Husqvarna (Sweden)

Context: IoT standards are vital for interoperability and longevity, with Open Source Software (OSS) implementations preventing vendor lock-in. These implementations form vast software ecosystems on platforms like GitHub, where industrial participation is crucial. Goal: This study characterizes industrial involvement (participation, leadership, collaboration) across the software ecosystems of four IoT standards (LwM2M, NB-IoT, CoAP, Zigbee) from different standards-setting organizations. It also investigates how software licensing, particularly OSS licenses, reflects and shapes this involvement. Method: We analyzed software projects related to these standards that are publicly available on the GitHub platform, examining authorship of commits, bug reports, pull requests, and metadata like licenses. We identified organizational affiliations (corporate or academic) of contributors to assess their presence and leadership. We performed a licensing analysis to understand the legal frameworks governing these projects. Results: Our research shows significant diversity in ecosystem scale and activity, with a consistent pattern of major corporate and organizational leadership in highly active projects. Despite robust institutional involvement, a pervasive issue is the widespread absence of explicit software licenses, even in collaborative and active repositories. When licenses are present, permissive OSS licenses (e.g., Apache-2.0, MIT) dominate. This indicates a complex and often ambiguous legal landscape. Conclusion: IoT standard ecosystem growth is driven by established organizations. Addressing the prevalent lack of licensing is crucial for fostering clearer collaboration, mitigating legal risks, and ensuring long-term sustainability and adoption of these foundational technologies.

The use of automation is reshaping tasks in diverse industries, leading to increased productivity and efficiency. The manufacturing sector, in particular, has enjoyed significant advantages from automation, including enhanced quality control, waste reduction, and improved worker safety. However, while the advantages of automation in manufacturing are clear, the implementation of automation in complex manufacturing processes is not without its challenges. One such challenge is ensuring adaptability to new products. In addition, the initial investment for automation in manufacturing processes often presents a significant financial difficulty, particularly in the areas of engineering, design, and programming. The aim of this paper is to provide flexible solutions that can be adopted on any manufacturing line within a short timeframe. This type of flexible solution is referred to as Automation Packaged Solution (APS). APSs involve the deployment of robotic systems and vision technologies to automate specific tasks. The key advantage of these flexible solutions is their ability to adapt to the introduction of new products into the production line without the need for extensive reengineering and reprogramming. The approach involves designing detailed computer simulations based on the initial solutions and bringing the solution to life through an offline commissioning method. In this research, a case study was conducted at a manufacturing plant in Sweden, where two APSs were introduced to their assembly line: Precise screwing and accurate application of product labeling. These APSs play a crucial role in facilitating rapid upgrades and adjustments to automation systems, especially considering the diverse range of product models. This adaptability reduces the time and resources required for reconfiguration and contributes to enhanced operational efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and more sustainable manufacturing solutions. Moreover, it opens up the possibility of transferring these APSs to another production line if the need arises.

Software reference implementations of ICT standards have an important role for verifying that a standard is implementable, supporting interoperability testing among other implementations, and providing feedback to the standard development process. Providing reference implementations and widely used implementations of a standard as Open Source Software promotes wide deployment in software systems, interoperability, longevity of systems and associated digital assets, and avoidance of different lock-in effects. In this paper results are reported on the availability of, and perceptions and practices concerning, reference implementations and widely deployed implementations provided as Open Source Software for standards issued by different standards setting organisations. Specifically, findings draw from observations and analyses related to software implementations for identified standards and policy statements, issued by ETSI, IEC, IEEE, IETF, ISO, ITU-T, OASIS, and W3C.

In this article the affiliation details for Simon Butler, Jonas Gamalielsson, and Björn Lundell were incorrectly given as '

Image-level weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) reduces the usually vast data annotation cost by surrogate segmentation masks during training. The typical approach involves training an image classification network using global average pooling (GAP) on convolutional feature maps. This enables the estimation of object locations based on class activation maps (CAMs), which identify the importance of image regions. The CAMs are then used to generate pseudo-labels, in the form of segmentation masks, to supervise a segmentation model in the absence of pixel-level ground truth. Our work is based on two techniques for improving CAMs; importance sampling, which is a substitute for GAP, and the feature similarity loss, which utilizes a heuristic that object contours almost always align with color edges in images. However, both are based on the multinomial posterior with softmax, and implicitly assume that classes are mutually exclusive, which turns out suboptimal in our experiments. Thus, we reformulate both techniques based on binomial posteriors of multiple independent binary problems. This has two benefits; their performance is improved and they become more general, resulting in an add-on method that can boost virtually any WSSS method. This is demonstrated on a wide variety of baselines on the PASCAL VOC dataset, improving the region similarity and contour quality of all implemented state-of-the-art methods. Experiments on the MS COCO dataset further show that our proposed add-on is well-suited for large-scale settings. Our code implementation is available at https://github.com/arvijj/hfpl.

