Understanding Consumer Behaviour to Reduce Environmental Impacts through Sustainable Product Design

The use phase of the lifecycle of electrical products has a significant environmental impact, mainly determined by the consumer’s behaviour. Many consumers do not make the link between their daily consumption behaviour in the household and environmental problems such as climate change. In the 21st century, the residential sector, together with transport and industry, is one of the largest man-made contributors in the UK to climate change. It is argued that technological innovations, current eco-efficient products and consumer education have been ineffective in creating the long term radical behavioural change needed to reduce the impact of product use. Products, as the interface between consumers and consumption activities, have the potential to influence the way in which consumption occurs. In the sustainable design field however, designer responsibility traditionally considers raw material selection and product disposal. There is limited work that addresses the environmental impacts relating directly to use behaviour of the product. This paper illustrates that user behaviour studies can be the preliminary step for designers to improve energy efficiency of products. A single product type, household cold appliance, was chosen as a case to explore the capacity of designer-conducted user study to identify unsustainable aspects of product use. Adopting a user-centred approach, two pilot studies were used to gain an insight into domestic fridge and freezer use in the UK. Qualitative ethnographical research methods were employed to investigate the daily practices and “real” needs of user as well as the connection between the knowledge, attitudes, intention and actual action. The design suggestions drawn from the user behaviour analysis provide examples of how energy impact level of the interaction with the product can be reduced through design. Keywords: User-Centred Research; Sustainable Product Design; Changing Consumer Behaviour; Design Research; Household Energy Consumption; Household Cold Appliance.</p

Nonadiabatic quantum pumping in mesoscopic nanostructures

We consider a nonadiabatic quantum pumping phenomena in a ballistic narrow constriction. The pumping is induced by a potential that has both spatial and temporal periodicity characterized by $K$ and $\Omega$. In the zero frequency ($\Omega=0$) limit, the transmission through narrow constriction exhibits valley structures due to the opening up of energy gaps in the pumping region -- a consequence of the $K$ periodicity. These valley structures remain robust in the regime of finite $\Omega$, while their energies of occurrence are shifted by about $\hbar\Omega/2$. The direction of these energy shifts depend on the directions of both the phase-velocity of the pumping potential and the transmitting electrons. This frequency dependent feature of the valley structures gives rise to both the asymmetry in the transmission coefficients and the pumping current. An experimental setup is suggested for a possible observation of our nonadiabatic quantum pumping findings.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Influence Maximization Meets Efficiency and Effectiveness: A Hop-Based Approach

Influence Maximization is an extensively-studied problem that targets at selecting a set of initial seed nodes in the Online Social Networks (OSNs) to spread the influence as widely as possible. However, it remains an open challenge to design fast and accurate algorithms to find solutions in large-scale OSNs. Prior Monte-Carlo-simulation-based methods are slow and not scalable, while other heuristic algorithms do not have any theoretical guarantee and they have been shown to produce poor solutions for quite some cases. In this paper, we propose hop-based algorithms that can easily scale to millions of nodes and billions of edges. Unlike previous heuristics, our proposed hop-based approaches can provide certain theoretical guarantees. Experimental evaluations with real OSN datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithms.Comment: Extended version of the conference paper at ASONAM 2017, 11 page

Towards Profit Maximization for Online Social Network Providers

Online Social Networks (OSNs) attract billions of users to share information and communicate where viral marketing has emerged as a new way to promote the sales of products. An OSN provider is often hired by an advertiser to conduct viral marketing campaigns. The OSN provider generates revenue from the commission paid by the advertiser which is determined by the spread of its product information. Meanwhile, to propagate influence, the activities performed by users such as viewing video ads normally induce diffusion cost to the OSN provider. In this paper, we aim to find a seed set to optimize a new profit metric that combines the benefit of influence spread with the cost of influence propagation for the OSN provider. Under many diffusion models, our profit metric is the difference between two submodular functions which is challenging to optimize as it is neither submodular nor monotone. We design a general two-phase framework to select seeds for profit maximization and develop several bounds to measure the quality of the seed set constructed. Experimental results with real OSN datasets show that our approach can achieve high approximation guarantees and significantly outperform the baseline algorithms, including state-of-the-art influence maximization algorithms.Comment: INFOCOM 2018 (Full version), 12 page

A note on the frontier of a branching reflected Brownian motion

In this note, we study the asymptotical frontier behavior of a branching reflected Brownian motion. There is essentially no difference in maximal displacement between a branching Brownian motion and its reflected counterpart. We provide two proofs of this fact, one via a soft argument on the dependance of two-sided extremal particles in a branching Brownian motion and the other based on direct computations as in Roberts. The asymptotics of minimal displacement is also given.Comment: 14 page

Spin Effects in High Energy Fragmentation Processes

Recent measurements, in particular those on $\Lambda$ polarization and spin alignment of vector mesons in $e^+e^-$ annihilation at LEP, and those on the azimuthal asymmetry at HERA, have attracted much attention on the spin effects in high energy fragmentation processes. In this talk, we make a brief introduction to the different topics studied in this connection and a short summary of the available data. After that, we present a short summary of the main theoretical results that we obtained in studying these different topics. The talk was mainly based on the publications [5-9] which have been finished in collaboration with C.Boros, Liu Chun-xiu and Xu Qing-hua.Comment: Plenary talk given at the 3rd Circum-Pan-Pacifc Symposium on High Energy Spin Physics, October 2001, 8 pages, 4 figure