Affective Role of the Future Autonomous Vehicle Interior

Recent advancements in autonomous technology allow for new opportunities in vehicle interior design. Such a shift in in-vehicle activity suggests vehicle interior spaces should provide an adequate manner by considering users' affective desires. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the affective role of future vehicle interiors. Thirty one participants in ten focus groups were interviewed about challenges they face regarding their current vehicle interior and expectations they have for future vehicles. Results from content analyses revealed the affective role of future vehicle interiors. Advanced exclusiveness and advanced convenience were two primary aspects identified. The identified affective roles of each aspect are a total of eight visceral levels, four visceral levels each, including focused, stimulating, amused, pleasant, safe, comfortable, accommodated, and organized. We expect the results from this study to lead to the development of affective vehicle interiors by providing the fundamental knowledge for developing conceptual direction and evaluating its impact on user experiences.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

Disentangling Structure and Style: Political Bias Detection in News by Inducing Document Hierarchy

We address an important gap in detection of political bias in news articles. Previous works that perform supervised document classification can be biased towards the writing style of each news outlet, leading to overfitting and limited generalizability. Our approach overcomes this limitation by considering both the sentence-level semantics and the document-level rhetorical structure, resulting in a more robust and style-agnostic approach to detecting political bias in news articles. We introduce a novel multi-head hierarchical attention model that effectively encodes the structure of long documents through a diverse ensemble of attention heads. While journalism follows a formalized rhetorical structure, the writing style may vary by news outlet. We demonstrate that our method overcomes this domain dependency and outperforms previous approaches for robustness and accuracy. Further analysis demonstrates the ability of our model to capture the discourse structures commonly used in the journalism domain.Comment: Preprint. Under revie

Free Speech, the Right to Petition, and Corporate Innovation

Using the passage of state-level anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuits against public participation) legislation as a plausible shock to free speech and the right to petition, we hypothesize and find that corporate innovation success increases following the passage of state anti-SLAPP laws. Our results suggest that the increase occurs through two channels: (i) a reduction in information asymmetry between the firm and outside investors on innovation investments and (ii) a reallocation of external capital to firms with higher growth prospects. Consistent with an informational channel, we find the increase is stronger for firms with an ex-ante lower quality information environment. Consistent with an external capital channel, our results also support the theory that outside capital providers are better able to distinguish between superior and inferior innovators in allocating their capital after the enactment of anti-SLAPP laws in a state. Our results hold under a battery of robustness tests. Overall, our results do not support the alternative view that firms use SLAPP lawsuits to stifle the release of public information contrary to their interests (e.g., proprietary information on trade secrets). Our study contributes to the accounting, law, and economics literatures by documenting a potentially unintended economic consequence for corporate innovation of state-level anti-SLAPP legislation

Three-dimensional digital microfluidic manipulation of droplets in oil medium

We here develop a three-dimensional DMF (3D DMF) platform with patterned electrodes submerged in an oil medium to provide fundamental solutions to the technical limitations of 2D DMF platforms and water-air systems. 3D droplet manipulation on patterned electrodes is demonstrated by programmably controlling electrical signals. We also demonstrate the formation of precipitates on the 3D DMF platform through the reaction of different chemical samples. A droplet containing precipitates, hanging on the top electrode, can be manipulated without adhesion of precipitates to the solid surface. This method could be a good alternative strategy to alleviate the existing problems of 2D DMF systems such as cross-contamination and solute adsorption. In addition, we ascertain the feasibility of temperature-controlled chemical reaction on the 3D DMF platform by introducing a simple heating process. To demonstrate applicability of the 3D DMF system to 3D biological process, we examine the 3D manipulation of droplets containing mouse fibroblasts in the 3D DMF platform. Finally, we show detachment of droplets wrapped by a flexible thin film by adopting the electro-elasto-capillarity ( EEC). The employment of the EEC may offer a strong potential in the development of 3D DMF platforms for drug encapsulation and actuation of microelectromechanical devices.open111416sciescopu

Research and Design of a Routing Protocol in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

无线传感器网络，作为全球未来十大技术之一，集成了传感器技术、嵌入式计算技术、分布式信息处理和自组织网技术，可实时感知、采集、处理、传输网络分布区域内的各种信息数据，在军事国防、生物医疗、环境监测、抢险救灾、防恐反恐、危险区域远程控制等领域具有十分广阔的应用前景。 本文研究分析了无线传感器网络的已有路由协议，并针对大规模的无线传感器网络设计了一种树状路由协议，它根据节点地址信息来形成路由，从而简化了复杂繁冗的路由表查找和维护，节省了不必要的开销，提高了路由效率，实现了快速有效的数据传输。 为支持此路由协议本文提出了一种自适应动态地址分配算——ADAR（AdaptiveDynamicAddre...As one of the ten high technologies in the future, wireless sensor network, which is the integration of micro-sensors, embedded computing, modern network and Ad Hoc technologies, can apperceive, collect, process and transmit various information data within the region. It can be used in military defense, biomedical, environmental monitoring, disaster relief, counter-terrorism, remote control of haz...学位：工学硕士院系专业：信息科学与技术学院通信工程系_通信与信息系统学号：2332007115216

