Do individual factors matter? A survey of scientists’ patenting in Portuguese public research organisations

This paper addresses scientists’ behaviour regarding the patenting of knowledge produced in universities and other public sector research organisations (PSROs). Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in patenting and licensing activities by PSROs. We argue that the whole process depends to a certain extent on scientists’ willingness to disclose their inventions. Given this assumption, we conduct research into individual behaviour in order to understand scientists’ views concerning the patenting of their research results. Data from a questionnaire survey of Portuguese researchers from nine PSROs in life sciences and biotechnology is presented and analysed and complemented with in-depth interviews. The results reveal that overall the scientists surveyed show a low propensity to become involved in patenting and licensing activities, despite the fact that the majority had no “ethical” objections to the disclosure of their inventions and the commercial exploitation of these. Perceptions about the impacts of these activities on certain fundamental aspects of knowledge production and dissemination are however divergent. This may account for the low participation levels. Furthermore, most scientists perceived the personal benefits deriving from this type of activity to be low. Similarly, the majority also believed that there are many difficulties associated with the patenting process and that they receive limited support from their organisations, which lack the proper competences and structures to assist with patenting and licensing.     

Analytical ray tracing system: Introducing art, a C-library designed for seismic applications

Ray tracing technique is an important tool not only to forward but also for inverse problems in Geophysics, which most of the seismic processing steps depend on. However, implementing ray tracing codes can be very time consuming. This article presents a computer library to trace rays in 2.5D media composed by a stack of layers. The velocity profile inside each layer is such that the eikonal equation can be analytically solved. Therefore, the ray tracing within such profile is made fast and accurate. The great advantage of an analytical ray tracing library is the numerical precision of the quantities computed and the fast execution of the implemented codes. Even though ray tracing programs exist for a long time, for example the seis88 package by ?ervený, most of those programs use a numerical approach to compute the ray. Regardless of the fact that numerical methods can solve more general problems, the analytical ones could be part of a more sophisticated simulation process, where the ray tracing time is completely relevant. We demonstrate the feasibility of our codes using several examples (Miqueles et al., 2013)  [1]. The library can also be used for other applications besides seismic, e.g., optics and tomography.     

Carbon nanotube supported ruthenium catalysts for the treatment of high strength wastewater with aniline using wet air oxidation

Multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) can be efficiently used as support of ruthenium catalysts for the catalytic wet air oxidation of high strength wastewater containing aniline. Catalysts were prepared using different ruthenium precursors, Ruthenocene [Ru(η⁵-C₅H₅)₂], Ruthenium (1,5-cyclooctadiene, 1,3,5-cyclooctatriene) [Ru(cod)(cot)] and Ruthenium trichloride (RuCl₃ · xH₂O), different impregnation methods (excess solution and incipient wetness impregnation) and different MWCNT support surface chemistry (nitric acid oxidized MWCNT-COOH and Na₂CO₃ ion exchanged MWCNT-COONa). The efficiency of the aniline removal obtained with the catalysts prepared with different precursors decreases in the order [Ru(cod)(cot)] > RuCl₃ · xH₂O > [Ru(η⁵-C₅H₅)₂], 100% aniline conversion being obtained after 45 min of reaction with the catalyst prepared with [Ru(cod)(cot)]. The influence of the impregnation technique was found to be negligible, while the use of the MWCNT-COONa support led to increased catalyst performances when compared to that obtained with catalysts prepared with the MWCNT-COOH support. Leaching of ruthenium was observed in all cases, but the use of the precursor [Ru(cod)(cot)] and of the support MWCNT-COONa in the preparation of the catalysts seems to improve their stability. A direct relationship between metal load and catalyst stability was found and attributed to the strength of metal-support interactions.     

