Emmanuel Maravelakis

Measuring and benchmarking the innovativeness of SMEs: A three-dimensional fuzzy logic approach

SMEs have been rather slow in adopting tools and techniques used in larger companies for improving their innovative performance, even if they are very well aware of the importance of innovation, due to difficulties in applying them in their practices. Furthermore, initiatives on improving the innovation within the SMEs in the past, have addressed ways of improving the product innovation process, through a wide spectrum of methods, techniques and tools without quantifying the degree of change of ‘innovativeness’. The approach presented in this paper, addresses both these issues. In the first part of this paper, the most commonly used measures of innovation are presented, and the difficulties in applying them to SMEs are described. In the second part a new methodology is presented, which is based on measuring and benchmarking innovation with fuzzy logic, through an innovation survey. This is achieved by addressing three inter-related, but separately measurable, aspects of a companys innovation process—the products developed; the innovation process utilized; the way the product innovation process is project managed. The approach aims at improving the iterative process of innovation in a SME, by assessing innovation and determining a product innovation profile. Finally an example based on data from 100 companies coming from the creative industries sector is presented.

Analysing User Needs for a Unified 3D Metadata Recording and Exploitation of Cultural Heritage Monuments System

This research paper aims to address the problem of lack of a unified system for 3D documentation, promotion and exploitation of cultural heritage monuments via complete 3D data acquisition, 3D modeling and metadata recording using terrestrial laser scanners. Terrestrial laser scanning is a new fast developing technology that allows for the mapping and exact replication of the entire 3D shape of physical objects through the extraction of a very large number of points in space (point cloud) in short time periods, with great density and precision, and with no actual physical contact with the object of interest. The problem lies on the various types of hardware equipment and software systems used in the whole workflow of the 3D scanning process, including for the extraction of point clouds and the building process of the computerized 3D model development and the final products presentation. These often results in a large volume of interim and final products with little if no standardization, multiple different metadata, various user-dependent annotation requirements and vague documentation which often casts repeating a certain process impossible. This paper presents a user requirement analysis for a complete metadata recording during the whole lifecycle of a 3D product, aiming at supporting workflow history and provenance of 3D products of cultural heritage monuments.

ATD: A Multiplatform for Semiautomatic 3-D Detection of Kidneys and Their Pathology in Real Time

This research presents a novel multifunctional platform focusing on the clinical diagnosis of kidneys and their pathology (tumors, stones and cysts), using a “templates”-based technique. As a first step, specialist clinicians train the system by accurately annotating the kidneys and their abnormalities creating “3-D golden standard models.” Then, medical technicians experimentally adjust rules and parameters (stored as “templates”) for the integrated “automatic recognition framework” to achieve results which are closest to those of the clinicians. These parameters can later be used by nonexperts to achieve increased automation in the identification process. The systems functionality was tested on 20 MRI datasets (552 images), while the “automatic 3-D models” created were validated against the “3-D golden standard models.” Results are promising as they yield an average accuracy of 97.2% in successfully identifying kidneys and 96.1% of their abnormalities thus outperforming existing methods both in accuracy and in processing time needed.

Seismic-mass density-based algorithm for spatio-temporal clustering

In this research work a new hybrid approach to spatio-temporal seismic clustering is proposed. The method builds upon a novel density based clustering scheme that explicitly takes into account earthquakes magnitude during the density estimation. The new density based clustering algorithm considers both time and spatial information during cluster formation. Therefore clusters lie in a spatio-temporal space. A hierarchical agglomerative clustering algorithm acts upon the identified clusters after dropping the time information in order to come up only with the spatial description of seismic events. The approach is demonstrated using data from the vicinity of the Hellenic seismic arc in order to enable its comparison with some of the state-of-the-art distinct seismic region identification methodologies. The presented results indicate that the combination of the two clustering stages could be potentially used for an automatic definition of major seismic sources.

Facial reconstruction of an 11-year-old female resident of 430 BC Athens

Although modern standards of ideal proportions and facial esthetics are based mostly on observations of human faces as depicted in Classical Greek masterpieces of art, the real faces of ordinary ancient Greeks have, until now, remained elusive and subject to the imagination. Objective forensic techniques of facial reconstruction have never been applied before, because human skeletal material from Classical Greece has been extremely scarce, since most decent burials of that time required cremation. Here, the authors show stage by stage the facial reconstruction of an 11-year-old girl whose skull was unearthed in excellent condition from a mass grave with victims of the Plague that struck Athens of 430 bc. The original skull was replicated via three-dimensional modeling and rapid prototyping techniques. The reconstruction followed the Manchester method, laying the facial tissues from the surface of the skull outward by using depth-marker pegs as thickness guides. The shape, size, and position of the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth were determined according to features of the underlying skeletal tissues, whereas the hairstyle followed the fashion of the time. This is the first case of facial reconstruction of a layperson residing in Athens of the Golden Age of Pericles. It is ironic, however, that this unfortunate girl who lived such a short life in ancient Athens, will now, 2500 years later, have the chance to travel and be universally recognizable in a world much bigger than anybody in ancient Athens could have ever imagined.

