The Rise of Innovation Districts: A New Geography of Innovation in America

As the United States slowly emerges from the great recession, a remarkable shify is occurring in the spatial geogrpahy of innovation. For the past 50 years, the landscape of innovation has been dominated by places like Silicon Valley - suburban corridors of spatially isolated corporate campuses, accessible only by car, with little emphasis on the quality of life or on integrating work, housing, and recreation. A new complementary urban model is now emerging, giving rise to what we and others are calling "innovation districts." These districts, by our definition, are geographic areas where leading-edge anchor institutions and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, business incubators, and accelerators. They are also physically compact, transit-accessible, and technicall

Color Fault-Tolerant Spanners

We initiate the study of spanners in arbitrarily vertex- or edge-colored graphs (with no "legality" restrictions), that are resilient to failures of entire color classes. When a color fails, all vertices/edges of that color crash. An $f$-color fault-tolerant ($f$-CFT) $t$-spanner of an $n$-vertex colored graph $G$ is a subgraph $H$ that preserves distances up to factor $t$, even in the presence of at most $f$ color faults. This notion generalizes the well-studied $f$-vertex/edge fault-tolerant ($f$-V/EFT) spanners. The size of an $f$-V/EFT spanner crucially depends on the number $f$ of vertex/edge faults to be tolerated. In the colored variants, even a single color fault can correspond to an unbounded number of vertex/edge faults. The key conceptual contribution of this work is in showing that the size (number of edges) required by an $f$-CFT spanner is in fact comparable to its uncolored counterpart, with no dependency on the size of color classes. We provide optimal bounds on the size required by $f$-CFT spanners, revealing an interesting phenomenon: while (individual) edge faults are "easier" than vertex faults in terms of spanner size, edge-color faults are "harder" than vertex-color faults. Our upper bounds are based on a generalization of the blocking set technique of [Bodwin and Patel, PODC 2019] for analyzing the (exponential-time) greedy algorithm for FT spanners. We complement them by providing efficient constructions of CFT spanners with similar size guarantees, based on the algorithm of [Dinitz and Robelle, PODC 2020].Comment: ITCS 2024, shortened abstract for arxi

A preliminary report on the Rural Neighbourhood Development Project in Tuen Mun and Yuen Long : implementation and achievement

With funding support from the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, the Asia-Pacific Institute of Ageing Studies (APIAS) of Lingnan University collaborated with Tuen Tsz Wai San Hing Tsuen Tsing Chuen Wai Rural Community Service Centre of Yan Oi Tong and Ngau Tam Mei Community Development Project of the Salvation Army to launch the first batch of professional support team-led (PST) district-based programme: Jockey Club Age-friendly City Project – Rural Neighbourhood Development Project (the programme) in April 2018. The programme provided training to residents in Tuen Mun and Yuen Long rural areas to be Rural Befrienders, they were well-equipped with skills to regularly visit older persons residing in nearby areas, raise awareness among the older persons about home safety and fall prevention, and foster connection between the older persons and Rural Befrienders as well as their neighbourship by establishing a support network in rural areas. The programme also invited an occupational therapist to do home assessments and make changes to the older persons’ living environment in order to achieve the long-term goal of ageing in place. Ageing in place is considered to be a critical global approach to caring for older persons. The framework promotes an agenda that support older persons to live in a familiar environment and enjoy added autonomy, which is beneficial to their physical and mental health. Hong Kong Government has also embraced the concept of ageing in place in the elderly care policy. Accordingly, the government recently initiated different programmes for Community Care and Support Services to facilitate ageing in place by engaging older persons in their communities. However, the current social environment can barely keep pace with the needs of the rapidly ageing population. According to the results of the Jockey Club Age-friendly City Project baseline assessment conducted in Tuen Mun and Yuen Long Districts, older persons in rural Hong Kong tend to be overly disadvantaged as regards community support services when compared with those in urban areas, leaving many of them with no choice but to settle in elderly homes once having mobility decline. Given this context, the programme generated social capital by consolidating the mutual support network in rural neighbourhoods in Tuen Mun and Yuen Long Districts, in response to the needs of older persons. The programme lasted for over 10 months, and more than 50 trained Rural Befrienders participated in volunteer service with over 100 elderly beneficiaries. The programme enhanced public awareness of the living conditions of older persons in the rural communities through public education activities, such as street exhibitions and the production of Age-friendly City Teaching Kit. Study Funded ByThe Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust(Part of the Jockey Club Age-friendly City Project) Contributors of ReportKa Ho MOKWai Tak SZECheuk Man LEUNGZhuoyi WENPadmore Adusei AMOAHChak Kwan CHANLai Wah L