826 research outputs found
The future of Airbnb in China: industry perspective from hospitality leaders
This study aims to investigate the development of Airbnb in China from the perspective of hospitality leaders by identifying the positive and negative effects of Airbnb development in the country. A qualitative approach was adopted to explore the current development of theaccommodation sharing service in China. Focus group discussions were conducted with the managers and top executives of hotels in China. Most of the participants affirmed that the experience of local culture and authenticity are the advantages of staying in this type of informal accommodation. From the viewpoint of hoteliers, traditional accommodation types must rethink their strategies by providing desired authentic experiences. By contrast, Airbnb may not seamlessly fit into Chinese culture. The result urges the government to regulate the informal accommodation platforms. The study provides views on Airbnb from the traditional accommodation sector in Mainland China, which can contribute to the future regulation of informal accommodation services
Tourists’ experiential value co-creation through online social contacts: Customer-dominant logic perspective
In the era of connectivity, the development of information and communications technology has immensely changed the way people travel, behave, and appreciate experience. The understanding of online experiential value co-creation remains limited considering the changes in modern travel and tourists. This study followed an eight-step scale development procedure and adopted a mixed-method approach to establish a reliable and valid measurement scale for online experiential value co-creation. By adopting a customer-dominant logic, this study positioned tourists at the center of the quest and explored the experiential value co-created via online social contacts. Results indicated that three distinct values, namely, intrinsic/extrinsic enjoyment, logistics, and efficiency values, were created online during travel. The proposed measurement scale is a pioneering tool for assessing tourists’ experiential value co-creation online. This scale also assists tourism professionals in appraising the effectiveness of different online activities and monitoring the progress toward identifying and creating positive experiential value for tourists
A Tourist Typology of Online and Face-to-Face Social Contact: Destination Immersion and Tourism Encapsulation/Decapsulation
The sense of tourism encapsulation/decapsulation is increasingly determined by the level and
type of connectivity enabled by advanced Information Communication Technology (ICT). This
study explores tourists’ online and face-to-face social contacts and their effects on travel
experiences. A six-fold tourist typology is established, namely: Disconnected Immersive
Traveller, Digital Detox Traveller, Diversionary Traveller, Dual Zone Traveller, Daily Life
Controller and Social Media Addict. A contact–immersion nexus is also developed to indicate
the attachment tendencies of different tourist types between their home and away zones.
Theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed
Electrochemically primed functional redox mediator generator from the decomposition of solid state electrolyte.
Recent works into sulfide-type solid electrolyte materials have attracted much attention among the battery community. Specifically, the oxidative decomposition of phosphorus and sulfur based solid state electrolyte has been considered one of the main hurdles towards practical application. Here we demonstrate that this phenomenon can be leveraged when lithium thiophosphate is applied as an electrochemically "switched-on" functional redox mediator-generator for the activation of commercial bulk lithium sulfide at up to 70 wt.% lithium sulfide electrode content. X-ray adsorption near-edge spectroscopy coupled with electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and Raman indicate a catalytic effect of generated redox mediators on the first charge of lithium sulfide. In contrast to pre-solvated redox mediator species, this design decouples the lithium sulfide activation process from the constraints of low electrolyte content cell operation stemming from pre-solvated redox mediators. Reasonable performance is demonstrated at strict testing conditions
HybridFusion: LiDAR and Vision Cross-Source Point Cloud Fusion
Recently, cross-source point cloud registration from different sensors has
become a significant research focus. However, traditional methods confront
challenges due to the varying density and structure of cross-source point
clouds. In order to solve these problems, we propose a cross-source point cloud
fusion algorithm called HybridFusion. It can register cross-source dense point
clouds from different viewing angle in outdoor large scenes. The entire
registration process is a coarse-to-fine procedure. First, the point cloud is
divided into small patches, and a matching patch set is selected based on
global descriptors and spatial distribution, which constitutes the coarse
matching process. To achieve fine matching, 2D registration is performed by
extracting 2D boundary points from patches, followed by 3D adjustment. Finally,
the results of multiple patch pose estimates are clustered and fused to
determine the final pose. The proposed approach is evaluated comprehensively
through qualitative and quantitative experiments. In order to compare the
robustness of cross-source point cloud registration, the proposed method and
generalized iterative closest point method are compared. Furthermore, a metric
for describing the degree of point cloud filling is proposed. The experimental
results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in
cross-source point cloud registration
Prospects of Searching for Type Ia Supernovae with 2.5-m Wide Field Survey Telescope
Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) are the thermonuclear explosion of a
carbon-oxygen white dwarf (WD) and are well-known as a distance indicator.
However, it is still unclear how WDs increase their mass near the Chandrasekhar
limit and how the thermonuclear runaway happens. The observational clues
associated with these open questions, such as the photometric data within hours
to days since the explosion, are scarce. Thus, an essential way is to discover
SNe Ia at specific epochs with optimal surveys. The 2.5-m Wide Field Survey
Telescope (WFST) is an upcoming survey facility deployed in western China. In
this paper, we assess the detecability of SNe Ia with mock observations of
WFST. Followed by the volumetric rate, we generate a spectral series of SNe Ia
based on a data-based model and introduce the line-of-sight extinction to
calculate the brightness from the observer. By comparing with the detection
limit of WFST, which is affected by the observing conditions, we can count the
number of SNe Ia discovered by mock WFST observations. We expect that WFST can
find more than pre-maximum SNe Ia within one-year running. In
particular, WFST could discover about 45 bright SNe Ia, 99 early-phase SNe Ia,
or well-observed SNe Ia with the hypothesized Wide, Deep, or
Medium mode, respectively, suggesting WFST will be an influential facility in
time-domain astronomy.Comment: Accepted by Univers
Control-A-Video: Controllable Text-to-Video Generation with Diffusion Models
This paper presents a controllable text-to-video (T2V) diffusion model, named
Video-ControlNet, that generates videos conditioned on a sequence of control
signals, such as edge or depth maps. Video-ControlNet is built on a pre-trained
conditional text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model by incorporating a
spatial-temporal self-attention mechanism and trainable temporal layers for
efficient cross-frame modeling. A first-frame conditioning strategy is proposed
to facilitate the model to generate videos transferred from the image domain as
well as arbitrary-length videos in an auto-regressive manner. Moreover,
Video-ControlNet employs a novel residual-based noise initialization strategy
to introduce motion prior from an input video, producing more coherent videos.
With the proposed architecture and strategies, Video-ControlNet can achieve
resource-efficient convergence and generate superior quality and consistent
videos with fine-grained control. Extensive experiments demonstrate its success
in various video generative tasks such as video editing and video style
transfer, outperforming previous methods in terms of consistency and quality.
Project Page: https://controlavideo.github.io
- …