China: Rule-taker or Rule-maker in the International Intellectual Property System?

Intellectual property has been a crucial issue for China in the past four decades. Internationally, it was central to China’s fifteen-year negotiation on its accession to the WTO and has been a priority in China-US bilateral relations. Domestically, changes in the regulation and use of intellectual property reflect a larger picture of rapid economic and social transition in China. Initially, China was a rule-taker in intellectual property, experiencing pressure from abroad to do much more on intellectual property. In response, China enacted comprehensive domestic intellectual property laws. From 2001, the Chinese Trademark Office was registering more trademarks than any other office in the world and from 2011, the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) became the world's largest patent office. Today the Chinese government promotes intellectual property protection in its national strategy of “innovation-driven development” and seeks to transform China into the world’s leading intellectual property power. This thesis focuses on whether the large-scale deployment of intellectual property by China in various markets means that it has become a regulatory power in intellectual property, in the sense of being an agenda setter and source of global influence over IP rules. The UK in the nineteenth century and the US in the twentieth were regulatory IP powers in this sense. China’s regulatory and international influence over IP rules is tracked empirically through case studies on geographical indications (Chapter 3), the disclosure obligation (Chapter 4), and intellectual property and standardization (Chapter 5), along with an examination of China’s international IP engagement at the bilateral level (Chapter 6) and plurilateral and multilateral levels (Chapter 7). This thesis also analyses the roles of sub-state actors and non-state actors in China’s international intellectual property engagement (Chapter 8). This thesis argues that China’s role in international intellectual property regulation is more nuanced and complicated than a binary categorization of “rule-maker” or “rule-taker”. China’s international IP engagement is guided by a group of key principles, specifically the principles of IP instrumentalism and a set of foreign policy principles. These principles have been implemented through a process of modeling, while potential conflicts have been minimized through a strategy of balancing. The effects of modeling are compliance and institutional isomorphism which makes the Chinese IP system similar to those of developed countries. Balancing leads to constructed inconsistency and has led China into keeping a low-profile in international policy debates on intellectual property

Web API evolution patterns: A usage-driven approach

As the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is increasingly growing, their evolution becomes more challenging in terms of the service provided according to consumers' needs. In this paper, we address the role of consumers' needs in WAPIs evolution and introduce a process mining pattern-based method to support providers in WAPIs evolution by analyzing and understanding consumers' behavior, imprinted in WAPI usage logs. We take the position that WAPIs' evolution should be mainly usage-based, i.e., the way consumers use them should be one of the main drivers of their changes. We start by characterizing the structural relationships between endpoints, and next, we summarize these relationships into a set of behavioral patterns (i.e., usage patterns whose occurrences indicate specific consumers' behavior like repetitive or consecutive calls), that can potentially imply the need for changes (e.g., creating new parameters for endpoints, merging endpoints). We analyze the logs and extract several metrics for the endpoints and their relationships, to then detect the patterns. We apply our method in two real-world WAPIs from different domains, education, and health, respectively the WAPI of Barcelona School of Informatics at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Facultat d'Informàtica de Barcelona, FIB, UPC), and District Health Information Software 2 (DHIS2) WAPI. The feedback from consumers and providers of these WAPIs proved the effectiveness of the detected patterns and confirmed the promising potential of our approach.This paper has been funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under project/funding scheme PID2020-117191RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Addressing indicator gaps: Climate change adaptation in fisheries and aquaculture, climate change adaptation in forestry, and share of wood in construction

The conceptual framework of the EU Bioeconomy Monitoring System was designed to assess the EU’s progress towards a circular and sustainable bioeconomy. Indicators were selected to cover the various parts of the framework but gaps in the knowledge or data still exist. This document describes the progress made in filling gaps in the indicators that had been identified as being important to understand the progress of the EU Bioeconomy. In 2022, three gaps were addressed: Climate change adaptation in fisheries and aquaculture, climate change adaptation in forestry and share of wood in construction. Indicators of adaptation to climate change in fisheries and aquaculture presented in Chapter 2 of this report are chosen for their ability to indicate changes in these sectors either as technical changes, changes in the behaviour of resource users/producers, or changes in the governance system. Many indicators are proposed here, but the final choice of the indicators selected to inform policymakers through the EU Bioeconomy Monitoring System must be preceded by a period of evaluation, consultation with the productive sectors and assessment of their operation in the medium to long term. For the indicators on climate change adaptation in forestry, indicators need to be applicable in as many forest ecosystems and methods of forest management as possible allowing comparisons across temporal and spatial scales. Moreover, they need to be concise, meaningful, and communicative, easily comprehensible, particularly by decisionmakers. The indicators presented here are proposed based on an in-depth literature review and assessment of data availability at EU level. Regarding indicators to assess the share of wood in construction, there is little data available. Timber use in construction is highly centred around residential construction, its total use varies from country to country and the data available is highly localized, thus there is no centralized EU-level database available for this indicator. The most feasible indicator is for the volume and share of wooden buildings (load-bearing frame mostly of wood) because of the homogeneity with which it is measured across different countries. So far, such data is only available in five countries: Germany, Sweden, Finland, Czechia, and Bulgaria.This work is fully funded by DG Research and Innovation under the Administrative Agreement DG RTD N° 013 KCB (LC-01591551) JRC Reference N ° 35895 NFP

