Graph Contrastive Learning for Materials

Recent work has shown the potential of graph neural networks to efficiently predict material properties, enabling high-throughput screening of materials. Training these models, however, often requires large quantities of labelled data, obtained via costly methods such as ab initio calculations or experimental evaluation. By leveraging a series of material-specific transformations, we introduce CrystalCLR, a framework for constrastive learning of representations with crystal graph neural networks. With the addition of a novel loss function, our framework is able to learn representations competitive with engineered fingerprinting methods. We also demonstrate that via model finetuning, contrastive pretraining can improve the performance of graph neural networks for prediction of material properties and significantly outperform traditional ML models that use engineered fingerprints. Lastly, we observe that CrystalCLR produces material representations that form clusters by compound class.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, NeurIPS 2022 AI for Accelerated Materials Design Worksho

Villagers, Elections, and Citizenship in Contemporary China

In this article, I assess the state of political citizenship in rural China. After discussing the often local and rural origins of citizenship and the meaning of the term itself, I review the limited reforms that have taken place in the election of high-ranking state leaders and people's congress deputies. I then turn to a more promising avenue of inclusion: the villagers' committee (VC) elections that began in the late 1980s. Here, we see notable efforts to heighten cadre responsiveness and draw rural residents into the local polity. At the same time, sizable obstacles to inclusion remain, not least because many electoral rules and practices do not enfranchise villagers reliably. The inescapable conclusion that villagers enjoy (at best) a partial citizenship needs to be qualified, however, owing to evidence that some rural people are starting to challenge improper elections using the language of rights. Building on a rules consciousness and a sensitivity to government rhetoric that have existed for centuries, as well as exploiting the spread of participatory ideologies and patterns of rule rooted in notions of equality, rights, and the rule of law, these villagers are busy advancing their interests within prevailing limits, forcing open blocked channels of participation, and struggling to make still-disputed rights real. In this regard, certain citizenship practices are emerging even before citizenship has appeared as a fully recognized status, and we may be observing the process by which a more complete citizenship comes about