The Marriages of Intellectual Property & Insurance

The marriages of Intellectual Property and Insurance may sound a magical word for all those companies which are playing the game of intellectual property in their business. These companies manage their intellectual property under the guidance of IP management and an IP policy in the company. These companies earn a huge amount of money in this game; but there are also chances for the companies to face the risks ahead. These expected risks can be minimized to some extent, if the companies understand the meaning and the importance of this new term “Intellectual Property Insurance”. In order to make the companies appreciate the depth significance of the term, the paper is written and the paper emphasizes the need of IP insurance in the business, the role of IP insurance in mitigating the risks involved in the business and the framework of IP insurance policy etc.Intellectual Property, Insurance, Intellectual Property Insurance

DESIGN OF REAL-TIME COMBUSTION FEEDBACK SYSTEM AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF AN RCCI ENGINE FOR CONTROL

Premixed compression ignition (PCI) technologies offer high efficiency and low emissions but are usually confined by limited operation range as well as high pressure rise and heat release rate. In this work, a more recently developed PCI mode is explored where in-cylinder blending of two fuels with different auto-ignition characteristics (diesel and gasoline) is utilized to create reactivity stratification such that heat release rate and combustion timing can be controlled. This mode has been defined as Reactivity Controlled Compression Ignition (RCCI). As part of this thesis, the main aim is to study various parameters that can be used to control combustion phasing. Also, steady state mapping of the engine is done so as to explore the operating range for the current engine setup. Best efficiencies as well as highest loads are obtained for higher Premixed Ratio (PR) values and advanced Start of Injection (SOI) timings, where as lower PR fuel blends are needed to achieve low load limit. The analysis is also extended to transient RCCI operation for observing various dynamics involved and their effects on combustion phasing. As part of realizing full-load range operation, switching to conventional Spark-Ignition (SI) combustion mode is also carried out. Various dynamics involved in the switching process are captured. A cycle-by-cycle closed loop combustion controller is designed and implemented on the engine to achieve optimum combustion phasing during transient engine operation. To provide feedback of combustion parameters like engine load and combustion phasing to the closed loop controller, a real-time combustion feedback system is designed and implemented utilizing Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)

Quest for good quality medicines in hospitals: a structured approach

Patients use medicines to gain speedy recovery from illness or to maintain wellbeing under the care of their physicians. For chronic illnesses, the pharmacotherapy may continue for the entire lifetime. Significant expenditure is incurred in sustaining this pharmacotherapy. Quite expectedly, the patients are concerned about the quality of medicines that they receive and consume. In recent times, the quality concerns have increased phenomenally due to media hype and overexposure all around. Ensuring quality of medicines in developing countries is not easy. Multi-pronged approaches are needed to ensure procurement of good quality medicines by institutional buyers. However, ensuring the procurement of good quality medicines is not enough. The quality of medicines has to be maintained till their consumption by patients and a rational, scientific method has to be adopted to ensure this goal. A structured approach in ensuring good quality medicines for optimum pharmacotherapy is being presented in this review

The Marriages of Intellectual Property & Insurance

The marriages of Intellectual Property and Insurance may sound a magical word for all those companies which are playing the game of intellectual property in their business. These companies manage their intellectual property under the guidance of IP management and an IP policy in the company. These companies earn a huge amount of money in this game; but there are also chances for the companies to face the risks ahead. These expected risks can be minimized to some extent, if the companies understand the meaning and the importance of this new term “Intellectual Property Insurance”. In order to make the companies appreciate the depth significance of the term, the paper is written and the paper emphasizes the need of IP insurance in the business, the role of IP insurance in mitigating the risks involved in the business and the framework of IP insurance policy etc

