Top Research Papers on Quality Assurance

The QA/QC programme allowed the identification of major difficulties and needs in HBM analysis as well of gaining insight in the analytical capacities of European laboratories, and is the first step towards the establishment of a sustainable European network of HBM laboratories.

This review was conducted to understand current contamination control practices, and seven measures to control for contamination are suggested in order to improve the quality of results in microplastic sampling in future assessments.

The prevalence of microplastics has heightened awareness of cross-contamination concerns in recent years, making quality control and assurance critical for the quantitative assessment of microplastics. Environmental scientists dealing with microplastics employ both field and laboratory blanks to determine the extent of cross-contamination in unknown samples (samples of interest) in their analyses, but this source of uncertainty has yet to be assessed and is being overlooked. This paper intends to present: (1) an overview of the approaches for monitoring external contamination; (2) issues relat...

Conclusive evidence showed that the pharmacological activities reported in crude extracts and chemical markers are supporting and provides confidence in the traditional use of A. paniculata as a herbal medicine.

Generally applicable recommendations on implementation and quality assurance of AI models are presented for commonly used applications in radiotherapy such as auto-segmentation, automated treatment planning and synthetic computed tomography.

Machine learning is an established and frequently used technique in industry and academia, but a standard process model to improve success and efficiency of machine learning applications is still missing. Project organizations and machine learning practitioners face manifold challenges and risks when developing machine learning applications and have a need for guidance to meet business expectations. This paper therefore proposes a process model for the development of machine learning applications, covering six phases from defining the scope to maintaining the deployed machine learning applicat...

The proposed pipeline is a single integrated pipeline that combines established diffusion preprocessing tools from major MRI-focused software packages with intuitive QA and was shown to be effective on externally available datasets.

This work presents an overview of QA/QC techniques for NTA workflows published to date, specifically focusing on the analysis of environmental samples using liquid chromatography coupled to HRMS, and discusses methods used for each step of analysis: sample preparation, chromatography, mass spectrometry, and data processing.

JEC-QA, the largest question answering dataset in the legal domain, collected from the National Judicial Examination of China, is presented and baselines are released to help improve the reasoning ability of machine comprehension models.

Given broad clinical adaptation of volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT), which is not a specific topic of TG 142, several tests and criteria specific to VMAT were added.

This work develops and evaluates machine learning-based predictive models using height map-derived quality metrics for single tracks and the accompanying pyrometer and high-speed video camera data collected under a wide range of laser power and laser velocity settings and finds the SeDANN model outperforms other purely data-driven black box models in both accuracy and speed.

This work constructs a large-scale dataset built on 40K information-seeking questions across 7 diverse non-English languages that TyDi QA could not find same-language answers for and introduces a task framework, called Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering (XOR QA), that consists of three new tasks involving cross-lingually document retrieval from multilingual and English resources.

Background Recent advances in machine and deep learning based on an increased availability of clinical data have fueled renewed interest in computerized clinical decision support systems (CDSSs). CDSSs have shown great potential to improve healthcare, increase patient safety and reduce costs. However, the use of CDSSs is not without pitfalls, as an inadequate or faulty CDSS can potentially deteriorate the quality of healthcare and put patients at risk. In addition, the adoption of a CDSS might fail because its intended users ignore the output of the CDSS due to lack of trust, relevancy or acti...

The continuous improvement in good practices and implementation of hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP) remains very crucial for food hygiene quality safety to steadily thrive in the agro-food product industry sector. To improve the agro-food product quality, the dependency of quality management (QM) on such key facets as quality assurance (QA), control, improvement, and planning appears to be on the rise. Herein, how food hygiene quality safety standards and their associated processes have been assured is described. To understand the relevance of QM in the (above-mentioned) pro...

Recommendations for commercially available MR simulators are provided, including initial equipment selection, siting, acceptance testing, quality assurance, optimization of dedicated radiation therapy specific MR-SIM workflows, patient-specific considerations, safety, and staffing.

