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COVID-19 hits the global supply chains in a non-paradigm manner unfolding new and systemic ambiguousness. Therefore, the unexpected and frequent disruptions forced the concern of preventing or creating supply chain resilience capabilities. This paper aims to provide theoretical and practical reflections on resilience in supply chains of essential goods during pandemics using a systems approach. Documental research was performed in order to characterize business practices in consulting reports and interviews with managers published in business communication media. Thus, a careful content analysis was carried out, including the coding and categorization of the leading practices indicated by these vehicles. We suggest categories of resilience factors as new concepts to face the new normal in the supply chains. These categories are Technology and People, Sourcing, Customer, Ecosystem, and Financial Assets. The systems approach consists of more qualified supply chain management stimulating several inputs and synchronized actions to sense and respond to the external environment dynamics.

Bioelectronic devices have shown their unprecedented potential in a wide range of biomedical applications due to their vast functionality. To fully unleash their potential, bioelectronic devices should be able to precisely respond to real-time changes in the environment to drive biological systems’ response towards the desired goals. However, controlling the biological systems’ response with bioelectronic devices is challenging due to the presence of uncertainties, stochasticity, unmodeled dynamics, and complex nonlinearities. Here, we demonstrate the promise of leveraging tools in synthetic biology with an online machine learning (ML)-based feedback controller to achieve a precise spatiotemporal response of biological systems using bioelectronics driven by an adaptive external “sense and respond” learning algorithm. The proposed ML-based feedback controller leverages the learning capability and low computational complexity of a class of artificial neural networks called the Radial Basis Function (RBF) network. Lyapunov analysis is provided to prove stability of the proposed controller. The satisfactory performance of the proposed method is experimentally validated by maintaining media pH using bioelectronic proton pumps.

Abstract— Bacteria adapt rapidly to changes in ambient conditions, constantly inspecting their surroundings by means of their sensor systems. These systems are often thought to respond only to signals of a chemical nature. Yet, bacteria are often affected by mechanical forces, e.g., during transition from planktonic to sessile state. Mechanical stimuli, however, have seldom been considered as the signals bacteria can sense and respond to. Nonetheless, bacteria perceive mechanical stimuli, generate signals, and develop responses. This review analyzes the information on the way bacteria respond to mechanical stimuli and outlines how bacteria convert incoming signals into appropriate responses.

All living cells sense and respond to changes in external or internal conditions. Without that cognitive capacity, they could not obtain nutrition essential for growth, survive inevitable ecological changes, or correct accidents in the complex processes of reproduction. Wherever examined, even the smallest living cells (prokaryotes) display sophisticated regulatory networks establishing appropriate adaptations to stress conditions that maximize the probability of survival. Supposedly "simple" prokaryotic organisms also display remarkable capabilities for intercellular signalling and multicellular coordination. These observations indicate that all living cells are cognitive.

Shape memory polymer (SMP) is a kind of material that can sense and respond to the changes of the external environment, and its behavior is similar to the intelligent reflection of life. Electrospinning, as a versatile and feasible technique, has been used to prepare shape memory polymer fibers (SMPFs) and expand their structures. SMPFs show some advanced features and functions in many fields. In this review, we give a comprehensive overview of SMPFs, including materials, fabrication methods, structures, multifunction, and applications. Firstly, the mechanism and characteristics of SMP are introduced. We then discuss the electrospinning method to form various microstructures, like non-woven fibers, core/shell fibers, hollow fibers and oriented fibers. Afterward, the multiple functions of SMPFs are discussed, such as multi-shape memory effect, reversible shape memory effect and remote actuation of composites. We also focus on some typical applications of SMPFs, including biomedical scaffolds, drug carriers, self-healing, smart textiles and sensors, as well as energy harvesting devices. At the end, the challenges and future development directions of SMPFs are proposed.

Plants are constantly threatened by herbivore attacks and must devise survival strategies. Some plants sense and respond to elicitors including specific molecules secreted by herbivores and molecules that are innate to plants. Elicitors activate diverse arrays of plant defense mechanisms that confer resistance to the predator. Recent new insights into the cellular pathways by which plants sense elicitors and elicit defense responses against herbivores are opening doors to a myriad of agricultural applications. This review focuses on the machinery of herbivory-sensing and on cellular and systemic/airborne signaling via elicitors, exemplified by the model case of interactions between Arabidopsis hosts and moths of the genus Spodoptera.

