Light-emitting diodes enhanced by localized surface plasmon resonance

Light-emitting diodes [LEDs] are of particular interest recently as their performance is approaching fluorescent/incandescent tubes. Moreover, their energy-saving property is attracting many researchers because of the huge energy crisis we are facing. Among all methods intending to enhance the efficiency and intensity of a conventional LED, localized surface plasmon resonance is a promising way. The mechanism is based on the energy coupling effect between the emitted photons from the semiconductor and metallic nanoparticles fabricated by nanotechnology. In this review, we describe the mechanism of this coupling effect and summarize the common fabrication techniques. The prospect, including the potential to replace fluorescent/incandescent lighting devices as well as applications to flat panel displays and optoelectronics, and future challenges with regard to the design of metallic nanostructures and fabrication techniques are discussed

Boosting Point Clouds Rendering via Radiance Mapping

Recent years we have witnessed rapid development in NeRF-based image rendering due to its high quality. However, point clouds rendering is somehow less explored. Compared to NeRF-based rendering which suffers from dense spatial sampling, point clouds rendering is naturally less computation intensive, which enables its deployment in mobile computing device. In this work, we focus on boosting the image quality of point clouds rendering with a compact model design. We first analyze the adaption of the volume rendering formulation on point clouds. Based on the analysis, we simplify the NeRF representation to a spatial mapping function which only requires single evaluation per pixel. Further, motivated by ray marching, we rectify the the noisy raw point clouds to the estimated intersection between rays and surfaces as queried coordinates, which could avoid spatial frequency collapse and neighbor point disturbance. Composed of rasterization, spatial mapping and the refinement stages, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on point clouds rendering, outperforming prior works by notable margins, with a smaller model size. We obtain a PSNR of 31.74 on NeRF-Synthetic, 25.88 on ScanNet and 30.81 on DTU. Code and data would be released soon

Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Domain Mixup

Recent works on domain adaptation reveal the effectiveness of adversarial learning on filling the discrepancy between source and target domains. However, two common limitations exist in current adversarial-learning-based methods. First, samples from two domains alone are not sufficient to ensure domain-invariance at most part of latent space. Second, the domain discriminator involved in these methods can only judge real or fake with the guidance of hard label, while it is more reasonable to use soft scores to evaluate the generated images or features, i.e., to fully utilize the inter-domain information. In this paper, we present adversarial domain adaptation with domain mixup (DM-ADA), which guarantees domain-invariance in a more continuous latent space and guides the domain discriminator in judging samples' difference relative to source and target domains. Domain mixup is jointly conducted on pixel and feature level to improve the robustness of models. Extensive experiments prove that the proposed approach can achieve superior performance on tasks with various degrees of domain shift and data complexity.Comment: Accepted as oral presentation at 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 202

The Relationship Between Hippocampal Volumes and Delayed Recall Is Modified by APOE ε4 in Mild Cognitive Impairment

Objective: To investigate whether APOE ε4 affects the association of verbal memory with neurodegeneration presented by the hippocampal volume/intracranial volume ratio (HpVR).Methods: The study sample included 371 individuals with normal cognition (NC), 725 subjects with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), and 251 patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD) from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) who underwent the rey auditory verbal learning test (RAVLT). Multiple linear regression models were conducted to assess the effect of the APOE ε4∗HpVR interaction on RAVLT in all subjects and in each diagnostic group adjusting for age, gender and educational attainment, and global cognition.Results: In all subjects, there was no significant APOE ε4 × HpVR interaction for immediate recall or delayed recall (p > 0.05). However, in aMCI subjects, there was a significant APOE ε4 × HpVR interaction for delayed recall (p = 0.008), but not immediate recall (p = 0.15). More specifically, the detrimental effect of APOE ε4 on delayed recall altered by HpVR such that this effect was most evident among subjects with small to moderate HpVR, but this disadvantage was absent or even reversed among subjects with larger HpVR. No significant interaction was observed in the NC or AD group.Conclusion: These findings highlight a potential role of APOE ε4 status in affecting the association of hippocampus size with delayed recall memory in the early stage of AD

Chromosome-level reference genome assembly provides insights into the evolution of Pennisetum alopecuroides

