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La gestion de la propriété intellectuelle dans les relations entre l'université et l'entreprise : revue des expériences au Québec, au Canada et à l'international. Document d'accompagnement

Le Conseil de la science et de la technologie vient de mettre en ligne La gestion de la propriété intellectuelle dans les relations entre l'université et l'entreprise : revue des expériences au Québec, au Canada et à l'international.

Ce document, produit en appui à l'avis que vient de diffuser le Conseil, La gestion de la propriété intellectuelle dans les relations entre l'université et l'entreprise : Pour une véritable dynamique d'alliances stratégiques, décrit et commente les principales données pertinentes en matière de valorisation de la recherche et de la gestion de la propriété intellectuelle pour le Québec, le Canada, l'Allemagne, les États-Unis, la Finlande, Israël, le Japon et Singapour. Il reprend également des extraits du dernier document de l'OCDE sur les perspectives 2010 en science, technologie et industrie.

MODÈLES DE RÉUSSITE DES COLLABORATIONS UNIVERSITÉ-ENTREPRISE AU QUÉBEC DANS UN CONTEXTE D'INNOVATION OUVERTE

Le Conseil de la science et de la technologie vient de mettre en ligne le rapport Modèles de réussite des collaborations université-entreprise au Québec dans un contexte d'innovation ouverte. Ce document, à partir de quatre études de cas ( IREQ, Ericsson, Technar et Kinova) et d'une revue de littérature, fait ressortir les pratiques gagnantes de collaboration entre le monde de la recherche universitaire et celui de l'industrie en accordant une attention particulière à la gestion de la propriété intellectuelle.

Le rapport a été préparé à la demande du Conseil, dans la foulée de son avis récent sur la gestion de la propriété intellectuelle, par Mme Isabelle Deschamps, professeure en gestion de l'innovation ainsi que Mmes Maria Macedo et Manon Hélie, candidates à la maîtrise, toutes trois de l'École de technologie supérieure.

ACCOMPAGNER LES PME DANS LEURS COLLABORATIONS UNIVERSITAIRES : RÔLE DES INTERMÉDIAIRES ET OUTILS DE GESTION DE LA PROPRIÉTÉ INTELLECTUELLE

Le Conseil de la science et de la technologie vient de mettre en ligne le rapport synthétique, Accompagner les PME dans leurs collaborations universitaires : rôle des intermédiaires et outils de gestion de la propriété intellectuelle.

Le rapport a été préparé à la demande du Conseil, dans la foulée de son avis récent sur la gestion de la propriété intellectuelle, par Mme Isabelle Deschamps, professeure en gestion de l'innovation ainsi que Mmes Maria Macedo et Manon Hélie, candidates à la maîtrise, toutes trois de l'École de technologie supérieure.

Petitcodiac Causeway restoration wins award in New Brunswick
In this season of awards celebrations, it was New Brunswick's turn on April 23.

Drilling for ground source heat pump systems causes alarm
The mayor of Oakville, a small town west of Toronto, is calling for the province to regulate the drilling of geothermal wells for ground source heat pump systems.

Nova Scotia to foster local expertise for tidal energy
The Government of Nova Scotia released a plan this week that outlines how it intends to develop its fledgling tidal energy industry, which in the Bay of Fundy, for example, has the potential for delivering 2,400 MW of power.

Students hail selection of L. Rafael Reif as MIT’s 17th president
Students who were involved in the search for MIT’s new leader say they welcome today’s selection of L. Rafael Reif as the Institute’s 17th president, citing his “willingness to engage students” as MIT’s provost since 2005.

Six MIT students — three undergraduates and three graduate students — formed the Executive Team of a larger Student Advisory Committee that provided input to the 22-member Presidential Search Committee created following Susan Hockfield’s Feb. 16 announcement that she would step down as MIT president. The Student Advisory Committee held a half-dozen campus forums in March, and informally sought out the views of students on the presidential search both in person and in online forums.

In conversations with MIT News, the student committee members praised the choice of Reif and discussed some of the issues that arose most frequently during their conversations with students on the presidential search.

Reif, stated sophomore Patrick A. Hulin, a mathematics major who served on the committee, provided “strong leadership and a willingness to engage students during the announcement of MITx,” MIT’s new online learning initiative. Junior Amanda David, a management student on the committee, said she was “thrilled” by the selection of Reif and suggested he would “foster and prioritize the culture of teaching and mentorship at MIT.”

And senior Kimberly Sparling, a civil and environmental engineering major on the committee, added that “there are few people who could be as well qualified” as Reif.

‘Students see MIT as their home’

While the students acknowledged that the administration must deal with a wide range of issues and stakeholders, one consistent theme of their input into the search was the need to maintain a sense of community at the Institute, members of the Student Advisory Committee said. 

“The student perspective is different,” said committee member Bryan Owens ’07, a PhD candidate in biological engineering. “In addition to it being a place of education and research, students see MIT as their home.”

“Students clearly said the most important issue facing MIT is student wellness and support,” Hulin added.

