Monthly Archives: April 2018

The Hedy Lamarr of international research: Canada’s Third assessment of The State of Science and Technology and Industrial Research and Development in Canada (2 of 2)

Taking up from where I left off with my comments on Competing in a Global Innovation Economy: The Current State of R and D in Canada or as I prefer to call it the Third assessment of Canadas S&T (science and technology) and R&D (research and development). (Part 1 for anyone who missed it).

Is it possible to get past Hedy?

Interestingly (to me anyway), one of our R&D strengths, the visual and performing arts, features sectors where a preponderance of people are dedicated to creating culture in Canada and don’t spend a lot of time trying to make money so they can retire before the age of 40 as so many of our start-up founders do. (Retiring before the age of 40 just reminded me of Hollywood actresses {Hedy] who found and still do find that work was/is hard to come by after that age. You may be able but I’m not sure I can get past Hedy.) Perhaps our business people (start-up founders) could take a leaf out of the visual and performing arts handbook? Or, not. There is another question.

Does it matter if we continue to be a ‘branch plant’ economy? Somebody once posed that question to me when I was grumbling that our start-ups never led to larger businesses and acted more like incubators (which could describe our R&D as well),. He noted that Canadians have a pretty good standard of living and we’ve been running things this way for over a century and it seems to work for us. Is it that bad? I didn’t have an  answer for him then and I don’t have one now but I think it’s a useful question to ask and no one on this (2018) expert panel or the previous expert panel (2013) seems to have asked.

I appreciate that the panel was constrained by the questions given by the government but given how they snuck in a few items that technically speaking were not part of their remit, I’m thinking they might have gone just a bit further. The problem with answering the questions as asked is that if you’ve got the wrong questions, your answers will be garbage (GIGO; garbage in, garbage out) or, as is said, where science is concerned, it’s the quality of your questions.

On that note, I would have liked to know more about the survey of top-cited researchers. I think looking at the questions could have been quite illuminating and I would have liked some information on from where (geographically and area of specialization) they got most of their answers. In keeping with past practice (2012 assessment published in 2013), there is no additional information offered about the survey questions or results. Still, there was this (from the report released April 10, 2018; Note: There may be some difference between the formatting seen here and that seen in the document),

3.1.2 International Perceptions of Canadian Research
As with the 2012 S&T report, the CCA commissioned a survey of top-cited researchers’ perceptions of Canada’s research strength in their field or subfield relative to that of other countries (Section 1.3.2). Researchers were asked to identify the top five countries in their field and subfield of expertise: 36% of respondents (compared with 37% in the 2012 survey) from across all fields of research rated Canada in the top five countries in their field (Figure B.1 and Table B.1 in the appendix). Canada ranks fourth out of all countries, behind the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany, and ahead of France. This represents a change of about 1 percentage point from the overall results of the 2012 S&T survey. There was a 4 percentage point decrease in how often France is ranked among the top five countries; the ordering of the top five countries, however, remains the same.

When asked to rate Canada’s research strength among other advanced countries in their field of expertise, 72% (4,005) of respondents rated Canadian research as “strong” (corresponding to a score of 5 or higher on a 7-point scale) compared with 68% in the 2012 S&T survey (Table 3.4). [pp. 40-41 Print; pp. 78-70 PDF]

Before I forget, there was mention of the international research scene,

Growth in research output, as estimated by number of publications, varies considerably for the 20 top countries. Brazil, China, India, Iran, and South Korea have had the most significant increases in publication output over the last 10 years. [emphases mine] In particular, the dramatic increase in China’s output means that it is closing the gap with the United States. In 2014, China’s output was 95% of that of the United States, compared with 26% in 2003. [emphasis mine]

Table 3.2 shows the Growth Index (GI), a measure of the rate at which the research output for a given country changed between 2003 and 2014, normalized by the world growth rate. If a country’s growth in research output is higher than the world average, the GI score is greater than 1.0. For example, between 2003 and 2014, China’s GI score was 1.50 (i.e., 50% greater than the world average) compared with 0.88 and 0.80 for Canada and the United States, respectively. Note that the dramatic increase in publication production of emerging economies such as China and India has had a negative impact on Canada’s rank and GI score (see CCA, 2016).

As long as I’ve been blogging (10 years), the international research community (in particular the US) has been looking over its shoulder at China.

Patents and intellectual property

As an inventor, Hedy got more than one patent. Much has been made of the fact that  despite an agreement, the US Navy did not pay her or her partner (George Antheil) for work that would lead to significant military use (apparently, it was instrumental in the Bay of Pigs incident, for those familiar with that bit of history), GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, and more.

Some comments about patents. They are meant to encourage more innovation by ensuring that creators/inventors get paid for their efforts .This is true for a set time period and when it’s over, other people get access and can innovate further. It’s not intended to be a lifelong (or inheritable) source of income. The issue in Lamarr’s case is that the navy developed the technology during the patent’s term without telling either her or her partner so, of course, they didn’t need to compensate them despite the original agreement. They really should have paid her and Antheil.

The current patent situation, particularly in the US, is vastly different from the original vision. These days patents are often used as weapons designed to halt innovation. One item that should be noted is that the Canadian federal budget indirectly addressed their misuse (from my March 16, 2018 posting),

Surprisingly, no one else seems to have mentioned a new (?) intellectual property strategy introduced in the document (from Chapter 2: Progress; scroll down about 80% of the way, Note: The formatting has been changed),

Budget 2018 proposes measures in support of a new Intellectual Property Strategy to help Canadian entrepreneurs better understand and protect intellectual property, and get better access to shared intellectual property.

What Is a Patent Collective?
A Patent Collective is a way for firms to share, generate, and license or purchase intellectual property. The collective approach is intended to help Canadian firms ensure a global “freedom to operate”, mitigate the risk of infringing a patent, and aid in the defence of a patent infringement suit.

Budget 2018 proposes to invest $85.3 million over five years, starting in 2018–19, with $10 million per year ongoing, in support of the strategy. The Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development will bring forward the full details of the strategy in the coming months, including the following initiatives to increase the intellectual property literacy of Canadian entrepreneurs, and to reduce costs and create incentives for Canadian businesses to leverage their intellectual property:

  • To better enable firms to access and share intellectual property, the Government proposes to provide $30 million in 2019–20 to pilot a Patent Collective. This collective will work with Canada’s entrepreneurs to pool patents, so that small and medium-sized firms have better access to the critical intellectual property they need to grow their businesses.
  • To support the development of intellectual property expertise and legal advice for Canada’s innovation community, the Government proposes to provide $21.5 million over five years, starting in 2018–19, to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. This funding will improve access for Canadian entrepreneurs to intellectual property legal clinics at universities. It will also enable the creation of a team in the federal government to work with Canadian entrepreneurs to help them develop tailored strategies for using their intellectual property and expanding into international markets.
  • To support strategic intellectual property tools that enable economic growth, Budget 2018 also proposes to provide $33.8 million over five years, starting in 2018–19, to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, including $4.5 million for the creation of an intellectual property marketplace. This marketplace will be a one-stop, online listing of public sector-owned intellectual property available for licensing or sale to reduce transaction costs for businesses and researchers, and to improve Canadian entrepreneurs’ access to public sector-owned intellectual property.

The Government will also consider further measures, including through legislation, in support of the new intellectual property strategy.

Helping All Canadians Harness Intellectual Property
Intellectual property is one of our most valuable resources, and every Canadian business owner should understand how to protect and use it.

To better understand what groups of Canadians are benefiting the most from intellectual property, Budget 2018 proposes to provide Statistics Canada with $2 million over three years to conduct an intellectual property awareness and use survey. This survey will help identify how Canadians understand and use intellectual property, including groups that have traditionally been less likely to use intellectual property, such as women and Indigenous entrepreneurs. The results of the survey should help the Government better meet the needs of these groups through education and awareness initiatives.

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office will also increase the number of education and awareness initiatives that are delivered in partnership with business, intermediaries and academia to ensure Canadians better understand, integrate and take advantage of intellectual property when building their business strategies. This will include targeted initiatives to support underrepresented groups.

Finally, Budget 2018 also proposes to invest $1 million over five years to enable representatives of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples to participate in discussions at the World Intellectual Property Organization related to traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, an important form of intellectual property.

It’s not wholly clear what they mean by ‘intellectual property’. The focus seems to be on  patents as they are the only intellectual property (as opposed to copyright and trademarks) singled out in the budget. As for how the ‘patent collective’ is going to meet all its objectives, this budget supplies no clarity on the matter. On the plus side, I’m glad to see that indigenous peoples’ knowledge is being acknowledged as “an important form of intellectual property” and I hope the discussions at the World Intellectual Property Organization are fruitful.

As for the patent situation in Canada (from the report released April 10, 2018),

Over the past decade, the Canadian patent flow in all technical sectors has consistently decreased. Patent flow provides a partial picture of how patents in Canada are exploited. A negative flow represents a deficit of patented inventions owned by Canadian assignees versus the number of patented inventions created by Canadian inventors. The patent flow for all Canadian patents decreased from about −0.04 in 2003 to −0.26 in 2014 (Figure 4.7). This means that there is an overall deficit of 26% of patent ownership in Canada. In other words, fewer patents were owned by Canadian institutions than were invented in Canada.

This is a significant change from 2003 when the deficit was only 4%. The drop is consistent across all technical sectors in the past 10 years, with Mechanical Engineering falling the least, and Electrical Engineering the most (Figure 4.7). At the technical field level, the patent flow dropped significantly in Digital Communication and Telecommunications. For example, the Digital Communication patent flow fell from 0.6 in 2003 to −0.2 in 2014. This fall could be partially linked to Nortel’s US$4.5 billion patent sale [emphasis mine] to the Rockstar consortium (which included Apple, BlackBerry, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Sony) (Brickley, 2011). Food Chemistry and Microstructural [?] and Nanotechnology both also showed a significant drop in patent flow. [p. 83 Print; p. 121 PDF]

Despite a fall in the number of parents for ‘Digital Communication’, we’re still doing well according to statistics elsewhere in this report. Is it possible that patents aren’t that big a deal? Of course, it’s also possible that we are enjoying the benefits of past work and will miss out on future work. (Note: A video of the April 10, 2018 report presentation by Max Blouw features him saying something like that.)

