Managing the information Technology help desk: An international dimension

Information Technology continues to change at a fast and furious rate that shows no signs of slowing. Support requirements are increasing, while businesses are becoming global and demanding more support for technology. This paper focuses on the issues and challenges faced by organizations in setting and running a help desk for end users in an international environment

Dynamic Pricing with a Prior on Market Response

We study a problem of dynamic pricing faced by a vendor with limited inventory, uncertain about demand, aiming to maximize expected discounted revenue over an infinite time horizon. The vendor learns from purchase data, so his strategy must take into account the impact of price on both revenue and future observations. We focus on a model in which customers arrive according to a Poisson process of uncertain rate, each with an independent, identically distributed reservation price. Upon arrival, a customer purchases a unit of inventory if and only if his reservation price equals or exceeds the vendor’s prevailing price.Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (MSOM society)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant IIS- 0428868

Computational reverse chemical ecology: Virtual screening and predicting behaviorally active semiochemicals for Bactrocera dorsalis

BACKGROUND: Semiochemical is a generic term used for a chemical substance that influences the behaviour of an organism. It is a common term used in the field of chemical ecology to encompass pheromones, allomones, kairomones, attractants and repellents. Insects have mastered the art of using semiochemicals as communication signals and rely on them to find mates, host or habitat. This dependency of insects on semiochemicals has allowed chemical ecologists to develop environment friendly pest management strategies. However, discovering semiochemicals is a laborious process that involves a plethora of behavioural and analytical techniques, making it expansively time consuming. Recently, reverse chemical ecology approach using odorant binding proteins (OBPs) as target for elucidating behaviourally active compounds is gaining eminence. In this scenario, we describe a “computational reverse chemical ecology” approach for rapid screening of potential semiochemicals. RESULTS: We illustrate the high prediction accuracy of our computational method. We screened 25 semiochemicals for their binding potential to a GOBP of B. dorsalis using molecular docking (in silico) and molecular dynamics. Parallely, compounds were subjected to fluorescent quenching assays (Experimental). The correlation between in silico and experimental data were significant (r(2) = 0.9408; P < 0.0001). Further, predicted compounds were subjected to behavioral bioassays and were found to be highly attractive to insects. CONCLUSIONS: The present study provides a unique methodology for rapid screening and predicting behaviorally active semiochemicals. This methodology may be developed as a viable approach for prospecting active semiochemicals for pest control, which otherwise is a laborious process

Fractional Hardy inequality with singularity on submanifold

We establish fractional Hardy inequality on bounded domains in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ with inverse of distance function from smooth boundary of codimension $k$, where $k=2, \dots,d$, as weight function. The case $sp=k$ is the critical case, where optimal logarithmic corrections are required. All the other cases of $spk$ are also addressed.Comment: 34 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2308.1195

Properties of Multihomogeneous Spaces and relation with T-varieties

We study multihomogeneous spaces corresponding to ${\mathbb Z}^n$-graded algebras over an algebraically closed field of characteristic 0 and their relation with the description of $T$-varieties.Comment: 10 page

Boundary Hardy inequality on functions of bounded variation

Classical boundary Hardy inequality, that goes back to 1988, states that if $1 < p < \infty, \ ~\Omega$ is bounded Lipschitz domain, then for all $u \in C^{\infty}_{c}(\Omega)$, $$\int_{\Omega} \frac{|u(x)|^{p}}{\delta^{p}_{\Omega}(x)} dx \leq C\int_{\Omega} |\nabla u(x) |^{p}dx,$$ where $\delta_\Omega(x)$ is the distance function from $\Omega^c$. In this article, we address the long standing open question on the case $p=1$ by establishing appropriate boundary Hardy inequalities in the space of functions of bounded variation. We first establish appropriate inequalities on fractional Sobolev spaces $W^{s,1}(\Omega)$ and then Brezis, Bourgain and Mironescu's result on limiting behavior of fractional Sobolev spaces as $s\rightarrow 1^{-}$ plays an important role in the proof. Moreover, we also derive an infinite series Hardy inequality for the case $p=1$.Comment: 25 page

Fractional boundary Hardy inequality for the critical cases

We establish fractional boundary Hardy-type inequality for the critical cases by introducing a logarithmically singular weight term for various domains in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$, $d \geq 1$. We show that this particular weight function is optimal, as the inequality becomes false when using weight functions more singular than this one. Additionally, we extend our results to include a weighted fractional boundary Hardy-type inequality for the critical case, employing the same type of weight function.Comment: 29 page