This work proposes a new model, QA-GNN, which addresses the problem of answering questions using knowledge from pre-trained language models (LMs) and knowledge graphs (KGs) through two key innovations: relevance scoring and joint reasoning.

A framework in which two separated BERT-based models were fine-tuned to identify and classify events in Portuguese documents, producing a new corpus for Portuguese event extraction and developing an automatic translation pipeline.

NExT-QA is introduced, a rigorously designed video question answering (VideoQA) benchmark to advance video understanding from describing to explaining the temporal actions, and it is found that top-performing methods excel at shallow scene descriptions but are weak in causal and temporal action reasoning.

This study presents a new multi-hop QA dataset, called 2WikiMultiHopQA, which uses structured and unstructured data and introduces the evidence information containing a reasoning path forMulti-hop questions, and demonstrates that the dataset is challenging formulti-hop models and it ensures that multi-Hop reasoning is required.

This article provides a comprehensive survey of the state of the art in the assurance of ML, i.e., in the generation of evidence that ML is sufficiently safe for its intended use, at different stages of the machine learning lifecycle.

This work extracts samples from real financial reports to build a new large-scale QA dataset containing both Tabular And Textual data, named TAT-QA, where numerical reasoning is usually required to infer the answer, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, counting, comparison/sorting, and the compositions.

A quantitative analysis of the data quality and example-level qualitative linguistic analyses of observed language phenomena that would not be found in English-only corpora are presented.

Confidently making progress on multilingual modeling requires challenging,\ntrustworthy evaluations. We present TyDi QA---a question answering dataset\ncovering 11 typologically diverse languages with 204K question-answer pairs.\nThe languages of TyDi QA are diverse with regard to their typology---the set of\nlinguistic features each language expresses---such that we expect models\nperforming well on this set to generalize across a large number of the world's\nlanguages. We present a quantitative analysis of the data quality and\nexample-level qualitative linguistic analyses of observed langua...

The linker has a key role in ADC outcomes because its characteristics substantially impact the therapeutic index efficacy and pharmacokinetics of these drugs.

To promote cobots in manufacturing applications, the future researches are expected for the systematic theory and methods to design and build cobots with the integration of ergonomic structures, sensing, real-time controls, and human-robot interfaces.

There is an increase in the number of studies published in recent years and some countries have received limited attention, such as the USA, and several new research suggestions are highlighted that may enhance the understanding of sustainability assurance practices.

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the supply and demand side of sustainability assurance in Bangladesh. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on signalling theory, a logistic regression model is used for a sample of 100 of the largest Bangladeshi companies to study the relationships between assurance, sustainability disclosure, industry membership and reporting format. Findings Authors’ results show that companies which produce more sustainability information are more likely to get their sustainability assured, to be from non-carbon intensive industries, and are more likely to integrate the...

In this paper, we investigate the learning-based adaptive optimal output regulation problem with convergence rate requirement for disturbed linear continuous-time systems. An adaptive optimal control approach is proposed based on reinforcement learning and adaptive dynamic programming to learn the optimal regulator with assured convergence rate. The above-mentioned problem is successfully solved by tackling a static optimization problem to find the optimal solution to the regulator equations, and a dynamic and constrained optimization problem to obtain the optimal feedback control gain. Withou...

Abstract Recent research shows the existence of a selective corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure strategy that creates a gap between CSR disclosure and actual performance. These CSR decoupling practices compromise the credibility of CSR reports and have triggered a demand for the adoption of credibility enhancement mechanisms, such as adherence to the global reporting initiative (GRI) reporting guidelines, and the external assurance of CSR reports. The effectiveness of such mechanisms is not clear, however. This paper draws on legitimacy theory and addresses the issue of symbolic v...

Drawing on signaling theory and the greenwashing tendency, the objective of this study is to explore the connection among four facets of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practice: CSR performance, CSR reporting, following the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines in preparing CSR reports, and verifying the reliability of CSR reports through an external assurance statement. The sample of the study includes 2244 firm-year observations of energy firms listed in the Thomson Reuters Eikon database for the period 2012–2018. Panel data analysis with fixed effects is used as the empirical ...