One last note, Nortel died many years ago. Disconcertingly, this report, despite more than one reference to Nortel, never mentions the company’s demise.

Boxed text

While the expert panel wasn’t tasked to answer certain types of questions, as I’ve noted earlier they managed to sneak in a few items.  One of the strategies they used was putting special inserts into text boxes including this (from the report released April 10, 2018),

Box 4.2
The FinTech Revolution

Financial services is a key industry in Canada. In 2015, the industry accounted for 4.4%

of Canadia jobs and about 7% of Canadian GDP (Burt, 2016). Toronto is the second largest financial services hub in North America and one of the most vibrant research hubs in FinTech. Since 2010, more than 100 start-up companies have been founded in Canada, attracting more than $1 billion in investment (Moffatt, 2016). In 2016 alone, venture-backed investment in Canadian financial technology companies grew by 35% to $137.7 million (Ho, 2017). The Toronto Financial Services Alliance estimates that there are approximately 40,000 ICT specialists working in financial services in Toronto alone.

AI, blockchain, [emphasis mine] and other results of ICT research provide the basis for several transformative FinTech innovations including, for example, decentralized transaction ledgers, cryptocurrencies (e.g., bitcoin), and AI-based risk assessment and fraud detection. These innovations offer opportunities to develop new markets for established financial services firms, but also provide entry points for technology firms to develop competing service offerings, increasing competition in the financial services industry. In response, many financial services companies are increasing their investments in FinTech companies (Breznitz et al., 2015). By their own account, the big five banks invest more than $1 billion annually in R&D of advanced software solutions, including AI-based innovations (J. Thompson, personal communication, 2016). The banks are also increasingly investing in university research and collaboration with start-up companies. For instance, together with several large insurance and financial management firms, all big five banks have invested in the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Kolm, 2017).

I’m glad to see the mention of blockchain while AI (artificial intelligence) is an area where we have innovated (from the report released April 10, 2018),

AI has attracted researchers and funding since the 1960s; however, there were periods of stagnation in the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes referred to as the “AI winter.” During this period, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), under the direction of Fraser Mustard, started supporting AI research with a decade-long program called Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Society, [emphasis mine] which was active from 1983 to 1994. In 2004, a new program called Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception was initiated and renewed twice in 2008 and 2014 under the title, Learning in Machines and Brains. Through these programs, the government provided long-term, predictable support for high- risk research that propelled Canadian researchers to the forefront of global AI development. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Canadian research output and impact on AI were second only to that of the United States (CIFAR, 2016). NSERC has also been an early supporter of AI. According to its searchable grant database, NSERC has given funding to research projects on AI since at least 1991–1992 (the earliest searchable year) (NSERC, 2017a).

The University of Toronto, the University of Alberta, and the Université de Montréal have emerged as international centres for research in neural networks and deep learning, with leading experts such as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. Recently, these locations have expanded into vibrant hubs for research in AI applications with a diverse mix of specialized research institutes, accelerators, and start-up companies, and growing investment by major international players in AI development, such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. Many highly influential AI researchers today are either from Canada or have at some point in their careers worked at a Canadian institution or with Canadian scholars.

As international opportunities in AI research and the ICT industry have grown, many of Canada’s AI pioneers have been drawn to research institutions and companies outside of Canada. According to the OECD, Canada’s share of patents in AI declined from 2.4% in 2000 to 2005 to 2% in 2010 to 2015. Although Canada is the sixth largest producer of top-cited scientific publications related to machine learning, firms headquartered in Canada accounted for only 0.9% of all AI-related inventions from 2012 to 2014 (OECD, 2017c). Canadian AI researchers, however, remain involved in the core nodes of an expanding international network of AI researchers, most of whom continue to maintain ties with their home institutions. Compared with their international peers, Canadian AI researchers are engaged in international collaborations far more often than would be expected by Canada’s level of research output, with Canada ranking fifth in collaboration. [p. 97-98 Print; p. 135-136 PDF]

The only mention of robotics seems to be here in this section and it’s only in passing. This is a bit surprising given its global importance. I wonder if robotics has been somehow hidden inside the term artificial intelligence, although sometimes it’s vice versa with robot being used to describe artificial intelligence. I’m noticing this trend of assuming the terms are synonymous or interchangeable not just in Canadian publications but elsewhere too.  ’nuff said.

Getting back to the matter at hand, t he report does note that patenting (technometric data) is problematic (from the report released April 10, 2018),

The limitations of technometric data stem largely from their restricted applicability across areas of R&D. Patenting, as a strategy for IP management, is similarly limited in not being equally relevant across industries. Trends in patenting can also reflect commercial pressures unrelated to R&D activities, such as defensive or strategic patenting practices. Finally, taxonomies for assessing patents are not aligned with bibliometric taxonomies, though links can be drawn to research publications through the analysis of patent citations. [p. 105 Print; p. 143 PDF]

It’s interesting to me that they make reference to many of the same issues that I mention but they seem to forget and don’t use that information in their conclusions.

There is one other piece of boxed text I want to highlight (from the report released April 10, 2018),

Box 6.3
Open Science: An Emerging Approach to Create New Linkages

Open Science is an umbrella term to describe collaborative and open approaches to
undertaking science, which can be powerful catalysts of innovation. This includes
the development of open collaborative networks among research performers, such
as the private sector, and the wider distribution of research that usually results when
restrictions on use are removed. Such an approach triggers faster translation of ideas
among research partners and moves the boundaries of pre-competitive research to
later, applied stages of research. With research results freely accessible, companies
can focus on developing new products and processes that can be commercialized.

Two Canadian organizations exemplify the development of such models. In June
2017, Genome Canada, the Ontario government, and pharmaceutical companies
invested $33 million in the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) (Genome Canada,
2017). Formed in 2004, the SGC is at the forefront of the Canadian open science
movement and has contributed to many key research advancements towards new
treatments (SGC, 2018). McGill University’s Montréal Neurological Institute and
Hospital has also embraced the principles of open science. Since 2016, it has been
sharing its research results with the scientific community without restriction, with
the objective of expanding “the impact of brain research and accelerat[ing] the
discovery of ground-breaking therapies to treat patients suffering from a wide range
of devastating neurological diseases” (neuro, n.d.).

This is exciting stuff and I’m happy the panel featured it. (I wrote about the Montréal Neurological Institute initiative in a Jan. 22, 2016 posting.)

More than once, the report notes the difficulties with using bibliometric and technometric data as measures of scientific achievement and progress and open science (along with its cousins, open data and open access) are contributing to the difficulties as James Somers notes in his April 5, 2018 article ‘The Scientific Paper is Obsolete’ for The Atlantic (Note: Links have been removed),

The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.

The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little “computation” contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.

The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it’s [sic] contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you’ve actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.

Perhaps the paper itself is to blame. Scientific methods evolve now at the speed of software; the skill most in demand among physicists, biologists, chemists, geologists, even anthropologists and research psychologists, is facility with programming languages and “data science” packages. And yet the basic means of communicating scientific results hasn’t changed for 400 years. Papers may be posted online, but they’re still text and pictures on a page.

What would you get if you designed the scientific paper from scratch today? A little while ago I spoke to Bret Victor, a researcher who worked at Apple on early user-interface prototypes for the iPad and now runs his own lab in Oakland, California, that studies the future of computing. Victor has long been convinced that scientists haven’t yet taken full advantage of the computer. “It’s not that different than looking at the printing press, and the evolution of the book,” he said. After Gutenberg, the printing press was mostly used to mimic the calligraphy in bibles. It took nearly 100 years of technical and conceptual improvements to invent the modern book. “There was this entire period where they had the new technology of printing, but they were just using it to emulate the old media.”Victor gestured at what might be possible when he redesigned a journal article by Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, “Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks.” He chose it both because it’s one of the most highly cited papers in all of science and because it’s a model of clear exposition. (Strogatz is best known for writing the beloved “Elements of Math” column for The New York Times.)

The Watts-Strogatz paper described its key findings the way most papers do, with text, pictures, and mathematical symbols. And like most papers, these findings were still hard to swallow, despite the lucid prose. The hardest parts were the ones that described procedures or algorithms, because these required the reader to “play computer” in their head, as Victor put it, that is, to strain to maintain a fragile mental picture of what was happening with each step of the algorithm.Victor’s redesign interleaved the explanatory text with little interactive diagrams that illustrated each step. In his version, you could see the algorithm at work on an example. You could even control it yourself….

For anyone interested in the evolution of how science is conducted and communicated, Somers’ article is a fascinating and in depth look at future possibilities.

Subregional R&D

I didn’t find this quite as compelling as the last time and that may be due to the fact that there’s less information and I think the 2012 report was the first to examine the Canadian R&D scene with a subregional (in their case, provinces) lens. On a high note, this report also covers cities (!) and regions, as well as, provinces.

Here’s the conclusion (from the report released April 10, 2018),

Ontario leads Canada in R&D investment and performance. The province accounts for almost half of R&D investment and personnel, research publications and collaborations, and patents. R&D activity in Ontario produces high-quality publications in each of Canada’s five R&D strengths, reflecting both the quantity and quality of universities in the province. Quebec lags Ontario in total investment, publications, and patents, but performs as well (citations) or better (R&D intensity) by some measures. Much like Ontario, Quebec researchers produce impactful publications across most of Canada’s five R&D strengths. Although it invests an amount similar to that of Alberta, British Columbia does so at a significantly higher intensity. British Columbia also produces more highly cited publications and patents, and is involved in more international research collaborations. R&D in British Columbia and Alberta clusters around Vancouver and Calgary in areas such as physics and ICT and in clinical medicine and energy, respectively. [emphasis mine] Smaller but vibrant R&D communities exist in the Prairies and Atlantic Canada [also referred to as the Maritime provinces or Maritimes] (and, to a lesser extent, in the Territories) in natural resource industries.

Globally, as urban populations expand exponentially, cities are likely to drive innovation and wealth creation at an increasing rate in the future. In Canada, R&D activity clusters around five large cities: Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Calgary. These five cities create patents and high-tech companies at nearly twice the rate of other Canadian cities. They also account for half of clusters in the services sector, and many in advanced manufacturing.