Owens suggested that enhancing the student experience includes adding to the facilities available for students to develop their intellectual interests. “Students … need space to study, to do research, and to become innovators and entrepreneurs,” he said.

Owens knows the positive impact the Institute’s programs can have: Participating in MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) convinced him to enter the Institute’s graduate program in biological engineering, where he now performs cancer research.

He also has a unique perspective on the matter of picking presidents: As an MIT undergraduate, Owens was on the search committee that selected Hockfield as president in 2004.

An ability to ‘engage with students collaboratively’

For all the accomplishments recorded during Hockfield’s tenure, Owens suggested, students should continue to present new goals and ideas to the administration as a way of keeping MIT moving forward — even if those requests may not seem immediately feasible.

“It’s important to project a vision that will require work,” Owens says.

Alex Evans, president of the Graduate Student Council and a PhD candidate in earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, said the transition in leadership represented a good opportunity for students to make their ideas heard about expanding the sense of community at MIT.

“I know there are a lot of students who are sad to see Susan Hockfield stepping down,” Evans said. Still, he added, students were impressed with Reif’s ability to “engage with students collaboratively,” and praised the selection as “in line with the areas and issues students have been looking at.”

A new look at prolonged radiation exposure
A new study from MIT scientists suggests that the guidelines governments use to determine when to evacuate people following a nuclear accident may be too conservative.

The study, led by Bevin Engelward and Jacquelyn Yanch and published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that when mice were exposed to radiation doses about 400 times greater than background levels for five weeks, no DNA damage could be detected.

Current U.S. regulations require that residents of any area that reaches radiation levels eight times higher than background should be evacuated. However, the financial and emotional cost of such relocation may not be worthwhile, the researchers say.

“There are no data that say that’s a dangerous level,” says Yanch, a senior lecturer in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. “This paper shows that you could go 400 times higher than average background levels and you’re still not detecting genetic damage. It could potentially have a big impact on tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in the vicinity of a nuclear powerplant accident or a nuclear bomb detonation, if we figure out just when we should evacuate and when it’s OK to stay where we are.”

Until now, very few studies have measured the effects of low doses of radiation delivered over a long period of time. This study is the first to measure the genetic damage seen at a level as low as 400 times background (0.0002 centigray per minute, or 105 cGy in a year).

“Almost all radiation studies are done with one quick hit of radiation. That would cause a totally different biological outcome compared to long-term conditions,” says Engelward, an associate professor of biological engineering at MIT.

How much is too much?

Background radiation comes from cosmic radiation and natural radioactive isotopes in the environment. These sources add up to about 0.3 cGy per year per person, on average.

“Exposure to low-dose-rate radiation is natural, and some people may even say essential for life. The question is, how high does the rate need to get before we need to worry about ill effects on our health?” Yanch says.

Previous studies have shown that a radiation level of 10.5 cGy, the total dose used in this study, does produce DNA damage if given all at once. However, for this study, the researchers spread the dose out over five weeks, using radioactive iodine as a source. The radiation emitted by the radioactive iodine is similar to that emitted by the damaged Fukushima reactor in Japan.

At the end of five weeks, the researchers tested for several types of DNA damage, using the most sensitive techniques available. Those types of damage fall into two major classes: base lesions, in which the structure of the DNA base (nucleotide) is altered, and breaks in the DNA strand. They found no significant increases in either type.

DNA damage occurs spontaneously even at background radiation levels, conservatively at a rate of about 10,000 changes per cell per day. Most of that damage is fixed by DNA repair systems within each cell. The researchers estimate that the amount of radiation used in this study produces an additional dozen lesions per cell per day, all of which appear to have been repaired.

Though the study ended after five weeks, Engelward believes the results would be the same for longer exposures. “My take on this is that this amount of radiation is not creating very many lesions to begin with, and you already have good DNA repair systems. My guess is that you could probably leave the mice there indefinitely and the damage wouldn’t be significant,” she says.

Doug Boreham, a professor of medical physics and applied radiation sciences at McMaster University, says the study adds to growing evidence that low doses of radiation are not as harmful as people often fear.

“Now, it’s believed that all radiation is bad for you, and any time you get a little bit of radiation, it adds up and your risk of cancer goes up,” says Boreham, who was not involved in this study. “There’s now evidence building that that is not the case.”

Conservative estimates

Most of the radiation studies on which evacuation guidelines have been based were originally done to establish safe levels for radiation in the workplace, Yanch says — meaning they are very conservative. In workplace cases, this makes sense because the employer can pay for shielding for all of their employees at once, which lowers the cost, she says.

However, “when you’ve got a contaminated environment, then the source is no longer controlled, and every citizen has to pay for their own dose avoidance,” Yanch says. “They have to leave their home or their community, maybe even forever. They often lose their jobs, like you saw in Fukushima. And there you really want to call into question how conservative in your analysis of the radiation effect you want to be. Instead of being conservative, it makes more sense to look at a best estimate of how hazardous radiation really is.”

