6,557 research outputs found
Examining Stakeholder Perspectives: Process, Performance and Progress of the Age-Friendly Taiwan Program.
Since Taiwans age-friendly city (AFC) program was launched in 2012, the central government has provided various resources to the countrys 22 local authorities, including budgetary support, policy advocacy, and consultation from a team of experts. This study examines stakeholder perspectives on the process, performance, and outcome of the AFC program. A 53-item questionnaire was developed based on the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline, including mechanisms and processes (20 items), outcome evaluations (23 items), and resource integration (10 items). There was a great difference found among scores between facilitators and experts for inter-exchange experience with local and international cities (40%) and monitor and revise indicators (37%) in mechanisms and processes, evaluate performance of indicators and action plans (37%) in outcome evaluations, and interaction between government and community (46%) and interaction between civil organization and senior society (39%) in resource integration. Clearly, facilitators showed overly optimistic assessments in AFC mechanisms and processes, outcome evaluation, and resource integration. The results showed disconnect between experts expectations versus actual practice conducted by facilitators. Implications of these findings are to integrate top down expectations with the realities of bottom up practice to design more realistic evaluations; continue to educate stakeholders about design, implementation and evaluation; and further integrate resources from government, civil organizations, and community
Safety-quantifiable Line Feature-based Monocular Visual Localization with 3D Prior Map
Accurate and safety-quantifiable localization is of great significance for
safety-critical autonomous systems, such as unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) and
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The visual odometry-based method can provide
accurate positioning in a short period but is subjected to drift over time.
Moreover, the quantification of the safety of the localization solution (the
error is bounded by a certain value) is still a challenge. To fill the gaps,
this paper proposes a safety-quantifiable line feature-based visual
localization method with a prior map. The visual-inertial odometry provides a
high-frequency local pose estimation which serves as the initial guess for the
visual localization. By obtaining a visual line feature pair association, a
foot point-based constraint is proposed to construct the cost function between
the 2D lines extracted from the real-time image and the 3D lines extracted from
the high-precision prior 3D point cloud map. Moreover, a global navigation
satellite systems (GNSS) receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (RAIM)
inspired method is employed to quantify the safety of the derived localization
solution. Among that, an outlier rejection (also well-known as fault detection
and exclusion) strategy is employed via the weighted sum of squares residual
with a Chi-squared probability distribution. A protection level (PL) scheme
considering multiple outliers is derived and utilized to quantify the potential
error bound of the localization solution in both position and rotation domains.
The effectiveness of the proposed safety-quantifiable localization system is
verified using the datasets collected in the UAV indoor and UGV outdoor
environments
Tailoring excitonic states of van der Waals bilayers through stacking configuration, band alignment and valley-spin
Excitons in monolayer semiconductors have large optical transition dipole for
strong coupling with light field. Interlayer excitons in heterobilayers, with
layer separation of electron and hole components, feature large electric dipole
that enables strong coupling with electric field and exciton-exciton
interaction, at the cost that the optical dipole is substantially quenched (by
several orders of magnitude). In this letter, we demonstrate the ability to
create a new class of excitons in transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) hetero-
and homo-bilayers that combines the advantages of monolayer- and
interlayer-excitons, i.e. featuring both large optical dipole and large
electric dipole. These excitons consist of an electron that is well confined in
an individual layer, and a hole that is well extended in both layers, realized
here through the carrier-species specific layer-hybridization controlled
through the interplay of rotational, translational, band offset, and
valley-spin degrees of freedom. We observe different species of such
layer-hybridized valley excitons in different heterobilayer and homobilayer
systems, which can be utilized for realizing strongly interacting
excitonic/polaritonic gases, as well as optical quantum coherent controls of
bidirectional interlayer carrier transfer either with upper conversion or down
conversion in energy
The Study of Construction Methods on Groundsill Works-Example of “Erren Intake”
Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchive
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