Many clusters relate to natural resources and long-standing areas of economic and research strength. Natural resource clusters have emerged around the location of resources, such as forestry in British Columbia, oil and gas in Alberta, agriculture in Ontario, mining in Quebec, and maritime resources in Atlantic Canada. The automotive, plastics, and steel industries have the most individual clusters as a result of their economic success in Windsor, Hamilton, and Oshawa. Advanced manufacturing industries tend to be more concentrated, often located near specialized research universities. Strong connections between academia and industry are often associated with these clusters. R&D activity is distributed across the country, varying both between and within regions. It is critical to avoid drawing the wrong conclusion from this fact. This distribution does not imply the existence of a problem that needs to be remedied. Rather, it signals the benefits of diverse innovation systems, with differentiation driven by the needs of and resources available in each province. [pp.  132-133 Print; pp. 170-171 PDF]

Intriguingly, there’s no mention that in British Columbia (BC), there are leading areas of research: Visual & Performing Arts, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, and Clinical Medicine (according to the table on p. 117 Print, p. 153 PDF).

As I said and hinted earlier, we’ve got brains; they’re just not the kind of brains that command respect.

Final comments

My hat’s off to the expert panel and staff of the Council of Canadian Academies. Combining two previous reports into one could not have been easy. As well, kudos to their attempts to broaden the discussion by mentioning initiative such as open science and for emphasizing the problems with bibliometrics, technometrics, and other measures. I have covered only parts of this assessment, (Competing in a Global Innovation Economy: The Current State of R&D in Canada), there’s a lot more to it including a substantive list of reference materials (bibliography).

While I have argued that perhaps the situation isn’t quite as bad as the headlines and statistics may suggest, there are some concerning trends for Canadians but we have to acknowledge that many countries have stepped up their research game and that’s good for all of us. You don’t get better at anything unless you work with and play with others who are better than you are. For example, both India and Italy surpassed us in numbers of published research papers. We slipped from 7th place to 9th. Thank you, Italy and India. (And, Happy ‘Italian Research in the World Day’ on April 15, 2018, the day’s inaugural year. In Italian: Piano Straordinario “Vivere all’Italiana” – Giornata della ricerca Italiana nel mondo.)

Unfortunately, the reading is harder going than previous R&D assessments in the CCA catalogue. And in the end, I can’t help thinking we’re just a little bit like Hedy Lamarr. Not really appreciated in all of our complexities although the expert panel and staff did try from time to time. Perhaps the government needs to find better ways of asking the questions.

***ETA April 12, 2018 at 1500 PDT: Talking about missing the obvious! I’ve been ranting on about how research strength in visual and performing arts and in philosophy and theology, etc. is perfectly fine and could lead to ‘traditional’ science breakthroughs without underlining the point by noting that Antheil was a musician, Lamarr was as an actress and they set the foundation for work by electrical engineers (or people with that specialty) for their signature work leading to WiFi, etc.***

There is, by the way, a Hedy-Canada connection. In 1998, she sued Canadian software company Corel, for its unauthorized use of her image on their Corel Draw 8 product packaging. She won.

More stuff

For those who’d like to see and hear the April 10, 2017 launch for “Competing in a Global Innovation Economy: The Current State of R&D in Canada” or the Third Assessment as I think of it, go here.

The report can be found here.

For anyone curious about ‘Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story’ to be broadcast on May 18, 2018 as part of PBS’s American Masters series, there’s this trailer,

For the curious, I did find out more about the Hedy Lamarr and Corel Draw. John Lettice’s December 2, 1998 article The Rgister describes the suit and her subsequent victory in less than admiring terms,

Our picture doesn’t show glamorous actress Hedy Lamarr, who yesterday [Dec. 1, 1998] came to a settlement with Corel over the use of her image on Corel’s packaging. But we suppose that following the settlement we could have used a picture of Corel’s packaging. Lamarr sued Corel earlier this year over its use of a CorelDraw image of her. The picture had been produced by John Corkery, who was 1996 Best of Show winner of the Corel World Design Contest. Corel now seems to have come to an undisclosed settlement with her, which includes a five-year exclusive (oops — maybe we can’t use the pack-shot then) licence to use “the lifelike vector illustration of Hedy Lamarr on Corel’s graphic software packaging”. Lamarr, bless ‘er, says she’s looking forward to the continued success of Corel Corporation,  …

There’s this excerpt from a Sept. 21, 2015 posting (a pictorial essay of Lamarr’s life) by Shahebaz Khan on The Blaze Blog,

6. CorelDRAW:
For several years beginning in 1997, the boxes of Corel DRAW’s software suites were graced by a large Corel-drawn image of Lamarr. The picture won Corel DRAW’s yearly software suite cover design contest in 1996. Lamarr sued Corel for using the image without her permission. Corel countered that she did not own rights to the image. The parties reached an undisclosed settlement in 1998.

There’s also a Nov. 23, 1998 Corel Draw 8 product review by Mike Gorman on mymac.com, which includes a screenshot of the packaging that precipitated the lawsuit. Once they settled, it seems Corel used her image at least one more time.

The Hedy Lamarr of international research: Canada’s Third assessment of The State of Science and Technology and Industrial Research and Development in Canada (1 of 2)

Before launching into the assessment, a brief explanation of my theme: Hedy Lamarr was considered to be one of the great beauties of her day,

“Ziegfeld Girl” Hedy Lamarr 1941 MGM *M.V.
Titles: Ziegfeld Girl
People: Hedy Lamarr
Image courtesy mptvimages.com [downloaded from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034415/mediaviewer/rm1566611456]

Aside from starring in Hollywood movies and, before that, movies in Europe, she was also an inventor and not just any inventor (from a Dec. 4, 2017 article by Laura Barnett for The Guardian), Note: Links have been removed,

Let’s take a moment to reflect on the mercurial brilliance of Hedy Lamarr. Not only did the Vienna-born actor flee a loveless marriage to a Nazi arms dealer to secure a seven-year, $3,000-a-week contract with MGM, and become (probably) the first Hollywood star to simulate a female orgasm on screen – she also took time out to invent a device that would eventually revolutionise mobile communications.

As described in unprecedented detail by the American journalist and historian Richard Rhodes in his new book, Hedy’s Folly, Lamarr and her business partner, the composer George Antheil, were awarded a patent in 1942 for a “secret communication system”. It was meant for radio-guided torpedoes, and the pair gave to the US Navy. It languished in their files for decades before eventually becoming a constituent part of GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology.

(The article goes on to mention other celebrities [Marlon Brando, Barbara Cartland, Mark Twain, etc] and their inventions.)

Lamarr’s work as an inventor was largely overlooked until the 1990’s when the technology community turned her into a ‘cultish’ favourite and from there her reputation grew and acknowledgement increased culminating in Rhodes’ book and the documentary by Alexandra Dean, ‘Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (to be broadcast as part of PBS’s American Masters series on May 18, 2018).

Canada as Hedy Lamarr

There are some parallels to be drawn between Canada’s S&T and R&D (science and technology; research and development) and Ms. Lamarr. Chief amongst them, we’re not always appreciated for our brains. Not even by people who are supposed to know better such as the experts on the panel for the ‘Third assessment of The State of Science and Technology and Industrial Research and Development in Canada’ (proper title: Competing in a Global Innovation Economy: The Current State of R&D in Canada) from the Expert Panel on the State of Science and Technology and Industrial Research and Development in Canada.

A little history

Before exploring the comparison to Hedy Lamarr further, here’s a bit more about the history of this latest assessment from the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA), from the report released April 10, 2018,

This assessment of Canada’s performance indicators in science, technology, research, and innovation comes at an opportune time. The Government of Canada has expressed a renewed commitment in several tangible ways to this broad domain of activity including its Innovation and Skills Plan, the announcement of five superclusters, its appointment of a new Chief Science Advisor, and its request for the Fundamental Science Review. More specifically, the 2018 Federal Budget demonstrated the government’s strong commitment to research and innovation with historic investments in science.

The CCA has a decade-long history of conducting evidence-based assessments about Canada’s research and development activities, producing seven assessments of relevance:

The State of Science and Technology in Canada (2006) [emphasis mine]
•Innovation and Business Strategy: Why Canada Falls Short (2009)
•Catalyzing Canada’s Digital Economy (2010)
•Informing Research Choices: Indicators and Judgment (2012)
The State of Science and Technology in Canada (2012) [emphasis mine]
The State of Industrial R&D in Canada (2013) [emphasis mine]
•Paradox Lost: Explaining Canada’s Research Strength and Innovation Weakness (2013)

Using similar methods and metrics to those in The State of Science and Technology in Canada (2012) and The State of Industrial R&D in Canada (2013), this assessment tells a similar and familiar story: Canada has much to be proud of, with world-class researchers in many domains of knowledge, but the rest of the world is not standing still. Our peers are also producing high quality results, and many countries are making significant commitments to supporting research and development that will position them to better leverage their strengths to compete globally. Canada will need to take notice as it determines how best to take action. This assessment provides valuable material for that conversation to occur, whether it takes place in the lab or the legislature, the bench or the boardroom. We also hope it will be used to inform public discussion. [p. ix Print, p. 11 PDF]

This latest assessment succeeds the general 2006 and 2012 reports, which were mostly focused on academic research, and combines it with an assessment of industrial research, which was previously separate. Also, this third assessment’s title (Competing in a Global Innovation Economy: The Current State of R&D in Canada) makes what was previously quietly declared in the text, explicit from the cover onwards. It’s all about competition, despite noises such as the 2017 Naylor report (Review of fundamental research) about the importance of fundamental research.

One other quick comment, I did wonder in my July 1, 2016 posting (featuring the announcement of the third assessment) how combining two assessments would impact the size of the expert panel and the size of the final report,

Given the size of the 2012 assessment of science and technology at 232 pp. (PDF) and the 2013 assessment of industrial research and development at 220 pp. (PDF) with two expert panels, the imagination boggles at the potential size of the 2016 expert panel and of the 2016 assessment combining the two areas.