Abstract In the article, we provide an original linkage between the corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rating and the cost of internal control system (ICSC) stemmed from two closely related frameworks: the 2017 CoSO Framework, which calls to strengthen internal control systems to integrate ESG issues, and the EU directive on nonfinancial reporting (2014/95/EU) that entered into force in 2017. Thus, we evaluate both introductions showing ESG integration in the internal control activities. We cover firms listed on Milan Exchange from 2016 to 2019, providing a thorough analysis...

Abstract This article examines the effects of various internal (board independence, gender diversity, and specialized sustainability committee) and external (analysts' coverage and institutional ownership) corporate governance mechanisms on firms' decision to purchase external assurance for their corporate social responsibility (CSR) report. Using an international sample, we show that board diversity, the existence of a CSR committee, analysts' coverage, and institutional investors increase the probability of assuring a CSR report, while board independence decreases it. The findings further su...

Equity crowdfunding (ECF) has potential benefits that might be attractive to high-quality entrepreneurs, including fast access to a large pool of investors and obtaining feedback from the market. However, there are potential costs associated with ECF due to early public disclosure of entrepreneurial activities, communication costs with large pools of investors, and equity dilution that could discourage future equity investors; these costs suggest that ECF attracts low-quality entrepreneurs. In this paper, we hypothesize that entrepreneurs tied to more risky banks are more likely to be low-qual...

Water quality index (WQI) is valuable and unique rating to depict the overall water quality status in a single term that is helpful for the selection of appropriate treatment technique to meet the concerned issues. However, WQI depicts the composite influence of different water quality parameters and communicates water quality information to the public and legislative decision makers. In spite of absence of a globally accepted composite index of water quality, some countries have used and are using aggregated water quality data in the development of water quality indices. Attempts have been ma...

This study explores the connections among corporate social responsibility performance, reporting, and external assurance in the hospitality and tourism industry by incorporating the Global Reporting Initiative framework. The originality of the study is that it tests signaling theory and the greenwashing tendency by examining different facets of corporate social responsibility engagement using a holistic approach with a cross-country sample. The data for the study were derived from the Thomson Reuters Eikon database for the years between 2012 and 2018. A panel data analysis with a Random-Effect...

Close interactions with a human operator are an important safety concern for collaborative robot systems. For safety assurance, robot integrators are required to demonstrate that they have taken steps to identify potential hazards, which may be embedded in collaborative tasks, or embedded within the collaborative workspace. Consequently, design safeguards are developed to mitigate unintended contact, which may be hazardous to the human co-worker, while performing cooperative or collaborative tasks. The ISO 15066 standard proposes guidelines, which designers, integrators, and users need to cons...

Digitalization is rushing throughout the world, namely, in industrial and societal infrastructures. Hence, digital transformation becomes a pillar of industrial policy, known in Europe as “Industry 4.0,” in China as “made in China 2025,” in Asia as “Smart Cities,” in Japan as “Society 5.0,” and in North America as “Industrial Internet.” These transformations will change the industrial landscape, toward Quality 4.0 and therefore, our lives. The presented research was conducted on quality management employees in Portugal and it aims to analyze if such employees have the perception of the impact ...

For design of healthy and sustainable diets and food systems, it is important to consider not only the quantity but also the quality of nutrients. This is particularly important for proteins, given the large variability in amino acid composition and digestibility between dietary proteins. This article reviews measurements and metrics in relation to protein quality, but also their application. Protein quality methods based on concentrations and digestibility of individual amino acids are preferred, because they do not only allow ranking of proteins, but also assessment of complementarity of pro...

A blockchain-based novel architecture that provides a decentralized EHR and smart-contract-based service automation without compromising with the system security and privacy is proposed, and experimental analysis proves that the fortified-chain-based H-CPS needs insignificant storage and has a response time in the order of milliseconds.

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