Energy Minimization of Portable Video Communication Devices Based on Power-Rate-Distortion Optimization

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCSVT.2008.918802Portable video communication devices operate on batteries with limited energy supply. However, video compression is computationally intensive and energy-demanding. Therefore, one of the central challenging issues in portable video communication system design is to minimize the energy consumption of video encoding so as to prolong the operational lifetime of portable video devices. In this work, based on power-rate-distortion (P-R-D) optimization, we develop a new approach for energy minimization by exploring the energy tradeoff between video encoding and wireless communication and exploiting the nonstationary characteristics of input video data. Both analytically and experimentally, we demonstrate that incorporating the third dimension of power consumption into conventional R-D analysis gives us one extra dimension of flexibility in resource allocation and allows us to achieve significant energy saving. Within the P-R-D analysis framework, power is tightly coupled with rate, enabling us to trade bits for joules and perform energy minimization through optimum bit allocation. Our experimental studies show that, for typical videos with nonstationary scene statistics, using the proposed P-R-D optimization technology, the energy consumption of video encoding can be significantly reduced (by up to 50%), especially in delay-tolerant portable video communication applications

Learning to Compose Relational Embeddings in Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge Graph Embedding methods learn low-dimensional representations for entities and relations in knowledge graphs, which can be used to infer previously unknown relations between pairs of entities in the knowledge graph. This is particularly useful for expanding otherwise sparse knowledge graphs. However, the relation types that can be predicted using knowledge graph embeddings are confined to the set of relations that already exists in the KG. Often the set of relations that exist between two entities are not independent, and it is possible to predict what other relations are likely to exist between two entities by composing the embeddings of the relations in which each entity participates. We introduce relation composition as the task of inferring embeddings for unseen relations by combining existing relations in a knowledge graph. Specifically, we propose a supervised method to compose relational embeddings for novel relations using pre-trained relation embeddings for existing relations. Our experimental results on a previously proposed benchmark dataset for relation composition ranking and triple classification show that the proposed supervised relation composition method outperforms several unsupervised relation composition methods

S-NeRF++: Autonomous Driving Simulation via Neural Reconstruction and Generation

Autonomous driving simulation system plays a crucial role in enhancing self-driving data and simulating complex and rare traffic scenarios, ensuring navigation safety. However, traditional simulation systems, which often heavily rely on manual modeling and 2D image editing, struggled with scaling to extensive scenes and generating realistic simulation data. In this study, we present S-NeRF++, an innovative autonomous driving simulation system based on neural reconstruction. Trained on widely-used self-driving datasets such as nuScenes and Waymo, S-NeRF++ can generate a large number of realistic street scenes and foreground objects with high rendering quality as well as offering considerable flexibility in manipulation and simulation. Specifically, S-NeRF++ is an enhanced neural radiance field for synthesizing large-scale scenes and moving vehicles, with improved scene parameterization and camera pose learning. The system effectively utilizes noisy and sparse LiDAR data to refine training and address depth outliers, ensuring high quality reconstruction and novel-view rendering. It also provides a diverse foreground asset bank through reconstructing and generating different foreground vehicles to support comprehensive scenario creation. Moreover, we have developed an advanced foreground-background fusion pipeline that skillfully integrates illumination and shadow effects, further enhancing the realism of our simulations. With the high-quality simulated data provided by our S-NeRF++, we found the perception methods enjoy performance boost on several autonomous driving downstream tasks, which further demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed simulator

Quality of General Medical Care in Community Health Centers in 2019—2020：Overview and Problems Analysis

BackgroundStrengtheningclinical quality control and supervision is one of the effective ways to ensure medical quality. Supervising the quality of general medical care in primary care settings in the local region could contribute to the systematical assessment of general medical care quality and identification of relevantproblems in such settings.ObjectiveTo analyze the supervision of quality of general medical care in Shanghai's primary care settings conducted in 2019 and 2020, and based on this, to give targeted, rational recommendations on the identified problems in quality management of general medical care.MethodsThe quality of general medical care in a cluster sample of community health centers (CHCs) of Shanghai was supervised in 2019 and 2020 by relevant experts from Shanghai's municipal and district general practice quality control departments using the Clinical Quality Control and Supervision Standards for General Medical Care in Shanghai's Community Health Centers (hereinafter referred to as CQCSS) developed by Shanghai General Practice Clinical Quality Control Center. In May 2021, the supervision results of the two years were analyzed using descriptive analysis, then compared, and the identified problems were summarized and analyzed.ResultsTwo hundred and forty-three CHCs were involved in the 2019 supervision, and 244 were involved in the 2020 supervision. The average total CQCSS score for 2019 was (87.32±5.97) points, and that for 2020 was (86.67±5.36) points. Compared to the results in 2019, the scores of first-level indicators of basic conditions (99.93% vs 99.80%) , staffing and determining job responsibilities of general practitioners (GPs) (93.44% vs 91.90%) , diagnosis and treatment ability of GPs (85.82% vs 85.72%) , chronic disease management ability of GPs (81.07% vs 80.95%) and scientific research and teaching levels (29.99% vs 28.87%) increased in 2020. The problems mentioned were mainly distributed in five aspects: staffing〔176 (22.03%) 〕, GPs' clinical management ability〔154 (19.27%) 〕, quality of inpatient medical records〔92 (11.51%) 〕, quality of home sickbed patients' medical records〔91 (11.39%) 〕, allocation of facilities〔91 (11.39%) 〕. In terms of the mentioned frequency, the top five problems were: ineligible senior GPs to registered GPs ratio〔84 (10.51%) 〕, poor scientific research〔84 (10.51%) 〕, less than 3.5 GPs per 1 000 residents〔61 (7.63%) 〕, unsatisfactory clinical skills〔40 (5.01%) 〕, and insufficient number of home sickbeds〔36 (4.51%) 〕.ConclusionThese two years of quality control supervision has initially promoted the quality improvementof general medical care in CHCs. To further improve it, it is suggested to take actions to deepen the core essence of general medical care quality management, improve the diagnosis and treatment ability of GPs, as well as their teaching and research ability

