cloud service providers. ...these companies’ long-standing practices ...in product management, funding, governance, and performance management may be hindrances to launching SaaS businesses. The Washington Post Company embraced this co-creation approach when it decided to offer its proprietary content-management system, Arc XP, as a SaaS product. Human-capital-management software provider Workday focused from the beginning on separating out its platform development from its application development so it could scale.
First let’s consider why and when a traditional insurer—both life and P&C property and casualty—should build a new business. Lloyd’s insurance market has been around, I think, since the 17th century ...and has been remarkably resilient to disruption over the years of all sorts of new technology and, frankly, has been dominated for decades by just a handful of pretty well-established players with relatively few new entrances versus other industries. ...I think the world’s now changing pretty fast for the sector, driven largely by new technology and data, making it possible to transform not just the core underwriting part of the industry but also how policies are distributed, how claims are managed, and how you serve clients and customers in new ways that could lower risk, increase engagement, and lower your cost to serve. ...I think we see four different models today in insurance of new digital businesses.
...all the technologies required above already exist, and many are available to consumers. By 2030, the proportion of autonomous vehicles on the road could exceed 25 percent, having grown from 10 ...percent just four years earlier.2 Carriers will need to understand how the increasing presence of robotics in everyday life and across industries will shift risk pools, change customer expectations, and enable new products and channels. Advances in cognitive technologies Convolutional neural networks and other deep learning technologies currently used primarily for image, voice, and unstructured text processing will evolve to be applied in a wide variety of applications. Furthermore, products are disaggregated substantially into microcoverage elements (for example, phone battery insurance, flight delay insurance, different coverage for a washer and dryer within the home) that consumers can customize to their particular needs, with the ability to instantaneously compare prices from various carriers for their individualized baskets of insurance products.
...during the past decade, the market for directors-and-officers-liability insurance endured waves of litigation—and subsequent spikes in claims—resulting from shock events like the financial crisis, ...the Madoff scandal, and new regulations governing options backdating. In life insurance, similarly, data and analytics have not yet been able to replicate the rigor of biometric underwriting, though external data (for example, credit scores and motor-vehicle records) are widely used to supplement underwriting. ...as with personal auto, credit scores for small-business owners have proved to be a source of insight about management attitudes, which indirectly indicate a company’s riskiness. ...improved capabilities for mining existing data would generate significant value. ...SPSS and even SAS are quickly being displaced by more modern, versatile open-source languages like Julia, Python, and R. There are also new platforms—such as Hadoop, Spark, and Storm—with higher processing capabilities that can handle real-time, unstructured data.
...our research shows that only 19 percent of newly launched insurance businesses have become viable large-scale enterprises. In the United States, Europe, and Asia, insurers’ TSR performance trailed ...that of the financial sector as a whole in most years from 2016 to 2021. ...emerging value pools—such as cyber in P&C and middle-market consumers in life and retirement—have yet to be addressed at scale. Insurers could provide adaptation and resilience services to help corporations deal with climate impacts, or they could even partner with investors on major carbon-reduction capital projects such as wind farms to build a loss history and adequate underwriting capabilities. Additional ecosystem ideas that could help carriers serve underserved segments include the following: packaging bundled auto or travel insurance products such as car sharing, car parking, and health tourism for specific digital platforms to pass group discounts on to consumers integrating insurance with housing appraisal, sales, and local-government property registry sites to track buyer activity and offer homeowner’s insurance based on the building and zip code history partnering with digital banks to offer discounted general liability insurance for microbusiness customers and upselling other small-business services through the digital-banking marketplace as needs evolve developing the equivalent of Apple Care for big machinery to be offered on primary or secondary market sites partnering with coworking spaces to offer bundled group health benefits providing custodial wallet insurance to blockchain marketplaces to protect customers against breach of wallets Lagging customer experience.
...over 45 percent of them outperform the market, while only 30 percent that don’t make new businesses a top three priority do the same. Faster moving and leaner than their predecessors, these ...incumbents have opportunities to leapfrog disruptors given their extensive existing customer bases, strong balance sheets capable of funding new ventures, and cash flow to remain competitively viable. An incumbent typically has an existing customer base, a balance sheet to fund new ventures, cash flow that provides working capital, a strong brand to reach wide audiences, and subject-matter experts with deep knowledge. Business building for incumbents is not easy While long-time industry players enjoy some key advantages over start-ups in understanding the automotive “lay of the land,” our analysis shows that many will likely fail to build successful new businesses that scale for several key reasons.