The ability of organizations to sense and respond to changes–defined as organizational agility–is considered by senior executives among their top information technology (IT) concerns as an important ability for organizations on their quest toward sustainedcompetitive advantage. However, every transformation toward agility also comes at a cost, requiring resource commitment and IT landscape changes. We present examples of successful and unsuccessful attempts at achieving agility while leveraging IT. Our presented cases focus on information systems development agility, customer agility, and entrepreneurial agility. Our findings suggest that agility is neither achieved easily, nor is a guarantor for success.Depending on the context and implementation of organizational agility, however, it can significantly improve process and product performance. We develop a three-pronged viewconsisting of a functional,temporal,andambidextrous viewtoresolve thesechallenges. We end with three recommendations for practitioners that seek to shape their organization’s journey toward agility.

Plants and microorganisms sense and respond to biotic and abiotic signals in the environment to competitively optimize their fitness. These specific adjustments which are pertinent to prevailing en...

The emerging community of cell-free synthetic biology aspires to build complex biochemical and genetic systems with functions that mimic or even exceed those in living cells. To achieve such functions, cell-free systems must be able to sense and respond to the complex chemical signals within and outside the system. Cell-free riboswitches can detect chemical signals via RNA–ligand interaction and respond by regulating protein synthesis in cell-free protein synthesis systems. In this article, we review synthetic cell-free riboswitches that function in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cell-free systems reported to date to provide a current perspective on the state of cell-free riboswitch technologies and their limitations., Synthetic riboswitches can be used as chemical gene switches in cell-free protein synthesis systems. We provide a current perspective on the state of cell-free riboswitch technologies and their future directions.

Inspired by the self-adaptive nature of living organisms, the development of stimuli-responsive polymers that can sense and respond to surrounding microenvironments has received increasing interest. To date, stimuli-responsive polymers have found promising applications in terms of smart coatings, actuators, photolithography, imaging and diagnosis, and so on. Notwithstanding significant progress, it remains a grand challenge to improve the sensitivity of stimuli-responsive polymers toward external stimuli, which is, however, highly desirable in practical applications when the input signals are very weak. To circumvent this problem, self-propagating polymers have been developed, which enable the amplification of input signals in a positive feedback manner, thereby exponentially elevating the sensitivity. In this minireview, we summarize the recent design strategies and potential applications of self-propagating polymers by integrating feedback signal amplification modules, which have shown promising applications ranging from fundamental research to industry.

Biological signaling pathways are underpinned by protein switches that sense and respond to molecular inputs. Inspired by nature, engineered protein switches have been designed to directly transduce analyte binding into a quantitative signal in a simple, wash-free, homogeneous assay format. As such, they offer great potential to underpin point-of-need diagnostics that are needed across broad sectors to improve access, costs, and speed compared to laboratory assays. Despite this, protein switch assays are not yet in routine diagnostic use, and a number of barriers to uptake must be overcome to realize this potential. Here, we review the opportunities and challenges in engineering protein switches for rapid diagnostic tests. We evaluate how their design, comprising a recognition element, reporter, and switching mechanism, relates to performance and identify areas for improvement to guide further optimization. Recent modular switches that enable new analytes to be targeted without redesign are crucial to ensure robust and efficient development processes. The importance of translational steps toward practical implementation, including integration into a user-friendly device and thorough assay validation, is also discussed.

This study aims to investigate the contributions of promotional marketing activities, historical demand and other factors to predict, and develop a big data-driven fuzzy classifier-based framework, also called “demand-driven forecasting,” that can shape, sense and respond to real customer demands. The availability of timely information about future customer needs is a key success factor for any business. For profit maximization, manufacturers want to sense demand signals and shape future demands using price, sales, promotion and others economic factors so that they can fulfil customer's orders immediately. However, most demand forecasting systems offer limited insight to manufacturers as they fail to capture contemporary market trends, product seasonality and the impact of forecasting on the magnitude of the bullwhip effect. This paper aims to improve the accuracy of demand forecasts. In order to achieve this, a back-propagation neural network-based model is trained by fuzzy inputs and compared with benchmark forecasting methods on a time series data, by using historical demand and sales data in combination with advertising effectiveness, expenditure, promotions, and marketing events data. A statistical analysis is conducted, and the experiments show that the method used in the proposed framework outperforms in optimality, efficiency and other statistical metrics. Finally, some invaluable insights for managers are presented to improve the forecast accuracy of fuzzy neural networks, develop marketing plans for products and discuss their implications in several fields.

As synthetic biocircuits become more complex, distributing computations within multi-strain microbial consortia becomes increasingly beneficial. However, designing distributed circuits that respond predictably to variation in consortium composition remains a challenge. Here we develop a two-strain gene circuit that senses and responds to which strain is in the majority. This involves a co-repressive system in which each strain produces a signaling molecule that signals the other strain to down-regulate production of its own, orthogonal signaling molecule. This co-repressive consortium links gene expression to ratio of the strains rather than population size. Further, we control the cross-over point for majority via external induction. We elucidate the mechanisms driving these dynamics by developing a mathematical model that captures consortia response as strain fractions and external induction are varied. These results show that simple gene circuits can be used within multicellular synthetic systems to sense and respond to the state of the population., Designing distributed circuits that respond predictably to variation in bacterial populations remains difficult. Here the authors develop a two-strain circuit that senses and responds to the majority strain.

