5,237 research outputs found
A Visual Modeling Method for Spatiotemporal and Multidimensional Features in Epidemiological Analysis: Applied COVID-19 Aggregated Datasets
The visual modeling method enables flexible interactions with rich graphical
depictions of data and supports the exploration of the complexities of
epidemiological analysis. However, most epidemiology visualizations do not
support the combined analysis of objective factors that might influence the
transmission situation, resulting in a lack of quantitative and qualitative
evidence. To address this issue, we have developed a portrait-based visual
modeling method called +msRNAer. This method considers the spatiotemporal
features of virus transmission patterns and the multidimensional features of
objective risk factors in communities, enabling portrait-based exploration and
comparison in epidemiological analysis. We applied +msRNAer to aggregate
COVID-19-related datasets in New South Wales, Australia, which combined
COVID-19 case number trends, geo-information, intervention events, and
expert-supervised risk factors extracted from LGA-based censuses. We perfected
the +msRNAer workflow with collaborative views and evaluated its feasibility,
effectiveness, and usefulness through one user study and three subject-driven
case studies. Positive feedback from experts indicates that +msRNAer provides a
general understanding of analyzing comprehension that not only compares
relationships between cases in time-varying and risk factors through portraits
but also supports navigation in fundamental geographical, timeline, and other
factor comparisons. By adopting interactions, experts discovered functional and
practical implications for potential patterns of long-standing community
factors against the vulnerability faced by the pandemic. Experts confirmed that
+msRNAer is expected to deliver visual modeling benefits with spatiotemporal
and multidimensional features in other epidemiological analysis scenarios
Interview with Wolfgang Knauss
An oral history in four sessions (September 2019âJanuary 2020) with Wolfgang Knauss, von KĂĄrmĂĄn Professor of Aeronautics and Applied Mechanics, Emeritus. Born in Germany in 1933, he speaks about his early life and experiences under the Nazi regime, his teenage years in Siegen and Heidelberg during the Allied occupation, and his move to Pasadena, California, in 1954 under the sponsorship of a local minister and his family. He enrolled in Caltech as an undergraduate in 1957, commencing a more than half-century affiliation with the Institute and GALCIT (today the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories of Caltech). He recalls the roots of his interest in aeronautics, his PhD solid mechanics studies with his advisor, M. Williams, and the GALCIT environment in the late 1950s and 1960s at the dawn of the Space Age, including the impact of Sputnik and classes with NASA astronauts. He discusses his experimental and theoretical work on materials deformation, dynamic fracture, and crack propagation, including his solid-propellant fuels research for NASA and the US Army, wide-ranging programs with the US Navy, and his pioneering micromechanics investigations and work on the time-dependent fracture of polymers in the 1990s.
He offers his perspective on GALCITâs academic culture, its solid mechanics and fluid mechanics programs, and its evolving administrative directions over the course of five decades, as well as its impact and reputation both within and beyond Caltech. He describes his work with Caltechâs undergraduate admissions committee and his scientific collaborations with numerous graduate students and postdocs and shares his recollections of GALCIT and other Caltech colleagues, including C. Babcock, D. Coles, R.P. Feynman, Y.C. Fung, G. Neugebauer, G. Housner, D. Hudson, H. Liepmann, A. Klein, G. Ravichandran, A. Rosakis, A. Roshko, and E. Sechler.
Six appendices contributed by Dr. Knauss, offering further insight into his life and career, also form part of this oral history and are cross-referenced in the main text
Supernatural crossing in Republican Chinese fiction, 1920sâ1940s
This dissertation studies supernatural narratives in Chinese fiction from the mid-1920s to the 1940s. The literary works present phenomena or elements that are or appear to be supernatural, many of which remain marginal or overlooked in Sinophone and Anglophone academia. These sources are situated in the May Fourth/New Culture ideological context, where supernatural narratives had to make way for the progressive intellectualsâ literary realism and their allegorical application of supernatural motifs. In the face of realism, supernatural narratives paled, dismissed as impractical fantasies that distract one from facing and tackling real life.