MARL-Based Dual Reward Model on Segmented Actions for Multiple Mobile Robots in Automated Warehouse Environment

The simple and labor-intensive tasks of workers on the job site are rapidly becoming digital. In the work environment of logistics warehouses and manufacturing plants, moving goods to a designated place is a typical labor-intensive task for workers. These tasks are rapidly undergoing digital transformation by leveraging mobile robots in automated warehouses. In this paper, we studied and tested realistically necessary conditions to operate mobile robots in an automated warehouse. In particular, considering conditions for operating multiple mobile robots in an automated warehouse, we added more complex actions and various routes and proposed a method for improving sparse reward problems when learning paths in a warehouse with reinforcement learning. Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) experiments were conducted with multiple mobile robots in an automated warehouse simulation environment, and it was confirmed that the proposed reward model method makes learning start earlier even there is a sparse reward problem and learning progress was maintained stably. We expect this study to help us understand the actual operation of mobile robots in an automated warehouse further

Bio-inspired cab-roof fairing of heavy vehicles for enhancing drag reduction and driving stability

Cab-roof fairing (CRF) has been developed to reduce the drag exerted on the forebody, thereby promoting fuel saving and environmental pollution control. Conventional CRFs with a 2D streamlined curvature have limitations in enhancing the driving stability and in reducing the drag at the forebody. In this study, new CRFs were designed with flow-guiding structures by mimicking the external forebody shape of sea lions. To evaluate the drag reduction effects of the proposed bio-inspired CRFs, three different types of CRFs (i.e., basic, bio-inspired, and advanced bio-inspired) were installed at scaled-down vehicle models of 15-ton (1:8) and 5-ton (1:6) heavy vehicles. The advanced bio-inspired CRF considerably reduced the drag coefficient of the 15-ton and 5-ton models by similar to 20% and 22.4%, respectively. The side force was also reduced by up to 8% and 9% for the 15-ton and 5-ton models with the advanced bio-inspired CRF at a yaw angle of beta = 3 degrees, respectively. The flow characteristics around the forebody of the 15-ton model (1:15) with and without CRFs were analyzed by particle image velocimetry to elucidate the drag-reduction mechanism of the proposed CRFs. The bio-inspired CRFs significantly reduced the regions of separated shear flow and turbulent kinetic energy level on the side surfaces of the vehicle models. The findings provide useful information for improving the design of new forebody devices to reduce the drag and enhance the driving stability of heavy vehicles. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.114sciescopu

Digital Microfluidic Mixing via Reciprocating Motions of Droplets Driven by Contact Charge Electrophoresis

Contact charge electrophoresis (CCEP) is an electrically controllable manipulation technique of conductive droplets and particles by charging and discharging when in contact with the electrode. Given its straightforward operation mechanism, low cost, and ease of system construction, it has gained traction as a versatile and potential strategy for the realistic establishment of lab-on-a-chip (LOC) in various engineering applications. We present a CCEP-based digital microfluidics (DMF) platform with two parallel electrode modules comprising assembled conventional pin header sockets, allowing for efficient mixing through horizontal and vertical shaking via droplet reciprocating motions. The temporal chromic change caused by the chemical reaction between the pH indicator and base solutions within the shaking droplets is quantitatively analyzed under various CCEP actuation conditions to evaluate the mixing performance in shaking droplets by vertical and horizontal reciprocating motions on the DMF platform. Furthermore, mixing flow patterns within shaking droplets are successfully visualized by a high-speed camera system. The suggested techniques can mix samples and reagents rapidly and efficiently in droplet-based microreactors for DMF applications, such as biochemical analysis and medical diagnostics

Droplet formation by density-induced flow-focusing in 3D-printed microfluidic device

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N-6-methyladenosine-modified RNA acts as a molecular glue that drives liquid-liquid phase separation in plants

Liquid-like condensates are organized by multivalent intrinsically disordered proteins and RNA molecules. We here demonstrate that N-6-methyladenosine (m(6)A)-modified RNA is widespread in establishing diverse plant cell condensates. Several m(6)A-reader proteins contain putative prion-like domains, and the ect2/3/4 mutant exhibited reduced formation of key nuclear and cytoplasmic condensates in Arabidopsis.N