The nature and role of social housing across the European States is growing more diverse every decade. From the wide range of social housing as a percentage of total housing stock, the many different housing options provided, to the vast array of housing allocation mechanisms and differing levels of equity delivered by such mechanisms, social housing across Europe presents an increasingly complex social challenge. As such a one-size-fits-all solution to these challenges is unlikely to present itself, and researchers are therefore forced to focus on the specifics of a region or state—this is the case with this study. Within the UK, Housing Associations (HAs) have played a fundamental role within successive government social housing policies for at least three decades. However, through a succession of legislative changes, welfare reform and the deregulation of their non-profit social role, HAs have been fundamentally challenged, and are now exposed to competition from private registered providers. This study poses the overarching research question; what role does performance management play in the transition to a competitive hybridised social housing sector? Exploring this question, the paper analyses the effect of this transition through institutional isomorphism and considers specifically how a sample of English HAs sense uncertainty within the social housing sector and respond to the coercive, normative, and mimetic isomorphic pressures at play. This study finds the primary mechanism by which HAs appear to sense and respond to external changes within the sector is through their strategic performance measurement systems and metrics. Social, political, and competitive changes in the sector are ‘sensed’ as a misalignment within the existing strategic performance metrics, exerting isomorphic pressures on the organisational governance team to respond by realigning the performance metrics with the sensed changes. In this way, we posit that strategic performance measurement is linked to and plays a much more pivotal role, in the hybridisation of third-sector organisations than previously reported within the literature. Examples of such realignment include the increased use of benchmarking performance as a normative practice, and the replication of perceived best practice from the private sector to remain competitive and sustainable. Such changes reflect on an increasingly hybridised position for HAs, which now focus on improving business-critical activities, rather than simply producing performance data as a means of demonstrating good governance and compliance to their regulatory body.

Ionotronic skin (i-skin) has drawn considerable attention, because it can interface with different systems to sense and respond to external stimuli, such as force and temperature. However, safety i...

Summary Studies on bacterial physiology are incomplete without knowledge of the signalling and regulatory systems that a bacterium uses to sense and respond to its environment. Two‐component systems (TCSs) are among the most prevalent bacterial signalling systems, and they control essential and secondary physiological processes; however, even in model organisms, we lack a complete understanding of the signals sensed, the phosphotransfer partners and the functions regulated by these systems. In this review, we discuss several tools to map the genes targeted by transcriptionally acting TCSs. Many of these tools have been used for studying individual TCSs across diverse species, but systematic approaches to delineate entire signalling networks have been very few. Since genome sequences and high‐throughput technologies are now readily available, the methods presented here can be applied to characterize the entire DNA‐binding TCS signalling network in any bacterial species and are especially useful for non‐model environmental bacteria.

The ability of cells to sense and respond to endogenous cues as well as cues from neighboring cells and tissues underlies the life and death of cells, their growth and proliferation, differentiation into tissues, and ultimately development into morphologically diverse organisms. Being able to sense

Supply chain management (SCM) is about relationships and links between supply chain partners and networks. Integration is the key to collectively achieve goals and the most efficient process (Kotler and Armstrong 2018). Supply chains consist of individual entities and networks across countries, which are also managed to pursue individual organization revenue goals. Interplay of two cultural orientations is therefore bound to exist naturally in managing supply chains, collective culture and individualistic culture. The design and effectiveness of a supply chain is therefore for revenue streams of companies. Figure 5.1 depicts the supply chain with the upstream (supply side), operations (production of goods or services) and downstream elements (demand side). Upstream partners include raw material suppliers, components, parts, information, finances and expertise to create a product or service Downstream partners include the marketing channels or distribution channels that look towards the customer. Supply chain “make and sell” view includes the firm’s raw materials, productive inputs and factory capacity. Demand chain “sense and respond” view suggests that planning starts with the needs of the target customer, and the firm responds to these needs by organizing a chain of resources and activities with the goal of creating customer value. Value delivery network is the firm’s suppliers, distributors and ultimately customers who partner with each other to improve the performance of the entire system. Intermediaries offer producers greater efficiency in making goods available to target markets. Through their contacts, experience, specialization and scale of operations, intermediaries usually offer the firm more than it can achieve on its own. From an economic view, intermediaries transform the assortment of products into assortments wanted by consumers. Channel members add value by bridging the major time, place and possession gaps that separate goods and services from those who would use them.