Efficient Machine Learning Methods for Document Image Analysis

With the exponential growth in volume of multimedia content on the internet, there has been an increasing interest for developing more efficient and scalable algorithms to learn directly from data without excessive restrictions on nature of the content. In the context of document images, many large scale digitization projects have called for reliable and scalable triage methods for enhancement, segmentation, grouping and categorization of captured images. Current approaches, however, are typically limited to a specific class of documents such as scanned books, newspapers, journal articles or forms for example, and analysis and processing of more unconstrained and noisy heterogeneous document collections has not been as widely addressed. Additionally, existing machine-learning based approaches for document processing need to be carefully applied to handle the challenges associated with large and imbalanced training data. In this thesis, we address these challenges in three primary applications of document image analysis - low-level document enhancement, mid-level handwritten line segmentation, and high-level classification and retrieval. We first present a data selection method for training Support Vector Machines (SVM) on large-scale data sets. We apply the proposed approach to pixel-level document image enhancement, and show promising results with a relatively small number of training samples. Second, we present a graph-based method for segmentation of handwritten document images into text-lines which is more efficient and adaptive than previous approaches. Our approach demonstrates that combining results from local and global methods enhances the final performance of text-line segmentation. Third, we present an approach to compute structural similarities between images for classification and retrieval. Results on real-world data sets show that the approach is more effective than earlier approaches when the labeled data is limited. We extend our classification approach to a completely unsupervised setting, where both the number of classes and representative samples from each class is assumed to be unknown. We present a method for computing similarities based on learned structural patterns and correlations from the given data. Experiments with four different data sets show that our approach can estimate number of classes in large document collections and group structurally similar images with a high-accuracy

Computationally efficient multibody simulations

Computationally efficient approaches to the solution of the dynamics of multibody systems are presented in this work. The computational efficiency is derived from both the algorithmic and implementational standpoint. Order(n) approaches provide a new formulation of the equations of motion eliminating the assembly and numerical inversion of a system mass matrix as required by conventional algorithms. Computational efficiency is also gained in the implementation phase by the symbolic processing and parallel implementation of these equations. Comparison of this algorithm with existing multibody simulation programs illustrates the increased computational efficiency

How uniform is donor history questionnaire for screening potential blood donors: a critical analysis

Background: Transfusion of whole blood or blood products are a clinical necessity in numerous clinical conditions. Blood donated from healthy human volunteers is the only method currently available to acquire blood transfusion and production of blood products. Donor history questionnaire (DHQ) contributes immensely to ensure safe blood donation. The aim was to compare the donor history questionnaire for blood donation deferral of various regions and organizations with that of World Health Organization (WHO).Methods: An extensive internet search for donor history questionnaires (DHQ) for blood donation deferral of different regions, countries and organization was conducted. Seven such forms were found which could be downloaded. A critical analysis of these forms was conducted based on history pertaining to use of medicines, disease history or procedure undergone recently. A comparative analysis was conducted finally with the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations on the issue of donor screening and deferral. Descriptive analysis was done for comparison of donor history questionnaires in regards to drugs taken, disease history and invasive procedures performed.Results: After the analysis of the DHQs, we found that despite many similarities, there were significant differences in the questionnaires. The differences were more with respect to questions asked about the medicines, both traditional as well as modern.Conclusions: DHQs analysed by us revealed wide variations in their enquiry from potential donors about exposure to prescription medicines as well as the disease history. A suggestion is that more questions related to alternative medicines, nutraceuticals and other similar xenobiotic should be included

Study of pnictides for photovoltaic applications

For the transition into a sustainable mode of energy usage, it is important to develop photovoltaic materials that exhibit better solar-to-electricity conversion efficiencies, a direct optimal band gap, and made of non-toxic, earth abundant elements compared to the state-of-the-art silicon photovoltaics. Here, we explore the non-redox-active pnictide chemical space, including binary A$_3$B$_2$, ternary AA'$_2$B$_2$, and quaternary AA'A"B$_2$ compounds (A, A', A" = Ca, Sr, or Zn; B = N or P), as candidate beyond-Si photovoltaics using density functional theory calculations. Specifically, we evaluate the ground state configurations, band gaps, and 0 K thermodynamic stability for all 20 pnictide compositions considered, besides computing the formation energy of cation vacancies, anion vacancies, and cation anti-sites in a subset of candidate compounds. Importantly, we identify SrZn$_2$N$_2$, SrZn$_2$P$_2$, and CaZn$_2$P$_2$ to be promising candidates, exhibiting optimal (1.1-1.5 eV) hybrid-functional-calculated band gaps, stability at 0 K, and high resistance to point defects (formation energies $>$1 eV), while other possible candidates include ZnCa$_2$N$_2$ and ZnSr$_2$N$_2$, which may be susceptible to N-vacancy formation. We hope that our study will contribute to the practical development of pnictide semiconductors as beyond-silicon light absorbers