Post occupancy of Olympic stadiums

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2013.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 125).On the surface, the spirit of Olympic Games is about the competition for medals. Underneath the surface, however, lies a series of political, economical, social agendas. Individual Olympians represent their Nations. Rising modernity, stabilization of economy and social cohesion of nations are represented by the contemporary Architecture of the games. Every Olympic game has resulted in a significant change in the host city and presented the host country with a unique opportunity to shed a new light on itself in front of a global audience. In anticipation of presenting a brilliant, dynamic image to the world, Olympic cities often build contemporary sporting arenas that follow similar design patterns of generating iconic and autonomous buildings with relatively fixed programs. In order for a city to accommodate such a large number of newly constructed sporting venues, a trend has emerged whereby cities shift the games from the urban core to outlying peripheries, scattered throughout the suburbs. After the 17 days of international use, the venues return to serve the host city's needs. But the stadiums are largely freestanding objects that compete with pre-existing residential fields for the occupancy of local teams. These local teams often favor smaller arenas that are less maintenance-intensive and are more widely accessible due to their greater proximity to the city core. As a result, Olympic stadiums become underused, labeled as white elephants and even in some instances abandoned. The next Olympics will be held in Rio, which has the 5th largest economy in the world while also having one of the world's lowest GDP per capita. This thesis explores the possibility of exploiting the flamboyant nature of the Olympics to create a dual purpose field hockey stadium, the design of which is flexible enough to adapt to a post Olympics transformation into a vocational school.by George X. Lin.M.Arch

Research Article Linear Reranking Model for Chinese Pinyin-to-Character Conversion

Abstract: Pinyin-to-character conversion is an important task for Chinese natural language processing tasks. Previous work mainly focused on n-gram language models and machine learning approaches, or with additional hand-crafted or automatic rule-based post-processing. There are two problems unable to solve for word n-gram language model: out-of-vocabulary word recognition and long-distance grammatical constraints. In this study, we proposed a linear reranking model trying to solve these problems. Our model uses minimum error learning method to combine different sub models, which includes word and character n-gram LMs, part-of-speech tagging model and dependency model. Impact of different sub models on the conversion are fully experimented and analyzed. Results on the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese show that our new model outperforms word n-gram language model

Three-Dimensional Medical Image Fusion with Deformable Cross-Attention

Multimodal medical image fusion plays an instrumental role in several areas of medical image processing, particularly in disease recognition and tumor detection. Traditional fusion methods tend to process each modality independently before combining the features and reconstructing the fusion image. However, this approach often neglects the fundamental commonalities and disparities between multimodal information. Furthermore, the prevailing methodologies are largely confined to fusing two-dimensional (2D) medical image slices, leading to a lack of contextual supervision in the fusion images and subsequently, a decreased information yield for physicians relative to three-dimensional (3D) images. In this study, we introduce an innovative unsupervised feature mutual learning fusion network designed to rectify these limitations. Our approach incorporates a Deformable Cross Feature Blend (DCFB) module that facilitates the dual modalities in discerning their respective similarities and differences. We have applied our model to the fusion of 3D MRI and PET images obtained from 660 patients in the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset. Through the application of the DCFB module, our network generates high-quality MRI-PET fusion images. Experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses traditional 2D image fusion methods in performance metrics such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM). Importantly, the capacity of our method to fuse 3D images enhances the information available to physicians and researchers, thus marking a significant step forward in the field. The code will soon be available online

A Net Loan Monitoring Platform for University Students Based on Visual Micro-blog

In order to prevent college students from tragic events, which mostly result from falling into illegal net loan, a net loan risk monitoring platform of college students was established based on the microblog visualization. Based on the calculation model of risk degree (CMRD) and the calculation model of relational closeness (CMRC), a visual system, a user relationship analysis system and an early warning system were constructed on the platform. Through the CMRD, the risk degree of micro-blog net loan contents can be worked out to decide whether warning behaviors are necessary. Through the CMRC, the closeness of net loan bloggers with users can be obtained a propagation map. The key nodes can be cut off by internet security officers in time, which can prevent further propagation of the contents of the microblog net loan. The platform can effectively alleviate the tense situation of college students and illegal online loans

DIoTA: Decentralized Ledger based Framework for Data Authenticity Protection in IoT Systems

