The systematic capacity for technological absorption (SCTA) and international technology transfer (ITT): how some Korean firms successfully exploit Russian technology

This thesis examines issues of international technology transfer (ITT), focusing on the exploitation of foreign technology between countries with contrasting strengths and capabilities. The tendency in ITT is that it has mostly been limited to the triad countries and to some latecomer economies in East Asia. An explanation for this tendency is that the extent of this shared common ground between countries directly affects a recipient country’s capability to exploit and absorb foreign knowledge. This thesis examines cases of ITT which successfully occurred without such common grounds and offers explanations for specific cases. The conceptual framework was developed to explain how such extraordinary capabilities are created in order to overcome barriers to technological transfer. In addition, several other mechanisms and special factors are hypothesised as candidates for explaining the technology transfer process as one involving bridging and overcoming the barriers. These hypotheses are examined in relation to the Korean-Russian technology transfer, the main target of the investigation. Korea and Russia are countries that had no interaction prior to or during the Cold War period and shared little or no common ground. Nonetheless, after 1990 Korean firms have actively attempted to exploit Russian technology and some of them, though not many, have succeeded in exploiting and commercialising Russian technology. Important contextual issues for this examination are the military and mission-focused body of Russia’s technological knowledge and the often cheaper importation of Western technology. Taking these contextual issues into account, this thesis identifies two principal issues that were overcome in the cases of successful technology transfer: a) the tacitness of Russian technological knowledge and b) the locality of the Russian “context of origin” in terms of the socio-cultural, economic, and political environment. The empirical content of the thesis involves a mixed approach with document analysis, interviews, a survey, and case studies. The research results show that the public agency programme’s facilitating role as an intermediary (developed by the Korean government) creates the extra capacity to bridge the gaps involved in adapting Russian technology

Fabricating functionally graded films with designed gradient profiles using pulsed laser deposition

A novel picosecond-laser pulsed laser deposition method has been developed for fabricating functionally graded films with pre-designed gradient profiles. Theoretically, the developed method is capable of precisely fabricating films with any thicknesses and any gradient profiles by controlling the laser beam powers for the two different targets based on the film composition profiles. As an implementation example, we have successfully constructed functionally graded diamond-like carbon films with six different gradient profiles: linear, quadratic, cubic, square root, cubic root, and sinusoidal. Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy is employed for investigating the chemical composition along the thickness of the film, and the deposition profile and thickness errors are found to be less than 3% and 1.04%, respectively. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first method for fabricating films with designed gradient profiles and has huge potential in many areas of coatings and films, including multifunctional optical films. We believe that this method is not only limited to the example considered in this study, but also can be applied to all material combinations as long as they can be deposited using the pulsed laser deposition technique.open0

Online Learning with Unknown Constraints

We consider the problem of online learning where the sequence of actions played by the learner must adhere to an unknown safety constraint at every round. The goal is to minimize regret with respect to the best safe action in hindsight while simultaneously satisfying the safety constraint with high probability on each round. We provide a general meta-algorithm that leverages an online regression oracle to estimate the unknown safety constraint, and converts the predictions of an online learning oracle to predictions that adhere to the unknown safety constraint. On the theoretical side, our algorithm's regret can be bounded by the regret of the online regression and online learning oracles, the eluder dimension of the model class containing the unknown safety constraint, and a novel complexity measure that captures the difficulty of safe learning. We complement our result with an asymptotic lower bound that shows that the aforementioned complexity measure is necessary. When the constraints are linear, we instantiate our result to provide a concrete algorithm with $\sqrt{T}$ regret using a scaling transformation that balances optimistic exploration with pessimistic constraint satisfaction

An improvement of a recent closed graph theorem

AbstractWe obtain a new closed graph theorem which is a substantial improvement of a recent result

Expression of Functional Recombinant Mussel Adhesive Protein Mgfp-5 in Escherichia coli

Mussel adhesive proteins have been suggested as a basis for environmentally friendly adhesives for use in aqueous conditions and in medicine. However, attempts to produce functional and economical recombinant mussel adhesive proteins (mainly foot protein type 1) in several systems have failed. Here, the cDNA coding for Mytilus galloprovincialis foot protein type 5 (Mgfp-5) was isolated for the first time. Using this cDNA, we produced a recombinant Mgfp-5 fused with a hexahistidine affinity ligand, which was expressed in a soluble form in Escherichia coli and was highly purified using affinity chromatography. The adhesive properties of purified recombinant Mgfp-5 were compared with the commercial extracted mussel adhesive Cell-Tak by investigating adhesion force using atomic force microscopy, material surface coating, and quartz crystal microbalance. Even though further macroscale assays are needed, these microscale assays showed that recombinant Mgfp-5 has significant adhesive ability and may be useful as a bioadhesive in medical or underwater environments.X119196sciescopu

Influencing Factors on Knowledge Adoption of Mobile Game Developers in Online Communities

Recently, with the advance of wireless Internet access via mobile devices, a myriad of game development companies has forayed into the mobile game market, leading to intense competition. To survive in this fierce competition, mobile game developers often try to get a grasp of the rapidly changing needs of their customers by operating their own official communities where game users freely leave their requests, suggestions, and ideas relevant to focal games. Based on the heuristic-systematic model (HSM) and data quality (DQ) framework, this study derives key content, non-content, and hybrid cues that can be utilized when game developers accept suggested postings in these online communities. The results of the hierarchical multiple regression analysis show relevancy, timeliness, amount of writing, and the number of comments are positively associated with mobile game developers’ knowledge adoption. In addition, title attractiveness mitigates the relationship between amount of writing/the number of comments and knowledge adoption