Geography of a “Foreign” China: British Intellectuals’ Encounter With Chinese Spaces, 1920-1945

This dissertation examines how eleven British intellectuals, who lived in or traveled to China from the early to mid twentieth century, represent Chinese spaces and how Chinese spaces shape their identities. This group of writers includes WilliamSomerset Maugham, Robert William Swallow, Ann Bridge, Stella Benson, Maurice Denton Welch, Harold Acton, Osbert Sitwell, Peter Quennell, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, and J.G. Ballard. Multiple genres, including travel writing, diaries, poetry, and fiction, based on the authors’ real experiences in China constitute the research corpus. Current scholarship has researched these works fromhistorical andsocio-political viewpoints, but the spatial perspective has been ignored. Edward Soja’s Thirdspace is constructed through his reading of Henry Lefebvre’s spatial trialectics. Soja develops Lefebvre’s conception into an-Other space, in which alternative possibilities beyond the binary logic exist. Drawing upon Soja’s concept of “Thirdspace,” the project brings space as a critical means to supplement current social and historical perspectives and addresses different responses to the conventional framework of spatial binaries. The works written by British intellectuals based ontheir real experiences not only reflect their controlling gaze on Chinese spaces as a means of enhancing their knowledge but also explain the process of the role of Chinese spaces in reshaping the cultural identity of individual British intellectuals. I argue that the spatial imagination constructed in British intellectuals’ works, whichis marked by their social, economic, cultural, and political identities, is in a constant process of negotiation. These British intellectuals’ travel writings in and of themselves represent an in-between territory, in which things are in continuous movement beyond dualism and in incessant compromise. In the constantly shiftingprocess of compromises, British intellectuals’ different class, gender, and cultural identities are all at work, and their identities are shaped by Chinese spaces as well

Leadership and Learning in Information System Development Project Team

In addition to traditional vertical leadership, the importance of shared leadership in teams has been highlighted recently. However, despite the growing interest in team leadership, researchers pay limited attention to the relationship between specific leadership styles and learning types in teams. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a theoretical model to answer the question: “How vertical and shared team leadership styles affect exploration and exploitation of team learning?” In addition to argue the impact of leadership on both types of learning, we further hypothesize a contingency relationship between learning types and leadership styles

Adaptive Safety-critical Control with Uncertainty Estimation for Human-robot Collaboration

In advanced manufacturing, strict safety guarantees are required to allow humans and robots to work together in a shared workspace. One of the challenges in this application field is the variety and unpredictability of human behavior, leading to potential dangers for human coworkers. This paper presents a novel control framework by adopting safety-critical control and uncertainty estimation for human-robot collaboration. Additionally, to select the shortest path during collaboration, a novel quadratic penalty method is presented. The innovation of the proposed approach is that the proposed controller will prevent the robot from violating any safety constraints even in cases where humans move accidentally in a collaboration task. This is implemented by the combination of a time-varying integral barrier Lyapunov function (TVIBLF) and an adaptive exponential control barrier function (AECBF) to achieve a flexible mode switch between path tracking and collision avoidance with guaranteed closed-loop system stability. The performance of our approach is demonstrated in simulation studies on a 7-DOF robot manipulator. Additionally, a comparison between the tasks involving static and dynamic targets is provided

Team Leadership and Diversity Management in Information Systems Development Project Teams

Background: The interplay of diversity and leadership produces mixed findings in the literature. Based on the categorization-elaboration model (CEM) and diversity management (DM) literature, this study investigates the role of team leadership in a diverse ISD team. Further, this study examines the moderating roles of DM practices in the relationships between group diversity, team leadership, and project performance. Method: This study selected a paired survey method to test the hypotheses. Eighty-two valid paired questionnaires were received from project managers and team members in ISD projects. In addition, this study used partial least squares (PLS) with a bootstrapping technique to examine the proposed model. Results: The results show that group diversity has mixed impacts on team leadership. Furthermore, DM practices positively moderate the effect of value diversity on team leadership, as value diversity is positively related to team leadership when DM practices are more robust. At last, DM practices negatively moderate the relationship between team leadership and project performance as the effect of team leadership has weaker effects on project performance when DM practices are strong than when the practices are weak. Conclusion: This study adds to the literature by examining team leadership in a heterogenous ISD team and providing empirical evidence for the moderating roles of DM practices in team leadership processes

A dialectical-relational approach to anti-trans sentiments on Hupu

As the first edition of the Olympics including transgender sportswomen, Tokyo 2020 brought trans-rights debates to the forefront of global sports spectatorship during the summer of 2021. In this article, we adopt a dialectical-relational approach to address how anti-trans sentiments unfold in male Chinese sports fans’ social-mediated communication. Based on textual analysis of posts retrieved from Hupu, the research reveals that anti-trans sentiments are largely informed by an essentialist notion of sex, which considers it to be a purely biological construct that is paramount in policymaking, being perpetuated in the process of China’s modernisation. Anti-trans discourses manifest in the sampled postings tend to converge with China’s official nationalist rhetoric, projecting critical voices against liberal-progressive values and Western-style democracy. The research findings shed new light on the dialectical relations between nationalist politics and anti-trans sentiments and, by extension, queerphobic views in China’s sports fandom, pointing towards the heteronormative monopoly of public discourses in sport and beyond

Safety-critical model predictive control with control barrier function for dynamic obstacle avoidance

In this paper, a safety critical control scheme for a nonholonomic robot is developed to generate control signals that result in optimal obstacle-free paths through dynamic environments. A barrier function is used to obtain a safety envelope for the robot. We formulate the control synthesis problem as an optimal control problem that enforces control barrier function (CBF) constraints to achieve obstacle avoidance. A nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) with CBF is studied to guarantee system safety and accomplish optimal performance at a short prediction horizon, which reduces computational burden in real-time NMPC implementation. An obstacle avoidance constraint under the Euclidean norm is also incorporated into NMPC to emphasize the effectiveness of CBF in both point stabilization and trajectory tracking problem of the robot. The performance of the proposed controller achieving both static and dynamic obstacle avoidance is verified using several simulation scenarios.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, IFAC World Congress 202

Reinforcement Learning-Enhanced Control Barrier Functions for Robot Manipulators

In this paper we present the implementation of a Control Barrier Function (CBF) using a quadratic program (QP) formulation that provides obstacle avoidance for a robotic manipulator arm system. CBF is a control technique that has emerged and developed over the past decade and has been extensively explored in the literature on its mathematical foundations, proof of set invariance and potential applications for a variety of safety-critical control systems. In this work we will look at the design of CBF for the robotic manipulator obstacle avoidance, discuss the selection of the CBF parameters and present a Reinforcement Learning (RL) scheme to assist with finding parameters values that provide the most efficient trajectory to successfully avoid different sized obstacles. We then create a data-set across a range of scenarios used to train a Neural-Network (NN) model that can be used within the control scheme to allow the system to efficiently adapt to different obstacle scenarios. Computer simulations (based on Matlab/Simulink) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm

The Positive Role of Multiplicative Noise in Complete Synchronization of Unidirectionally Coupled Ring with Three Nodes

The role of multiplicative noise in the synchronization of unidirectionally coupled ring with three nodes is studied. Based on the theory of stochastic differential equations, we demonstrate that noise plays a positive role in complete synchronization. In numerical simulations, the Lorenz system, Rössler like system, and Hindmarsh-Rose neuron model are employed to demonstrate the correctness of our theoretical result