The ability to sense and respond to physical forces is critical for the proper function of cells, tissues, and organisms across the evolutionary tree. Plants sense gravity, osmotic conditions, pathogen invasion, wind, and the presence of barriers in the soil, and dynamically integrate internal and external stimuli during every stage of growth and development. While the field of plant mechanobiology is growing, much is still poorly understood—including the interplay between mechanical and biochemical information at the single-cell level. In this review, we provide an overview of the mechanical properties of three main components of the plant cell and the mechanoperceptive pathways that link them, with an emphasis on areas of complexity and interaction. We discuss the concept of mechanical homeostasis, or “mechanostasis,” and examine the ways in which cellular structures and pathways serve to maintain it. We argue that viewing mechanics and mechanotransduction as emergent properties of the plant cell can be a useful conceptual framework for synthesizing current knowledge and driving future research.

Ecol. Lett. 22, 2019, 1483 demonstrated, for the first time, a rapid response of a plant to the airborne sounds of pollinators. Pyke et al. argue that this response is unlikely to be adaptive. Here we clarify some misunderstandings, and demonstrate the potential adaptive value using theoretical modelling and field observations.

The coordinated behaviors of living organisms in nature have inspired the design of artificial micro/nanomachines that mimics biological methods of group motion and responses to the environment. Designing and developing the coordinated behavior of micro/nanomachines will bring benefits of synchronized operation, multitasking, and adaptability to a wide spectrum of environments. Similar to macroscale organization in biological systems, we can postulate that interactions between neighbors follow simple rules and that their capabilities to sense and respond to the environment matters for achieving coordinated behavior among micro/nanomachines. In this review, we focus on the efforts made toward the coordinated behavior of micro/nanomachines from both individual-individual and individual-environment interactions. The possible interactions that might be useful to induce coordinated behavior among micro/nanomachines are categorized and illustrated. By highlighting the progress toward designing and studying these interactions, we anticipate insight into the design of artificial micro/nanomachines capable of behaving in a coordinated manner.

Entrepreneurial scholarship suggests that a small firm’s ability to grow is a function of its capacity to sense and respond to changes in the market as well as the broader environment for the firm’s goods and services. Developing detailed measures of internal capabilities at a large scale, however, is often hampered by limitations in the availability of data from conventional sources, low survey response rates and panel attrition. The emergence of new information sources, including big data sets derived from the online activities of firms, coupled with advanced computational approaches, raises fresh analytical possibilities. In this exploratory study, we turn to freely accessible website data to gauge internal capabilities, specifically for market sensing and responding. To operationalize the construct of seizing, the paper uses an application of topic modeling, a text mining approach commonly used in computer science, on archived website data from the Wayback Machine for two time periods, 2008–2009 and 2010–2011, to explain sales growth for green goods enterprises in two later time periods, from 2010 to 2012. We find an endogenous inverse U-shaped relationship exists between market seizing and sales growth. Increasing levels of focus on a firm’s local geographic area also predict sales growth. We consider these findings in light of the practitioner literature on firm agility and pivoting and discuss opportunities for future work using website data to study entrepreneurship and the strategic management of innovation.

Life is an emergent property of transient interactions between biomolecules and other organic and inorganic molecules that somehow leads to harmony and order. Measurement and quantitation of these biological interactions are of value to scientists and are major goals of biochemistry, as affinities provide insight into biological processes. In an organism, these interactions occur in the context of forces and the need for a consideration of binding affinities in the context of a changing mechanical landscape necessitates a new way to consider the biochemistry of protein-protein interactions. In the past few decades, the field of mechanobiology has exploded, as both the appreciation of, and the technical advances required to facilitate the study of, how forces impact biological processes have become evident. The aim of this review is to introduce the concept of force dependence of biomolecular interactions and the requirement to be able to measure force-dependent binding constants. The focus of this discussion will be on the mechanotransduction that occurs at the integrin-mediated adhesions with the extracellular matrix and the major mechanosensors talin and vinculin. However, the approaches that the cell uses to sense and respond to forces can be applied to other systems, and this therefore provides a general discussion of the force dependence of biomolecule interactions.

