233 research outputs found
FDI, Market Structure and R&D Investments in China
FDI can be an important channel for developing countriesâ ability to get access to new technology. The impact of FDI on domestically-owned firmsâ technology development is less examined but it is frequently argued that technology externalities or demonstration effects could have a positive impact. Another and so far little examined effect of FDI on technology development in domestically-owned firms is through the impact on competition. We examine the effect of FDI on competition in the Chinese manufacturing sector and the effect of competition on firmsâ R&D. Our analysis is conducted on a large dataset including all Chinese large and medium sized firms over the period 1998-2004. Our results show that FDI increases competition but there are no strong indications of competition affecting investments in R&D.China; FDI; Competition; R&D
Technology Development and Job Creation in China
This paper examines how Science and Technology (S&T) contribute to job creation in the Chinese manufacturing sector. The ambition of transforming China into an innovation-oriented nation and the emphasis on indigenous innovation capacity building have placed Science and Technology (S&T) high on the Chinese policy agenda. At the same time, the need for job creation is pressing, both to absorb the huge supply of underemployed people, and to enable the annual 20 million new labor market entrants to find employment. We examine the relationship between S&T and job growth in the Chinese industrial sector. S&T can be expected to have both positive and negative effects on employment. For instance, new technology might increase competitiveness and enable Chinese firms to expand their labor force. On the other hand, new technology might be labor-saving, thereby enabling Chinese firms to produce more output with fewer employees. Based on a large sample of manufacturing firms in China between 1998 and 2004, we analyze how S&T affect employment growth. Our results suggest that S&T activities have no effect on job creation.China; Science and Technology; Job-Creation
Introducing Model-based Design Methodology with LabVIEW to Teaching ARM-based Embedded System Design
This paper presents our latest experience of introducing the new topic of model-based design (MBD) concepts and tools to a Programming Tools (PT) course for educating students to be capable of utilizing modern tools for correctly developing complicated ARM-based embedded systems. It describes the course contents, student outcomes and lecture and lab preparation for teaching this topic with the emphasis on two sub-topics. Firstly, we present the details of using NI LabVIEW tool in programming ARM Cortex-M MCUs or ARM Cortex-A9 MCUs on the embedded device like NI myRIO for fast developing embedded applications. Secondly, to integrate an on-going research effort on the model-based verification into this course, we also introduce model-checking and the tools that have been utilized in the research project. This new topic helps introducing students the latest research advances which promote the wide applications of the MBD in safety-critical embedded applications. Our primary experience shows that the project-based learning approach with the graphical programming tools and selected MCUs is efficient and practical to teach the MBD of 32-bit MCUs programming
Experience of Teaching Advanced Touch Sensing Technologies
A touchscreen is an electronic visual display that users can control by touching the screen with a special stylus or fingers. It allows the rapid, accurate and direct interaction by the user with display contents, which existing keyboard and mouse systems cannot. Touchscreens are popular in many information appliances such as tablet computers, smartphones, and personal digital assistants (PDAs). In fact, many display manufactures and chip vendors around the world, such as Samsung, Chimei, Atmel, ST Microelectronics, and Texas Instruments, have recognized the trend of using touchscreens as a highly desirable user interface component and started to integrate the touch-sensing technology into their products. There are many touch sensing technologies. Among them, analog resistive, surface capacitive, projected capacitive, infrared grid, optical imaging, and surface acoustic wave are the most important ones. We feel the importance and need to teach engineering students the touch sensing technology. This paper presents our experience of teaching touch sensing technology in our second microprocessor course. This course taught the touch-sensing technology in slightly over 5 weeks. As the start of the course, we introduced the working principles of each touch technology to students. We then conducted a comparison among these technologies and their applications in real-world electronic devices. Students were taught to program a touchscreen through a series of lab exercises. The Atmel SAM 4S-EK board was the main development board employed in the course for practicing touchscreen programming. This board includes four QTouch buttons and slides which utilize capacitive sensing technology, and a resistive touch panel on a color LCD display. Atmel provides a royalty free software library for developing touch applications in C. Students learned to link the library into their applications so as to provide touch sensing capability in their projects. During the course our students have shown great interests in touch sensing technologies and are capable of incorporating touch devices to improve the human machine interface of their capstone projects
The Use of BeagleBone Black Board in Engineering Design and Development
The BeagleBone Black (BBB) board is a low cost, powerful expandable computer launched by a community of developers sponsored by Texas Instruments in the early 2013. It is the newest product in the Beagle family. This board features a powerful TI Sitaraâą ARM Cortexâą-A8 processor which runs at 1 GHz. And a 2 GB on-board flash memory acts as the âhard driveâ for the board to host a Linux operating system and other software development tools. The size of the board is small enough to fit in a mint tin box. It can be used for a variety of projects from high school fair projects to prototypes of very complex embedded systems.
With a user-friendly, browser-based Bonescript programming environment called Cloud9, a learner can easily program the BBB board to rapidly prototype electronic systems that interface with real-world applications. Afterwards, as the knowledge of users develops, the board provides more complicated interfaces including C/C++ functions to access digital and analog pins aboard the ARM Cortex A8 microprocessor. The full power and capability of the BBB board may be programmed in the underlying onboard Linux operating system, such as Angstrom or Ubuntu. Moreover, the Beagle community provides a useful repository of example projects, forums and hardware/software documentation.
