THUIR at the NTCIR-16 WWW-4 Task

The THUIR team participates in the English subtask of the NTCIR-16 We Want Web with CENTRE(WWW-4) task. This paper elaborates on our methods and discusses the experimental results. We adopt three methods, namely learning-to-rank models, a pre-trained language model tailored for information retrieval, and BERT with prompt learning. Experimental results demonstrate the importance of designing pre-training task specifically for information retrieval. Results also suggest the relatively simple prompt method cannot effectively improve the ranking performance.conference pape

100 essential questions for the future of agriculture

Publication history: Accepted - 8 March 2023; Published online - 11 April 2023.The world is at a crossroad when it comes to agriculture. The global population is growing, and the demand for food is increasing, putting a strain on our agricultural resources and practices. To address this challenge, innovative, sustainable, and inclusive approaches to agriculture are urgently required. In this paper, we launched a call for Essential Questions for the Future of Agriculture and identified a priority list of 100 questions. We focus on 10 primary themes: transforming agri-food systems, enhancing resilience of agriculture to climate change, mitigating climate change through agriculture, exploring resources and technologies for breeding, advancing cultivation methods, sustaining healthy agroecosystems, enabling smart and controlled-environment agriculture for food security, promoting health and nutrition-driven agriculture, exploring economic opportunities and addressing social challenges, and integrating one health and modern agriculture. We emphasise the critical importance of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research that integrates both basic and applied sciences and bridges the gaps among various stakeholders for achieving sustainable agriculture. Key points Growing demand and resource limitations pose a critical challenge for agriculture, necessitating innovative and sustainable approaches. The paper identifies 100 priority questions for the future of agriculture, indicating current and future research directions. Sustainable agriculture depends on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research that harmonises basic and applied sciences and fosters collaboration among different stakeholders

A study of the impact of doubling carbon dioxide and solar radiation variations on the climate system

The exchange of moisture and heat between the atmosphere and the Earth's surface fundamentally affect the dynamics and thermodynamics of the climate system. In order to trace moisture flow through the climate system and examine its impact on climate, a hydrologic cycle and a land energy balance have been developed and incorporated into a coupled climate-thermodynamic sea ice (CCSI) model. The expanded CCSI model has been tested by comparing computed climate parameters with available observations and GCM modeling results. In general, the expanded model does a good job in simulating the large scale features of the atmospheric circulation and precipitation in both space and time. The expanded model has been used to examine the possibility that increased levels of CO\sb2 in the atmosphere may induce the growth of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets. Results of the study indicate that if summer ice albedo is high enough, and there is some mechanism for initially maintaining ice through the summer season, then it may be possible to have ice sheet growth under the conditions CO\sb2 induced warming, mainly the result of decreased summer ice melt in response to the higher land ice albedo, and not an increase in precipitation. The expanded model has also been used to examine the impact of Milankovitch solar radiation variations on the climate system, to study the mechanisms that produce glacial-interglacial cycles, especially with respect to the initiation of ice sheets. The results show the Milankovitch solar radiation variations affect the climate system most in the polar regions with the mean annual surface air temperature varying directly in response to changes in the annually averaged incoming solar radiation. However, the seasonal variations in the surface air temperatures are much more complex with large magnitude variations for brief times during the year. The study indicates that ice sheets may start to grow under the conditions of low insolation that occurred at 25, 70, and 115 kyr BP and a land ice minimum albedo of 0.53, with the largest growth rate at 115 kyr BP, approximately when the current 100 kyr cycle began as observed in the geological record