© 1963-2012 IEEE. The ability of cells to sense and respond to their environment is encoded in biomolecular reaction networks, in which information travels through processes such as production, modification, and removal of biomolecules. Recent advances in biotechnology have made it possible to reengineer these physical processes to the point where synthetic biomolecular circuits can be inserted into cells to program cell behavior for useful functionalities. These circuits are often designed in a bottom-up fashion with smaller components connected to form complex systems. In a bottom-up approach to design, it is highly desirable that circuit components behave modularly, that is, the input-output behavior of a module characterized in isolation remains unchanged when the context changes. Unfortunately, due to the physical processes by which information is communicated from one biomolecular circuit module to the other, the lack of modularity is often a problem. In fact, the input-output behavior of a module depends on both direct connectivity to other modules, due to loading effects, and indirect connectivity arising from loads applied to shared cellular resources. In this paper, we summarize the published work illustrating how the means of molecular communication lead to these problems. Specifically, we review the concept of retroactivity, which has been proposed to capture loading problems within a 'signals and systems' framework, allowing for engineering solutions that restore modularity.

Historically mechanisms with which basal animals such as reef-building corals use to respond to changing and increasingly stressful environments have remained elusive. However, the increasing availability of genomic and transcriptomic data from these organisms has provided fundamental insights into the biology of these critically important ecosystem engineers. Notably, insights into cnidarians gained in the post-genomics age have revealed a surprisingly complex immune system which bears a surprising level of similarity with the vertebrate innate immune system. This system has been critically linked to how corals respond to the two most prominent threats on a global scale, emerging coral diseases and increasing water temperature, which are recognized cellularly as either foreign or domestic threats, respectively. These threats can arise from pathogenic microbes or internal cellular dysfunction, underscoring the need to further understand mechanisms corals use to sense and respond to threats to their cellular integrity. In this investigation and meta-analysis, we utilize resources only recently available in the post-genomic era to identify and characterize members of an underexplored class of molecules known as NOD-like receptors in the endangered Caribbean coral Orbicella faveolata. We then leverage these data to identify pathways possibly mediated by NLRs in both O. faveolata and the ecologically important branching coral Acropora digitifera. Overall, we find support that this class of proteins may provide a mechanistic link to how reef-building corals respond to threats both foreign and domestic.

Bacteria sense and respond to the environment, communicate, and continuously interact with their surroundings, including host bodies. For more than a century, engineers have been trying to harness the natural ability of bacteria as live biotherapeutics for the treatment of diseases. Recent advances in synthetic biology facilitate the enlargement of the repertoire of genetic parts, tools, and devices that serve as a framework for biotherapy. This review describes bacterial species developed for specific diseases shown in in vitro studies and clinical stages. Here, we focus on drug delivery by programing bacteria and discuss the challenges for safety and improvement.

Motivated by pressing planetary concerns, scientists are increasingly taking their work into the public arena, but it remains uncertain whether current science communication practices are appropriate for tackling complex and contested societal issues. A fresh perspective emerges from the business sector, and from the contrasting marketing paradigms of ‘make and sell’, ‘sense and respond’, and ‘guide and co‐create’. The newly emergent guide‐and‐co‐ create paradigm – purpose‐driven, interdisciplinary, participatory, and reflexive – would seem to offer the best template for science communicators addressing long‐term geo‐environmental concerns.

Low-cost microcontroller boards like the BBC micro:bit are used to engage and inspire students worldwide to learn more about computing. Easy-to-use web-based programming environments and low-cost hardware allow novices to build physical computing systems with the micro:bit – systems that sense and respond to the real world. However, devices such as the micro:bit may not capture the attention of every student, as the interests of some may lie in graphic design, animation, or other areas that are not the main focus of physical computing. Video game creation offers the opportunity for students to engage with computing concepts from a different angle, while keeping open the possibilities for physical computing. To date however, there is no game creation platform that has both the same low-barrier to entry and low-cost hardware as the BBC micro:bit. We present MakeCode Arcade, a web app for creating video games for gaming handhelds, built on the same technologies as the BBC micro:bit, extended to support multiple microcontrollers and including a 2D game engine and easy-to-use sprite and music editors. We also designed a simple hardware specification that resulted in five different companies creating seven Arcade-compatible handhelds. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation demonstrates that Arcade enables a modern and fully web-based programming experience for low-cost microcontroller-based gaming handhelds.

Hospitals are currently exploring digital options to transform their clinical procedures and their overall engagement with patients. This paper investigates how hospital departments can leverage the ability of firms to simultaneously explore new IT resources and practices (IT exploration) as well as exploit their current IT resources and practices (IT exploitation), i.e., IT ambidexterity, to adequately sense and respond to patients' needs and demands, i.e., patient agility. This study embraces the dynamic capability view and develops a research model, and tests it accordingly using cross-sectional data from 90 clinical hospital departments from the Netherlands through an online survey. The model's hypothesized relationships are tested using Partial Least Squares (PLS) structural equation modeling (SEM). The outcomes demonstrate the significance of IT ambidexterity in developing patient agility, positively influencing patient service performance. The study outcomes support the theorized model can the outcomes shed light on how to transform clinical practice and drive patient agility., Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, 1 Table. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2105.09013