I got my answer with regard to the panel as noted in my Oct. 20, 2016 update (which featured a list of the members),

A few observations, given the size of the task, this panel is lean. As well, there are three women in a group of 13 (less than 25% representation) in 2016? It’s Ontario and Québec-dominant; only BC and Alberta rate a representative on the panel. I hope they will find ways to better balance this panel and communicate that ‘balanced story’ to the rest of us. On the plus side, the panel has representatives from the humanities, arts, and industry in addition to the expected representatives from the sciences.

The imbalance I noted then was addressed, somewhat, with the selection of the reviewers (from the report released April 10, 2018),

The CCA wishes to thank the following individuals for their review of this report:

Ronald Burnett, C.M., O.B.C., RCA, Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des
lettres, President and Vice-Chancellor, Emily Carr University of Art and Design
(Vancouver, BC)

Michelle N. Chretien, Director, Centre for Advanced Manufacturing and Design
Technologies, Sheridan College; Former Program and Business Development
Manager, Electronic Materials, Xerox Research Centre of Canada (Brampton,
ON)

Lisa Crossley, CEO, Reliq Health Technologies, Inc. (Ancaster, ON)
Natalie Dakers, Founding President and CEO, Accel-Rx Health Sciences
Accelerator (Vancouver, BC)

Fred Gault, Professorial Fellow, United Nations University-MERIT (Maastricht,
Netherlands)

Patrick D. Germain, Principal Engineering Specialist, Advanced Aerodynamics,
Bombardier Aerospace (Montréal, QC)

Robert Brian Haynes, O.C., FRSC, FCAHS, Professor Emeritus, DeGroote
School of Medicine, McMaster University (Hamilton, ON)

Susan Holt, Chief, Innovation and Business Relationships, Government of
New Brunswick (Fredericton, NB)

Pierre A. Mohnen, Professor, United Nations University-MERIT and Maastricht
University (Maastricht, Netherlands)

Peter J. M. Nicholson, C.M., Retired; Former and Founding President and
CEO, Council of Canadian Academies (Annapolis Royal, NS)

Raymond G. Siemens, Distinguished Professor, English and Computer Science
and Former Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing, University of
Victoria (Victoria, BC) [pp. xii- xiv Print; pp. 15-16 PDF]

The proportion of women to men as reviewers jumped up to about 36% (4 of 11 reviewers) and there are two reviewers from the Maritime provinces. As usual, reviewers external to Canada were from Europe. Although this time, they came from Dutch institutions rather than UK or German institutions. Interestingly and unusually, there was no one from a US institution. When will they start using reviewers from other parts of the world?

As for the report itself, it is 244 pp. (PDF). (For the really curious, I have a  December 15, 2016 post featuring my comments on the preliminary data for the third assessment.)

To sum up, they had a lean expert panel tasked with bringing together two inquiries and two reports. I imagine that was daunting. Good on them for finding a way to make it manageable.

Bibliometrics, patents, and a survey

I wish more attention had been paid to some of the issues around open science, open access, and open data, which are changing how science is being conducted. (I have more about this from an April 5, 2018 article by James Somers for The Atlantic but more about that later.) If I understand rightly, they may not have been possible due to the nature of the questions posed by the government when requested the assessment.

As was done for the second assessment, there is an acknowledgement that the standard measures/metrics (bibliometrics [no. of papers published, which journals published them; number of times papers were cited] and technometrics [no. of patent applications, etc.] of scientific accomplishment and progress are not the best and new approaches need to be developed and adopted (from the report released April 10, 2018),

It is also worth noting that the Panel itself recognized the limits that come from using traditional historic metrics. Additional approaches will be needed the next time this assessment is done. [p. ix Print; p. 11 PDF]

For the second assessment and as a means of addressing some of the problems with metrics, the panel decided to take a survey which the panel for the third assessment has also done (from the report released April 10, 2018),

The Panel relied on evidence from multiple sources to address its charge, including a literature review and data extracted from statistical agencies and organizations such as Statistics Canada and the OECD. For international comparisons, the Panel focused on OECD countries along with developing countries that are among the top 20 producers of peer-reviewed research publications (e.g., China, India, Brazil, Iran, Turkey). In addition to the literature review, two primary research approaches informed the Panel’s assessment:
•a comprehensive bibliometric and technometric analysis of Canadian research publications and patents; and,
•a survey of top-cited researchers around the world.

Despite best efforts to collect and analyze up-to-date information, one of the Panel’s findings is that data limitations continue to constrain the assessment of R&D activity and excellence in Canada. This is particularly the case with industrial R&D and in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Data on industrial R&D activity continue to suffer from time lags for some measures, such as internationally comparable data on R&D intensity by sector and industry. These data also rely on industrial categories (i.e., NAICS and ISIC codes) that can obscure important trends, particularly in the services sector, though Statistics Canada’s recent revisions to how this data is reported have improved this situation. There is also a lack of internationally comparable metrics relating to R&D outcomes and impacts, aside from those based on patents.

For the social sciences, arts, and humanities, metrics based on journal articles and other indexed publications provide an incomplete and uneven picture of research contributions. The expansion of bibliometric databases and methodological improvements such as greater use of web-based metrics, including paper views/downloads and social media references, will support ongoing, incremental improvements in the availability and accuracy of data. However, future assessments of R&D in Canada may benefit from more substantive integration of expert review, capable of factoring in different types of research outputs (e.g., non-indexed books) and impacts (e.g., contributions to communities or impacts on public policy). The Panel has no doubt that contributions from the humanities, arts, and social sciences are of equal importance to national prosperity. It is vital that such contributions are better measured and assessed. [p. xvii Print; p. 19 PDF]

My reading: there’s a problem and we’re not going to try and fix it this time. Good luck to those who come after us. As for this line: “The Panel has no doubt that contributions from the humanities, arts, and social sciences are of equal importance to national prosperity.” Did no one explain that when you use ‘no doubt’, you are introducing doubt? It’s a cousin to ‘don’t take this the wrong way’ and ‘I don’t mean to be rude but …’ .

Good news

This is somewhat encouraging (from the report released April 10, 2018),

Canada’s international reputation for its capacity to participate in cutting-edge R&D is strong, with 60% of top-cited researchers surveyed internationally indicating that Canada hosts world-leading infrastructure or programs in their fields. This share increased by four percentage points between 2012 and 2017. Canada continues to benefit from a highly educated population and deep pools of research skills and talent. Its population has the highest level of educational attainment in the OECD in the proportion of the population with
a post-secondary education. However, among younger cohorts (aged 25 to 34), Canada has fallen behind Japan and South Korea. The number of researchers per capita in Canada is on a par with that of other developed countries, andincreased modestly between 2004 and 2012. Canada’s output of PhD graduates has also grown in recent years, though it remains low in per capita terms relative to many OECD countries. [pp. xvii-xviii; pp. 19-20]

Don’t let your head get too big

Most of the report observes that our international standing is slipping in various ways such as this (from the report released April 10, 2018),

In contrast, the number of R&D personnel employed in Canadian businesses
dropped by 20% between 2008 and 2013. This is likely related to sustained and
ongoing decline in business R&D investment across the country. R&D as a share
of gross domestic product (GDP) has steadily declined in Canada since 2001,
and now stands well below the OECD average (Figure 1). As one of few OECD
countries with virtually no growth in total national R&D expenditures between
2006 and 2015, Canada would now need to more than double expenditures to
achieve an R&D intensity comparable to that of leading countries.

Low and declining business R&D expenditures are the dominant driver of this
trend; however, R&D spending in all sectors is implicated. Government R&D
expenditures declined, in real terms, over the same period. Expenditures in the
higher education sector (an indicator on which Canada has traditionally ranked
highly) are also increasing more slowly than the OECD average. Significant
erosion of Canada’s international competitiveness and capacity to participate
in R&D and innovation is likely to occur if this decline and underinvestment
continue.

Between 2009 and 2014, Canada produced 3.8% of the world’s research
publications, ranking ninth in the world. This is down from seventh place for
the 2003–2008 period. India and Italy have overtaken Canada although the
difference between Italy and Canada is small. Publication output in Canada grew
by 26% between 2003 and 2014, a growth rate greater than many developed
countries (including United States, France, Germany, United Kingdom, and
Japan), but below the world average, which reflects the rapid growth in China
and other emerging economies. Research output from the federal government,
particularly the National Research Council Canada, dropped significantly
between 2009 and 2014.(emphasis mine)  [p. xviii Print; p. 20 PDF]

For anyone unfamiliar with Canadian politics,  2009 – 2014 were years during which Stephen Harper’s Conservatives formed the government. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were elected to form the government in late 2015.

During Harper’s years in government, the Conservatives were very interested in changing how the National Research Council of Canada operated and, if memory serves, the focus was on innovation over research. Consequently, the drop in their research output is predictable.

Given my interest in nanotechnology and other emerging technologies, this popped out (from the report released April 10, 2018),

When it comes to research on most enabling and strategic technologies, however, Canada lags other countries. Bibliometric evidence suggests that, with the exception of selected subfields in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) such as Medical Informatics and Personalized Medicine, Canada accounts for a relatively small share of the world’s research output for promising areas of technology development. This is particularly true for Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, and Materials science [emphasis mine]. Canada’s research impact, as reflected by citations, is also modest in these areas. Aside from Biotechnology, none of the other subfields in Enabling and Strategic Technologies has an ARC rank among the top five countries. Optoelectronics and photonics is the next highest ranked at 7th place, followed by Materials, and Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, both of which have a rank of 9th. Even in areas where Canadian researchers and institutions played a seminal role in early research (and retain a substantial research capacity), such as Artificial Intelligence and Regenerative Medicine, Canada has lost ground to other countries.

Arguably, our early efforts in artificial intelligence wouldn’t have garnered us much in the way of ranking and yet we managed some cutting edge work such as machine learning. I’m not suggesting the expert panel should have or could have found some way to measure these kinds of efforts but I’m wondering if there could have been some acknowledgement in the text of the report. I’m thinking a couple of sentences in a paragraph about the confounding nature of scientific research where areas that are ignored for years and even decades then become important (e.g., machine learning) but are not measured as part of scientific progress until after they are universally recognized.

