772 research outputs found
Some questions of space bioengineering
Zero-gravity offers selective effect on growth and metabolic activity unicellular organisms as well as unique opportunities in purification of organic compounds. These make it possible to consider the biosynthesis and recovery of certain metabolites economically feasible in space. Design, construction and operation of systems for the above mentioned purposes requires interdisciplinary actions within the scope of a new discipline: space bioengineering. The problems and perspectives of this discipline particularly in the application of bioreactor-recovery systems in space to manufacture metabolites of high economic and scientific value. Special attention is paid to pivotal factors such as various mass transport phenomena, contamination control, automatic control of optimum environment and synchronization of the operation of the biological (biosynthesis) and the physiochemical (recovery-purification) systems
The Socio-economic Impacts of Framework Programmes in Transition Countries - A systemic Approach of Assessment Methods
This paper assesses the socio-economic impacts stemming from Research,Technological Development and Demonstration Framework Programmes (FPs) project participation in a transition economy. Some of the most significant impacts of Central and Eastern European participation in FPs can only be understood in the context of the changing national innovation systems (NIS). In other words, when assessing impacts, besides the ‘usual’ questions on product and process development, job creation, etc., a broader set of questions should be asked, concerning competences: managerial, project development, network and collaboration-building capabilities, i.e. the process, and elements, of organisational learning, broadly defined. Our main methodological argument is based on two underlying characteristics of the Hungarian NIS. First, it had been fragmented during the planned economy the academy-industry relations had been rather weak. Second, due to the overall socio-economic transition it is also in flux, some former links have been further damaged, while new players have appeared and new, stronger incentives have been put in place to form new partnerships. Behavioural and organisational ‘effects’ of FP participation are likely to be crucial – besides the ‘usual’ outputs and impacts. Our main policy conclusion is that it would well worth the effort to apply – a broader framework for impacts and effects to a larger, statistically representative sample. Thus a reliable description could be obtained, on which basis sound policy conclusions could also be drawn.
Clustering for Different Scales of Measurement - the Gap-Ratio Weighted K-means Algorithm
This paper describes a method for clustering data that are spread out over
large regions and which dimensions are on different scales of measurement. Such
an algorithm was developed to implement a robotics application consisting in
sorting and storing objects in an unsupervised way. The toy dataset used to
validate such application consists of Lego bricks of different shapes and
colors. The uncontrolled lighting conditions together with the use of RGB color
features, respectively involve data with a large spread and different levels of
measurement between data dimensions. To overcome the combination of these two
characteristics in the data, we have developed a new weighted K-means
algorithm, called gap-ratio K-means, which consists in weighting each dimension
of the feature space before running the K-means algorithm. The weight
associated with a feature is proportional to the ratio of the biggest gap
between two consecutive data points, and the average of all the other gaps.
This method is compared with two other variants of K-means on the Lego bricks
clustering problem as well as two other common classification datasets.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. This paper is under the review process
for AIAP 201
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