Euro-CASE Academies’ Annual Reports
Euro-CASE euro case european academies European Council of Applied Sciences Technologies and Engineering technologic scientific economic social progress Energy energy Environment Environment Mobility mobiliy Transport transport Education education Safety safety Security security Millenium millenium technology prize 2010 climate change medicine MedicineLena Treschow Torell
Euro-CASE euro case european academies European Council of Applied Sciences Technologies and Engineering technologic scientific economic social progress Energy energy Environment Environment Mobility mobiliy Transport transport Education education Safety safety Security security Millenium millenium technology prize 2010 climate change medicine MedicineLena Treschow Torell
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18 Oct Biotechnology for all

Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW)
2015
Biotechnological research is no longer limited to specialist laboratories: a growing community of biologists, amateur enthusiasts and technophiles is experimenting in kitchens, workshops and DIY laboratories. Some people view the democratisation of biotechnology as a threat, others as an opportunity to gain a better understanding of complex scientific interrelationships within society. A few years ago, something which occurred in software development in the early 1990s also began to emerge in the field of biotechnology: “open source” and “do-it-yourself” (“DIY”) strategies are opening up a field of knowledge traditionally occupied by experts, universities and large companies to a broader community. In 2008, a handful of technology enthusiasts in Boston set out to drag biotechnological research out of established institutions into garages and kitchens in urban and rural settings. Since then, Europe, the USA and Asia have seen the emergence of dozens of garage laboratories with scales, mixers, refrigerators and incubators, all purchased cheaply from eBay. Some laboratories are also equipped with homemade bioanalytical devices. Inquisitive laymen and experienced researchers conduct experiments shoulder to shoulder, pursuing personal biotech research projects or simply indulging in the satisfaction of DIY.
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18 Oct Renewable instead of fossil resources

Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW)
2015
The current price of oil lessens the urgency of replacing fossil with renewable base materials. Yet due to oil’s finite nature, one day this replacement will become inevitable. Addressing this issue today, launching and intensifying research and development activities, therefore represents a major opportunity for Switzerland. Thanks to its academic institutions, its existing infrastructure and its industry, the country is starting from a good position despite difficult economic framework conditions. The new SATW brochure “Renewable instead of fossil resources – An opportunity for Switzerland” describes the current state of technology as regards the production of basic materials, active substances and reusables. It makes the distinction between quasi-available technologies and processes as yet only existing at a conceptual level. It also addresses the necessary and promising industrial combination of biotechnology and chemistry. The survey ends with biorefineries, which in Switzerland have not yet moved beyond the conceptual stage. The brochure closes with a brief list of conclusions and four recommendations, which one can only hope will meet with constructive interest within industry, politics and the population at large, so that this “opportunity for Switzerland” may truly be seized.
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18 Oct White biotechnology and synthetic biology

National Academy of Technologies of France (NATF)
2012
Biotechnology is the application of S&T to living organisms. White biotechnology (Bio-Based Industries - BBl) uses renewable carbon sources  in fermentation processes to produce food compounds, fuels, specialties and chemical commodities, and plastics.  Synthetic biology (SB) introduces engineering principles into biotechnology, promoting the emergence of a true bio-economy.  Although endowed with a well-developed agriculture and BBI-related research, there are only about a dozen companies engaged in applications of SB to BBl in France, including start-ups, intermediate enterprises, and Total, resulting in few industrial realisations. The sector is considered risky by investors.  A consistent effort to train  engineers and PhD-students in these areas is essential.  Regarding risks, traditional BBI-products must be distinguished from SB-products in specific sectors. Upstream from industrial SB-applications on a large scale, research on the security, safety, ethics, toxicology and ecotoxicology is vital.  The academic SB community self-regulates its conduct in an effort of openness, transparency, anticipation and prevention of potential risks. Working-group leader: Pierre Monsan, director “Toulouse White Biotechnology” and NATF Fellow.
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18 Oct Synthetic biology and (white) industrial biotechnologies (Advice) – (Report only in French)