Still, point taken about our diminishing returns in ’emerging’ technologies and sciences (from the report released April 10, 2018),

The impression that emerges from these data is sobering. With the exception of selected ICT subfields, such as Medical Informatics, bibliometric evidence does not suggest that Canada excels internationally in most of these research areas. In areas such as Nanotechnology and Materials science, Canada lags behind other countries in levels of research output and impact, and other countries are outpacing Canada’s publication growth in these areas — leading to declining shares of world publications. Even in research areas such as AI, where Canadian researchers and institutions played a foundational role, Canadian R&D activity is not keeping pace with that of other countries and some researchers trained in Canada have relocated to other countries (Section 4.4.1). There are isolated exceptions to these trends, but the aggregate data reviewed by this Panel suggest that Canada is not currently a world leader in research on most emerging technologies.

The Hedy Lamarr treatment

We have ‘good looks’ (arts and humanities) but not the kind of brains (physical sciences and engineering) that people admire (from the report released April 10, 2018),

Canada, relative to the world, specializes in subjects generally referred to as the
humanities and social sciences (plus health and the environment), and does
not specialize as much as others in areas traditionally referred to as the physical
sciences and engineering. Specifically, Canada has comparatively high levels
of research output in Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, Public Health and
Health Services, Philosophy and Theology, Earth and Environmental Sciences,
and Visual and Performing Arts. [emphases mine] It accounts for more than 5% of world researchin these fields. Conversely, Canada has lower research output than expected
in Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy, Enabling and Strategic Technologies,
Engineering, and Mathematics and Statistics. The comparatively low research
output in core areas of the natural sciences and engineering is concerning,
and could impair the flexibility of Canada’s research base, preventing research
institutions and researchers from being able to pivot to tomorrow’s emerging
research areas. [p. xix Print; p. 21 PDF]

Couldn’t they have used a more buoyant tone? After all, science was known as ‘natural philosophy’ up until the 19th century. As for visual and performing arts, let’s include poetry as a performing and literary art (both have been the case historically and cross-culturally) and let’s also note that one of the great physics texts, (De rerum natura by Lucretius) was a multi-volume poem (from Lucretius’ Wikipedia entry; Note: Links have been removed).

His poem De rerum natura (usually translated as “On the Nature of Things” or “On the Nature of the Universe”) transmits the ideas of Epicureanism, which includes Atomism [the concept of atoms forming materials] and psychology. Lucretius was the first writer to introduce Roman readers to Epicurean philosophy.[15] The poem, written in some 7,400 dactylic hexameters, is divided into six untitled books, and explores Epicurean physics through richly poetic language and metaphors. Lucretius presents the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles, guided by fortuna, “chance”, and not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities.[16]

Should you need more proof that the arts might have something to contribute to physical sciences, there’s this in my March 7, 2018 posting,

It’s not often you see research that combines biologically inspired engineering and a molecular biophysicist with a professional animator who worked at Peter Jackson’s (Lord of the Rings film trilogy, etc.) Park Road Post film studio. An Oct. 18, 2017 news item on ScienceDaily describes the project,

Like many other scientists, Don Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., the Founding Director of the Wyss Institute, [emphasis mine] is concerned that non-scientists have become skeptical and even fearful of his field at a time when technology can offer solutions to many of the world’s greatest problems. “I feel that there’s a huge disconnect between science and the public because it’s depicted as rote memorization in schools, when by definition, if you can memorize it, it’s not science,” says Ingber, who is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). [emphasis mine] “Science is the pursuit of the unknown. We have a responsibility to reach out to the public and convey that excitement of exploration and discovery, and fortunately, the film industry is already great at doing that.”

“Not only is our physics-based simulation and animation system as good as other data-based modeling systems, it led to the new scientific insight [emphasis mine] that the limited motion of the dynein hinge focuses the energy released by ATP hydrolysis, which causes dynein’s shape change and drives microtubule sliding and axoneme motion,” says Ingber. “Additionally, while previous studies of dynein have revealed the molecule’s two different static conformations, our animation visually depicts one plausible way that the protein can transition between those shapes at atomic resolution, which is something that other simulations can’t do. The animation approach also allows us to visualize how rows of dyneins work in unison, like rowers pulling together in a boat, which is difficult using conventional scientific simulation approaches.”

It comes down to how we look at things. Yes, physical sciences and engineering are very important. If the report is to be believed we have a very highly educated population and according to PISA scores our students rank highly in mathematics, science, and reading skills. (For more information on Canada’s latest PISA scores from 2015 see this OECD page. As for PISA itself, it’s an OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] programme where 15-year-old students from around the world are tested on their reading, mathematics, and science skills, you can get some information from my Oct. 9, 2013 posting.)

Is it really so bad that we choose to apply those skills in fields other than the physical sciences and engineering? It’s a little bit like Hedy Lamarr’s problem except instead of being judged for our looks and having our inventions dismissed, we’re being judged for not applying ourselves to physical sciences and engineering and having our work in other closely aligned fields dismissed as less important.

Canada’s Industrial R&D: an oft-told, very sad story

Bemoaning the state of Canada’s industrial research and development efforts has been a national pastime as long as I can remember. Here’s this from the report released April 10, 2018,

There has been a sustained erosion in Canada’s industrial R&D capacity and competitiveness. Canada ranks 33rd among leading countries on an index assessing the magnitude, intensity, and growth of industrial R&D expenditures. Although Canada is the 11th largest spender, its industrial R&D intensity (0.9%) is only half the OECD average and total spending is declining (−0.7%). Compared with G7 countries, the Canadian portfolio of R&D investment is more concentrated in industries that are intrinsically not as R&D intensive. Canada invests more heavily than the G7 average in oil and gas, forestry, machinery and equipment, and finance where R&D has been less central to business strategy than in many other industries. …  About 50% of Canada’s industrial R&D spending is in high-tech sectors (including industries such as ICT, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, and automotive) compared with the G7 average of 80%. Canadian Business Enterprise Expenditures on R&D (BERD) intensity is also below the OECD average in these sectors. In contrast, Canadian investment in low and medium-low tech sectors is substantially higher than the G7 average. Canada’s spending reflects both its long-standing industrial structure and patterns of economic activity.

R&D investment patterns in Canada appear to be evolving in response to global and domestic shifts. While small and medium-sized enterprises continue to perform a greater share of industrial R&D in Canada than in the United States, between 2009 and 2013, there was a shift in R&D from smaller to larger firms. Canada is an increasingly attractive place to conduct R&D. Investment by foreign-controlled firms in Canada has increased to more than 35% of total R&D investment, with the United States accounting for more than half of that. [emphasis mine]  Multinational enterprises seem to be increasingly locating some of their R&D operations outside their country of ownership, possibly to gain proximity to superior talent. Increasing foreign-controlled R&D, however, also could signal a long-term strategic loss of control over intellectual property (IP) developed in this country, ultimately undermining the government’s efforts to support high-growth firms as they scale up. [pp. xxii-xxiii Print; pp. 24-25 PDF]

Canada has been known as a ‘branch plant’ economy for decades. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, it means that companies from other countries come here, open up a branch and that’s how we get our jobs as we don’t have all that many large companies here. Increasingly, multinationals are locating R&D shops here.

While our small to medium size companies fund industrial R&D, it’s large companies (multinationals) which can afford long-term and serious investment in R&D. Luckily for companies from other countries, we have a well-educated population of people looking for jobs.

In 2017, we opened the door more widely so we can scoop up talented researchers and scientists from other countries, from a June 14, 2017 article by Beckie Smith for The PIE News,

Universities have welcomed the inclusion of the work permit exemption for academic stays of up to 120 days in the strategy, which also introduces expedited visa processing for some highly skilled professions.

Foreign researchers working on projects at a publicly funded degree-granting institution or affiliated research institution will be eligible for one 120-day stay in Canada every 12 months.

And universities will also be able to access a dedicated service channel that will support employers and provide guidance on visa applications for foreign talent.

The Global Skills Strategy, which came into force on June 12 [2017], aims to boost the Canadian economy by filling skills gaps with international talent.

As well as the short term work permit exemption, the Global Skills Strategy aims to make it easier for employers to recruit highly skilled workers in certain fields such as computer engineering.

“Employers that are making plans for job-creating investments in Canada will often need an experienced leader, dynamic researcher or an innovator with unique skills not readily available in Canada to make that investment happen,” said Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship.

“The Global Skills Strategy aims to give those employers confidence that when they need to hire from abroad, they’ll have faster, more reliable access to top talent.”

Coincidentally, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc. have announced, in 2017, new jobs and new offices in Canadian cities. There’s a also Chinese multinational telecom company Huawei Canada which has enjoyed success in Canada and continues to invest here (from a Jan. 19, 2018 article about security concerns by Matthew Braga for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) online news,

For the past decade, Chinese tech company Huawei has found no shortage of success in Canada. Its equipment is used in telecommunications infrastructure run by the country’s major carriers, and some have sold Huawei’s phones.

The company has struck up partnerships with Canadian universities, and say it is investing more than half a billion dollars in researching next generation cellular networks here. [emphasis mine]

While I’m not thrilled about using patents as an indicator of progress, this is interesting to note (from the report released April 10, 2018),

Canada produces about 1% of global patents, ranking 18th in the world. It lags further behind in trademark (34th) and design applications (34th). Despite relatively weak performance overall in patents, Canada excels in some technical fields such as Civil Engineering, Digital Communication, Other Special Machines, Computer Technology, and Telecommunications. [emphases mine] Canada is a net exporter of patents, which signals the R&D strength of some technology industries. It may also reflect increasing R&D investment by foreign-controlled firms. [emphasis mine] [p. xxiii Print; p. 25 PDF]

Getting back to my point, we don’t have large companies here. In fact, the dream for most of our high tech startups is to build up the company so it’s attractive to buyers, sell, and retire (hopefully before the age of 40). Strangely, the expert panel doesn’t seem to share my insight into this matter,

Canada’s combination of high performance in measures of research output and impact, and low performance on measures of industrial R&D investment and innovation (e.g., subpar productivity growth), continue to be viewed as a paradox, leading to the hypothesis that barriers are impeding the flow of Canada’s research achievements into commercial applications. The Panel’s analysis suggests the need for a more nuanced view. The process of transforming research into innovation and wealth creation is a complex multifaceted process, making it difficult to point to any definitive cause of Canada’s deficit in R&D investment and productivity growth. Based on the Panel’s interpretation of the evidence, Canada is a highly innovative nation, but significant barriers prevent the translation of innovation into wealth creation. The available evidence does point to a number of important contributing factors that are analyzed in this report. Figure 5 represents the relationships between R&D, innovation, and wealth creation.