There is a limited understanding of IT's role as a crucial enabler of patient agility and the department's ability to respond to patient's needs and wishes adequately. This study's objective is to contribute to the insights of the validity of the hypothesized relationship between IT resources, practices and capabilities, and hospital departments' knowledge processes and the department's ability to adequately sense and respond to patient needs and wishes, i.e., patient agility. This study conveniently sampled data from 107 clinical hospital departments in the Netherlands and uses structural equation modeling for model assessment. IT ambidexterity positively enhances the development of a digital dynamic capability. Likewise, IT ambidexterity also positively impacts the hospital department's knowledge processes. Both digital dynamic capability and knowledge processes positively influence patient agility. IT ambidexterity promotes taking advantage of IT resources and experiments to reshape patient services and enhance patient agility., 23 pages, 2 figures, 5 tables. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2105.09013

Cells in natural environments like tissue or soil sense and respond to extracellular ligands with intricately structured and non-monotonic spatial distributions, sculpted by processes such as fluid flow and substrate adhesion. In this work, we show that spatial sensing and navigation can be optimized by adapting the spatial organization of signaling pathways to the spatial structure of the environment. We develop an information-theoretic framework for computing the optimal spatial organization of a sensing system for a given signaling environment. We find that receptor localization maximizes information acquisition in simulated natural contexts, including tissue and soil. Receptor localization extends naturally to produce a dynamic protocol for continuously redistributing signaling receptors, which when implemented using simple feedback, boosts cell navigation efficiency by 30-fold. Broadly, our work shows how cells can maximize the fidelity of information transfer by adapting the spatial organization of signaling molecules to the spatial structure of the environment.

The purpose of the paper is to introduce a new bi-directional approach to assess the gap between the customer needs and technology developers’ perception on the value propositions of innovations which includes storages. The paper used two methods, the first comprehensive sense and respond analysis investigated technology developers’ perceptions using the value propositions defined under the EU-funded H2020 RESOLVD project. The second method focused on customers and collected a survey which covered challenges, value propositions and preparedness to adopt new technology. The H2020 RESOLVD project has developed an intelligent low-voltage grid management system with storage. The results from the sense and respond analysis showed that most of the value propositions aligned with the responses from the broader survey which are needed within five years (e.g., improved power quality of grid, fault detection, reduced technical loss). However, the cybersecurity perception differed between developers and distribution system operators (DSOs). The customer survey highlighted that certain value propositions of technological solutions are needed more urgently than others, and therefore, technology developers should prioritize these in further developments. Regarding the use of flexibility to manage the LV grid, unclear regulations were expressed as a key barrier, thereby affecting business feasibility around battery storage.

Genetically engineered microbes that secrete therapeutics, sense and respond to external environments, and/or target specific sites in the gut fall under an emergent class of therapeutics, called live biotherapeutic products (LBPs). As live organisms that require symbiotic host interactions, LBPs offer unique therapeutic opportunities, but also face distinct challenges in the gut microenvironment. In this review, we describe recent approaches (often demonstrated using traditional probiotic microorganisms) to discover LBP chassis and genetic parts utilizing omics-based methods and highlight LBP delivery strategies, with a focus on addressing physiological challenges that LBPs encounter after oral administration. Finally, we share our perspective on the opportunity to apply an integrated approach, wherein discovery and delivery strategies are utilized synergistically, towards tailoring and optimizing LBP efficacy.

Summary Synthetic biology offers new tools and capabilities of engineering cells with desired functions for example as new biosensing platforms leveraging engineered microbes. In the last two decades, bacterial cells have been programmed to sense and respond to various input cues for versatile purposes including environmental monitoring, disease diagnosis and adaptive biomanufacturing. Despite demonstrated proof‐of‐concept success in the laboratory, the real‐world applications of microbial sensors have been restricted due to certain technical and societal limitations. Yet, most limitations can be addressed by new technological developments in synthetic biology such as circuit design, biocontainment and machine learning. Here, we summarize the latest advances in synthetic biology and discuss how they could accelerate the development, enhance the performance and address the present limitations of microbial sensors to facilitate their use in the field. We view that programmable living sensors are promising sensing platforms to achieve sustainable, affordable and easy‐to‐use on‐site detection in diverse settings., Synthetic biology offers new tools and capabilities of engineering microbes with defined functions as new biosensing platforms for environmental monitoring, disease diagnosis and adaptive biomanufacturing. Here, we summarize the latest advances in synthetic biology and discuss how they could accelerate the development, enhance the performance and address the present limitations of microbial sensors to facilitate their use in the field. We view that programmable living sensors are promising sensing platforms to achieve sustainable, affordable, and easy‐to‐use on‐site detection in diverse settings.

