ATG Press Research Kit

In the IT industry, more than 90% of the corporate R&D budget goes for development and less than 10% remains for research. Therefore, the research budget goes trivial when the size of an IT company goes down. In fact for most of SMB (small and midsize business) class IT companies, the research is nothing more than a wish. Since one of our important goals is to improve the IT industry, specially through our Appetizer Program, we found that most of the SMB-class IT companies cannot adopt the ideas we publish in our Appetizer series into their own companies, while the large IT enterprises have a range of facilities to do this.

In response to the above problem, we launched ATG Press Research Kit to enable the SMB-class IT firms to adopt the proposed technologies into their own companies. To this end, each Research Kit contains a portion of the works that should be carried out inside an R&D division. It includes some technical papers and probably some source codes to enable the designers and developers to utilize the proposed technologies in their own projects. In addition to the companies, individual professionals can use these kits for improving their own knowledge and skills, especially the professionals who want to keep their knowledge and skills in a cutting edge level. All of the source codes that are delivered inside our Research Kits are under ATG Blue License. This implies that the user of a Research Kit has agreed this license in advance.

By default, all of the Research Kits are priced materials, but some of them have been relaxed as a part of our non-profit activities. The price of each item is cited after its title in USD. If you would like to purchase a priced material, you should firstly register yourself (freely) in our contact manager system code-named Jethro. The only way for transferring your fund is wire transfer and you can see the details in Jethro. We have also a discounting policy in which the second time buyers will receive 10% discount on all of our products, and the third time buyers and more will permanently receive 20% discount.

The following is the list of the released Research Kits in chronological order:

Inside IT Firms (release date: February 6, 2006; price: free)

Overview:
When we look to the IT industry from 1987 to 2001, what gets the looks among other things is the fast growth of the field itself. In human history, the fast growth of an industry is regularly accompanied with two things: buzzword, and frenzy. Most likely, these things cause to stun the industry insiders as of outsiders, if not mislead them completely! In this situation, a notable portion of the industry comes to failure in both of developing and marketing efforts. Losers are more among new players and less among old and long-established players. The mentioned failure urges the industry to reorganize itself and this is what we have been seeing in the IT industry since 2002 and expect to last by the end of 2006. Addressing the future tendency of the IT industry, we divide the industry into two main sections: companies and organizations. In this research kit, we focus on both of the sections in two separate documents. To this end, we look to the IT firms from three different viewpoints: their functions, their behaviors, and their impacts. This research kit wants to be a brief, bright, and realistic one that provides helpful information for strategists at SMB-class IT companies around the world.

This research kit contains only two papers in PDF as follows:

1. Inside IT Firms I: Outlook on IT Companies

2. Inside IT Firms II: Outlook on IT Organizations

Inside Document Management (release date: March 19, 2006; price: free)

Overview:
The growing of the Internet in recent years has attracted many attentions to the concept of document. The reason is very clear: everyday millions of documents are updated or added to the net (the so-called information explosion) and the management of these activities would cost billions of dollars worldwide. In addition to this, new and complex technical issues should involve in this huge-scale management. As the term “document” is a very general concept, we believe any effort for giving a precise definition to it would come to an apparent limitation to the field instead of opening a new way. Traditionally, document is a record of some activities. Technically, document is a package of information. Intuitively, document is the heart of information technology. In the current IT world, the most important issue regarding document is its manageability and other efforts such as document definition/standardization are just used as leverage in this issue. Addressing the issue, we attempt to show a new perspective to the critical problems in document management. To this end, we divide the document management domain into two main parts: document creation and document presentation. In this research kit, we try to briefly describe the problems involve in the realm of document creation & presentation including why, how, and by whom a document can be created & presented. Detailed solutions to the mentioned problems are expected to appear in a series of our future research kits, but in this research kit, we only address those solutions.

This research kit contains only two papers in PDF as follows:

1. Inside Document Management I: Document Creation

2. Inside Document Management II: Document Presentation

Something New to the Traveling Salesman Problem (release date: January 7, 2008; price: $3,000)

Overview:
The Coordinated Brute Force method, as introduced in our Appetizer "Globe Optimizer," has a unique property: it is originally an exact solution to the hard computational problems, but it can be easily scaled back to a heuristic method only buy decreasing the amount of the required space (memory). In this research kit, we investigate the performance of this method in its heuristic form. The important question here was how this method works in its weakest form, i.e. the most limited assigned space, on the TSP as the most challengeable NP-C problem. To this end, we set the width of the space tape (see "Globe Optimizer") to one, and applied the method to the 14 symmetric and 10 asymmetric samples of TSPLIB. As the exact solution of these samples have been known, we was able to measure the approximation rate for each sample. The interesting result was the low approximation rates: 1.39 in the worst case and 1.10 in the best case. The average approximation rate for the symmetric samples was 1.27 and for the asymmetric ones was 1.23. We also investigated how the results improve when we increase the assigned space. So we increased the width of the space tape to two and repeated the test. The average approximation rate for the symmetric and asymmetric samples decreased to 1.23 and 1.18, respectively. The largest sample we tested had 4461 cities (nodes).

This research kit contains an executive summary, a research report, and two documented program source codes in Pascal language (Delphi for Windows). The source codes are easily convertible to other programming languages under different platforms, and can be directly compiled by Turbo Delphi Explorer, a free compiler for Microsoft Windows. The executive summary is free and can be downloaded from the following link. We urge you to read this summary before any decision regarding the purchase of this research kit. For making an order, please login Jethro.

• The Executive Summary in PDF

Recommendations:
This research kit is the extension of our Appetizer entitled "Globe Optimizer." Therefore you must read this paper to be able to follow the technical stuff in this research kit. The firms and individuals who are working on technologies regarding routing, navigation, planning, placement, scheduling, and combinatorial optimization, are among the potential users of this research kit.