Waterborne Disease Reduction Using Evidence-based Microbiology Verification in Lower Nyakach, Kenya

Waterborne diseases continue to plague the poorest people in low-income countries and are estimated to cause 4,600,000 acute incidents of diarrhea resulting in over 2,000 deaths daily. A major challenge is performing microbiology tests to monitor drinking water quality. Friends of the Old (FOTO) implemented a novel strategy using evidence-based microbiology to educate communities about the relationship between contaminated water and disease. Two commercially available tests for E.coli, adapted for fieldwork, provided easily interpreted results of contamination that correlate with WHO\u27s disease risk categories. Simple and effective household water treatment options \u27solar pasteurization and/or chlorination\u27 were provided to all 14,400 families and 42 schools in Lower Nyakach, Kenya. From February to May, 2015, adjacent districts had serious cholera outbreaks, but in Lower Nyakach, where education and the use of chlorine were nearly universal, there were no cases of cholera and steadily decreasing rates of diarrhea. A cross-sectional study was conducted to verify self-reported water treatment practices with evidence-based microbiological testing. A random sample of 377 households revealed that 95% treat their water each and every time they collect. Microbiological verification found 96% of household safe water storage vessels were low risk compared to their very high risk source water. A strong association (p \u3c 0.001) existed between the observed decrease in diarrhea trends from health facilities in Lower Nyakach and exposure to the novel training. The strategy used by FOTO could be replicated to empower communities worldwide to identify contaminated drinking water sources and to reduce the incidence of waterborne disease

Phone Merging for Code-switched Speech Recognition

International audienceSpeakers in multilingual communities often switch between or mix multiple languages in the same conversation. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) of code-switched speech faces many challenges including the influence of phones of different languages on each other. This paper shows evidence that phone sharing between languages improves the Acoustic Model performance for Hindi-English code-switched speech. We compare base-line system built with separate phones for Hindi and English with systems where the phones were manually merged based on linguistic knowledge. Encouraged by the improved ASR performance after manually merging the phones, we further investigate multiple data-driven methods to identify phones to be merged across the languages. We show detailed analysis of automatic phone merging in this language pair and the impact it has on individual phone accuracies and WER. Though the best performance gain of 1.2% WER was observed with manually merged phones, we show experimentally that the manual phone merge is not optimal

Quality of Water in Relation to Diarrheal Disease Incidence in Obunga

Kenyan cities are experiencing a serious dilemma in dealing with the large influx of people from rural parts of the country to the cities. Most people come to the city in pursuit of better opportunities and jobs. Rapid urban growth with little planning and preparation by the national and county governments has led to the development of informal settlements. These informal settlements are characterized by poor environmental conditions that predispose their residents for poor health conditions. Because of their illegal status, most residents of informal settlements in Kenya do not receive government services such as water, drainage, sewerage, and rubbish collection. This study will focus specifically on the lack of proper water supply in these informal settlements. Informal settlements usually use well water, public taps, or water vendors in order to get the water they need. The water options are not always adequate or safe. This study seeks to understand the use of well water in the informal settlement Obunga located in Kisumu County, Kenya. The study looks at the proximity of wells to pit latrines and how this affects the bacteriological quality of the water. The results found that there was no correlation between well contamination and distance from pit latrine and no correlation between diarrheal disease and the distance of a water source from a pit latrine. There was, however, a correlation between drinking dirty water and experiencing diarrhea. This finding suggests that contaminated water does indeed cause diarrhea. The study also found that there was not adequate access to safe drinking water in Obunga since 100% of the sampled wells tested positive for fecal coliforms. Taps were found to be the safest water source with only 10% contamination, but there are simply not enough taps in Obunga to serve the growing population of residents

