Harmonization Without Consensus: Critical Reflections on Drafting a Substantive Patent Law Treaty

In this Article, we contend that the World Intellectual Property Organization\u27s proposed Substantive Patent Law Treaty (SPLT) is premature. Developing countries are struggling to adjust to the heightened standards of intellectual property protection required by the TRIPS Agreement of 1994. With TRIPS, at least, these countries obtained side payments (in the form of trade concessions) to offset the rising costs of knowledge products. A free-standing instrument, such as the SPLT, would shrink the remaining flexibilities in the TRIPS Agreement with no side payments and no concessions to the catch-up strategies of developing countries at different stages of technological advancement. More controversially, we argue that a deep harmonization would boomerang against even its developed country promoters by creating more problems than it would solve. There is no vision of a properly functioning patent system for the developed world that commands even the appearance of a consensus. The evidence shows, instead, that the worldwide intellectual property system has entered a brave new scientific epoch, in which experts have only tentative, divergent ideas about how best to treat a daunting array of new technologies. The proposals for reconciling the needs of different sectors, such as information technology and biotechnology, pose hard, unresolved issues at a time when the costs of litigation are rising at the expense of profits from innovation. These difficulties are compounded by the tendency of universities to push patenting up stream, generating new rights to core methodologies and research tools. As new approaches to new technologies emerge in different jurisdictions, there is a need to gather empirical evidence to determine which, if any, of these still experimental solutions are preferable over time. Our argument need not foreclose other less intrusive options and measures surveyed in the Article that can reduce the costs of delaying harmonization. However, the international community should not rush to freeze legal obligations regarding the protection of intellectual property. It should wait until economists and policymakers better understand the dynamics of innovation and the role that patent rights play in promoting progress and until there are mechanisms in place to keep international obligations responsive to developments in science, technology, and the organization of the creative community

Knowledge-based vision for space station object motion detection, recognition, and tracking

Computer vision, especially color image analysis and understanding, has much to offer in the area of the automation of Space Station tasks such as construction, satellite servicing, rendezvous and proximity operations, inspection, experiment monitoring, data management and training. Knowledge-based techniques improve the performance of vision algorithms for unstructured environments because of their ability to deal with imprecise a priori information or inaccurately estimated feature data and still produce useful results. Conventional techniques using statistical and purely model-based approaches lack flexibility in dealing with the variabilities anticipated in the unstructured viewing environment of space. Algorithms developed under NASA sponsorship for Space Station applications to demonstrate the value of a hypothesized architecture for a Video Image Processor (VIP) are presented. Approaches to the enhancement of the performance of these algorithms with knowledge-based techniques and the potential for deployment of highly-parallel multi-processor systems for these algorithms are discussed

Professional Judgment in an Era of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Though artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare and education now accomplishes diverse tasks, there are two features that tend to unite the information processing behind efforts to substitute it for professionals in these fields: reductionism and functionalism. True believers in substitutive automation tend to model work in human services by reducing the professional role to a set of behaviors initiated by some stimulus, which are intended to accomplish some predetermined goal, or maximize some measure of well-being. However, true professional judgment hinges on a way of knowing the world that is at odds with the epistemology of substitutive automation. Instead of reductionism, an encompassing holism is a hallmark of professional practice—an ability to integrate facts and values, the demands of the particular case and prerogatives of society, and the delicate balance between mission and margin. Any presently plausible vision of substituting AI for education and health-care professionals would necessitate a corrosive reductionism. The only way these sectors can progress is to maintain, at their core, autonomous professionals capable of carefully intermediating between technology and the patients it would help treat, or the students it would help learn

Private sector involvement in civil space remote sensing. Volume 1: Report

A survey of private sector developers, users, and interpreters of Earth resources data was conducted in an effort to encourage private investment and participation in remote sensing systems. Results indicate positive interest in participation beyond the current hardware contracting level, however, there is a substantial gap between current market levels and system costs. Issues identified include the selection process for an operating entity, the public/private interface, data collection and access policies, price and profit regulation in a subsidized system, international participation, and the responsibility for research and development. It was agreed that the cost, complexity, and security implications of integrated systems need not be an absolute bar to their private operation

Lex Informatica: The Formulation of Information Policy Rules through Technology

Historically, law and government regulation have established default rules for information policy, including constitutional rules on freedom of expression and statutory rights of ownership of information. This Article will show that for network environments and the Information Society, however, law and government regulation are not the only source of rule-making. Technological capabilities and system design choices impose rules on participants. The creation and implementation of information policy are embedded in network designs and standards as well as in system configurations. Even user preferences and technical choices create overarching, local default rules. This Article argues, in essence, that the set of rules for information flows imposed by technology and communication networks form a “Lex Informatica” that policymakers must understand, consciously recognize, and encourage