The Panel concluded that many factors commonly identified as points of concern do not adequately explain the overall weakness in Canada’s innovation performance compared with other countries. [emphasis mine] Academia-business linkages appear relatively robust in quantitative terms given the extent of cross-sectoral R&D funding and increasing academia-industry partnerships, though the volume of academia-industry interactions does not indicate the nature or the quality of that interaction, nor the extent to which firms are capitalizing on the research conducted and the resulting IP. The educational system is high performing by international standards and there does not appear to be a widespread lack of researchers or STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) skills. IP policies differ across universities and are unlikely to explain a divergence in research commercialization activity between Canadian and U.S. institutions, though Canadian universities and governments could do more to help Canadian firms access university IP and compete in IP management and strategy. Venture capital availability in Canada has improved dramatically in recent years and is now competitive internationally, though still overshadowed by Silicon Valley. Technology start-ups and start-up ecosystems are also flourishing in many sectors and regions, demonstrating their ability to build on research advances to develop and deliver innovative products and services.

You’ll note there’s no mention of a cultural issue where start-ups are designed for sale as soon as possible and this isn’t new. Years ago, there was an accounting firm that published a series of historical maps (the last one I saw was in 2005) of technology companies in the Vancouver region. Technology companies were being developed and sold to large foreign companies from the 19th century to present day.

Part 2

Cloaking devices made from DNA and gold nanoparticles using top-down lithography

This new technique seems promising but there’ve been a lot of ‘cloaking’ devices announced in the years I’ve been blogging and, in all likelihood, I was late to the party so I’m exercising a little caution before getting too excited. For the latest development in cloaking devices, there’s a January 18, 2018 news item on Nanowerk,

Northwestern University researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind technique for creating entirely new classes of optical materials and devices that could lead to light bending and cloaking devices — news to make the ears of Star Trek’s Spock perk up.

Using DNA [deoxyribonucleic acid] as a key tool, the interdisciplinary team took gold nanoparticles of different sizes and shapes and arranged them in two and three dimensions to form optically active superlattices. Structures with specific configurations could be programmed through choice of particle type and both DNA-pattern and sequence to exhibit almost any color across the visible spectrum, the scientists report.

A January 18, 2018 Northwestern University news release (also on EurekAlert) by Megan Fellman, which originated the news item, delves into more detail (Note: Links have been removed),

“Architecture is everything when designing new materials, and we now have a new way to precisely control particle architectures over large areas,” said Chad A. Mirkin, the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. “Chemists and physicists will be able to build an almost infinite number of new structures with all sorts of interesting properties. These structures cannot be made by any known technique.”

The technique combines an old fabrication method — top-down lithography, the same method used to make computer chips — with a new one — programmable self-assembly driven by DNA. The Northwestern team is the first to combine the two to achieve individual particle control in three dimensions.

The study was published online by the journal Science today (Jan. 18). Mirkin and Vinayak P. Dravid and Koray Aydin, both professors in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, are co-corresponding authors.

Scientists will be able to use the powerful and flexible technique to build metamaterials — materials not found in nature — for a range of applications including sensors for medical and environmental uses.

The researchers used a combination of numerical simulations and optical spectroscopy techniques to identify particular nanoparticle superlattices that absorb specific wavelengths of visible light. The DNA-modified nanoparticles — gold in this case — are positioned on a pre-patterned template made of complementary DNA. Stacks of structures can be made by introducing a second and then a third DNA-modified particle with DNA that is complementary to the subsequent layers.

In addition to being unusual architectures, these materials are stimuli-responsive: the DNA strands that hold them together change in length when exposed to new environments, such as solutions of ethanol that vary in concentration. The change in DNA length, the researchers found, resulted in a change of color from black to red to green, providing extreme tunability of optical properties.

“Tuning the optical properties of metamaterials is a significant challenge, and our study achieves one of the highest tunability ranges achieved to date in optical metamaterials,” said Aydin, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at McCormick.

“Our novel metamaterial platform — enabled by precise and extreme control of gold nanoparticle shape, size and spacing — holds significant promise for next-generation optical metamaterials and metasurfaces,” Aydin said.

The study describes a new way to organize nanoparticles in two and three dimensions. The researchers used lithography methods to drill tiny holes — only one nanoparticle wide — in a polymer resist, creating “landing pads” for nanoparticle components modified with strands of DNA. The landing pads are essential, Mirkin said, since they keep the structures that are grown vertical.

The nanoscopic landing pads are modified with one sequence of DNA, and the gold nanoparticles are modified with complementary DNA. By alternating nanoparticles with complementary DNA, the researchers built nanoparticle stacks with tremendous positional control and over a large area. The particles can be different sizes and shapes (spheres, cubes and disks, for example).

“This approach can be used to build periodic lattices from optically active particles, such as gold, silver and any other material that can be modified with DNA, with extraordinary nanoscale precision,” said Mirkin, director of Northwestern’s International Institute for Nanotechnology.

Mirkin also is a professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and professor of chemical and biological engineering, biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering in the McCormick School.

The success of the reported DNA programmable assembly required expertise with hybrid (soft-hard) materials and exquisite nanopatterning and lithographic capabilities to achieve the requisite spatial resolution, definition and fidelity across large substrate areas. The project team turned to Dravid, a longtime collaborator of Mirkin’s who specializes in nanopatterning, advanced microscopy and characterization of soft, hard and hybrid nanostructures.

Dravid contributed his expertise and assisted in designing the nanopatterning and lithography strategy and the associated characterization of the new exotic structures. He is the Abraham Harris Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in McCormick and the founding director of the NUANCE center, which houses the advanced patterning, lithography and characterization used in the DNA-programmed structures.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Building superlattices from individual nanoparticles via template-confined DNA-mediated assembly by Qing-Yuan Lin, Jarad A. Mason, Zhongyang, Wenjie Zhou, Matthew N. O’Brien, Keith A. Brown, Matthew R. Jones, Serkan Butun, Byeongdu Lee, Vinayak P. Dravid, Koray Aydin, Chad A. Mirkin. Science 18 Jan 2018: eaaq0591 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaq0591

This paper is behind a paywall.

As noted earlier, it could be a while before cloaking devices are made available. In the meantime, you may find this image inspiring,

Caption: Northwestern University researchers have developed a new method to precisely arrange nanoparticles of different sizes and shapes in two and three dimensions, resulting in optically active superlattices. Credit: Northwestern University

Immune to CRISPR?

I guess if you’re going to use bacteria as part of your gene editing technology (CRISPR [clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats]/Cas9) then, you might half expect the body’s immune system may have developed some defenses. A Jan. 9, 2018 article by Sarah Zhang for The Atlantic provides some insight into what the new research suggests (Note: Links have been removed),

2018 is supposed to be the year of CRISPR in humans. The first U.S. and European clinical trials that test the gene-editing tool’s ability to treat diseases—such as sickle-cell anemia, beta thalassemia, and a type of inherited blindness—are slated to begin this year.

But the year has begun on a cautionary note. On Friday [January 5, 2018], Stanford researchers posted a preprint (which has not been peer reviewed) to the website biorXiv highlighting a potential obstacle to using CRISPR in humans: Many of us may already be immune to it. That’s because CRISPR actually comes from bacteria that often live on or infect humans, and we have built up immunity to the proteins from these bacteria over our lives.

Not all CRISPR therapies in humans will be doomed. “We don’t think this is the end of the story. This is the start of the story,” says Porteus [Matthew Porteus, a pediatrician and stem-cell researcher at Stanford]. There are likely ways around the problem of immunity to CRISPR proteins, and many of the early clinical trials appear to be designed around this problem.

Porteus and his colleagues focused on two versions of Cas9, the bacterial protein mostly commonly used in CRISPR gene editing. One comes from Staphylococcus aureus, which often harmlessly lives on skin but can sometimes causes staph infections, and another from Streptococcus pyogenes, which causes strep throat but can also become “flesh-eating bacteria” when it spreads to other parts of the body. So yeah, you want your immune system to be on guard against these bacteria.

The human immune system has a couple different ways of recognizing foreign proteins, and the team tested for both. First, they looked to see if people have molecules in their blood called antibodies that can specifically bind to Cas9. Among 34 people they tested, 79 percent had antibodies against the staph Cas9 and 65 percent against the strep Cas9.

The Stanford team only tested for preexisting immunity against Cas9, but anytime you inject a large bacterial protein into the human body, it can provoke an immune response. After all, that’s how the immune system learns to fight off bacteria it’s never seen before. (Preexisting immunity can make the response faster and more robust, though.)

The danger of the immune system turning on a patient’s body hangs over a lot of research into correcting genes. In the late 1990s and 2000s, research into gene therapy was derailed by the death of 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger, who died from an immune reaction to the virus used to deliver the corrected gene. This is the worst-case scenario that the CRISPR world hopes to avoid.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the preprint,

Identification of Pre-Existing Adaptive Immunity to Cas9 Proteins in Humans by Carsten Trevor Charlesworth, Priyanka S Deshpande, Daniel P Dever, Beruh Dejene, Natalia Gomez-Ospina, Sruthi Mantri, Mara Pavel-Dinu, Joab Camarena, Kenneth I Weinberg, Matthew H Porteus. bioRxiv posted January 5, 2018 doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/243345

This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed …

This preprint (not yet published paper) is open access and open for feedback.

Meanwhile, the year of CRISPR takes off (from a January 10, 2018 American Chemical Society news release on EurekAlert),

This year could be a defining one for CRISPR, the gene editing technique, which has been hailed as an important breakthrough in laboratory research. That’s because the first company-sponsored clinical studies will be conducted to see if it can help treat diseases in humans, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society.

