China: Rule-taker or Rule-maker in the International Intellectual Property System?

Intellectual property has been a crucial issue for China in the past four decades. Internationally, it was central to China’s fifteen-year negotiation on its accession to the WTO and has been a priority in China-US bilateral relations. Domestically, changes in the regulation and use of intellectual property reflect a larger picture of rapid economic and social transition in China. Initially, China was a rule-taker in intellectual property, experiencing pressure from abroad to do much more on intellectual property. In response, China enacted comprehensive domestic intellectual property laws. From 2001, the Chinese Trademark Office was registering more trademarks than any other office in the world and from 2011, the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) became the world's largest patent office. Today the Chinese government promotes intellectual property protection in its national strategy of “innovation-driven development” and seeks to transform China into the world’s leading intellectual property power. This thesis focuses on whether the large-scale deployment of intellectual property by China in various markets means that it has become a regulatory power in intellectual property, in the sense of being an agenda setter and source of global influence over IP rules. The UK in the nineteenth century and the US in the twentieth were regulatory IP powers in this sense. China’s regulatory and international influence over IP rules is tracked empirically through case studies on geographical indications (Chapter 3), the disclosure obligation (Chapter 4), and intellectual property and standardization (Chapter 5), along with an examination of China’s international IP engagement at the bilateral level (Chapter 6) and plurilateral and multilateral levels (Chapter 7). This thesis also analyses the roles of sub-state actors and non-state actors in China’s international intellectual property engagement (Chapter 8). This thesis argues that China’s role in international intellectual property regulation is more nuanced and complicated than a binary categorization of “rule-maker” or “rule-taker”. China’s international IP engagement is guided by a group of key principles, specifically the principles of IP instrumentalism and a set of foreign policy principles. These principles have been implemented through a process of modeling, while potential conflicts have been minimized through a strategy of balancing. The effects of modeling are compliance and institutional isomorphism which makes the Chinese IP system similar to those of developed countries. Balancing leads to constructed inconsistency and has led China into keeping a low-profile in international policy debates on intellectual property

Investigation of topological phonons in acoustic metamaterials

Topological acoustics is a recent and intense area of research. It merges the knowledge of mathematical topology, condensed matter physics, and acoustics. At the same time, it has been pointed out that quasiperiodicity can greatly enhance the periodic table of topological systems. Because quasiperiodic patterns have an intrinsic global degree of freedom, which exists in the topological space called the hull of a pattern, where the shape traced in this topological space is called the phason. The hull augments the physical space, which opens a door to the physics of the integer quantum Hall effect (IQHE) in arbitrary dimensions. In this dissertation, acoustic metamaterials that exhibit two-dimensional (2D) and four-dimensional (4D) IQHE physics are demonstrated by laboratory implementation based on these ideas. In the second chapter, the acoustic waveguide generated by a simple quasiperiodic patterning exhibits topological edge modes and interface modes without any additional fine-tuning. In the third chapter, acoustic metamaterials generated by incommensurate bilayers present dynamic energy transfer in adiabatic cycles across the crystal via pumping of topological edge modes without any external intervention or assistance. In the fourth chapter, a re-configurable 2D quasiperiodic acoustic crystal with a phason living on a 2-torus displays 4D quantum Hall physics. The topological boundary spectrum assembles in a Weyl singularity when mapped as the function of the quasi-momenta. Topological wave steering enabled by the Weyl physics of the three-dimensional (3D) boundaries is also demonstrated experimentally. All acoustic systems mentioned previously are characterized experimentally by standard acoustic measurements, and via a finite element analysis utilizing COMSOL Multiphysics. The experimental measurements and simulations reproduce the theoretical predictions with high fidelity

Analysis and Detection of Information Types of Open Source Software Issue Discussions

Most modern Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) for open source software (OSS) projects allow users to add comments to issues. Over time, these comments accumulate into discussion threads embedded with rich information about the software project, which can potentially satisfy the diverse needs of OSS stakeholders. However, discovering and retrieving relevant information from the discussion threads is a challenging task, especially when the discussions are lengthy and the number of issues in ITSs are vast. In this paper, we address this challenge by identifying the information types presented in OSS issue discussions. Through qualitative content analysis of 15 complex issue threads across three projects hosted on GitHub, we uncovered 16 information types and created a labeled corpus containing 4656 sentences. Our investigation of supervised, automated classification techniques indicated that, when prior knowledge about the issue is available, Random Forest can effectively detect most sentence types using conversational features such as the sentence length and its position. When classifying sentences from new issues, Logistic Regression can yield satisfactory performance using textual features for certain information types, while falling short on others. Our work represents a nontrivial first step towards tools and techniques for identifying and obtaining the rich information recorded in the ITSs to support various software engineering activities and to satisfy the diverse needs of OSS stakeholders.Comment: 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE2019

Understanding thermal nature of de Sitter spacetime via inter-detector interaction

The seminar discovery by Gibbons and Hawking that a freely falling detector observes an isotropic background of thermal radiation reveals that de Sitter space is equivalent to a thermal bath at the Gibbons-Hawking temperature in Minkowski space, as far as the response rate of the detector is concerned. Meanwhile, for a static detector which is endowed with a proper acceleration with respect to the local freely-falling detectors, the temperature becomes the square root of the sum of the squared Gibbons-Hawking temperature and the squared Unruh temperature associated with the proper acceleration of the detector. Here, we demonstrate, by examining the interaction of two static detectors in the de Sitter invariant vacuum, that de Sitter space in regard to its thermal nature is unique on its own right in the sense that it is even neither equivalent to the thermal bath in Minkowski space when the static detectors become freely-falling nor to the Unruh thermal bath at the cosmological horizon where the Unruh effect dominates, insofar as the behavior of the inter-detector interaction in de Sitter space dramatically differs both from that in the Minkowski thermal bath and the Unruh thermal bath.Comment: 14 page