The Double-Edged Sword of Industry Collaboration: Evidence from Engineering Academics in the UK

This paper studies the impact of university-industry collaboration on academic research output. We report findings from a unique longitudinal dataset on all the researchers in all the engineering departments of 40 major universities in the UK for the last 20 years. We introduce a new measure of industry collaboration based on the fraction of research grants that include industry partners. Our results show that productivity increases with the intensity of industry collaboration, but only up to a certain point. Above a certain threshold, research productivity declines. Our results are robust to several econometric estimation methods, measures of research output, and for various subsamples of academics

The Impact of Industry Collaboration on Academic Research Output: A Dynamic Panel Data Analysis

The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of university knowledge and technology transfer activities on academic research output. Specifically, we study whether researchers with collaborative links with the private sector publish less than their peers without such links, once controlling for other sources of heterogeneity. We report findings from a longitudinal dataset on researchers from two engineering departments in the UK between 1985 until 2006. Our results indicate that researchers with industrial links publish significantly more than their peers. Academic productivity, though, is higher for low levels of industry involvement as compared to high levels

The Fractal Dimension of SAT Formulas

Modern SAT solvers have experienced a remarkable progress on solving industrial instances. Most of the techniques have been developed after an intensive experimental testing process. Recently, there have been some attempts to analyze the structure of these formulas in terms of complex networks, with the long-term aim of explaining the success of these SAT solving techniques, and possibly improving them. We study the fractal dimension of SAT formulas, and show that most industrial families of formulas are self-similar, with a small fractal dimension. We also show that this dimension is not affected by the addition of learnt clauses. We explore how the dimension of a formula, together with other graph properties can be used to characterize SAT instances. Finally, we give empirical evidence that these graph properties can be used in state-of-the-art portfolios.Comment: 20 pages, 11 Postscript figure

The Deduction Theorem for Strong Propositional Proof Systems

This paper focuses on the deduction theorem for propositional logic. We define and investigate different deduction properties and show that the presence of these deduction properties for strong proof systems is powerful enough to characterize the existence of optimal and even polynomially bounded proof systems. We also exhibit a similar, but apparently weaker condition that implies the existence of complete disjoint NPUnknown control sequence '\mathsf' -pairs. In particular, this yields a sufficient condition for the completeness of the canonical pair of Frege systems and provides a general framework for the search for complete NPUnknown control sequence '\mathsf' -pairs

The deduction theorem for strong propositional proof systems

This paper focuses on the deduction theorem for propositional logic. We define and investigate different deduction properties and show that the presence of these deduction properties for strong proof systems is powerful enough to characterize the existence of optimal and even polynomially bounded proof systems. We also exhibit a similar, but apparently weaker condition that implies the existence of complete disjoint NP-pairs. In particular, this yields a sufficient condition for the completeness of the canonical pair of Frege systems and provides a general framework for the search for complete NP-pairs

Cosmology with running parameters

The experimental evidence that the equation of state (EOS) of the dark energy (DE) could be evolving with time/redshift (including the possibility that it might behave phantom-like near our time) suggests that there might be dynamical DE fields that could explain this behavior. We propose, instead, that a variable cosmological term (including perhaps a variable Newton's gravitational coupling too) may account in a natural way for all these features.Comment: Talk given at TAUP 2005, Zaragoza, Spain, 10-14 Sep 200

STM and ab initio study of holmium nanowires on a Ge(111) Surface

A nanorod structure has been observed on the Ho/Ge(111) surface using scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). The rods do not require patterning of the surface or defects such as step edges in order to grow as is the case for nanorods on Si(111). At low holmium coverage the nanorods exist as isolated nanostructures while at high coverage they form a periodic 5x1 structure. We propose a structural model for the 5x1 unit cell and show using an ab initio calculation that the STM profile of our model structure compares favorably to that obtained experimentally for both filled and empty states sampling. The calculated local density of states shows that the nanorod is metallic in character.Comment: 4 pages, 12 figures (inc. subfigures). Presented at the the APS March meeting, Baltimore MD, 200