Pennisetum alopecuroides is an important forage grass resource, which plays a vital role in ecological environment improvement. Therefore, the acquisition of P. alopecuroides genome resources is conducive to the study of the adaptability of Pennisetum species in ecological remediation and forage breeding development. Here we assembled a P. alopecuroides cv. 'Liqiu' genome at the chromosome level with a size of approximately 845.71 Mb, contig N50 of 84.83Mb, and genome integrity of 99.13% as assessed by CEGMA. A total of 833.41-Mb sequences were mounted on nine chromosomes by Hi-C technology. In total, 60.66% of the repetitive sequences and 34,312 genes were predicted. The genomic evolution analysis showed that P. alopecuroides cv. 'Liqiu' was isolated from Setaria 7.53–13.80 million years ago and from Cenchrus 5.33–8.99 million years ago, respectively. The whole-genome event analysis showed that P. alopecuroides cv. 'Liqiu' underwent two whole-genome duplication (WGD) events in the evolution process, and the duplication events occurred at a similar time to that of Oryza sativa and Setaria viridis. The completion of the genome sequencing of P. alopecuroides cv. 'Liqiu' provides data support for mining high-quality genetic resources of P. alopecuroides and provides a theoretical basis for the origin and evolutionary characteristics of Pennisetum

Dye-sensitized solar cells: Investigation of D-A-π-A organic sensitizers based on [1,2,5]selenadiazolo[3,4-c]pyridine

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Russian Science Foundation (grant no. 15-13-10022). Wenjun Wu thanks the Scientific Committee of Shanghai (14ZR1409700) for financial support. The authors thank the Leverhulme Trust for an International Network grant.We report two series of D-A-π-A metal-free organic sensitizers for dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) based on triphenylamine and N-hexyl-carbazole as electronic donors, respectively. Through varying auxiliary acceptors and π-spacers, several significant consequences on cell efficiency were identified: (i) a broadened UV-Vis absorption spectrum and low-lying LUMO level with [1,2,5]selenadiazolo [3,4-c] pyridine as auxiliary acceptor; (ii) compensation for the absorption valley around 400 nm in the UV-vis spectra by the introduction of a thiophene unit into the π-bridge; (iii) effective improvement of the power conversion efficiency (PCE) by means of cosensitization, leading to dye OKT-1 , 3.10% PCE, increased to 4.19% with squaraine dye SQ2 as co-sensitizer. The design criteria identified have opened the door for further optimization of this new dye family.PostprintPeer reviewe

6G Network AI Architecture for Everyone-Centric Customized Services

Mobile communication standards were developed for enhancing transmission and network performance by using more radio resources and improving spectrum and energy efficiency. How to effectively address diverse user requirements and guarantee everyone's Quality of Experience (QoE) remains an open problem. The Sixth Generation (6G) mobile systems will solve this problem by utilizing heterogenous network resources and pervasive intelligence to support everyone-centric customized services anywhere and anytime. In this article, we first coin the concept of Service Requirement Zone (SRZ) on the user side to characterize and visualize the integrated service requirements and preferences of specific tasks of individual users. On the system side, we further introduce the concept of User Satisfaction Ratio (USR) to evaluate the system's overall service ability of satisfying a variety of tasks with different SRZs. Then, we propose a network Artificial Intelligence (AI) architecture with integrated network resources and pervasive AI capabilities for supporting customized services with guaranteed QoEs. Finally, extensive simulations show that the proposed network AI architecture can consistently offer a higher USR performance than the cloud AI and edge AI architectures with respect to different task scheduling algorithms, random service requirements, and dynamic network conditions

Equality in education, synchronous enrolment policy and housing prices of school districts: Based on the experience of Hangzhou

Housing is the major way for Hangzhou residents to access public primary and secondary education resources. The implementation of educational equalization policies will impact housing prices, especially school district housing prices. This paper focuses on the synchronous enrollment policy, which requires both public and private schools to enroll students simultaneously, thus changing the enrollment strategies for students and parents. Using the 2019 implementation of the synchronous enrollment policy in Hangzhou primary schools as a natural experiment, the difference-in-differences and quantile regression models were employed to estimate the capitalization of this policy and its heterogeneity. The results indicate that the policy leads to an appreciation of school district housing prices, with a stronger effect on the housing prices of elite public school districts. To achieve educational equalization, the government must formulate supporting policies to ensure internal balance in public schools and simultaneously create sufficient high-quality educational resources

Light-emitting diodes enhanced by localized surface plasmon resonance

Abstract Light-emitting diodes [LEDs] are of particular interest recently as their performance is approaching fluorescent/incandescent tubes. Moreover, their energy-saving property is attracting many researchers because of the huge energy crisis we are facing. Among all methods intending to enhance the efficiency and intensity of a conventional LED, localized surface plasmon resonance is a promising way. The mechanism is based on the energy coupling effect between the emitted photons from the semiconductor and metallic nanoparticles fabricated by nanotechnology. In this review, we describe the mechanism of this coupling effect and summarize the common fabrication techniques. The prospect, including the potential to replace fluorescent/incandescent lighting devices as well as applications to flat panel displays and optoelectronics, and future challenges with regard to the design of metallic nanostructures and fabrication techniques are discussed.</p