A Brief History of the Bioengineering Institute of California and the UC System-wide Symposia

The plan to establish a Multicampus Research Unit (MRU) on Bioengineering in the University of California (UC) System started in August 1999. The cooperative efforts of the UC campuses led to the formal establishment of the Bioengineering Institute of California (BIC) in October 2003. Three years prior to the BIC establishment, the System-wide Annual Bioengineering Symposium was started at UC Davis. The Symposia were then hosted sequentially by UC Santa Barbara, UC Berkeley, UCSD, UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, UCSF, UCLA, and UC Riverside, with the completion of the first cycle of a decade in the newest campus of UC Merced in 2009. The second cycle began in 2010 with the Symposium returning again to UC Davis. Each campus hosted a wonderful Symposium, with the active participation of students and faculty from all campuses, with the motto of “Ten campuses united as one, learning and growing together.” These Symposia have contributed significantly to the collaborative research and training of students and young scientists in bioengineering, as well as fruitful interactions with industry and government agencies, which have provided strong support for these valuable meetings. The BIC will endeavor to further enhance these efforts by fostering research collaborations and joint education and training activities, with the ultimate goal of advancing bioengineering for the improvement of human health and wellbeing

Towards A Benefit-Based Market Neutral Formulary Apportionment System in the EU: Reflections for the BEFIT Proposal

The European Union’s latest tax reform project, ‘Business in Europe: Framework for Income Taxation’ (BEFIT), is a formulary apportionment regime. This article explains how the EU should design its formulary apportionment system that is fair for the EU Member States. This article argues that the normative framework should combine the benefit principle and the concept of Market Neutrality. This Benefit-Based Market Neutrality framework can cover multiple policies pursued by BEFIT and respect the diversity of different EU Member States. Moreover, by comparing the experiences in the US state taxation with the EU’s preparation work on the Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB), the article concludes that the EU should implement a formula consisting of three equally weighted factors, the sales factor, the asset factor and the labour factor. After clarifying prevalent myths, this article negates the single sales factor formula option and embraces Intellectual property rights in the asset factor

A Complexity-Based Approach to Intra-Organizational Team Selection

Early studies recognized the significance of team's work capacity and suggested the selection of team members based on individual skills and performance in alignment with task characteristics. The equitable team selection method, for example, assigns people to different tasks with even skill distributions for the best overall performance. Recent advancement in organization science also identifies the importance of contextual skills. However, work teams are complex adaptive systems with interdependence between workers and social environment, and exhibit surprising, nonlinear behavior. Optimizing individual stages without taking organizational complexity into account is unlikely to yield a high performing new combination of teams. The objectives of this study can be stated as: a) Utilizing complex system theory to better understand the processes of team selection including forming teams with considering worker's interdependence and replacing the unsuitable members through a time frame; b) Comparing different team selection methods, including random selection, equity method, using knowledge of interdependence in different economic conditions through simulation; c) Comparing different policies of replacing members of teams. This study utilizes a computational model to understand the complexity of project team selection and to examine how diversity of capability and interdependence between workers to effect team performance in different economic conditions. The NK model, a widely used theory for complex systems is utilized here to illustrate the worker's interdependence and fed into an Agent-Based Model. This study uses a small design firm as a case implementation to examine the performance of a variety of team selection approaches and replacement policies. Project data, task assignment, and individual and team performance information were collected for the period of 2009-2011. The simulation results show that while the equity selection method can increase the diversity of capabilities of teams, the net performance is often worse than optimizing worker interdependencies. This study suggests that managers should protect their higher-performing workers with minimal interdependence disruption when they considered team selection. Thus taking the advantages and disadvantages of all three policies into account, transferring low contributors or least supported members are recommended to be enacted before hiring new workers to avoid this last policy's especially large additional costs