Commercial Incentives in Academia

This paper investigates the effects of monetary rewards from commercialisation on the pattern of research. We build a simple repeated model of a researcher capable to obtain innovative ideas. We analyse how academic and market incentives affect the allocation of the researcher’s time between research and development. We argue, however, that technology transfer objectives also affect the choice of research projects. Although commercialisation incentives reduce the time spent in research, they might also induce researchers to conduct research that is more basic in nature, contrary to what the “skewing problem” would presage. Monetary rewards induce a more intensive search for (ex-post) path-breaking innovations, which are more likely to be generated through (ex-ante) basic research programs. These results are shown to hold even if development delays publication

Experiences in teaching Hydrogen Technologies in the framework of the International Campus of Excellence Andalucia TECH

The increasing importance of hydrogen technologies is demanding prepared professionals in the numerous topics related to this energy vector. Apart from some basic and advanced courses given by actual experts in these topics, universities must play an important role in the general formation of future professionals. In this way, the International Campus of Excellence (ICE) Andalucía TECH has created several degrees taught jointly by its participating universities of Seville (US) and Málaga (UMA). Among those degrees, Energy Engineering is the best suited to the field of this conference because this degree provide future engineers with specialized training in energy generation, transformation and management. In relation to hydrogen technologies this degree includes a cross sectional optional unit named Hydrogen Based Systems (4.5 ECTS/112.5 h), which is placed in the last term of the fourth year and sharing space with work placement and mobility courses. This paper will present some author’s experiences as teachers of that unit during its short history of only three years. In spite of being a joint degree, which is coordinated between both universities (US and UMA) trying to give similar contents, it is interesting to highlight the differential experiences coming from the teachers of both universities in relation to the teaching methodologies and academic results.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Multilingual Lexical Semantic Resources for Ontology Translation

We describe the integration of some multilingual language resources in ontological descriptions, with the purpose of providing ontologies, which are normally using concept labels in just one (natural) language, with multilingual facility in their design and use in the context of Semantic Web applications, supporting both the semantic annotation of textual documents with multilingual ontology labels and ontology extraction from multilingual text sources

Financial incentives in academia: research versus development

This paper investigates the effects of monetary rewards on the pattern of research. We build a simple repeated model of a researcher capable to obtain innovative ideas. We analyse how the legal environment affects the allocation of researcher's time between research and development. Although technology transfer objectives reduce the time spent in research, they might also induce researchers to conduct research that is more basic in nature, contrary to what the "skewing problem" would presage. We also show that our results hold even if development delays publication.Financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (SEJ2006-00538), Consolider-Ingenio 2010 (CSD 2006-00016), Generalitat (Barcelona Economics - xarxa CREA and 2005SGR00836) is gratefully acknowledged

Unsupervised and Domain Independent Ontology Learning: Combining Heterogeneous Sources of Evidence

Acquiring knowledge from theWeb to build domain ontologies has become a common practice in the Ontological Engineering field. The vast amount of freely available information allows collecting enough information about any domain. However, the Web usually suffers a lack of structure, untrustworthiness and ambiguity of the content. These drawbacks hamper the application of unsupervised methods of building ontologies demanded by the increasingly popular applications of the Semantic Web. We believe that the combination of several processing mechanisms and complementary information sources may potentially solve the problem. The analysis of different sources of evidence allows determining with greater reliability the validity of the detected knowledge. In this paper, we present GALEON (General Architecture for Learning Ontologies) that combines sources and processing resources to provide complementary and redundant evidence for making better estimations about the relevance of the extracted knowledge and their relationships. Our goal in this paper is to show how combining several information sources and extraction mechanisms is possible to build a taxonomy of concepts with a higher accuracy than if only one of them is applied. The experimental results show how this combination notably increases the precision of the obtained results with minimum user intervention

L''espace dans Un mort tout neuf d''Eugène dabit, un cadre pour une écriture non engagée

Pour beaucoup d’auteurs, Eugène Dabit est uniquement un représentant de la littérature populiste. Il s’agit néanmoins d’un classement qu’il a toujours rejeté, considérant que ses œuvres ne répondaient pas aux postulats du mouvement. Toutefois, pour certains, Dabit était la voix du peuple car il parlait des classes moins favorisées à partir de sa propre expérience. L’étude du roman Un mort tout neuf permet de montrer l’auteur sous un angle différent. En effet, la présentation d’un mode de vie et du cadre dans lequel il se déroule ont plus de poids que toute considération idéologique. For many authors, Eugène Dabit is only a representative figure of literary populism. It is nevertheless a classification which he always rejected, considering that his works did not correspond to the postulates of the movement. However, for some, Dabit was the voice of the people because he spoke of the less privileged classes from his own experience. The study of the novel Un mort tout neuf allows to show the author in a different light. Indeed, the presentation of a way of life and the setting in which it takes place are more important than political ideolog

Fuzzy integral based information fusion for classification of highly confusable non-speech sounds

Acoustic event classification may help to describe acoustic scenes and contribute to improve the robustness of speech technologies. In this work, fusion of different information sources with the fuzzy integral (FI), and the associated fuzzy measure (FM), are applied to the problem of classifying a small set of highly confusable human non-speech sounds. As FI is a meaningful formalism for combining classifier outputs that can capture interactions among the various sources of information, it shows in our experiments a significantly better performance than that of any single classifier entering the FI fusion module. Actually, that FI decision-level fusion approach shows comparable results to the high-performing SVM feature-level fusion and thus it seems to be a good choice when feature-level fusion is not an option. We have also observed that the importance and the degree of interaction among the various feature types given by the FM can be used for feature selection, and gives a valuable insight into the problem.Peer Reviewe