Competing by Saving Lives: How Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Companies Create Shared Value in Global Health

This report looks at how pharmaceutical and medical device companies can create shared value in global health by addressing unmet health needs in low- and middle-income countries. Companies have already begun to reap business value and are securing competitive advantages in the markets of tomorrow

Mass Measurement Using Energy Spectra in Three-body Decays

In previous works we have demonstrated how the energy distribution of massless decay products in two body decays can be used to measure the mass of decaying particles. In this work we show how such results can be generalized to the case of multi-body decays. The key ideas that allow us to deal with multi-body final states are an extension of our previous results to the case of massive decay products and the factorization of the multi-body phase space. The mass measurement strategy that we propose is distinct from alternative methods because it does not require an accurate reconstruction of the entire event, as it does not involve, for instance, the missing transverse momentum, but rather requires measuring only the visible decay products of the decay of interest. To demonstrate the general strategy, we study a supersymmetric model wherein pair-produced gluinos each decay to a stable neutralino and a bottom quark-antiquark pair via an off-shell bottom squark. The combinatorial background stemming from the indistinguishable visible final states on both decay sides can be treated by an "event mixing" technique, the performance of which is discussed in detail. Taking into account dominant backgrounds, we are able to show that the mass of the gluino and, in favorable cases, that of the neutralino can be determined by this mass measurement strategy.Comment: 42 pages, 12 figures, Journal-submitted versio

Using Energy Peaks to Count Dark Matter Particles in Decays

We study the determination of the symmetry that stabilizes a dark matter (DM) candidate produced at colliders. Our question is motivated per se, and by several alternative symmetries that appear in models that provide a DM particle. To this end, we devise a strategy to determine whether a heavy mother particle decays into one visible massless particle and one or two DM particles. The counting of DM particles in these decays is relevant to distinguish the minimal choice of Z_2, from a Z_3, stabilization symmetry, under which the heavy particle and the DM are charged and the visible particle is not. Our method is novel in that it chiefly uses the peak of the energy spectrum of the visible particle and only secondarily uses the M_T2 endpoint of events in which the heavy mother particles are pair-produced. We present new theoretical results concerning the energy distribution of the decay products of a three-body decay, which are crucial for our method. To demonstrate the feasibility of our method in investigating the stabilization symmetry, we apply it in distinguishing the decay of a bottom quark partner into a b quark and one or two DM particles. The method can be applied generally to distinguish two- and three-body decays, irrespective of DM.Comment: 25 pages, 5 figure

Patent Amendments and Prosecution History Estoppel Under Festo

On November 29, 2000, the Federal Circuit retroactively reduced the value of nearly 1.2 million unexpired United States patents by announcing a new rule for the somewhat obscure doctrine of prosecution history estoppel. Designed to foster clarity in patent applications, this new pronouncement in Festo Corp v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co. allows for easy copying of some patented inventions and reduces patent owner\u27s ability to prove infringement. This article outlines the change in the law and discusses the positive and negative consequences of the decision

Who’s Afraid of amazon.com v. barnesandnoble.com?

On October 2, 2000, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard the appeal in the case of Amazon.com, Inc. v. Barnesandnoble.com, Inc. This appeal revolves around the alleged infringement by Barnesandnoble.com of a one-click web-shopping system patented by Amazon.com. The one-click system is among a series of recent controversial business method patents. According to some, business methods are legitimate inventions that deserve the protection of the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). According to others, business methods are unworthy of patent protection and may inhibit innovation in e-commerce. The outcome of this case has been widely anticipated by both sides of the business method patent debate as a signal that these patents will or will not be upheld by courts

Understanding face and eye visibility in front-facing cameras of smartphones used in the wild

Commodity mobile devices are now equipped with high-resolution front-facing cameras, allowing applications in biometrics (e.g., FaceID in the iPhone X), facial expression analysis, or gaze interaction. However, it is unknown how often users hold devices in a way that allows capturing their face or eyes, and how this impacts detection accuracy. We collected 25,726 in-the-wild photos, taken from the front-facing camera of smartphones as well as associated application usage logs. We found that the full face is visible about 29% of the time, and that in most cases the face is only partially visible. Furthermore, we identified an influence of users' current activity; for example, when watching videos, the eyes but not the entire face are visible 75% of the time in our dataset. We found that a state-of-the-art face detection algorithm performs poorly against photos taken from front-facing cameras. We discuss how these findings impact mobile applications that leverage face and eye detection, and derive practical implications to address state-of-the art's limitations

Lose The Views: Limited Angle CT Reconstruction via Implicit Sinogram Completion

Computed Tomography (CT) reconstruction is a fundamental component to a wide variety of applications ranging from security, to healthcare. The classical techniques require measuring projections, called sinograms, from a full 180$^\circ$ view of the object. This is impractical in a limited angle scenario, when the viewing angle is less than 180$^\circ$, which can occur due to different factors including restrictions on scanning time, limited flexibility of scanner rotation, etc. The sinograms obtained as a result, cause existing techniques to produce highly artifact-laden reconstructions. In this paper, we propose to address this problem through implicit sinogram completion, on a challenging real world dataset containing scans of common checked-in luggage. We propose a system, consisting of 1D and 2D convolutional neural networks, that operates on a limited angle sinogram to directly produce the best estimate of a reconstruction. Next, we use the x-ray transform on this reconstruction to obtain a "completed" sinogram, as if it came from a full 180$^\circ$ measurement. We feed this to standard analytical and iterative reconstruction techniques to obtain the final reconstruction. We show with extensive experimentation that this combined strategy outperforms many competitive baselines. We also propose a measure of confidence for the reconstruction that enables a practitioner to gauge the reliability of a prediction made by our network. We show that this measure is a strong indicator of quality as measured by the PSNR, while not requiring ground truth at test time. Finally, using a segmentation experiment, we show that our reconstruction preserves the 3D structure of objects effectively.Comment: Spotlight presentation at CVPR 201

Single-photon detection timing jitter in a visible light photon counter

Visible light photon counters (VLPCs) offer many attractive features as photon detectors, such as high quantum efficiency and photon number resolution. We report measurements of the single-photon timing jitter in a VLPC, a critical performance factor in a time-correlated single-photon counting measurement, in a fiber-coupled closed-cycle cryocooler. The measured timing jitter is 240 ps full-width-at-half-maximum at a wavelength of 550 nm, with a dark count rate of 25 000 counts per second. The timing jitter increases modestly at longer wavelengths to 300 ps at 1000 nm, and increases substantially at lower bias voltages as the quantum efficiency is reduced