Agile RF (United States)

Modern supply chains have become increasingly complex due to factors such as mergers, acquisitions, the rise of omnichannel strategies, and market volatility. To effectively serve this diverse customer base and manage various products, markets, and channels profitably, businesses need a closed-loop Integrated Business Planning process wherein diverse internal and external stakeholders—such as sales, marketing, development, operations, sourcing, finance, transportation, warehousing and trading partners—collaborate inside a formalized structure to formulate a cohesive corporate strategy. A closed-loop IBP process can integrate social, news, events, and weather (SNEW) data, demand sensing, and advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). This approach enables companies to gather real-time signals from digital sources, allowing for agile, automated, responsive, and flexible decision-making. By leveraging AI and ML for predictive and prescriptive analytics, organizations can quickly adjust their plans through a continuously adaptive, self-learning IBP process.

Early warning decision support tools to identify clinical deterioration in the hospital are widely used, but there is little information on their comparative performance. To compare 3 proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) early warning scores and 3 publicly available simple aggregated weighted scores. This retrospective cohort study was performed at 7 hospitals in the Yale New Haven Health System. All consecutive adult medical-surgical ward hospital encounters between March 9, 2019, and November 9, 2023, were included. Simultaneous Epic Deterioration Index (EDI), Rothman Index (RI), eCARTv5 (eCART), Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS), National Early Warning Score (NEWS), and NEWS2 scores. Clinical deterioration, defined as a transfer from ward to intensive care unit or death within 24 hours of an observation. Of the 362 926 patient encounters (median patient age, 64 [IQR, 47-77] years; 200 642 [55.3%] female), 16 693 (4.6%) experienced a clinical deterioration event. eCART had the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve at 0.895 (95% CI, 0.891-0.900), followed by NEWS2 at 0.831 (95% CI, 0.826-0.836), NEWS at 0.829 (95% CI, 0.824-0.835), RI at 0.828 (95% CI, 0.823-0.834), EDI at 0.808 (95% CI, 0.802-0.812), and MEWS at 0.757 (95% CI, 0.750-0.764). After matching scores at the moderate-risk sensitivity level for a NEWS score of 5, overall positive predictive values (PPVs) ranged from a low of 6.3% (95% CI, 6.1%-6.4%) for an EDI score of 41 to a high of 17.3% (95% CI, 16.9%-17.8%) for an eCART score of 94. Matching scores at the high-risk specificity of a NEWS score of 7 yielded overall PPVs ranging from a low of 14.5% (95% CI, 14.0%-15.2%) for an EDI score of 54 to a high of 23.3% (95% CI, 22.7%-24.2%) for an eCART score of 97. The moderate-risk thresholds provided a median of at least 20 hours of lead time for all the scores. Median lead time at the high-risk threshold was 11 (IQR, 0-69) hours for eCART, 8 (IQR, 0-63) hours for NEWS, 6 (IQR, 0-62) hours for NEWS2, 5 (IQR, 0-56) hours for MEWS, 1 (IQR, 0-39) hour for EDI, and 0 (IQR, 0-42) hours for RI. In this cohort study of inpatient encounters, eCART outperformed the other AI and non-AI scores, identifying more deteriorating patients with fewer false alarms and sufficient time to intervene. NEWS, a non-AI, publicly available early warning score, significantly outperformed EDI. Given the wide variation in accuracy, additional transparency and oversight of early warning tools may be warranted.

This Paper investigates the mutually beneficial relationship between cloud computing and machine learning's (ML) explosive growth.It looks at how cloud platforms have aided in the spread of machine learning applications, promoting innovation and scalability across a range of sectors.

The catastrophic impact of Hurricane Dorian in September 2019 was unprecedented for the island of Grand Bahama. Flooding in the western portion of the island damaged pine ecosystems, inundated the soil and groundwater with salt water, and disrupted potable water service throughout the island. More than two years post-Hurricane Dorian, the freshwater lenses that the island relies on for potable water are still inundated with salt water. This collaborative paper summarizes all efforts of researchers and practitioners to evaluate the freshwater lenses, as well as their associated ecosystems, that serve as the main source of drinking water for the island of Grand Bahama. Hydrogeologic and vegetation assessments were conducted on the two primary wellfields that provide 95% of the drinking water to the island, over the span of two and a half years from the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Dorian through present day. While salinity and total dissolved solid concentrations in groundwater have declined, present levels indicate that the full recovery of the freshwater lenses may take decades. Forest assessments indicate that in Wellfield 6, which was the primary source of potable water pre-Hurricane Dorian, the pine forests suffered significant damage with complete pine mortality and little regeneration of pine trees occurring, which could impact the underlying freshwater lens. Lessons learned from this event underscore the vulnerability of water resources in The Bahamas and the critical need for adaptation strategies to improve resilience to future extreme events and climate change.