A universal principle of all living cells is the ability to sense and respond to mechanical stimuli which is essential for many biological processes. Recent efforts have identified critical mechanosensitive molecules and response pathways involved in mechanotransduction during development and tissue homeostasis. Tissue-wide force transmission and local force sensing need to be spatiotemporally coordinated to precisely regulate essential processes during development such as tissue morphogenesis, patterning, cell migration and organogenesis. Understanding how cells identify and interpret extrinsic forces and integrate a specific response on cell and tissue level remains a major challenge. In this review we consider important cellular and physical factors in control of cell-cell mechanotransduction and discuss their significance for cell and developmental processes. We further highlight mechanosensitive macromolecules that are known to respond to external forces and present examples of how force responses can be integrated into cell and developmental programs.

Physical computing concerns the design of systems that can sense and respond to the world around them, which is why it is often used in interaction design projects in educational settings. However, students who encounter physical computing for the first time are typically not aware of the form factors and the potential for interaction of the various sensing and actuating possibilities. To complement existing touchpoints that these students have with physical computing, we present electronic smorgasbords: boards that display collections of physical computing components that are available inhouse in an organised and interactive way to support the initiation of interaction design projects. The development of the boards allowed us to articulate four principles for their design, which are intended to inspire the development of future educational material.

COVID-19 is affecting all walks of life. To deal with it, we need to make use of scientifically sound tools and models. Operations research (OR), as a well-established field which focuses on deploying analytical tools to solving decision making problems, comes to the rescue. In this paper, by examining the OR literature and practices related to pandemics (including COVID-19), we discuss what OR can help to tackle challenges under COVID-19. We classify the literature into three stages, namely "before pandemic", "during pandemic" and "after pandemic". We examine the related literature and reveal the respective research areas and OR methods employed. Then, we propose a future research agenda. Finally, we establish the sense-and-respond OR framework regarding what specific actions should be taken to cope with COVID-19 from the perspectives of governments, healthcare and non-profit-making organizations, and businesses. We believe that the findings of this paper lay the solid foundation to stimulate further OR studies to combat COVID-19.

There is still a limited understanding of the necessary skill, talent, and expertise to manage digital technologies as a crucial enabler of the hospital’s ability to adequately ‘sense’ and ‘respond’ to patient needs and wishes, i.e., patient agility. Therefore, this investigates how hospital departments can leverage a ‘digital dynamic capability’ to enable the department’s patient agility. This study embraces the dynamic capabilities theory, develops a research model, and tests it accordingly using data from 90 clinical hospital departments from the Netherlands through an online survey. The model’s hypothesized relationships are tested using structural equation modeling (SEM). The outcomes demonstrate the significance of digital dynamic capability in developing patient sensing and responding capabilities that, in turn, positively influence patient service performance. Outcomes are very relevant for the hospital practice now, as hospitals worldwide need to transform healthcare delivery processes using digital technologies and increase clinical productivity.

Supply chains are growing increasingly complex with global, multi-enterprise and multi-channel operations to meet the ever-growing customer expectations and need for individualized products. In this intelligent era, supply chains need to be digitized in order to be responsive, sustainable, profitable and resilient to disruptions. The flow of information across all aspects of the supply chain from strategy to execution and the collaboration across inter- enterprises and cross functional units are a necessity of modern supply chains. An end-to-end visibility of connected supply chain data is key to analyze, sense and respond to changing market situations. In this chapter, we will cover the digitization of supply chains and intelligent visibility with a focus on the following topics

A Sense and Respond (SaR) system endows a Business Intelligence system with the intelligence needed to react timely to exogenous as well as endogenous events. To this end, a SaR system needs to kno...

Stimuli-responsive smart materials that can be prepared by various methods have the ability to sense and respond to various kinds of physical and chemical stimuli in their environment. These materials have many potential applications in fibrous materials in the fields of medicine, protection, security communication, and textile electronics. Smart fibrous materials are an interesting class of materials providing various functions in the textiles. The functionality of smart textiles consists of many fields such as informing, protecting, and relaxing the wearer. The objective of this chapter is to present the latest research results together with basic concepts related to the preparation methods, characterizations, and applications of stimuli-sensitive materials in smart fibrous materials and their importance in clothing. Future trends in this area of research are presented and issues regarding technology development and its uptake are highlighted.