National Academy of Technologies of France (NATF)
2012
Biotechnology is the application of S&T to living organisms. White biotechnology (Bio-Based Industries - BBl) uses renewable carbon-sources in fermentation-processes to produce food compounds, fuels, specialties and chemical commodities, and plastics.  Synthetic biology (SB) introduces engineering principles into biotechnology, promoting the emergence of a true bio-economy.  Although endowed with a well-developed agriculture and BBI-related research, there are only about a dozen companies engaged in applications of SB to BBl in France, including start-ups, intermediate enterprises, and Total, resulting in few industrial realisations. The sector is considered risky by investors.  Consistent efforts to train engineers and PhD-students in these areas are essential.  Regarding risks, traditional BBI-products must be distinguished from SB-products in specific sectors. Upstream from industrial SB-applications on a large scale, research on the security, safety, ethics, toxicology and ecotoxicology is vital.  The academic SB-community self-regulates its conduct in an effort of openness, transparency, anticipation and prevention of potential risks.
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18 Oct Jubilee Annual of Croatian Academy of Engineering 2016

Croatian Academy of Engineering (HATZ)
2017
The development of technical and biotechnical sciences is the basis for the overall social progress. We have witnessed that in recent years the focus of international research competitions is directed towards the applied sphere. The emphasis of innovation processes is also noticeable, as well as the recommendation of involving small and medium-sized enterprises in research activities. Because of the accelerated development of technical sciences, the answer to the question about future directions of development is not unambiguous. Croatia's Republic of Croatia, as a shortage of unclear values of quality of life and technological standards of developed EU countries, one of the high priorities should be to consider one's own relationship to the underlying principles of such development. The topics of optimal higher education and the promotion of innovation, as well as the appropriate incorporation of engineering sciences into the general social phenomena, give particular importance to the importance of analyzing the present situation and the development of guidelines for future development.
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18 Oct Engineering Power – Vol. 13(1)

Croatian Academy of Engineering (HATZ)
2018
This issue is dedicated to the scientific work in the field of biomechanical engineering in the Laboratory for Numerical Mechanics at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, University of Zagreb. Our work concerns modeling of soft tissue behavior, particularly abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) development. We addressed the problem of intraluminal thrombus enlargement within abdominal aortic aneurysm. Our main goal was to develop a theoretical and computational biochemomechanical model of evolving properties of ILT incorporated into an initially healthy artery. We showed that thrombus-laden lesions can either arrest or rupture depending on the biochemical (e.g., concentration of elastases) and biomechanical (stiffness of fibrin) properties of the ILT. These computational results suggest that ILT should be accounted for when predicting a potential enlargement or rupture risk of AAAs and highlight some specific needs for further experimental and computational research. The scientific work within our group concerned the very first growth and remodelling model that addresses together the mechanobiology, biochemistry, and biomechanics of thrombus-laden AAAs. The herein presented results are the result of fruitful cooperation with Jay D Humphrey’s group from Yale University, USA, Gerhard Holzapfel’s group from TU Graz, Austria, Seungik Baek from Michigan State University, USA and Ivo Lovričević, Medical School, University of Zagreb. The scientific work in our group was supported by grants from the Croatian Science Foundation project IP-2014-09-7382 and Installation Grant to I. Karšaj.
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18 Oct Engineering Power – Vol. 13(2)

Croatian Academy of Engineering (HATZ)
2018
A large part of present technological achievements results from research and continuing advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). AI is a part of computer science that aims to create intelligent machines, capable of thinking, acting and learning like humans. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning a variety of subfields, among which machine learning (ML) and computer vision (CV) are generally regarded as core parts of AI. CV is a field that aims to give the computer visual understanding of the world from images. ML is a field of study that gives computers the ability to learn how to solve a certain task. It is particularly suited for problems that may seem relatively simple for humans, but are rather difficult to solve by using classical image processing approaches. CV and ML fields have a significant overlap where many CV problems can be solved using ML techniques. Several papers listed below present a part of CV and related ML research conducted by experts from two laboratories of the Center of Excellence for Computer Vision (CRV) at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing and also by CRV collaboration researchers. The first laboratory involved is Human-oriented Technologies Laboratory (HOTLab) led by Prof. Igor S. Pandžić, Ph.D., while the second laboratory involved is Advanced Shape Reconstruction and Registration Laboratory (SHARK Lab) led by Tomislav Pribanić, Ph.D., Associate Prof. Nowadays one heavily studied ML application is certainly face analysis (FA) presented in one of the papers below. Applications of FA technologies range from marketing and entertainment to automotive industry in which, for instance, the goal is fatigue detection for vehicle driver. Another paper presented discusses two thoroughly researched CV tasks: object localization and semantic segmentation. The former attempts to find objects in the input image, where minimum bounding rectangle of the object and the associated object class are the ideal output. The latter is somewhat more detailed where each image pixel is assigned to the corresponding class label. Interesting applications can be found in traffic control systems and medical imaging. The next paper presents ML in the context of image categorization and image similarity whereby a commercial service was developed, enabling buyers of certain products to find visually similar objects of interest. The camera is the essential tool used in CV. For numerous geometry related tasks the camera requires calibration which affects many applications such as geocoding, as explained in another paper. A geometrically calibrated camera is a basis for the 3D passive and 3D active reconstruction system too. 3D scanning systems are extensively used in fashion design and development and medical applications such as human back surface analyses. The last two papers put emphasis on those two applications.
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18 Oct Enineering Power – Bulletin of the Croatian Academy of Engineering – Vol. 12(3)