Nevertheless, I argue that the supernatural narratives do not probe into another mystical dimension that might co-exist alongside the empirical world. Rather, they imagine various cases of the charactersâ crossing to voice their discontent with contemporary society or to reflect on the notion of reality. âCrossingâ relates to charactersâ acts or processes of trespassing the boundary that separates the supernatural from the conventional natural world, thus entailing encounters and interaction between the natural and the supernatural. The dissertation examines how crossing, as a narrative device, disturbs accustomed and mundane situations, releases hidden tensions, and discloses repressed truths in Republican fiction.
There are five types of crossing in the supernatural narratives.
Type 1 is the crossing into âhauntedâ houses. This includes (intangible) human agency crossing into domestic spaces and revealing secrets and truths concealed by the scary, feigned âhauntingâ, thus exposing the hidden evil and the other house occupiersâ silenced, suffocated state.
Type 2 is men crossing into female ghostsâ apparitional residences. The female ghosts allude to heart-breaking, traumatic experiences in socio-historical reality, evoking sympathetic concern for suffering individuals who are caught in social upheavals.
Type 3 is the crossing from reality into the charactersâ delusional/hallucinatory realities. While they physically remain in the empirical world, the charactersâ abnormal perceptions lead them to exclusive, delirious, and quasi-supernatural experiences of reality. Their crossings blur the concrete boundaries between the real and the unreal on the mental level: their abnormal perceptions construct a significant, meaningful reality for them, which may be as real as the commonly regarded objective reality.
Type 4 is the crossing into the netherworld modelled on the real world in the authorsâ observation and bears a spectrum of satirised objects of the Republican society.
The last type is immortal visitors crossing into the human world. This type satirises humanityâs vices and destructive potential.
The primary sources demonstrate their writersâ witty passion to play with super--natural notions and imagery (such as ghosts, demons, and immortals) and stitch them into vivid, engaging scenes using techniques such as the gothic, the grotesque, and the satirical, in order to evoke sentiments such as terror, horror, disgust, dis--orientation, or awe, all in service of their insights into realist issues. The works also creatively tailor traditional Chinese modes and motifs, which exemplifies the revival of Republican interest in traditional cultural heritage. The supernatural narratives may amaze or disturb the reader at first, but what is more shocking, unpleasantly nudging, or thought-provoking is the problematic society and peopleâs lives that the supernatural (misunderstandings) eventually reveals. They present a more compre--hensive treatment of reality than Republican literature with its revolutionary consciousness surrounding class struggle. The critical perspectives of the supernatural narratives include domestic space, unacknowledged history and marginal individuals, abnormal mentality, and pervasive weaknesses in humanity.
The crossing and supernatural narratives function as a means of better understanding the lived reality.
This study gathers diverse primary sources written by Republican writers from various educational and political backgrounds and interprets them from a rare perspective, thus filling a research gap. It promotes a fuller view of supernatural narratives in twentieth-century Chinese literature. In terms of reflecting the social and personal reality of the Republican era, the supernatural narratives supplement the realist fiction of the time
'Exarcheia doesn't exist': Authenticity, Resistance and Archival Politics in Athens
My thesis investigates the ways people, materialities and urban spaces interact to form affective ecologies and produce historicity. It focuses on the neighbourhood of Exarcheia, Athensâ contested political topography par excellence, known for its production of radical politics of discontent and resistance to state oppression and eoliberal capitalism. Embracing Exarcheiaâs controversial status within Greek vernacular, media and state discourses, this thesis aims to unpick the neighbourhoodsâ socio-spatial assemblage imbued with affect and formed through the numerous (mis)understandings and (mis)interpretations rooted in its turbulent political history. Drawing on theory on urban spaces, affect, hauntology and archival politics, I argue for Exarcheia as an unwavering archival space composed of affective chronotopes â (in)tangible loci that defy space and temporality. I posit that the interwoven narratives and materialities emerging in my fieldwork are persistently â and perhaps obsessively â reiterating themselves and remaining imprinted on the neighbourhoodâs landscape as an incessant reminder of violent histories that the state often seeks to erase and forget. Through this analysis, I contribute to understandings of place as a primary ethnographic âobjectâ and the ways in which place forms complex interactions and relationships with social actors, shapes their subjectivities, retains and bestows their memories and senses of historicity
Walking with the Earth: Intercultural Perspectives on Ethics of Ecological Caring