It is predicted that more than 20 billion IoT devices will be deployed worldwide by 2020. These devices form the critical infrastructure to support a variety of important applications such as smart city, smart grid, and industrial internet. To guarantee that these applications work properly, it is imperative to authenticate these devices and data generated from them. Although digital signatures can be applied for these purposes, the scale of the overall system and the limited computation capability of IoT devices pose two big challenges. In order to overcome these obstacles, we propose DIoTA, a novel decentralized ledger-based authentication framework for IoT devices. DIoTA uses a two-layer decentralized ledger architecture together with a lightweight data authentication mechanism to facilitate IoT devices and data management. We also analyze the performance and security of DIoTA, and explicitly give the major parameters an administrator can choose to achieve a desirable balance between different metrics

Supporting Blockchain-Based Cryptocurrency Mobile Payment With Smart Devices

The smart device owning rate such as smart phone and smart watch is higher than ever before and mobile payment has become one of the major payment methods in many different areas. At the same time, blockchain-based cryptocurrency is becoming a nonnegligible type of currency and the total value of all types of cryptocurrency has reached USD 200 billion. Therefore, it is a natural demand to support cryptocurrency payment on mobile devices. Considering the poor infrastructure and low penetration of financial service in developing countries, this combination is especially attractive. The high storage cost and payment processing latency are the two main obstacles for mobile payment using cryptocurrency. We propose two different schemes for cryptocurrency mobile payment, one involves a centralized bank and the other one does not require any centralized party. We also provide a solution for the bank to meet KYC (know your customer)/AML (antimoney laundering) compliance requirements when it is involved in cryptocurrency mobile payment processing

Platelets can reflect the severity of Crohn’s disease without the effect of anemia

OBJECTIVES: Anemia and changes in platelets (PLT) are common in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). In our study, we aimed to verify whether PLT count can independently reflect the severity of IBD. METHODS: In our hospital, 137 Crohn’s Disease (CD), 69 Ulcerative colitis (UC) patients, and 412 healthy controls were included to compare the differences in PLT count. In addition, the effect of anemia, C-reactive protein (CRP), age, CD activity index (CDAI) or Mayo on PLTs was also analyzed. If PLTs independently affected CD or UC, we used the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve to verify the diagnostic value and obtain the cut-off value of PLT. RESULTS: CD and UC patients had higher PLT than controls (po0.001, po0.001; respectively). In CD patients, the results showed that patients with anemia (Po0.01), Iron Deficiency Anemia (IDA) (po0.001), CRPX8 mg/L (p=0.046), and CDAIX150 (po0.001) had higher PLT, while in UC patients, those with anemia (p=0.018), CRPX8 mg/L (p=0.045), and MayoX3 (p=0.029) had higher PLT. Univariate analysis showed that CDAI was positively correlated with PLT count (po0.001), while hemoglobin (p=0.001) and age (po0.001) were negatively correlated with PLT in CD. In UC patients, Mayo (p=0.001) and CRP (po0.001) were positively correlated with PLT, while hemoglobin (p=0.002) was negatively correlated. Finally, by linear stepwise multivariate analysis, we clarified the positive relationship between PLT and CD (po0.001) by eliminating the interference of hemoglobin, and determined the cut-off value of PLT as 298 109/L. For UC, we did not obtain similar results. CONCLUSIONS: PLT can be an indicator of disease severity in CD, while there is a lack of evidence regarding this finding in UC

The hidden spin-momentum locking and topological defects in unpolarized light fields

Electromagnetic waves characterized by intensity, phase, and polarization degrees of freedom are widely applied in data storage, encryption, and communications. However, these properties can be substantially affected by phase disorders and disturbances, whereas high-dimensional degrees of freedom including momentum and angular momentum of electromagnetic waves can offer new insights into their features and phenomena, for example topological characteristics and structures that are robust to these disturbances. Here, we discover and demonstrate theoretically and experimentally spin-momentum locking and topological defects in unpolarized light. The coherent spin is locked to the kinetic momentum except for a small coupling spin term, due to the simultaneous presence of transverse magnetic and electric components in unpolarized light. To cancel the coupling term, we employ a metal film acting as a polarizer to form some skyrmion-like spin textures at the metal/air interface. Using an in-house scanning optical microscopic system to image the out-of-plane spin density of the focused unpolarized vortex light, we obtained experimental results that coincide well with our theoretical predictions. The theory and technique promote the applications of topological defects in optical data storage, encryption, and decryption, and communications.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, 47 reference