Simple approach for the plasma treatment of polymeric membranes and investigation of the aging effect

The modification of the surface characteristics after treatment with plasma in polymeric materials, such as the aging phenomenon, calls the attention of research in the area of nonthermal plasma technology. In this work, a direct treatment with dielectric-barrier discharge plasma was used on the surfaces of ultrafiltration membranes. The measurements of the contact angle with water, attenuated total reflectance accessory, zeta potential, atomic force microscopy and scanning electron microscopy-MEV were performed on the surfaces to verify changes after plasma treatment and to understand the occurrence and timing of the plasma aging effect. In the analysis of the membrane performance, hydraulic permeation and protein retention tests were performed. The results showed an improvement in wettability and hydrophilic properties in the post-treated membranes. The study of reversibility/aging of the post-plasma surface is important for research that deals with the modification of polymeric membranes. Changes in surface morphology, topography and wettability of the membranes were observed up to seven days after treatment, with a tendency to return to the initial characteristics of the membranes.     

Probabilistic consensus clustering using evidence accumulation

Machine Learning - Clustering ensemble methods produce a consensus partition of a set of data points by combining the results of a collection of base clustering algorithms. In the evidence...     

Design Optimization of Composite Prosthetic Tubes Using GA-ANN Algorithm Considering Tsai-Wu Failure Criteria

The investigation of possible failures in composite materials is a matter of very great importance, and the Tsai-Wu criterion is an effective criterion for analyzing those flaws in anisotropic materials and defining whether the material at a given load will or will not suffer structural failure. In this study, an optimization procedure is proposed to minimize the maximum value of Tsai-Wu of laminated composite tubes subject to axial loading. Artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms are chosen as optimization tools. The results of this study show that the developed algorithm converges faster. Then, the maximum Tsai-Wu value is used as the objective function and the fiber orientations are the constraints in the optimization process. The results yielded by them are compared and discussed. Optimal results are compared with respect to the usual initial design. The design approach is recommended for structures where composites are the key load-carrying members such as orthopedic prosthesis.     

A particular approach for the Three-dimensional Packing Problem with additional constraints

This paper focuses on a restrained concretization of the general NP-hard Container Loading Problem that arises from a real world application. This particular problem can be informally described as: given different sets of bins and boxes, find the packing of the boxes into the smallest number of bins obeying some additional restrictions on the placement. The mathematical programming formulation that appears to better model this application is the Three-dimensional Bin-Packing Problem (3D-BPP) which is no more than an extension of the classic Bin-Packing Problem to the orthogonal packing of solid objects.We present an alternative non-linear formulation for the 3D-BPP version as well as new designed heuristic algorithms (CPBOX and BOXCP) for the approximation of the optimal solution using boxes and bins of heterogeneous dimensions. Moreover, we also present a heuristic specifically designed to work under very particular storage application restrictions. The numerical results indicate that all of these new heuristics have good performance standards especially when applied to replications of real input data.     

Algorithms for the Homogeneous Set Sandwich Problem

A homogeneous set is a non-trivial module of a graph, i.e. a non-empty, non-unitary, proper subset of a graph's vertices such that all its elements present exactly the same outer neighborhood. Given two graphs the Homogeneous Set Sandwich Problem (HSSP) asks whether there exists a sandwich graph which has a homogeneous set. In 2001 Tang et al. published an all-fast algorithm which was recently proven wrong, so that the HSSP's known upper bound would have been reset thereafter at the former determined by Cerioli et al. in 1998. We present, notwithstanding, new deterministic algorithms which have it established at We give as well two even faster randomized algorithms, whose simplicity might lend them didactic usefulness. We believe that, besides providing efficient easy-to-implement procedures to solve it, the study of these new approaches allows a fairly thorough understanding of the problem.     

Distance preserving flattening of surface sections

Curved cross-sections extracted from medical volume images are useful for analyzing nonplanar anatomic structures such as the aorta arch or the pelvis. For visualization and for performing distance measurements, extracted surface sections need to be adequately flattened. We present two different distance preserving surface flattening methods which preserve distances according to a user-specified center of interest and according to user-specified orientations. The first method flattens surface sections by preserving distances along surface curves located within planes having a user specified constant orientation. The second method flattens surfaces along curves located within radial planes crossing the center of interest. We study and compare the properties of the two flattening methods by analyzing their distortion maps. Thanks to a multiresolution approach, we provide surface flattening at interactive rates, allowing users to displace their focus point while visualizing the resulting flattened surface. These distance preserving flattening methods provide new means of inspecting curved cross-sections extracted from medical images.