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">A multi-position 4-stroke piston engine utilizing a novel rotary valve system was developed for handheld outdoor power equipment applications such as chainsaws, brush cutters, and string trimmers. The purpose of the project was to create a low-emission 4-stroke engine with 2-stroke performance levels including high RPM limits and power output. This was accomplished using a rotary valve system in lieu of the typical poppet valves of traditional 4-stroke engines. The prototype was then incorporated into a functional product for overall performance evaluation.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">Three prototype 45cc rotary valve engines were developed and tested in both real-world usage and on laboratory engine dynamometers to measure power output and emissions levels. The rotary valve system provided the ability to achieve high RPM limits without the risk of valve float, delivered improved volumetric efficiency, and exhibited lower vibration and noise levels with improved power density over traditional 4-stroke valvetrains. Additionally, the total valvetrain part count and complexity was greatly reduced over poppet valve cylinder head designs.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">This paper will discuss the goals of this exercise and the relative performance of the final prototypes.</div></div>

Introduction: Phosphorylcholine (PC), one of the main oxLDL epitopes, is an important pro-inflammatory damage associated molecular pattern. Epidemiologic data show that natural anti-PC IgM protect against cardiovascular disease. Within atherosclerotic lesions, inflammation and angiogenesis are linked via VEGFA secreting CD163 + macrophages. PC antibodies are recognized for their anti-inflammatory properties, the effect of PC antibodies on intraplaque angiogenesis (IPA) and intraplaque hemorrhage (IPH) is yet unknown. Hypothesis: Newly developed IgG1 PC antibody (PCmAb) inhibits lesion development via IPA and IPH reduction in murine vein graft atherosclerosis. Methods: Hypercholesterolemic male ApoE3*Leiden mice received a (donor) caval vein interposition in the carotid artery and weekly ip injections of (5mg/kg) PCmAb (n=11) or vehicle (n=12) until sacrifice at day 28. Vein graft morphometry and lesion composition including IPA and IPH were evaluated via immunohistochemistry. In vitro PCmAb effects were investigated in Hemoglobin (Hb):Haptoglobin(Hp)-cultured THP-1 macrophages and HUVECs. Results: PCmAb significantly decreased vein graft media area (13%), intima lesion (25%), and increased lumen area with 53% compared to vehicle. PCmAb improved lesion stability by increasing collagen content (18%) and decreased macrophages presence (31%). VCAM-1 and ICAM-1 expression in the vessel wall were also reduced (29%, 36%). PCmAb resulted in 23% decreased CD163 + macrophages content in vein grafts whereas CD163 expression was reduced in Hb:Hp stimulated macrophages. PCmAb significantly reduced neovessel density (34%) and significant reduced EC proliferation and migration with and without oxLDL stimulation. Moreover, PCmAb enhanced maturation of intraplaque angiogenic vessels by increasing neovessel pericyte coverage in vivo (31%). Together, this resulted in a 62%reduction of IPH. Conclusions: PCmAb effectively inhibits murine atherosclerotic lesion formation. PCmAb reduces IPA and IPH by decreased neovessel density and macrophages influx via reduced expression of VCAM-1 and ICAM-1, and increased neovessel maturation in vein graft atherosclerosis. PCmAb holds promise as a new therapeutic approach for plaque stability.

Most industries are shifting from product-oriented business models towards services to step up the value chain and engage in long-term relationships with their customers throughout the service lifecycle. Digital technologies are contributing to servitization in many ways by creating and enabling capabilities like connectivity, IoT, data generation and assessment, etc., for new value generation, distribution, and capture. Because value is subjective, dynamic, and changes during the service lifecycle, service providers need to examine closely the value perceptions of customers to constantly provide better value and remain relevant with the competition. Through a consumer survey and a longitudinal study of thirteen customers, this paper uses qualitative and quantitative assessment to identify the value dimensions that play a major role for customers being onboarded on a digital enabled service, and also highlights how customer value dimensions change over the course of the service lifecycle. One important finding is that change in customer value perception does not follow a pattern and is highly individual and personal. This opens a discussion regarding the need for hyper-personalization in successful servitization, and the role of digital technologies towards the same.

This study addresses the role of visual representations in supporting communication between an R&D team and geographically distributed suppliers for a new product development (NPD) project. It specifically focuses on the design and use of visual representations as a feasible way for communication between the distributed actors when they face communication challenges originating from differences in skills in the English language, but also from differences in work experiences. Relying on empirical materials from a Swedish manufacturing company in the mechanical engineering industry, this paper makes the following contributions to the literature. First, it shows that visual representations are effective boundary objects able to support process-oriented and product-oriented communication in distributed NPD projects. Second, it illustrates that visual representations do not necessarily have to follow graphic design principles, but can still be effective if distributed actors share the same project context. Finally, it highlights the need for a dynamic and context-dependent perspective on communication in NPD projects.

The majority of contributions to community open source software (OSS) projects are made by practitioners acting on behalf of companies and other organisations. Previous research has addressed the motivations of both individuals and companies to engage with OSS projects. However, limited research has been undertaken that examines and explains the practical mechanisms or work practices used by companies and their developers to pursue their commercial and technical objectives when engaging with OSS projects. This research investigates the variety of work practices used in public communication channels by company contributors to engage with and contribute to eight community OSS projects. Through interviews with contributors to the eight projects we draw on their experiences and insights to explore the motivations to use particular methods of contribution. We find that companies utilise work practices for contributing to community projects which are congruent with the circumstances and their capabilities that support their short- and long-term needs. We also find that companies contribute to community OSS projects in ways that may not always be apparent from public sources, such as employing core project developers, making donations, and joining project steering committees in order to advance strategic interests. The factors influencing contributor work practices can be complex and are often dynamic arising from considerations such as company and project structure, as well as technical concerns and commercial strategies. The business context in which software created by the OSS project is deployed is also found to influence contributor work practices.