Those conservative estimates are based on acute radiation exposures, and then extrapolating what might happen at lower doses and lower dose-rates, Engelward says. “Basically you’re using a data set collected based on an acute high dose exposure to make predictions about what’s happening at very low doses over a long period of time, and you don’t really have any direct data. It’s guesswork,” she says. “People argue constantly about how to predict what is happening at lower doses and lower dose-rates.”

However, the researchers say that more studies are needed before evacuation guidelines can be revised.

“Clearly these studies had to be done in animals rather than people, but many studies show that mice and humans share similar responses to radiation. This work therefore provides a framework for additional research and careful evaluation of our current guidelines,” Engelward says.

“It is interesting that, despite the evacuation of roughly 100,000 residents, the Japanese government was criticized for not imposing evacuations for even more people. From our studies, we would predict that the population that was left behind would not show excess DNA damage — this is something we can test using technologies recently developed in our laboratory,” she adds.

The first author on these studies is former MIT postdoc Werner Olipitz, and the work was done in collaboration with Department of Biological Engineering faculty Leona Samson and Peter Dedon. These studies were supported by the DOE and by MIT’s Center for Environmental Health Sciences.

The elusive capacity of networks
In its early years, information theory — which grew out of a landmark 1948 paper by MIT alumnus and future professor Claude Shannon — was dominated by research on error-correcting codes: How do you encode information so as to guarantee its faithful transmission, even in the presence of the corrupting influences engineers call "noise"?

Recently, one of the most intriguing developments in information theory has been a different kind of coding, called network coding, in which the question is how to encode information in order to maximize the capacity of a network as a whole. For information theorists, it was natural to ask how these two types of coding might be combined: If you want to both minimize error and maximize capacity, which kind of coding do you apply where, and when do you do the decoding?

What makes that question particularly hard to answer is that no one knows how to calculate the data capacity of a network as a whole — or even whether it can be calculated. Nonetheless, in the first half of a two-part paper, which was published recently in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, MIT's Muriel Médard, California Institute of Technology's Michelle Effros and the late Ralf Koetter of the University of Technology in Munich show that in a wired network, network coding and error-correcting coding can be handled separately, without reduction in the network's capacity. In the forthcoming second half of the paper, the same researchers demonstrate some bounds on the capacities of wireless networks, which could help guide future research in both industry and academia.

A typical data network consists of an array of nodes — which could be routers on the Internet, wireless base stations or even processing units on a single chip — each of which can directly communicate with a handful of its neighbors. When a packet of data arrives at a node, the node inspects its addressing information and decides which of several pathways to send it along.

Calculated confusion

With network coding, on the other hand, a node scrambles together the packets it receives and sends the hybrid packets down multiple paths; at each subsequent node they're scrambled again in different ways. Counterintuitively, this can significantly increase the capacity of the network as a whole: Hybrid packets arrive at their destination along multiple paths. If one of those paths is congested, or if one of its links fails outright, the packets arriving via the other paths will probably contain enough information that the recipient can piece together the original message.

But each link between nodes could be noisy, so the information in the packets also needs to be encoded to correct for errors. "Suppose that I'm a node in a network, and I see a communication coming in, and it is corrupted by noise," says Médard, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science. "I could try to remove the noise, but by doing that, I'm in effect making a decision right now that maybe would have been better taken by someone downstream from me who might have had more observations of the same source."

On the other hand, Médard says, if a node simply forwards the data it receives without performing any error correction, it could end up squandering bandwidth. "If the node takes all the signal it has and does not whittle down his representation, then it might be using a lot of energy to transmit noise," she says. "The question is, how much of the noise do I remove, and how much do I leave in?"

In their first paper, Médard and her colleagues analyze the case in which the noise in a given link is unrelated to the signals traveling over other links, as is true of most wired networks. In that case, the researchers show, the problems of error correction and network coding can be separated without limiting the capacity of the network as a whole.

Noisy neighbors

In the second paper, the researchers tackle the case in which the noise on a given link is related to the signals on other links, as is true of most wireless networks, since the transmissions of neighboring base stations can interfere with each other. This complicates things enormously: Indeed, Médard points out, information theorists still don't know how to quantify the capacity of a simple three-node wireless network, in which two nodes relay messages to each other via a third node.

Nonetheless, Médard and her colleagues show how to calculate upper and lower bounds on the capacity of a given wireless network. While the gap between the bounds can be very large in practice, knowing the bounds could still help network operators evaluate the benefits of further research on network coding. If the observed bit rate on a real-world network is below the lower bound, the operator knows the minimum improvement that the ideal code would provide; if the observed rate is above the lower bound but below the upper, then the operator knows the maximum improvement that the ideal code might provide. If even the maximum improvement would afford only a small savings in operational expenses, the operator may decide that further research on improved coding isn't worth the money.

"The separation theorem they proved is of fundamental interest," says Raymond Yeung, a professor of information engineering and co-director of the Institute of Network Coding at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "While the result itself is not surprising, it is somewhat unexpected that they were able to prove the result in such a general setting."

Yeung cautions, however, that while the researchers have "decomposed a very difficult problem into two," one of those problems "remains very difficult. … The bound is in terms of the solution to another problem which is difficult to solve," he says. "It is not clear how tight this bound is; that needs further research."