An analysis of European textile sector competitiveness

Purpose – The European Union (EU) clothing and textile industries are characterized by very intense international competition. EU producers face fierce competition from exports of new industrialized countries whose low wages and social charges give them a considerable competitive advantage. This paper seeks to present the results of an analysis of the European textile sector competitiveness.Design/methodology/approach – The analysis is based on an industrial excellence (IE) model developed by INSEAD. This model has been used for the last ten years in an annual award (IEA), given out in France and Germany. This time the model was used not for giving an award, but for assessing and analyzing the current status of industrial excellence in the textile sector. For this reason a sample of textile companies from three European countries was used and results of the analysis are presented. The textile companies that participated in the analysis were benchmarked against the technologically advanced IEA sample consi...

3D-SYSTEK: Recording and exploiting the production workflow of 3D-models in Cultural Heritage

The diversity of contemporary technology on 3D-model digitizing and processing procedures necessitates the systematic documentation of all the involved activities. In this paper we present essential concepts and the infrastructure of 3D-SYSTEK (3DS), a system that supports the 3D-modelling provenance preservation in the Cultural Heritage (CH) domain. The proposed system provides an efficient repository and special tools for ingesting and browsing data, supporting the detailed and effective documentation. Specialists working on 3D-model production are able to record the production steps, keep track of their work and recall conditions and processing methods for reproduction. Additionally, CH scientists and researchers are able to browse, retrieve and annotate related CH data. Hence 3D-SYSTEK becomes a powerful tool in the area of 3D-model production, archiving and dissemination.

State-of-the-art web technologies for progressive presentation of synthetic cultural heritage scenes

With the advancement of both 3D scanning technologies and Web3D, it is now feasible to convert Cultural Heritage objects and locations of interest into synthetic 3D scenes, and directly embed them in HTML pages so that users can visit them remotely, from practically any Web-enabled device. However, since such scanned scenes tend to be extremely detailed and consist of large volumes of data, browsing them can become a long, burdensome experience. While a number of progressive streaming approaches for 3D graphics have been proposed in the past, such methods tend to require a radical restructuring of the original data in order to be streamed to a web client. We implement a platform for 3D scenes that can stream any model encoded in declarative X3DOM format without further pre-processing. We explore a number of state-of-the-art web technologies for model transmission, and compare them to the typical methods used until now. We present the advantages of each, and lay the groundwork for further extensions to our approach, towards a large-scale platform for the smooth streaming distribution of detailed 3D scenes to a large number of clients, without needing to destroy the original model Web3D format.

An MPEG-DASH Methodology for QoE-Aware Web3D Streaming

Recent advances in web technologies have now created a ubiquitous environment for cross-platform and cross-device multimedia applications. Media files can now be reproduced in a wide range of devices, from mobile phones to desktop computers and web-enabled televisions, using a common infrastructure. This trend towards unifying the technological infrastructure, however, has given rise to a new array of problems resulting from the varying technological capabilities of the different devices and environments. This paper, proposes an adaptive streaming framework for the display of 3D models on a wide range of web-enabled devices. The open, XML-based X3D language for 3D graphics is combined with the MPEG-DASH standard for adaptive streaming. The end result is a framework that can adaptively display 3D graphics in the face of network or computational limitations, and dynamically adapt data flow to maximize user Quality of Experience in any situation.

A Framework for Maintaining Provenance Information of Cultural Heritage 3D-models

The advances in 3D digitizing technology have found significant application in the Cultural Heritage domain. The systematic large-scale production of digital cultural objects, the diversity of the processes involved and the complexity of describing historical relationships among them imposes the need for innovative knowledge management to handle all the semantic information in order to monitor, manage and document the origins and derivation of digital products. Flexibility is also very important for the enrichment and sharing of the acquired knowledge. The latter can be exploited by all members of the Cultural Heritage scientific community who can take advantage of the recorded provenance information for evaluating the 3D representation, tracking reliability of production, detecting tolerance and accuracy in acquisition and processing phases, documenting digitisation techniques, studying evidence of historic and cultural events. In this paper we present a framework that supports the documentation, archiving and dissemination of data and metadata of 3D digital cultural heritage objects, enhancing the OAIS approach by permitting the ingest of all the involved data, not only the final result, during a workflow progress.