C&EN Assistant Editor Ryan Cross reports that a big push is coming from industry, specifically from three companies that are each partly founded by one of the three inventors of the method. They are zeroing in on the blood diseases called sickle-cell anemia and β-thalassemia, mostly because their precise cause is known. In these diseases, hemoglobin doesn’t function properly, leading to severe health issues in some people. Crispr Therapeutics and Intellia Therapeutics plan to test the technique to boost levels of an alternative version of healthy hemoglobin. Editas Medicine, however, will also use CRISPR to correct mutations in the faulty hemoglobin gene. Labs led by university researchers are also joining the mix, starting or continuing clinical trials with the approach in 2018.

Because CRISPR is being used to cut a cell’s DNA and insert a new sequence, concerns have been raised about the potential for accidents. A cut in the wrong place could mean introducing a new mutation that could be benign — or cancerous. But according to proponents of the method, researchers are conducting extensive computer predictions and in vitro tests to help avoid this outcome.

The January 8, 2018 Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) open access article by Ryan Cross is here.

Finally, if you are interested in how this affects research as it’s being developed, there’s University of British Columbia researcher Rosie Redfield’s January 16, 2018 posting on RRResearch blog,

Thursday’s [January 11, 2018] post described the hypothesis that bacteria might use gene transfer agent particles to inoculate other cells in the population with fragments of phage DNA, and outlined an experiment to test this.  Now I’m realizing that I need to know a lot more about the kind of immunity I should expect to see if this GTA-as-vaccine hypothesis is correct.

That should give you some idea of what I meant by “research as it’s being developed.” Redfield’s blog is not for the mildly interested.

Redfield is well-known internationally as being one of the first to refute research which suggested the existence of an ‘arsenic bacterium’ (see my Dec. 8, 2010 posting: My apologies for arsenic blooper. She’s first mentioned in the second excerpt, second paragraph.) The affair was known online as #arseniclife. There’s a May 27, 2011 essay by Carl Zimmer on Slate titled: The Discovery of Arsenic-Based Twitter: How #arseniclife changed science.

Molecular electronics: one atom at a time

This research on developing molecular electronics comes from Okinawa (Japan) according to a January 17, 2018 news item on Nanowerk,

Electronic devices are getting smaller and smaller. Early computers filled entire rooms. Today you can hold one in the palm of your hand. Now the field of molecular electronics is taking miniaturization to the next level. Researchers are creating electronic components so tiny they can’t be seen with the naked eye.

Molecular electronics is a branch of nanotechnology that uses single molecules, or nanoscale collections of molecules, as electronic components. The purpose is to create miniature computing devices, replacing bulk materials with molecular blocks.

For instance, metal atoms can be made into nanoscale ‘molecular wires.’ Also known as Extended Metal Atom Chains (EMACs), molecular wires are one-dimensional chains of single metal atoms connected to an organic molecule, called a ligand, that acts as a support. Molecular wire-type compounds have a diverse array of potential uses, from LED lights to catalysts.

Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have found a simple way to create copper molecular wires of different lengths by adding or removing copper atoms one by one. “This is the first example of a molecular copper wire being formed in a stepwise, atom-by-atom process,” says Julia Khusnutdinova, head of the OIST Coordination Chemistry and Catalysis Unit. “Our method can be compared to Lego construction in which you add one brick at a time,” she says.

A January 16, 2018 OIST press release (also on EurekAlert but with a January 17, 2018 date) by Sophie Protheroe, which originated the news item, adds detail,

Molecular wires can vary in length, with different lengths having different molecular properties and practical applications.  At present, the longest EMAC reported in the literature is based on nickel and it contains 11 metal atoms in a single linear chain.

The structure of the longest EMAC reported in the literature, confirmed by X-ray crystallography. It contains 11 nickel atoms arranged in a linear chain.

Creating molecular wires of different lengths is difficult because it requires a specific ligand to be synthesized each time. The ligand, which can be seen as an ‘insulator’ by analogy to the macro world, helps the wires to form by bringing the metal atoms together and aligning them into a linear string. However, creating ligands of different lengths can be an elaborate and complicated process.

The OIST researchers have found a new way to overcome this problem.  “We have created a single dynamic ligand that can be used to synthesize multiple chain lengths,” says Dr. Orestes Rivada-Wheelaghan, first author of the paper.  “This is much more efficient than making a new ligand each time,” he says.

In their paper, published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, the researchers describe their new stepwise method of creating copper molecular wires.  “The ligand opens up from one end to let a metal atom enter and, when the chain extends, the ligand undergoes a sliding movement along the chain to accommodate more metal atoms,” says Prof. Khusnutdinova.  “This can be likened to a molecular accordion that can be extended and shortened,” says Rivada-Wheelaghan. By adding or removing copper atoms one at a time in this way, the researchers can construct molecular wires of different lengths, varying from 1 to 4 copper atoms.

A cartoon by Dr. Rivada-Wheelaghan shows the simple stepwise process of copper atom chain synthesis using a dynamic ligand. Copper atoms can be added or removed one by one to make chains of different lengths.

This dynamic ligand offers a new way for chemists to synthesize molecules with specific shapes and properties, creating potential for many practical applications in microelectronics and beyond.

“The next step is to develop dynamic ligands that could be used to create molecular wires made from other metals, or a combination of different metals,” says Dr. Rivada-Wheelaghan. “For example, by selectively inserting copper atoms at the termini of the chain, and using a different type of metal at the center of the chain, we could create new compounds with interesting electronic properties,” says Prof. Khusnutdinova.

I particularly enjoy the cartoon. Getting back to business, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Controlled and Reversible Stepwise Growth of Linear Copper(I) Chains Enabled by Dynamic Ligand Scaffolds by Dr. Orestes Rivada-Wheelaghan, Sandra L. Aristizábal, Dr. Joaquín López-Serrano, Dr. Robert R. Fayzullin, and Prof. Julia R. Khusnutdinova. Angewandte Chemie International Edition Version of Record online: 23 NOV 2017 Volume 56, Issue 51, pages 16267–16271, December 18, 2017 DOI: 10.1002/anie.201709167

© 2017 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

This paper is behind a paywall.

Trounce biofouling with nanowrinkles

This is an example of what the researchers mean by ‘nanowrinkles’,

Caption: The Nepenthes pitcher plant (left) and its nanowrinkled ‘mouth’ (centre) inspired the engineered nanomaterial (right). Credit: Sydney Nano Courtesy: University of Sydney

As for ‘biofouling’, here’s my rough and ready description for anyone who might find it helpful, if you’ve been to the beach and slipped on some rocks, that slip was probably due to a biofilm and biofilm contributes to ‘biofouling’.

Australian scientists have announced research on a new technique for the eradication of biofouling according to a January 17, 2018 University of Sydney press release (also on EurekAlert but dated Jan. 16, 2018),

Sydney scientists have developed nanowrinkled coatings that could avoid the build-up of damaging biological material and save some of the $320 million annually spent by the Australian shipping industry because of biofouling.

A team of chemistry researchers from the University of Sydney Nano Institute has developed nanostructured surface coatings that have anti-fouling properties without using any toxic components.

Biofouling – the build-up of damaging biological material – is a huge economic issue, costing the aquaculture and shipping industries billions of dollars a year in maintenance and extra fuel usage. It is estimated that the increased drag on ship hulls due to biofouling costs the shipping industry in Australia $320 million a year a b.

Since the banning of the toxic anti-fouling agent tributyltin, the need for new non-toxic methods to stop marine biofouling has been pressing.

Leader of the research team, Associate Professor Chiara Neto, said: “We are keen to understand how these surfaces work and also push the boundaries of their application, especially for energy efficiency. Slippery coatings are expected to be drag-reducing, which means that objects, such as ships, could move through water with much less energy required.”

The new materials were tested tied to shark netting in Sydney’s Watson Bay, showing that the nanomaterials were efficient at resisting biofouling in a marine environment.

The research has been published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

The new coating uses ‘nanowrinkles’ inspired by the carnivorous Nepenthes pitcher plant. The plant traps a layer of water on the tiny structures around the rim of its opening. This creates a slippery layer causing insects to aquaplane on the surface, before they slip into the pitcher where they are digested.

Nanostructures utilise materials engineered at the scale of billionths of a metre – 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Associate Professor Neto’s group at Sydney Nano is developing nanoscale materials for future development in industry.

Biofouling can occur on any surface that is wet for a long period of time, for example aquaculture nets, marine sensors and cameras, and ship hulls. The slippery surface developed by the Neto group stops the initial adhesion of bacteria, inhibiting the formation of a biofilm from which larger marine fouling organisms can grow.

The interdisciplinary University of Sydney team included biofouling expert Professor Truis Smith-Palmer of St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada, who was on sabbatical visit to the Neto group for a year, partially funded by the Faculty of Science scheme for visiting women.

In the lab, the slippery surfaces resisted almost all fouling from a common species of marine bacteria, while control Teflon samples without the lubricating layer were completely fouled. Not satisfied with testing the surfaces under highly controlled lab conditions with only one type of bacteria the team also tested the surfaces in the ocean, with the help of marine biologist Professor Ross Coleman.

Test surfaces were attached to swimming nets at Watsons Bay baths in Sydney Harbour for a period of seven weeks. In the much harsher marine environment, the slippery surfaces were still very efficient at resisting fouling.

The antifouling coatings are mouldable and transparent, making their application ideal for underwater cameras and sensors.

Sources for economic data:
a) M. P. Schultz, J. A. Bendick, E. R. Holm, W. M. Hertel, Biofouling 2011, 27, 87-98;
b) Western Australia Departmet of Fisheries, in Fisheries Occasional Publication No. 115, 2012

Even though there’s a link to the paper in the excerpt, here’s a citation and another link to the paper,

Marine Antifouling Behavior of Lubricant-Infused Nanowrinkled Polymeric Surfaces by
Cameron S. Ware, Truis Smith-Palmer, Sam Peppou-Chapman, Liam R. J. Scarratt, Erin M. Humphries, Daniel Balzer, and Chiara Neto. ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces, Article ASAP DOI: 10.1021/acsami.7b14736 Publication Date (Web): December 18, 2017

Copyright © 2017 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.