Croatian Academy of Engineering (HATZ)
2018
Biomedical engineering is one of the fastest developing fields, which touches many specialties and provides a basis for the faster development of medical science. Close and fruitful cooperation of medical doctors and engineers results in team synergy, thus enabling faster progress than in the case when everyone works seperately in their own "silos". At the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Mechanical engineering and Naval Architecture we recognised the necessity of such cooperation more than ten years ago. Today, our several engineer teams are teames up with medical doctors in projects related to medicine. As pathological conditions in the cardiovascular system (such as atherosclerosis, formation of aneurysms, valvular jeart diseases, etc.) are strongly interlinked with the hemodynamics of the cardiovascular system and tissue remodeling, they attract interest of our departments. The Department of Fluid Mechanics is now in charge of hemodynamics and the Department of Mechanics is in charge of tissue remodeling and formation of aneurysms.The papers provide the Department of Fluid Mechanics team with a short overview over research activities and results in the field of hemodynamic modeling of the cardiovascular system. We have developed models and numerical methods with different levels of complexity: from a lumped parameter model to one-dimensional and quasi two-dimensional to three-dimensional model.
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18 Oct Enineering Power – Bulletin of the Croatian Academy of Engineering – Vol. 13(1)

Croatian Academy of Engineering (HATZ)
2018
This issue is dedicated to the scientific work in the field of biomechanical engineering in the Laboratory for numerical Mechanics at the Faculty of Mechanical engineering and Naval Arhitecture, University of Zagreb. Our work concerns modeling of soft tissue behavior, particularly abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) development. We addressed the problem of intraluminal thrombus enlargement within abdominal aortic aneurysm. Our mail goal was to develop a theoretical and computational biochemomechanical model of evolving properties of ILT incorporated into an initially healthy artery.We showed that thrombus-laden lesions can either arrest or rupture depending on the biochemical (e.g., concentration of elastases) and biomechanical (stiffness of fibrin) properties of the ILT. The herein presented results are the results of fruitful cooperation with Jay D Humphrey's group from Yale university, USA, Gerhard Holzapfel's group from TU Graz, austria, Seungik Baek from Michigan state University, USA and Ivo Lovričević, Medical School, University of Zagreb. The scientific work in our group was supported by grants from the Croatian Science Foundation project IP-2014-09-7382 and Installation Grant to I. Karšaj.
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18 Oct Enineering Power – Bulletin of the Croatian Academy of Engineering – Vol. 13(2)

Croatian Academy of Engineering (HATZ)
2018
A large part of present technological achievements result from research and continuing advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). AI is a part of computer science that aims to create intelligent machines, capable of thinking, acting and learning like humans. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning a variety of subfields, among which machine learning (ML) and computer vision (CV) are generally regarded as core parts of AI. CV is field that aims to give the computer visual understanding of the world from images. ML is a field od study that gives computers visual understanding of the world from images. ML a field of study that gives computers the ability to learn how to solve a certain task. It is particularly suited for problems that may seem relatively simple for humans, but are rather difficult to solve by using classical image processing approaches. CV and ML fields have a significant overlap where many CV problems can be solved using ML techniques.
Read More