Recommendation and weaving of reusable mashup model patterns for assisted development

With this article, we give an answer to one of the open problems of mashup development that users may face when operating a model-driven mashup tool, namely the lack of modeling expertise. Although commonly considered simple applications, mashups can also be complex software artifacts depending on the number and types of Web resources (the components) they integrate. Mashup tools have undoubtedly simplified mashup development, yet the problem is still generally nontrivial and requires intimate knowledge of the components provided by the mashup tool, its underlying mashup paradigm, and of how to apply such to the integration of the components. This knowledge is generally neither intuitive nor standardized across different mashup tools and the consequent lack of modeling expertise affects both skilled programmers and end-user programmers alike. In this article, we show how to effectively assist the users of mashup tools with contextual, interactive recommendations of composition knowledge in the form of reusable mashup model patterns. We design and study three different recommendation algorithms and describe a pattern weaving approach for the one-click reuse of composition knowledge. We report on the implementation of three pattern recommender plugins for different mashup tools and demonstrate via user studies that recommending and weaving contextual mashup model patterns significantly reduces development times in all three cases

MASISCo—Methodological Approach for the Selection of Information Security Controls

As cyber-attacks grow worldwide, companies have begun to realize the importance of being protected against malicious actions that seek to violate their systems and access their information assets. Faced with this scenario, organizations must carry out correct and efficient management of their information security, which implies that they must adopt a proactive attitude, implementing standards that allow them to reduce the risk of computer attacks. Unfortunately, the problem is not only implementing a standard but also determining the best way to do it, defining an implementation path that considers the particular objectives and conditions of the organization and its availability of resources. This paper proposes a methodological approach for selecting and planning security controls, standardizing and systematizing the process by modeling the situation (objectives and constraints), and applying optimization techniques. The work presents an evaluation of the proposal through a methodology adoption study. This study showed a tendency of the study subjects to adopt the proposal, perceiving it as a helpful element that adapts to their way of working. The main weakness of the proposal was centered on ease of use since the modeling and resolution of the problem require advanced knowledge of optimization techniques.This research was funded by Universidad de La Frontera, research direction, research project DIUFRO DI22-0043

Scheduling Refactoring Opportunities Using Computational Search

Maintaining a high-level code quality can be extremely expensive since time and monetary pressures force programmers to neglect improving the quality of their source code. Refactoring is an extremely important solution to reduce and manage the growing complexity of software systems. Developers often need to make trade-offs between code quality, available resources and delivering a product on time, and such management support is beyond the scope and capability of existing refactoring engines. The problem of finding the optimal sequence in which the refactoring opportunities, such as bad smells, should be ordered is rarely studied. Due to the large number of possible scheduling solutions to explore, software engineers cannot manually find an optimal sequence of refactoring opportunities that may reduce the effort and time required to efficiently improve the quality of software systems. In this paper, we use bi-level multi-objective optimization to the refactoring opportunities management problem. The upper level generates a population of solutions where each solution is defined as an ordered list of code smells to fix which maximize the benefits in terms of quality improvements and minimize the cost in terms of number of refactorings to apply. The lower level finds the best sequence of refactorings that fixes the maximum number of code smells with a minimum number of refactorings for each solution (code smells sequence) in the upper level. The statistical analysis of our experiments over 30 runs on 6 open source systems and 1 industrial project shows a significant reduction in effort and better improvements of quality when compared to state-of-art bad smells prioritization techniques. The manual evaluation performed by software engineers also confirms the relevance of our refactoring opportunities scheduling solutions.Master of ScienceComputer Science, College of Engineering and Computer ScienceUniversity of Michigan-Dearbornhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136063/1/Scheduling Refactoring Opportunities Using Computational Search.pd

Setting Priorities for Space Research: Opportunities and Imperatives

This report represents the first phase of a study by a task group convened by the Space Studies Board to ascertain whether it should attempt to develop a methodology for recommending priorities among the various initiatives in space research (that is, scientific activities concerned with phenomena in space or utilizing observations from space). The report argues that such priority statements by the space research community are both necessary and desirable and would contribute to the formulation and implementation of public policy. The report advocates the establishment of priorities to enhance effective management of the nation's scientific research program in space. It argues that scientific objectives and purposes should determine how and under what circumstances scientific research should be done. The report does not take a position on the controversy between advocates of manned space exploration and those who favor the exclusive use of unmanned space vehicles. Nor does the report address questions about the value or appropriateness of Space Station Freedom or proposals to establish a permanent manned Moon base or to undertake a manned mission to Mars. These issues lie beyond the charge to the task group