An evaluation of the influence of livestock movements on the transmission, spread and persistence of infectious diseases in northern Tanzania

In northern Tanzania livestock are heavily relied upon as a main source of income, social status and nutritional security, especially by those living in the most impoverished communities (Covarrubias et al., 2012; Government of Tanzania, 2017). The high dependence on livestock is accompanied by a high burden of infectious production-limiting and zoonotic pathogens circulating within the livestock population but poor access to veterinary services. Zoonotic pathogens can spill over to cause disease in people, which are often misdiagnosed and erroneously treated leading to worse patient outcomes (Crump et al., 2013; Zhang et al., 2016). For pathogens that cause disease in livestock alone, the economic returns from investing in disease control can far outweigh the costs (Jones et al., 2016). Improved livestock health and productivity is widely recognised as a route out of and away from poverty for people living in the most marginalised communities (Randolph et al., 2007). Funding and resources to invest in the livestock sector and livestock disease control are often lacking as the broad benefits to individuals, societies and economies are poorly documented and often overlooked (Rich and Perry, 2011; World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), 2013). Policy makers need clear guidelines to develop efficient livestock disease control programmes that reduce livestock and zoonotic pathogen burden through minimal use of resources for maximal societal gains (FAO, 2009; Dutilly et al., 2020). Livestock movements are widely recognised as providing a route to move pathogens between populations (Fevre et al., 2006). These movements can drive large epidemic outbreaks of disease and also provide opportunities for pathogens with relatively low R0 to persist in populations (Green, Kiss and Kao, 2006a; Prentice et al., 2017). Where dense comprehensive data on livestock movements is available, this can be used by policy makers to guide effective disease control programmes (Kao et al., 2006). However, information on livestock movements is not routinely collected and centrally recorded in Tanzania and is therefore not available to guide livestock disease control programmes. Through this PhD, I gather and analyse data on three major types of permanent livestock movements in cattle and small ruminants across and beyond the Arusha, Manyara and Kilimanjaro regions in northern Tanzania. Permanent movements are those into or out of household herds and flocks with no plan to return the animal(s) to their origin. Using household survey data in conjunction with livestock serological data, market survey data and government movement permit data, I evaluate how livestock movements contribute to epidemiological connectivity and disease risk. Movements to and from households, including market movements go largely unreported in the study area but can cover long distances up to 300 km in a single movement. I use the data to construct networks of livestock movements and use concepts from network analysis to identify sub-village and ward locations that can be targeted with efficient disease control and surveillance interventions. My analysis shows that high risk locations for disease introduction are also those at high risk of onward transmission, and that locations at high risk for small ruminant pathogen transmission are also high risk for cattle pathogen transmission. Additionally, I show that locations at risk of introduction and onward transmission of less transmissible pathogens (e.g. Brucella spp.) are also high risk for epidemic-prone pathogens (e.g. Foot and Mouth disease virus) that are rapidly transmitted. The positive correlations identified between locations’ risk ranks show that multi-species interventions which aim to prevent introduction and onward transmission of multiple pathogens could be an efficient use of disease control resources in northern Tanzania. Specifically, I show that household cattle introductions and sub-village betweenness are positively associated with cattle’s risk of bovine viral diarrhoea virus (BVDV) exposure and this risk is ubiquitous across the study area. For other pathogens investigated, the associations between introductions and exposure are complex and vary depending on pathogen and the agro-ecological (A-E) class of the livestock keeping system. This complexity is likely driven by the varying transmission routes and shedding cycles of different pathogens, in combination with the different livestock mixing and contact rates between infectious and susceptible individuals in the different A-E systems. Nevertheless, risk factors relating to household and sub-village livestock introductions are identified and can be used to guide disease control interventions in different settings. I also identify that livestock market movements are most often made on foot with increased risk of these livestock contacting local non-moving livestock and creating opportunities for pathogen dissemination across the landscape. Frequently travelled routes to and from market are therefore also identified as areas where an increase in active surveillance would benefit both local livestock and animals moving into the market system. Findings from this work will be useful for policy makers in northern Tanzania who have minimal resources available to reduce livestock and zoonotic pathogen burden. High risk locations identified in this analysis can be made targets for knowledge exchange and information dissemination, active surveillance and multi-pathogen vaccination programmes. Additionally, the results from this study can be used to guide future research questions which address how temporary contacts between livestock from different herds and flocks might affect pathogen transmission in the area