It is commonly believed that considering nature different from us, human beings (qua rational, cultural, religious and social actors), is detrimental to our engagement for the preservation of nature. An obvious example is animal rights, a deep concern for all living beings, including non-human living creatures, which is understandable only if we approach nature, without fearing it, as something which should remain outside of our true home. âWalking with the earthâ aims at questioning any similar preconceptions in the wide sense, including allegoric-poetic contributions. We invited 14 authors from 4 continents to express all sorts of ways of saying why caring is so important, why togetherness, being-with each others, as a spiritual but also embodied ethics is important in a divided world
WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents
Existing benchmarks for grounding language in interactive environments either
lack real-world linguistic elements, or prove difficult to scale up due to
substantial human involvement in the collection of data or feedback signals. To
bridge this gap, we develop WebShop -- a simulated e-commerce website
environment with million real-world products and crowd-sourced
text instructions. Given a text instruction specifying a product requirement,
an agent needs to navigate multiple types of webpages and issue diverse actions
to find, customize, and purchase an item. WebShop provides several challenges
for language grounding including understanding compositional instructions,
query (re-)formulation, comprehending and acting on noisy text in webpages, and
performing strategic exploration. We collect over human demonstrations
for the task, and train and evaluate a diverse range of agents using
reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and pre-trained image and language
models. Our best model achieves a task success rate of , which
outperforms rule-based heuristics () but is far lower than human expert
performance (). We also analyze agent and human trajectories and ablate
various model components to provide insights for developing future agents with
stronger language understanding and decision making abilities. Finally, we show
that agents trained on WebShop exhibit non-trivial sim-to-real transfer when
evaluated on amazon.com and ebay.com, indicating the potential value of WebShop
in developing practical web-based agents that can operate in the wild.Comment: Project page with code, data, demos: https://webshop-pnlp.github.io.
v2 adds transfer to eBa
Strung pieces: on the aesthetics of television fiction series
As layered and long works, television fiction series have aesthetic properties that are built over time, bit by bit. This thesis develops a group of concepts that enable the study of these properties, It argues that a series is made of strung pieces, a system of related elements. The text begins by considering this sequential form within the fields of film and television. This opening chapter defines the object and methodology of research, arguing for a non-essentialist distinction between cinema and television and against the adequacy of textual and contextual analyses as approaches to the aesthetics of these shows. It proposes instead that these programmes should be described as televisual works that can be scrutinised through aesthetic analysis. The next chapters propose a sequence of interrelated concepts. The second chapter contends that series are composed of building blocks that can be either units into which series are divided or motifs that unify series and are dispersed across their pans. These blocks are patterned according to four kinds of relations or principles of composition. Repetition and variation are treated in tandem in the third chapter because of their close connection, given that variation emerges from established repetition. Exception and progression are also discussed together in the fourth chapter since they both require a long view of these serial works. The former, in order to be recognised as a deviation from the patterns of repetition and variation. The latter, In order to be understood in Its many dimensions as the series advances. Each of these concepts is further detailed with additional distinctions between types of units, motifs, repetitions, variations, and exceptions, using illustrative examples from numerous shows. In contrast, the section on progression uses a single series as case study, CarnivĂ le (2003-05), because this is the overarching principle that encompasses all the others. The conclusion considers the findings of the research and suggests avenues for their application
Channel estimation and beam training with machine learning applications for millimetre-wave communication systems
The fifth generation (5G) wireless system will extend the capabilities of the fourth generation
(4G) standards to serve more users and provide timely communication. To this end, the carriers
of 5G systems will be able to operate at higher frequency bands, such as the millimetre-wave
(mmWave) bands that span from 30 GHz to 300 GHz, to obtain greater bandwidths and higher
data rates. As a result, the deployment of 5G networks is required to accommodate more antennas
and offer pervasive coverage with controlled power consumption. The complexity of 5G
systems introduces new challenges to traditional signal processing techniques. To address these
challenges, a major step is to integrate machine learning (ML) algorithms into wireless communication
systems. ML can learn patterns from datasets to achieve control and optimisation of
complex radio frequency (RF) networks. This PhD thesis focuses on developing efficient channel
estimation methods and beam training strategies with the application of ML algorithms for
mmWave wireless systems.
