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Decision-makers (DMs) are not sufficiently exposed to concepts such as efficiency and risk in innovative activities from the perspective of organizational strategy. The challenges become even greater when these DMs lack expertise in technology and deal with uncertain circumstances. In this sense, exchanging expert knowledge between DMs and technical teams will strengthen the link between technology planning and strategic management. The purpose of this study is to bridge the knowledge gap between these two groups. It introduces a framework to translate the organization's strategy into technological decisions at an acceptable innovation risk level. This framework considers aspects such as knowledge, type of innovation, and innovation process. This study focuses on determining whether activities should be accepted or rejected by examining the uncertainty and efficiency of innovation. It also introduces a novel perspective on the hybrid "success-failure" uncertainty of innovation, and a new measure called "efficiency probability," which DMs and technology developers can use to intuitively engage in the innovation process. This paper seeks to propose a practical strategy map for new product development under uncertain conditions. To achieve this goal, the Fuzzy Front-End (FFE) concept, fuzzy data envelopment analysis (FDEA) model, and adjustable possibilistic programming (APP) approach are applied. The results of this study indicate that innovative activities typically have low efficiency and high uncertainty. Therefore, the decision to implement or abandon them requires reviewing and balancing the goals and strategic approach of the organization with technological and business features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the study was to compare the effect of visual search and skill-level on the spatial occlusion anticipation in handball players. Thirty skilled and thirty unskilled handball players aged 20 to 35 years anticipated the situation of seven handball attack video movies. Visual search behavior was measured by using validated researcher made questionnaire. The results of anticipation illustrated that skilled players were better than unskilled players in all of the situations but the important point was that skilled players anticipated situations based on their roles and position in game. Also there were significant difference between skilled and unskilled players in regard to anticipation, skill- level and visual search behavior. In summary the results indicated that visual attention of skilled players was on the attacker player's upper body. In general, consideration of involved factors in sports performance can reveal substantial cues in exercise and training different sports to facilitate and be effective in executing different handball skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An optical quantum memory is a stationary device that is capable of storing and recreating photonic qubits with a higher fidelity than any classical device. Thus far, these two requirements have been fulfilled for polarization qubits in systems based on cold atoms and cryogenically cooled crystals. Here, we report a room-temperature memory capable of storing arbitrary polarization qubits with a signal-to-background ratio higher than 1 and an average fidelity surpassing the classical benchmark for weak laser pulses containing 1.6 photons on average, without taking into account non-unitary operation. Our results demonstrate that a common vapor cell can reach the low background noise levels necessary for polarization qubit storage using single-photon level light, and propels atomic-vapor systems towards a level of functionality akin to other quantum information processing architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of useful photon-photon interactions can trigger numerous breakthroughs in quantum information science, however, this has remained a considerable challenge spanning several decades. Here, we demonstrate the first room-temperature implementation of large phase shifts (≈π) on a single-photon level probe pulse (1.5 µs) triggered by a simultaneously propagating few-photon-level signal field. This process is mediated by Rb87 vapor in a double-Λ atomic configuration. We use homodyne tomography to obtain the quadrature statistics of the phase-shifted quantum fields and perform maximum-likelihood estimation to reconstruct their quantum state in the Fock state basis. For the probe field, we have observed input-output fidelities higher than 90% for phase-shifted output states, and high overlap (over 90%) with a theoretically perfect coherent state. Our noise-free, four-wave-mixing-mediated photon-photon interface is a key milestone toward developing quantum logic and nondemolition photon detection using schemes such as coherent photon conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]