A cell's ability to change shape is one of the most fundamental biological processes and is essential for maintaining healthy organisms. When the ability to control shape goes awry, it often results in a diseased system. As such, it is important to understand the mechanisms that allow a cell to sense and respond to its environment so as to maintain cellular shape homeostasis. Because of the inherent complexity of the system, computational models that are based on sound theoretical understanding of the biochemistry and biomechanics and that use experimentally measured parameters are an essential tool. These models involve an inherent feedback, whereby shape is determined by the action of regulatory signals whose spatial distribution depends on the shape. To carry out computational simulations of these moving boundary problems requires special computational techniques. A variety of alternative approaches, depending on the type and scale of question being asked, have been used to simulate various biological processes, including cell motility, division, mechanosensation, and cell engulfment. In general, these models consider the forces that act on the system (both internally generated, or externally imposed) and the mechanical properties of the cell that resist these forces. Moving forward, making these techniques more accessible to the non-expert will help improve interdisciplinary research thereby providing new insight into important biological processes that affect human health. This article is categorized under: Cancer > Cancer>Computational Models Cancer > Cancer>Molecular and Cellular Physiology.

Drawing boards offer a self-stable work surface that is continuously adjustable. On digital displays, such as the Microsoft Surface Studio, these properties open up a class of techniques that sense and respond to tilt adjustments. Each display posture-whether angled high, low, or somewhere in-between-affords some activities, but not others. Because what is appropriate also depends on the application and task, we explore a range of app-specific transitions between reading vs. writing (annotation), public vs. personal, shared person-space vs. task-space, and other nuances of input and feedback, contingent on display angle. Continuous responses provide interactive transitions tailored to each use-case. We show how a variety of knowledge work scenarios can use sensed display adjustments to drive context-appropriate transitions, as well as technical software details of how to best realize these concepts. A preliminary remote user study suggests that techniques must balance effort required to adjust tilt, versus the potential benefits of a sensed transition.

Microbes from the three domains of life, Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya, share the need to sense and respond to changes in the external and internal concentrations of protons. When the proton concentration is high, acidic conditions prevail and cells must respond appropriately to ensure that macromolecules and metabolic processes are sufficiently protected to sustain life. While, we have learned much in recent decades about the mechanisms that microbes use to cope with acid, including the unique challenges presented by organic acids, there is still much to be gained from developing a deeper understanding of the effects and responses to acid in microbes. In this perspective article, we survey the key molecular mechanisms known to be important for microbial survival during acid stress and discuss how this knowledge might be relevant to microbe-based applications and processes that are consequential for humans. We discuss the research approaches that have been taken to investigate the problem and highlight promising new avenues. We discuss the influence of acid on pathogens during the course of infections and highlight the potential of using organic acids in treatments for some types of infection. We explore the influence of acid stress on photosynthetic microbes, and on biotechnological and industrial processes, including those needed to produce organic acids. We highlight the importance of understanding acid stress in controlling spoilage and pathogenic microbes in the food chain. Finally, we invite colleagues with an interest in microbial responses to low pH to participate in the EU-funded COST Action network called EuroMicropH and contribute to a comprehensive database of literature on this topic that we are making publicly available. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

The molecular machinery controlling immune development has been extensively investigated. Studies in animal models and adult individuals have revealed fundamental mechanisms of disease and have been essential to understanding how humans sense and respond to cellular stress, tissue damage, pathogens and their environment. Nonetheless, our understanding of how immune responses originate during human development is just starting to emerge. In particular, studies to unveil how environmental and other non-heritable factors shape the immune system at the beginning of life offer great promise to yield important knowledge about determinants of normal inter-individual immune variation and to prevent and treat many human diseases. In this review, we summarize our current understanding of some of the mechanisms determining early life antibody production as a model of an immune process with sequential molecular checkpoints susceptible to influence by non-heritable factors. We discuss the potential of epigenomics as a valuable approach that may reveal not only relevant gene-environment interactions but important clues about immune developmental processes and homeostasis in early life. We then highlight the novel paradigm of human immunology as a complex field that nowadays requires a longitudinal systems-biology approach to understand normal variation and developmental changes during the first few years of life.

Fully autonomous aerial systems (FAAS) are an increasingly relevant research topic to the computer systems community [1] –[6]. FAAS use unmanned aerial vehicles and edge and cloud compute resources to dynamically sense and respond to their environments without human piloting. FAAS can be used in crop scouting, autonomous photography, search and rescue, infrastructure inspection, and many other domains.

Smart glasses are new wearable devices whose characteristics include following the wearer's eyesight and hands-free augmented reality (AR) capabilities that can be used for improving communication. We designed and built an emotion recognition system on smart glasses to help improve human-to-human communication. We identified doctors and autistic adults as two populations that could benefit from enhancing their ability to sense and respond to their conversation partner's emotional state. We explored what role emotions plays in communication, and developed an assistive tool by combining emotion recognition, AI and smart glasses. Lastly, we evaluated our prototypes for usability with both doctors and autistic adults and summarized our findings.