Firstly, the channel estimation and signal detection problem is investigated for orthogonal
frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems that operate at mmWave bands. A deep
neural network (DNN)-based joint channel estimation and signal detection approach is proposed
to achieve multi-user detection in a one-shot process for non-orthogonal multiple access
(NOMA) systems. The DNN acts as the receiver, which can recover the transmitted data by
learning the channel implicitly from suitable training. The proposed approach can be adapted to
work for both single-input and single-output (SISO) systems and multiple-output and multipleoutput
(MIMO) systems. This DNN-based approach is shown to provide good performance for
OFDM systems that suffer from severe inter-symbol interference or where small numbers of
pilot symbols are used.
Secondly, the beam training and tracking problem is studied for mmWave channels with receiver
mobility. To reduce the signalling overhead caused by frequent beam training, a lowcomplexity
beam training strategy is proposed for mobile mmWave channels, which searches
a set of selected beams obtained based on the recent beam search results. By searching only
the adjacent beams to the one recently used, the proposed beam training strategy can reduce
the beam training delay significantly while maintaining high transmission rates. The proposed
strategy works effectively for channel datasets generated using either the stochastic or the raytracing
channel model. This strategy is shown to approach the performance for an exhaustive
beam search while saving up to 92% on the required beam training overhead.
Thirdly, the proposed low-complexity beam training strategy is enhanced with the use of deep
reinforcement learning (DRL) for mobile mmWave channels. A DRL-based beam training algorithm
is proposed, which can intelligently switch between different beam training methods
such that the average beam training overhead is minimised while achieving good spectral efficiency
or energy efficiency performance. Given the desired performance requirement in the
reward function for the DRL model, the spectral efficiency or energy efficiency can be maximised
for the current channel condition by controlling the number of activated RF chains. The
DRL-based approach can adjust the amount of beam training overhead required according to
the dynamics of the environment. This approach can provide a good overhead-performance
trade-off and achieve higher data rates in channels with significant levels of signal blockage
Recent Hong Kong cinema and the generic role of film noir in relation to the politics of identity and difference
This thesis identifies a connection in Hong Kong cinema with classical Hollywood film noir and examines what it will call a 'reinvestment' in film noir in recent films. It will show that this reinvestment is a discursive strategy that both engages the spectator-subject in the cinematic practice and disengages him or her from the hegemony of the discourse by decentring the narrative. The thesis argues that a cinematic practice has occurred in the recent reinvestment of film noir in Hong Kong, which restages the intertextual relay of the historical genre that gives rise to an expectation of ideas about social instability. The noir vision that is seen as related to the fixed categories of film narratives, characterizations and visual styles is reassessed in the course of the thesis using Derridian theory. The focus of analysis is the way in which the constitution of meanings is dependent on generic characteristics that are different. Key to the phenomenon is a film strategy that destabilizes, differs and defers the interpretation of crises-personal, social, political and/or cultural-by soliciting self-conscious re-reading of suffering, evil, fate, chance and fortune. It will be argued that such a strategy evokes the genre expectation as the film invokes a network of ideas regarding a world perceived by the audience in association with the noirish moods of claustrophobia, paranoia, despair and nihilism. The noir vision is thus mutated and transformed when the film device differs and defers the conception of the crises as tragic in nature by exposing the workings of the genre amalgamation and the ideological function of the cinematic discourse. Thus, noirishness becomes both an affect and an agent that contrives a self-reflexive re-reading of the tragic vision and of the conventional comprehension of reality within the discursive practice. The film strategy, as an agent that problematizes the film form and narrative, gives rise to what I call a politics of difference, which may also be understood as the Lyotardian 'language game' or a practice of 'pastiche' in Jameson's terminology. Under the influence of the film strategy, the spectator is enabled to negotiate his or her understanding of recent Hong Kong cinema diegetically and extra-diegetically by traversing different positions of cinematic identification. When the practice of genre amalgamation adopts the visual impact of the noirish film form, the film turns itself into a playing field of 'fatal' misrecognition or a site of question. Through cinematic identification and alienation from the identification, the spectator-subject is enabled to experience the misrecognition as the film slowly foregrounds the way in which the viewer's presence is implicated in the narrative. This thesis demonstrates that certain contemporary Hong Kong films introduce this selfconscious mode of explication and interpretation, which solicits the spectator to negotiate his or her subject-position in the course of viewing. The notions of identity and subjectivity under scrutiny will thus be reread. With reference to The Private Eye Blue, Swordsman II, City a/Glass and Happy Together, the thesis shall explore the ways in which the Hong Kong films enable and facilitate a negotiation of cultural identity
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