Economic Impacts of High Technology

Rapid penetration into the market of new technologies will certainly bring in benefits to consumers or more generally to the economy, but almost unavoidably be accompanied by frictions in both domestic and international markets. For these technologies to be really beneficial to the society, such strategies are to be implemented that reduce frictions in the markets with as little decrease in positive impacts as possible. Taking into account that the issues are of interdisciplinary (technology and economy) and international character and IIASA's sales point is exactly on this point, we are convinced that IIASA is one of the most appropriate institutions which can conduct a study on the issues. The author takes industrial robots as the target technology and describes possible research items

Cosmological backreaction of a quantized massless scalar field

We consider the backreaction problem of a quantized minimally coupled massless scalar field in cosmology. The adiabatically regularized stress-energy tensor in a general Friedmann-Robertson-Walker background is approximately evaluated by using the fact that subhorizon modes evolve adiabatically and superhorizon modes are frozen. The vacuum energy density is verified to obey a new first order differential equation depending on a dimensionless parameter of order unity, which calibrates subhorizon/superhorizon division. We check the validity of the approximation by calculating the corresponding vacuum energy densities in fixed backgrounds, which are shown to agree with the known results in de Sitter space and space-times undergoing power law expansions. We then apply our findings to slow-roll inflationary models. Although backreaction effects are found to be negligible during the near exponential expansion, the vacuum energy density generated during this period might be important at later stages since it decreases slower than radiation or dust.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figures, v2: comments and a reference added, to appear in JCA

Quantum Chromodynamics with Many Flavors

We investigate the phase structure of lattice QCD for general number of flavors $N_F$. Based on numerical data combined with the results of the perturbation theory we propose the following picture: When $N_F \ge 17$, there is only one IR fixed point at vanishing gauge coupling, i.e., the theory in the continuum limit is trivial. On the other hand, when $16 \ge N_F \ge 7$, there is a non-trivial fixed point. Therefore, the theory is non-trivial with anomalous dimensions, however, without quark confinement. Theories which satisfy both quark confinement and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in the continuum limit exist only for $N_F \le 6$.Comment: Talk presented by K. Kanaya at the 1997 Yukawa International Seminar (YKIS'97) on ``Non-Perturbative QCD --- Structure of the QCD Vacuum ---'', YITP, Kyoto, Japan, 2--12 Dec. 1997. To be published in the proceedings [Prog. Theor. Phys. Suppl.

Evolving temporal fuzzy association rules from quantitative data with a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm

A novel method for mining association rules that are both quantitative and temporal using a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is presented. This method successfully identifies numerous temporal association rules that occur more frequently in areas of a dataset with specific quantitative values represented with fuzzy sets. The novelty of this research lies in exploring the composition of quantitative and temporal fuzzy association rules and the approach of using a hybridisation of a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm with fuzzy sets. Results show the ability of a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (NSGA-II) to evolve multiple target itemsets that have been augmented into synthetic datasets