Concurrence et propriété intellectuelle

Concurrence et propriété intellectuelle est une étude approfondie des relations entre deux branches très modernes du droit, dont les points de rencontre et de friction se sont multipliés depuis une vingtaine d’années. L’ouvrage étudie les applications du droit de la concurrence à l’obtention et l’exercice des droits de propriété industrielle et artistique, dont il explore aussi certains aspects méconnus tels que les concentrations, les lignes directrices relatives aux règlements d’exemption pertinents (transfert de technologie, accords verticaux, spécialisation, recherche-développement), les « pools » de brevets, la jurisprudence et la doctrine américaines spécifiques (accords de licence, facilités essentielles, etc.)... L\u27auteur adopte une approche claire et approfondie, étayée par des sources très complètes et éclairée par l\u27analyse économique, qui recherche constamment un équilibre sans parti pris entre le droit de la propriété intellectuelle et le droit de la concurrence. En témoigne le plan de l\u27ouvrage. Une première partie aborde les conséquences de l\u27application du droit de la concurrence au droit de la propriété intellectuelle, étudiant, d\u27une part, les éléments neutres, ceux qui n\u27affectent pas les droits de propriété intellectuelle et, d\u27autre part, l\u27érosion du droit exclusif. Une seconde partie envisage les instruments de cette application, c\u27est-à-dire, d\u27une part, les méthodes et raisonnements conduisant à un relatif équilibre entre les deux branches du droit, et, d\u27autre part, ceux qui induisent une rupture au détriment des droits de propriété intellectuelle et créent de l\u27insécurité juridique (notion de marché pertinent, théorie des infrastructures essentielles, règlements d\u27exemption dans leur nouvelle forme, lignes directrices, règle de raison, référence à une notion ambiguë d\u27un consommateur servant désormais d\u27arbitre aux conflits...). Tout en montrant les apports positifs du droit de la concurrence, l’ouvrage souligne ses défauts : complexité de la construction ; caractère artificiel et fluctuant de théories qui n’assurent pas de prévisibilité au titulaire de droits ; ambiguïté de la référence à l’économie, facteur apparent de réalisme mais source d’insécurité réelle ; utilisation maladroite de notions empruntées au droit des États-Unis (alors même qu’elles y restent controversées) par le droit communautaire et, à un second niveau, difficultés de mise en œuvre des constructions communautaires par les autorités nationales. Cet ouvrage a été honoré du prix de thèse de l’IRPI et d’un prix de la Fondation Robert ABDESSELAM

Resolving Out-of-Vocabulary Words with Bilingual Embeddings in Machine Translation

Out-of-vocabulary words account for a large proportion of errors in machine translation systems, especially when the system is used on a different domain than the one where it was trained. In order to alleviate the problem, we propose to use a log-bilinear softmax-based model for vocabulary expansion, such that given an out-of-vocabulary source word, the model generates a probabilistic list of possible translations in the target language. Our model uses only word embeddings trained on significantly large unlabelled monolingual corpora and trains over a fairly small, word-to-word bilingual dictionary. We input this probabilistic list into a standard phrase-based statistical machine translation system and obtain consistent improvements in translation quality on the English-Spanish language pair. Especially, we get an improvement of 3.9 BLEU points when tested over an out-of-domain test set

Disjoint NP-pairs from propositional proof systems

For a proof system P we introduce the complexity class DNPP(P) of all disjoint NP-pairs for which the disjointness of the pair is efficiently provable in the proof system P. We exhibit structural properties of proof systems which make the previously defined canonical NP-pairs of these proof systems hard or complete for DNPP(P). Moreover we demonstrate that non-equivalent proof systems can have equivalent canonical pairs and that depending on the properties of the proof systems different scenarios for DNPP(P) and the reductions between the canonical pairs exist