655 research outputs found
Carbon emissions in China: How far can new efforts bend the curve?
While China is on track to meet its global climate commitments through 2020, China’s post-2020 CO2
emissions trajectory is highly uncertain, with projections varying widely across studies. Over the past
year, the Chinese government has announced new policy directives to deepen economic reform,
protect the environment, and limit fossil energy use in China. To evaluate how new policy directives
could affect energy and climate change outcomes, we simulate two levels of policy effort—a
Continued Effort scenario that extends current policies beyond 2020 and an Accelerated Effort
scenario that reflects newly announced policies—on the evolution of China’s energy and economic
system over the next several decades. Importantly, we find that both levels of policy effort would bend
down the CO2 emissions trajectory before 2050 without undermining economic development,
although coal use and CO2 emissions peak about 10 years earlier in the Accelerated Effort scenario
Co3O4@CoS core-shell nanosheets on carbon cloth for high performance supercapacitor electrodes
In this work, a two-step electrodeposition strategy is developed for the synthesis of core-shell Co3O4@CoS nanosheet arrays on carbon cloth (CC) for supercapacitor applications. Porous Co3O4 nanosheet arrays are first directly grown on CC by electrodeposition, followed by the coating of a thin layer of CoS on the surface of Co3O4 nanosheets via the secondary electrodeposition. The morphology control of the ternary composites can be easily achieved by altering the number of cyclic voltammetry (CV) cycles of CoS deposition. Electrochemical performance of the composite electrodes was evaluated by cyclic voltammetry, galvanostatic charge-discharge and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy techniques. The results demonstrate that the Co3O4@CoS/CC with 4 CV cycles of CoS deposition possesses the largest specific capacitance 887.5 F·g-1 at a scan rate of 10 mV·s-1 (764.2 F·g-1 at a current density of 1.0 A·g-1), and excellent cycling stability (78.1% capacitance retention) at high current density of 5.0 A·g-1 after 5000 cycles. The porous nanostructures on CC not only provide large accessible surface area for fast ions diffusion, electron transport and efficient utilization of active CoS and Co3O4, but also reduce the internal resistance of electrodes, which leads to superior electrochemical performance of Co3O4@CoS/CC composite at 4 cycles of CoS deposition. © 2017 by the authors.National Natural Science Foundation of China [21371057]; International Science and Technology Cooperation Program of China [2016YFE0131200, 2015DFA51220]; International Cooperation Project of Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Committee [15520721100
Breathing Life into Faces: Speech-driven 3D Facial Animation with Natural Head Pose and Detailed Shape
The creation of lifelike speech-driven 3D facial animation requires a natural
and precise synchronization between audio input and facial expressions.
However, existing works still fail to render shapes with flexible head poses
and natural facial details (e.g., wrinkles). This limitation is mainly due to
two aspects: 1) Collecting training set with detailed 3D facial shapes is
highly expensive. This scarcity of detailed shape annotations hinders the
training of models with expressive facial animation. 2) Compared to mouth
movement, the head pose is much less correlated to speech content.
Consequently, concurrent modeling of both mouth movement and head pose yields
the lack of facial movement controllability. To address these challenges, we
introduce VividTalker, a new framework designed to facilitate speech-driven 3D
facial animation characterized by flexible head pose and natural facial
details. Specifically, we explicitly disentangle facial animation into head
pose and mouth movement and encode them separately into discrete latent spaces.
Then, these attributes are generated through an autoregressive process
leveraging a window-based Transformer architecture. To augment the richness of
3D facial animation, we construct a new 3D dataset with detailed shapes and
learn to synthesize facial details in line with speech content. Extensive
quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that VividTalker
outperforms state-of-the-art methods, resulting in vivid and realistic
speech-driven 3D facial animation
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