No abstract

Remote sensing is important to precision agriculture and the spatial resolution provided by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is revolutionizing precision agriculture workflows for measurement crop condition and yields over the growing season, for identifying and monitoring weeds and other applications. Monitoring of individual trees for growth, fruit production and pest and disease occurrence remains a high research priority and the delineation of each tree using automated means as an alternative to manual delineation would be useful for long-term farm management. In this paper, we detected citrus and other crop trees from UAV images using a simple convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithm, followed by a classification refinement using superpixels derived from a Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) algorithm. The workflow performed well in a relatively complex agricultural environment (multiple targets, multiple size trees and ages, etc.) achieving high accuracy (overall accuracy = 96.24%, Precision (positive predictive value) = 94.59%, Recall (sensitivity) = 97.94%). To our knowledge, this is the first time a CNN has been used with UAV multi-spectral imagery to focus on citrus trees. More of these individual cases are needed to develop standard automated workflows to help agricultural managers better incorporate large volumes of high resolution UAV imagery into agricultural management operations.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Big data analytics (BDA) is beneficial for organisations, yet implementing BDA to leverage profitability is fundamental challenge confronting practitioners. Although prior research has explored the impact that BDA has on business growth, there is a lack of research that explains the full complexity of BDA implementations. Examination of how and under what conditions BDA achieve organisational performance from a holistic perspective is absent from the existing literature. Extending the theoretical perspective from the traditional views (e.g. resource-based theory) to configuration theory, we have developed a conceptual model of BDA success that aims to investigate how BDA capabilities interact with complementary organisational resources and organisational capabilities in multiple configuration solutions leading to higher quality of care in healthcare organisations. To test this model, we use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to analyse multi-source data acquired from a survey and databases maintained by the Centres for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Our findings suggest that BDA when given alone, is not sufficient in achieving the outcome but is a synergy effect in which BDA capabilities and analytical personnel's skills together with organisational resources and capabilities as supportive role can improve readmission rates and patient satisfaction in healthcare organisations.

Purpose: Although lean thinking is deemed to be a gold standard of modern production management, a lot of scepticism still remains regarding its applicability in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This paper aims to understand the perception of lean in SMEs and establish the relationship between lean adoption and operational performance.Design/Methodology/Approach: With the help of a survey, data was collected from 425 SMEs in India and analyzed using structural equation modelling (SEM).

No abstract