Essays on the Bioeconomy

This dissertation covers three research papers on the resource use and the sustainability of the bioeconomy and specific bioeconomy conscepts. The first paper is build on a narrative literature review of studies that have examined effects of potential bioeconomy activities on factors that are captured within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper identifies trade-offs between the two political concepts of bioeconomy and SDGs, and reveals which aspects of sustainability are addressed and neglected by policy makers formulating bioeconomy concepts. The second paper quantifies the effects of an EU bioeconomy policy on global energy and agricultural markets, as well as on land use. In this paper, we analyze the implications of the EU biofuel policy stated in the latest renewable energy directive (RED II) using a global computable general equilibrium (CGE) Model. A crucial aspect of this paper is the evaluation of the palm oil biodiesel phase-out, conditioned by the regulations within the RED II. It is shown how the substitution and feedback effects of global agricultural markets undermine a policy meant to protect tropical ecosystems, and acts as a technical barrier to trade (TBT) potentially discriminating certain regions. The third paper is on the first study that explicitly focuses on aquaculture production in a CGE model.In this study feedback effects of substituting fishmeal and plant-based feed in aquaculture production and their implications on agricultural markets under various scenario assumptions are analyzed. The results show direct effects of aquaculture production and limited fishmeal supply on agricultural production, land use, and food prices. In addition, expanding aquaculture production increases prices for capture fish via fishmeal demand, and rebuilding sustainable fish stocks to achieve SDG 14 has significant adverse effects on welfare and food prices in marine fish dependent regions in the southern hemisphere

Practical Model-based and Robust Control of Parallel Manipulators Using Passivity and Sliding Mode Theory

This chapter provides a practical strategy to realize accurate and robust control for 6 DOFs (degrees of freedom) parallel robots. The presented approach consists in two parts. The first basic part is based on the the compensation of the desired dynamics in combination with controller/observer for the single actuators. The passivity formalism offers an excellent framework to design and to tune the closed-loop dynamics, such that the desired behavior is obtained. The basic algorithm is proved to be locally robust towards uncertainties. The second part of the control strategy consists in a sliding mode controller. To keep the practical and computational efficient implementation, the proposed switching control considers explicitly only the friction model. Here we opt for the so called model-decomposition paradigm and we use additional integral action to improve robustness. The proposed approach is substantiated with experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness and success of the strategy that keeps control setup simple and intuitive. Keywords parallel manipulators, robust control, passivity formalism, sliding mode control, desired dynamics compensation, velocity observe

End-to-end Learning for Image-based Detection of Molecular Alterations in Digital Pathology

Current approaches for classification of whole slide images (WSI) in digital pathology predominantly utilize a two-stage learning pipeline. The first stage identifies areas of interest (e.g. tumor tissue), while the second stage processes cropped tiles from these areas in a supervised fashion. During inference, a large number of tiles are combined into a unified prediction for the entire slide. A major drawback of such approaches is the requirement for task-specific auxiliary labels which are not acquired in clinical routine. We propose a novel learning pipeline for WSI classification that is trainable end-to-end and does not require any auxiliary annotations. We apply our approach to predict molecular alterations for a number of different use-cases, including detection of microsatellite instability in colorectal tumors and prediction of specific mutations for colon, lung, and breast cancer cases from The Cancer Genome Atlas. Results reach AUC scores of up to 94% and are shown to be competitive with state of the art two-stage pipelines. We believe our approach can facilitate future research in digital pathology and contribute to solve a large range of problems around the prediction of cancer phenotypes, hopefully enabling personalized therapies for more patients in future.Comment: MICCAI 2022; 8.5 Pages, 4 Figure

The analysis of cadmium and its oxide by atomic-emission and massspectrometry with inductive coupled plasma

In present work, the multielemental methods for the cadmium and its oxide analysis by atomicemission and mass-spectrometry with inductively coupled plasma (AES-ICP and MS-ICP) have been proposed. The influence of the matrix concentration and the power supplied to the plasma on the analytic signals of the impurities has been studied, analytical lines and isotopes of the determined elements have been chosen. We have made the accuracy estimation of the developed techniques, the ICP-AES technique allows to determine 41 analytes with detection limits in the range from n•10{-7} to n•10{-4} % wt, ICP-MS technique allows to determine 58 elements with detection limits on the level n •10{-8}-n•10{-3} % wt Введение. Кадмий высокой чистоты является прекурсором

Scenarios for an impact assessment of global bioeconomy strategies: Results from a co-design process

The replacement of fossil resources with renewable biomass in a bioeconomy is seen as a major contribution to climate change mitigation. This transformation will affect all members of society, making it crucial to consider the views of different stakeholders to ensure a socially acceptable transition towards a sustainable bioeconomy. To explore potential outcomes of bioeconomy strategies assuming different future pathways, a scenario analysis is a tool to inform decision-makers about policy impacts and trade-offs. The inter- and transdisciplinary research project "BioNex - The future of the biomass nexus" is the first project to develop bioeconomy scenarios together with stakeholders from politics, industry, and civil society in an iterative co-design process. As a result, three storylines describing diverging potential global futures are developed and quantified: Towards sustainability, business as usual, and towards resource depletion. The futures are driven by different assumptions on climate policy, cropland expansion, productivity growth in agriculture, prices of fossil energy, and consumption behaviour. Additionally, in the co-design process, three bioeconomy policies are developed: policy as usual, stronger development of the bioeconomy, and no policies. Besides presenting the results of the stakeholder workshops, this paper evaluates the strengths and shortcomings of a stakeholder approach in terms of policy-oriented research. According to the experience made within this study, it provides valuable insights for researchers and funding authorities they can use to optimise the employment of stakeholder-based research approaches

Разработка приложения для покадровой обработки видео с помощью библиотеки классов AForge.NET

The following article describes libraries and classes for frame extraction from videofile and creating an RGB-histogram for those extracted frames.. As a result, it will help to develop a dynamic RGB-histogram creator

Simulation of Congenital Heart Defect Corrective Surgeries Using Thin Shell Elements

International audienceCongenital heart defect (CHD) corrective interventions in infants are extremely challenging due to commonly complex and heterogeneous disease pat-terns. At present, cardiac surgeons can only rely on non-invasive imaging prior to surgery. Critical decisions regarding the surgical procedure of choice and its exe-cution must be made during the actual surgery and are strongly dependent on ex-perience. We want to improve surgery planning by providing a simulation system that is able to accurately predict patient-specific results for different surgical pro-cedures preoperatively. Therefore we use a sophisticated simulation model based on thin shell elements. We present a novel joining approach that allows for im-plementing all necessary surgical low-level procedures, e.g. incising and suturing, independent from the simulation model. No modifications are necessary for al-ready approved thin shell implementations and our simulation system can instan-taneously benefit from further improved simulation models in the future. By re-ducing computationally expensive simulations to a minimum during a virtual surgery we can achieve a fluent workflow for surgeons. However, a specialized mesh resampling algorithm is required to fully utilize our simulation system