'Getting out of the closet': Scientific authorship of literary fiction and knowledge transfer

Some scientists write literary fiction books in their spare time. If these books contain scientific knowledge, literary fiction becomes a mechanism of knowledge transfer. In this case, we could conceptualize literary fiction as non-formal knowledge transfer. We model knowledge transfer via literary fiction as a function of the type of scientist (academic or non-academic) and his/her scientific field. Academic scientists are those employed in academia and public research organizations whereas non-academic scientists are those with a scientific background employed in other sectors. We also distinguish between direct knowledge transfer (the book includes the scientist's research topics), indirect knowledge transfer (scientific authors talk about their research with cultural agents) and reverse knowledge transfer (cultural agents give scientists ideas for future research). Through mixed-methods research and a sample from Spain, we find that scientific authorship accounts for a considerable percentage of all literary fiction authorship. Academic scientists do not transfer knowledge directly so often as non-academic scientists, but the former engage into indirect and reverse transfer knowledge more often than the latter. Scientists from History stand out in direct knowledge transfer. We draw propositions about the role of the academic logic and scientific field on knowledge transfer via literary fiction. We advance some tentative conclusions regarding the consideration of scientific authorship of literary fiction as a valuable knowledge transfer mechanism.Comment: Paper published in Journal of Technology Transfe

Do public research organisations own most patents invented by their staff?

[EN] Technology ownership and knowledge transfer aim at the dissemination of public research results, usually in one direction – from the university or public research organisation (PRO) that produced the results. However, the complementarities between these types of instruments are not clear compared to the bidirectional channels of knowledge exchange. We analyse one PRO in Spain, a country that is peculiar in terms of infrequent changes to the legislation on science and patents and a predominance of PRO-owned over PRO-invented patents, similar to the situation in the USA but different from that in most EU member states. Against this background, knowledge transfer (measured through PROinvented patents) increases faster than technology ownership (measured through PRO-owned patents). This situation may be damaging to knowledge exchange (measured through PRO co-owned patents).Azagra-Caro, JM. (2011). Do public research organisations own most patents invented by their staff?. Science and Public Policy. 38(3):237-250. doi:10.3152/016502611X12849792159272S23725038

Differences between examiner and applicant citations in the European Patent Office: a first approach

Trabajo presentado a la 19th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators: "Context counts: Pathways to Master Big and Little Data" celebrada en Leiden (Holanda) del 3 al 5 de septiembre de 2014.In the US Patent Office, examiners add extra shares of citations to foreign applicants. We explore a similar country club effect in the European Patent Office (EPO). Using EPO data of over 3,500,000 citations in years 1997-2007, we find national variation in the probability of an applicant originating a citation rather than the examiner. Symmetrically to the US case, EPO examiners add extra citations to non-signatory member states. Moreover, if examiners are likely to come from the same country of the applicants, applicant-citation shares increase, pointing to the existence of national bias in EPO patent examiners. These results hold after controlling for sub-national characteristics of the patenting process.Peer Reviewe

Academic artists' engagement and commercialisation

[EN] Academic artists are researchers who create artistic work. They form part of the cultural life of cities and contribute to welfare not only through research but also through art. They may commercialise their art or use it to engage in scientifc knowledge difusion. We seek to understand the relationship between art, academic commercialisation and engagement, and detect barriers to academic art. The resources needed to develop and difuse art in addition to conducting research may be incompatible with a career focused on science quality or an organisational logic based on teaching and pure basic research. We study the responses to a survey of some 7,000 Spanish academics and compare university research ers to other researchers. More than half of the researchers surveyed create artistic work; however, whereas engagement is the norm rather than the exception, commercialisation is rare. Working in a university and producing good quality science run counter to being an artist. The detrimental efect of science quality on being a commercial or engaged artist turns positive after a certain threshold, which suggests polarisation among academic art ists. Among commercial artists, this polarisation seems to apply specifcally to university researchers. We discuss the implications for the valorisation of art across knowledge trans fer channels and in research evaluations.The Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities funded this research through Project CSO2016-79045-C2-2-R of the Spanish National R&D&I Plan. We are grateful to Christopher S. Hayter and Einar Rasmussen for their constructive comments. Our special thanks go to the volunteers who pilot-tested the survey: David Barberá, Àngels Bernabeu, Joaquín Camps, Gérard Carat, María Ángeles Chavarría, Anabel Fernández, Ester Linde, Óscar Llopis, Francisco Rivas and Soberana Sáez. Thanks are due also to the survey respondents and, particularly, those who spontaneously provided supporting statements. Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature.Azagra-Caro, JM.; Benito Amat, C.; Planells-Aleixandre, E. (2022). Academic artists' engagement and commercialisation. The Journal of Technology Transfer. 47(4):1273-1296. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-022-09940-21273129647