This paper presents our work of employing the BBB board in designing engineering senior projects, and uses a case study of robot car with voice recognition senior project to compares it with Raspberry Pi and Arduino in educating engineering students to construct embedded systems. Our primary experiences demonstrate that the BBB board is an easy-to-use and cost-effective development kit which can be employed by college-level engineering students for their capstone design projects
Diff-Privacy: Diffusion-based Face Privacy Protection
Privacy protection has become a top priority as the proliferation of AI
techniques has led to widespread collection and misuse of personal data.
Anonymization and visual identity information hiding are two important facial
privacy protection tasks that aim to remove identification characteristics from
facial images at the human perception level. However, they have a significant
difference in that the former aims to prevent the machine from recognizing
correctly, while the latter needs to ensure the accuracy of machine
recognition. Therefore, it is difficult to train a model to complete these two
tasks simultaneously. In this paper, we unify the task of anonymization and
visual identity information hiding and propose a novel face privacy protection
method based on diffusion models, dubbed Diff-Privacy. Specifically, we train
our proposed multi-scale image inversion module (MSI) to obtain a set of SDM
format conditional embeddings of the original image. Based on the conditional
embeddings, we design corresponding embedding scheduling strategies and
construct different energy functions during the denoising process to achieve
anonymization and visual identity information hiding. Extensive experiments
have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in
protecting facial privacy.Comment: 17page
All-to-key Attention for Arbitrary Style Transfer
Attention-based arbitrary style transfer studies have shown promising
performance in synthesizing vivid local style details. They typically use the
all-to-all attention mechanism -- each position of content features is fully
matched to all positions of style features. However, all-to-all attention tends
to generate distorted style patterns and has quadratic complexity, limiting the
effectiveness and efficiency of arbitrary style transfer. In this paper, we
propose a novel all-to-key attention mechanism -- each position of content
features is matched to stable key positions of style features -- that is more
in line with the characteristics of style transfer. Specifically, it integrates
two newly proposed attention forms: distributed and progressive attention.
Distributed attention assigns attention to key style representations that
depict the style distribution of local regions; Progressive attention pays
attention from coarse-grained regions to fine-grained key positions. The
resultant module, dubbed StyA2K, shows extraordinary performance in preserving
the semantic structure and rendering consistent style patterns. Qualitative and
quantitative comparisons with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superior
performance of our approach
The Estimation of Nodal Power Supply Reliability through the Network Connectivity by Complex Network Method
The paper studies the reliability of the power system from the perspective of node loads. The reliability of the whole system can be estimated by evaluating the power supply reliability of each node. A measure, connectivity observed at load node (Ci), is proposed. Ci is calculated through a recursion equation by evaluating the generation capacity that can be transferred from the further neighbor to the nearest neighbor of load node i. IEEE-30 bus system is taken as a test system. We calculated the index of 7 load nodes at 2 different load levels with different N-1 failures. The test results show that the variation of the index and that of the percentage load shedding at selected load nodes show good consistency
Efficient Bilateral Cross-Modality Cluster Matching for Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person ReID
Unsupervised visible-infrared person re-identification (USL-VI-ReID) aims to
match pedestrian images of the same identity from different modalities without
annotations. Existing works mainly focus on alleviating the modality gap by
aligning instance-level features of the unlabeled samples. However, the
relationships between cross-modality clusters are not well explored. To this
end, we propose a novel bilateral cluster matching-based learning framework to
reduce the modality gap by matching cross-modality clusters. Specifically, we
design a Many-to-many Bilateral Cross-Modality Cluster Matching (MBCCM)
algorithm through optimizing the maximum matching problem in a bipartite graph.
Then, the matched pairwise clusters utilize shared visible and infrared
pseudo-labels during the model training. Under such a supervisory signal, a
Modality-Specific and Modality-Agnostic (MSMA) contrastive learning framework
is proposed to align features jointly at a cluster-level. Meanwhile, the
cross-modality Consistency Constraint (CC) is proposed to explicitly reduce the
large modality discrepancy. Extensive experiments on the public SYSU-MM01 and
RegDB datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, surpassing
state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin of 8.76% mAP on average
TransFA: Transformer-based Representation for Face Attribute Evaluation
Face attribute evaluation plays an important role in video surveillance and
face analysis. Although methods based on convolution neural networks have made
great progress, they inevitably only deal with one local neighborhood with
convolutions at a time. Besides, existing methods mostly regard face attribute
evaluation as the individual multi-label classification task, ignoring the
inherent relationship between semantic attributes and face identity
information. In this paper, we propose a novel \textbf{trans}former-based
representation for \textbf{f}ace \textbf{a}ttribute evaluation method
(\textbf{TransFA}), which could effectively enhance the attribute
discriminative representation learning in the context of attention mechanism.
The multiple branches transformer is employed to explore the inter-correlation
between different attributes in similar semantic regions for attribute feature
learning. Specially, the hierarchical identity-constraint attribute loss is
designed to train the end-to-end architecture, which could further integrate
face identity discriminative information to boost performance. Experimental
results on multiple face attribute benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed
TransFA achieves superior performances compared with state-of-the-art methods
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