Robotics where and how you don’t expect them: a wearable robot and a robot implant for regeneration

Generally I  expect robots to be machines that are external to my body but recently there were two news bits about some different approaches. First, the wearable robot.

A robot that supports your hip

A January 10, 2018 news item on ScienceDaily describes research into muscles that can be worn,

Scientists are one step closer to artificial muscles. Orthotics have come a long way since their initial wood and strap designs, yet innovation lapsed when it came to compensating for muscle power — until now.

A collaborative research team has designed a wearable robot to support a person’s hip joint while walking. The team, led by Minoru Hashimoto, a professor of textile science and technology at Shinshu University in Japan, published the details of their prototype in Smart Materials and Structures, a journal published by the Institute of Physics.

A January 9, 2018 Shinshu University press release on EurekAlert, which originated the news item, provides more detail,

“With a rapidly aging society, an increasing number of elderly people require care after suffering from stroke, and other-age related disabilities. Various technologies, devices, and robots are emerging to aid caretakers,” wrote Hashimoto, noting that several technologies meant to assist a person with walking are often cumbersome to the user. “[In our] current study, [we] sought to develop a lightweight, soft, wearable assist wear for supporting activities of daily life for older people with weakened muscles and those with mobility issues.”

The wearable system consists of plasticized polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gel, mesh electrodes, and applied voltage. The mesh electrodes sandwich the gel, and when voltage is applied, the gel flexes and contracts, like a muscle. It’s a wearable actuator, the mechanism that causes movement.

“We thought that the electrical mechanical properties of the PVC gel could be used for robotic artificial muscles, so we started researching the PVC gel,” said Hashimoto. “The ability to add voltage to PVC gel is especially attractive for high speed movement, and the gel moves with high speed with just a few hundred volts.”

In a preliminary evaluation, a stroke patient with some paralysis on one side of his body walked with and without the wearable system.

“We found that the assist wear enabled natural movement, increasing step length and decreasing muscular activity during straight line walking,” wrote Hashimoto. The researchers also found that adjusting the charge could change the level of assistance the actuator provides.

The robotic system earned first place in demonstrations with their multilayer PVC gel artificial muscle at the, “24th International Symposium on Smart Structures and Materials & Nondestructive Evaluation and Health Monitoring” for SPIE the international society for optics and photonics.

Next, the researchers plan to create a string actuator using the PVC gel, which could potentially lead to the development of fabric capable of providing more manageable external muscular support with ease.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

PVC gel soft actuator-based wearable assist wear for hip joint support during walking by Yi Li and Minoru Hashimoto. Smart Materials and Structures, Volume 26, Number 12 DOI: 10.1088/1361-665X/aa9315 Published 30 October 2017

© 2017 IOP Publishing Ltd

This paper is behind a paywall and I see it was published in the Fall of 2017. Either they postponed the publicity or this is the second wave. In any event, it was timely as it allowed me to post this along with the robotic research on regeneration.

Robotic implants and tissue regeneration

Boston Children’s Hospital in a January 10, 2018 news release on EurekAlert describes a new (to me) method for tissue regeneration,

An implanted, programmable medical robot can gradually lengthen tubular organs by applying traction forces — stimulating tissue growth in stunted organs without interfering with organ function or causing apparent discomfort, report researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital.

The robotic system, described today in Science Robotics, induced cell proliferation and lengthened part of the esophagus in a large animal by about 75 percent, while the animal remained awake and mobile. The researchers say the system could treat long-gap esophageal atresia, a rare birth defect in which part of the esophagus is missing, and could also be used to lengthen the small intestine in short bowel syndrome.

The most effective current operation for long-gap esophageal atresia, called the Foker process, uses sutures anchored on the patient’s back to gradually pull on the esophagus. To prevent the esophagus from tearing, patients must be paralyzed in a medically induced coma and placed on mechanical ventilation in the intensive care unit for one to four weeks. The long period of immobilization can also cause medical complications such as bone fractures and blood clots.

“This project demonstrates proof-of-concept that miniature robots can induce organ growth inside a living being for repair or replacement, while avoiding the sedation and paralysis currently required for the most difficult cases of esophageal atresia,” says Russell Jennings, MD, surgical director of the Esophageal and Airway Treatment Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, and a co-investigator on the study. “The potential uses of such robots are yet to be fully explored, but they will certainly be applied to many organs in the near future.”

The motorized robotic device is attached only to the esophagus, so would allow a patient to move freely. Covered by a smooth, biocompatible, waterproof “skin,” it includes two attachment rings, placed around the esophagus and sewn into place with sutures. A programmable control unit outside the body applies adjustable traction forces to the rings, slowly and steadily pulling the tissue in the desired direction.

The device was tested in the esophagi of pigs (five received the implant and three served as controls). The distance between the two rings (pulling the esophagus in opposite directions) was increased by small, 2.5-millimeter increments each day for 8 to 9 days. The animals were able to eat normally even with the device applying traction to its esophagus, and showed no sign of discomfort.

On day 10, the segment of esophagus had increased in length by 77 percent on average. Examination of the tissue showed a proliferation of the cells that make up the esophagus. The organ also maintained its normal diameter.

“This shows we didn’t simply stretch the esophagus — it lengthened through cell growth,” says Pierre Dupont, PhD, the study’s senior investigator and Chief of Pediatric Cardiac Bioengineering at Boston Children’s.

The research team is now starting to test the robotic system in a large animal model of short bowel syndrome. While long-gap esophageal atresia is quite rare, the prevalence of short bowel syndrome is much higher. Short bowel can be caused by necrotizing enterocolitis in the newborn, Crohn’s disease in adults, or a serious infection or cancer requiring a large segment of intestine to be removed.

“Short bowel syndrome is a devastating illness requiring patients to be fed intravenously,” says gastroenterologist Peter Ngo, MD, a coauthor on the study. “This, in turn, can lead to liver failure, sometimes requiring a liver or multivisceral (liver-intestine) transplant, outcomes that are both devastating and costly.”

The team hopes to get support to continue its tests of the device in large animal models, and eventually conduct clinical trials. They will also test other features.

“No one knows the best amount of force to apply to an organ to induce growth,” explains Dupont. “Today, in fact, we don’t even know what forces we are applying clinically. It’s all based on surgeon experience. A robotic device can figure out the best forces to apply and then apply those forces precisely.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

In vivo tissue regeneration with robotic implants by Dana D. Damian, Karl Price, Slava Arabagi, Ignacio Berra, Zurab Machaidze, Sunil Manjila, Shogo Shimada, Assunta Fabozzo, Gustavo Arnal, David Van Story, Jeffrey D. Goldsmith, Agoston T. Agoston, Chunwoo Kim, Russell W. Jennings, Peter D. Ngo, Michael Manfredi, and Pierre E. Dupont. Science Robotics 10 Jan 2018: Vol. 3, Issue 14, eaaq0018 DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aaq0018

This paper is behind a paywall.

Organic nanoelectronics in water

Researchers in Sweden have developed organic electronics that are stable in water according to a January 11, 2018 news item on ScienceDaily,

Researchers at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Linköping University [Sweden], have developed the world’s first complementary electrochemical logic circuits that can function stably for long periods in water. This is a highly significant breakthrough in the development of bioelectronics.

A January 11, 2018 Linköping University press release, which originated the news item, notes this latest advance is based on work that started in 2002,

Complementary logic circuitComplementary logic circuit Photo credit: Thor Balkhed

The first printable organic electrochemical transistors were presented by researchers at LiU as early as 2002, and research since then has progressed rapidly. Several organic electronic components, such as light-emitting diodes and electrochromic displays, are already commercially available.

The dominating material used until now has been PEDOT:PSS, which is a p-type material, in which the charge carriers are holes. In order to construct effective electron components, a complementary material, n-type, is required, in which the charge carriers are electrons.
It has been difficult to find a sufficiently stable polymer material, one that can operate in water media and in which the long polymer chains can sustain high current when the material is doped.

N-type material

In an article in the prestigious scientific journal Advanced Materials, Simone Fabiano, head of research in the Organic Nanoelectronics group at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, presents, together with his colleagues, results from an n-type conducting material in which the ladder-type structure of the polymer backbone favours ambient stability and high current when doped. One example is BBL, poly(benzimidazobenzophenanthroline), a material often used in solar cell research.

Postdoctoral researcher Hengda Sun has found a method to create thick films of the material. The thicker the film, the greater the conductivity.

“We have used spray-coating to produce films up to 200 nm thick. These can reach extremely high conductivities,” says Simone Fabiano.

The method can also be successfully used together with printed electronics across large surfaces.

Hengda Sun has also shown that the circuits function for long periods, both in the presence of oxygen and water.

Moist surroundings

“This may appear at first glance to be a small advance in a specialised field, but what is great about it is that it has major consequences for many applications. We can now construct complementary logic circuits – inverters, sensors and other components – that function in moist surroundings,” says Simone Fabiano.

“Resistors are needed in logical circuits that are based solely on p-type electrochemical transistors. These are rather bulky, and this limits the applications that can be achieved. With an n-type material in our toolbox, we can produce complementary circuits that occupy the available space much more efficiently, since resistors are no longer required in the logical circuits,” says Magnus Berggren, professor of organic electronics and head of the Laboratory for Organic Electronics.

Applications of the organic components include logic circuits that can be printed on textile or paper, various types of cheap sensor, non-rigid and flexible displays, and – not least – the huge field of bioelectronics. Polymers that conduct both ions and electrons are the bridge needed between the ion-conducting systems in the body and the electronic components of, for example, sensors.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Complementary Logic Circuits Based on High-Performance n-Type Organic Electrochemical Transistors by Hengda Sun, Mikhail Vagin, Suhao Wang, Xavier Crispin, Robert Forchheimer, Magnus Berggren, and Simone Fabiano. Advanced Materials Vol. 30 Issue 3 Version of Record online: 10 JAN 2018 DOI: 10.1002/adma.201704916

© 2018 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

This paper is behind a paywall.