In this paper we have studied alternative alliances between banks and insurance companies. First we defined six different possible structure models for such alliances, and nine criteria used to evaluate the models. The models and the criteria were introduced together with bank and insurance experts. The experts are representatives of the top management of Finnish banks and insurance companies. ...

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) constitute a major safety problem. Healthcare managers need complete and valid information to fight against these infections. The purpose of this study was to develop a dashboard of indicators to help healthcare managers monitor HAIs. A pilot testing approach was used that was composed of the following steps: literature review, consultation with infection...

It is indeed a pleasure and privilege to be amidst this august gathering of eminent bankers, experts and policymakers. Over the years, the Conference has evolved as an important forum for structured information sharing among not only delegates from the banking sector, but also experts from research institutions, credit rating agencies, international institutions and other financial sector bodie...

In many application areas including economics, experts describe their knowledge by using imprecise (“fuzzy”) words from natural language. To design an automatic control system, it is therefore necessary to translate this knowledge into precise computer-understandable terms. To perform such a translation, a special semi-heuristic fuzzy methodology was designed. This methodology has been successf...

Vehicles makers are now extremely concerned by the perceived quality of their products. For the design of many parts of vehicles, sensory profiling techniques are used, which are traditionally carried out by experts. These tests incur a significant financial effort and are time consuming. We propose in this paper an evaluation method with naive subjects, based on paired comparisons. Two studies...

As guest editors of this sustainability issue of Biopreservation and Biobanking focused on business planning, utilization, and marketing, we invited a number of experts from different sectors of the biobanking arena to provide their views on business planning issues. Each expert was asked to provide a brief background statement on their biobanks, to build a context to understand their answers t...

Bankruptcy is one of the most important issues in Financial Management and investment. Numerous studies on Bankruptcy Prediction have been carried out considering Quantitative factors and they applied different techniques on it to predict Bankruptcy, while only fewer studies have proposed and considered Qualitative factors for prediction of Bankruptcy and even then failure of bankruptcy persist...

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is a committee within the central banking system of the US and decides on the target rate. Analyzing the positions of its members is a challenge even for experts with a deep knowledge of the financial domain. In our work, we aim at automatically determining opinion groups in transcriptions of the FOMC discussions. We face two main challenges: first, the ...

The Augmented Representation of Cultural Objects (ARCO) system provides software and interface tools to museum curators to develop virtual museum exhibitions, as well as a virtual environment for museum visitors over the World Wide Web or in informative kiosks. The main purpose of the system is to offer an enhanced educative and entertaining experience to virtual museum visitors. In order to as...