Dynamic perspectives on technology transfer: introduction to the special section

[EN] Theoretical frameworks acknowledge the dynamic and evolving nature of technology transfer. However, there is a scarcity of empirical work in the field incorporating a dynamic and longitudinal perspective. Several literature reviews call for technology transfer research agendas to include longitudinal studies. In response to such calls, this special section comprises selected contributions to the 2018 Technology Transfer Society (T2S) Conference which address this gap from different angles. The three qualitative and three quantitative works chosen contain research questions and methodologies related to dynamic aspects of technology transfer. We argue that historical and processual studies offer additional new directionsThe editors are grateful to 2018 T2S Conference participants for their comments on the papers published in this special section. We thank the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the Polytechnic Innovation City for their support and hospitality. We are indebted to the reviewers of the papers submitted to this special section. The Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities funded Joaquin M. Azagra-Caro's and Pablo D'Este's contribution to the special section as part of the CSO2016-79045-C2-2-R and the RTI2018-101232-B-100 Projects of the Spanish National R&D&I Plan, respectively.Barberá Tomás, JD.; Azagra-Caro, JM.; Deste Cukierman, P. (2021). Dynamic perspectives on technology transfer: introduction to the special section. The Journal of Technology Transfer. 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-021-09898-7S1

Fine grained pointing recognition for natural drone guidance

Human action recognition systems are typically focused on identifying different actions, rather than fine grained variations of the same action. This work explores strategies to identify different pointing directions in order to build a natural interaction system to guide autonomous systems such as drones. Commanding a drone with hand-held panels or tablets is common practice but intuitive user-drone interfaces might have significant benefits. The system proposed in this work just requires the user to provide occasional high-level navigation commands by pointing the drone towards the desired motion direction. Due to the lack of data on these settings, we present a new benchmarking video dataset to validate our framework and facilitate future research on the area. Our results show good accuracy for pointing direction recognition, while running at interactive rates and exhibiting robustness to variability in user appearance, viewpoint, camera distance and scenery

Real-Time Polarimetry of Hyperpolarized 13C Nuclear Spins Using an Atomic Magnetometer

We introduce a method for nondestructive quantification of nuclear spin polarization, of relevance to hyperpolarized spin tracers widely used in magnetic resonance from spectroscopy to in vivo imaging. In a bias field of around 30 nT we use a high-sensitivity miniaturized 87Rb-vapor magnetometer to measure the field generated by the sample, as it is driven by a windowed dynamical decoupling pulse sequence that both maximizes the nuclear spin lifetime and modulates the polarization for easy detection. We demonstrate the procedure applied to a 0.08 M hyperpolarized [1-13C]-pyruvate solution produced by dissolution dynamic nuclear polarization, measuring polarization repeatedly during natural decay at Earth's field. Application to real-time and continuous quality monitoring of hyperpolarized substances is discussed

Energy management of refrigeration systems with thermal energy storage based on non-linear model predictive control

This work addresses the energy management of a combined system consisting of a refrigeration cycle and a thermal energy storage tank based on phase change materials. The storage tank is used as a cold-energy buffer, thus decoupling cooling demand and production, which leads to cost reduction and satisfaction of peak demand that would be infeasible for the original cycle. A layered scheduling and control strategy is proposed, where a non-linear predictive scheduler computes the references of the main powers involved (storage tank charging/discharging powers and direct cooling production), while a low-level controller ensures that the requested powers are actually achieved. A simplified model retaining the dominant dynamics is proposed as the prediction model for the scheduler. Economic, efficiency, and feasibility criteria are considered, seeking operating cost reduction while ensuring demand satisfaction. The performance of the proposed strategy for the system with energy storage is compared in simulation with that of a cycle without energy storage, where the former is shown to satisfy challenging demands while reducing the operating cost by up to 28%. The proposed approach also shows suitable robustness when significant uncertainty in the prediction model is considered