If change is a process and people are critical to successfully implementing or following the change, then, how can middle management lead their teams effectively to contribute to strategic objectives without getting lost in the labyrinth of leadership schools and theories? This article places a simple direction to action-oriented leadership. It builds on the construct of qualifying (adverb) actions (verbs) on an object (noun). This simplistic leadership framework is called SLEEP - Swiftly Lead Energize and Empower People.

RESUMO: A construcao civil e o principal consumidor de recursos naturais do planeta. Assim, o desenvolvimento de materiais que utilizam materias-primas alternativas, tais como o residuo proveniente do corte de marmore granito (RCMG) pode resultar em solucoes satisfatorias do ponto de vista tecnico-economico e ambiental. Neste sentido, o RCMG, gerado pelas industrias de processamento de rochas ornamentais para a utilizacao na construcao civil, foi devidamente caracterizado e adicionado as argamassas simples (cimento Portland e areia) e as argamassas industrializadas, nos teores de 0% (referencia), 1,4%, 2,8% e 4,2% em relacao a massa total de materiais secos. A seguir, analisaram-se as propriedades no estado aplicado: dureza superficial (NBR 7584/1995), resistencia de aderencia a tracao (NBR 13528/2010) e absorcao de agua sob-baixa pressao ao longo do tempo, (metodo 11.4 - RILEM). A adicao do RCMG as argamassas mostrou-se satisfatoria, atingindo-se os melhores resultados quando adicionado um teor de 2,8% e 1,4% as argamassas simples e as argamassas industrializadas, respectivamente. Palavras chave: Argamassa. Residuo de marmore e granito. Filler .

This paper describes a model, ASKNEXT, for connecting agents using social networks for knowledge exchanges using email. It proposes a protocol and a mathematical model to understand how emails spread throughout social networks of agents and people, which can be used to predict the scalability of agents exchanging emails to find answers to questions.

This paper describes a user-interaction design process created and used by a consultant to solve two challenges: (1) how to decrease the need for changes in the user interface by subsequent system releases without doing big design up-front and (2) how to apply a structured user-interaction design process no matter when brought into a project or what software methodology was being used. The four design levels in the process parallel Beck and Fowler’s four planning levels described in their book Planning Extreme Programming. The design process is called “GAINS” because the user-interaction designer has only Attraction, Information and Navigation to connect users’ Goals with the project sponsors’ criteria for Success. Thus there are five questions, one for each letter of the acronym GAINS, asked at each of four levels of design: The first two design levels, Rough Plan and Big Plan, focus on business-process actions and objects that define users’ goals. The next two levels, Release Planning and Iteration Planning, focus on the user interface objects that support the tasks necessary to achieve those goals. Release Planning identifies the displays the user sees for each goal included in that release, and also the across-display navigation for the proposed functionality. Iteration Planning focuses at a lower level of interaction, such as the within-display navigation among ontrols. For a voice system, the word “sees” would be changed to “hears,” but the design rocess and the levels of focus are the same for user interfaces that are vision output (e.g., GUIs), voice output (e.g., VRs), or multimodal.

Projects combining agile methods with CMMI1 are more successful in producing higher quality software that more effectively meets customer needs at a faster pace. Systematic Software Engineering works at CMMI level 5 and uses lean Software Development as a driver for optimizing software processes. Early pilot projects at Systematic showed productivity on Scrum teams almost twice that of traditional teams. Other projects demonstrated a story based test driven approach to software development reduced defects found during final test by 40%. We assert that Scrum and CMMI together bring a more powerful combination of adaptability and predictability than either one alone and suggest how other companies can combine them.

Most significant software processes involve a wide range of disciplines, from programming to testing, and from documentation to database development. Unfortunately, processes are typically presented from the point of view of programmers, with the other disciplines often left feeling excluded and disenfranchised. One such discipline is that of user experience design (often abbreviated UED), a discipline encompassing several key specialties including user research, interface design, visual design and usability testing. UED activities span the full lifecycle of product development from early requirements analysis to construction and testing, spanning both large scale system issues and detailed components, with its work products forming key inputs and deliverables of many development activities. In this experience report, we discuss the author's coaching experiences integrating sophisticated UED practices into the process initiatives of several organizations. His background is initially that of a programmer and later that of an process coach, and we'll explore his journey understanding UED practices and how they map to popular processes, mainly in agile software development with Scrum by K. Schwaber and M. Beedle (2002) and programming in extreme programming explained: embrace change by K. Beck (2000). We'll chronicle the teams' struggles to come to grips with the often programming centric orientation of processes, and their ongoing efforts to integrate their UED best practices into the incremental, collaborative world of processes.