Manipulation of structure and optoelectronic properties through bromine inclusion in a layered lead bromide perovskite

Funding: UK Research and Innovation - MR/T022094/1; Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council - EP/V034138/1, EP/R023751/1, EP/T019298/1; Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland - RIG008653.One of the great advantages of organic–inorganic metal halides is that their structures and properties are highly tuneable and this is important when optimizing materials for photovoltaics or other optoelectronic devices. One of the most common and effective ways of tuning the electronic structure is through anion substitution. Here, we report the inclusion of bromine into the layered perovskite [H3N(CH2)6NH3]PbBr4 to form [H3N(CH2)6NH3]PbBr4·Br2, which contains molecular bromine (Br2) intercalated between the layers of corner-sharing PbBr6 octahedra. Bromine intercalation in [H3N(CH2)6NH3]PbBr4·Br2 results in a decrease in the band gap of 0.85 eV and induces a structural transition from a Ruddlesden–Popper-like to Dion–Jacobson-like phase, while also changing the conformation of the amine. Electronic structure calculations show that Br2 intercalation is accompanied by the formation of a new band in the electronic structure and a significant decrease in the effective masses of around two orders of magnitude. This is backed up by our resistivity measurements that show that [H3N(CH2)6NH3]PbBr4·Br2 has a resistivity value of one order of magnitude lower than [H3N(CH2)6NH3]PbBr4, suggesting that bromine inclusion significantly increases the mobility and/or carrier concentration in the material. This work highlights the possibility of using molecular inclusion as an alternative tool to tune the electronic properties of layered organic–inorganic perovskites, while also being the first example of molecular bromine inclusion in a layered lead halide perovskite. By using a combination of crystallography and computation, we show that the key to this manipulation of the electronic structure is the formation of halogen bonds between the Br2 and Br in the [PbBr4]∞ layers, which is likely to have important effects in a range of organic–inorganic metal halides.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

A compendium of genetic regulatory effects across pig tissues

The Farm Animal Genotype-Tissue Expression (FarmGTEx) project has been established to develop a public resource of genetic regulatory variants in livestock, which is essential for linking genetic polymorphisms to variation in phenotypes, helping fundamental biological discovery and exploitation in animal breeding and human biomedicine. Here we show results from the pilot phase of PigGTEx by processing 5,457 RNA-sequencing and 1,602 whole-genome sequencing samples passing quality control from pigs. We build a pig genotype imputation panel and associate millions of genetic variants with five types of transcriptomic phenotypes in 34 tissues. We evaluate tissue specificity of regulatory effects and elucidate molecular mechanisms of their action using multi-omics data. Leveraging this resource, we decipher regulatory mechanisms underlying 207 pig complex phenotypes and demonstrate the similarity of pigs to humans in gene expression and the genetic regulation behind complex phenotypes, supporting the importance of pigs as a human biomedical model.</p

Thermionic emission in nodal-ring semimetals

© 2020 Author(s). We theoretically investigate the thermionic emission from nodal-ring semimetals. The thermionic emission is found to be anisotropic in the x- and y-directions. The anisotropic emission can be enhanced by increasing the radius of nodal-ring b. The main feature of nodal-ring semimetals not only results in anisotropic thermionic emission but also affects the value of thermionic emission current density (TECD). The TECD of the lower branch of the energy-momentum dispersion increases with b, while the TECD of the upper branch decreases with b. Unlike in conventional materials, the TECD in nodal-ring semimetals depends on Fermi energy that is similar to the situation in Dirac semimetals. The underlined reason is that Dirac semimetals and nodal-ring semimetals have a linear or a linear-like energy-momentum dispersion while conventional materials have a parabolic energy-momentum dispersion. The TECD of nodal-ring semimetals depends strongly on work function and temperature

Anti-Disturbance Tracking Control for a Class of PMSM Driven-Based Flexible Manipulator Systems With Input Saturation and Angular Velocity Constraint

This paper proposes a feasible anti-disturbance constrained control algorithm for a class of typical permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) driven-based single-joint flexible manipulator systems with input saturation and angular velocity constraint. Firstly, by actuating with a surface-mounted PMSM, and setting the d-axis current as zero, the single-joint flexible manipulator is converted into a normal state space model. Secondly, compared with classical harmonic or linear disturbance, the exogenous disturbance model with configurable parameters and the associated disturbance observer (DO) are continuously introduced to dynamically estimate those unknown irregular disturbance. Moreover, by combining the convex hull representation of the saturating input with the suggested adaptive law, an efficient adaptive active anti-disturbance controller is designed to ensure the stability of closed-loop manipulator systems. By using convex optimization technique, not only the dynamic tracking for the rotation position but also the angular velocity constraint can be guaranteed simultaneously. Finally, simulation results for three different kinds of disturbances are showed to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method

Accounting Reporting Complexity, Audit Engagement Partner Mandatory Rotation, and Audit Quality

This paper investigates the influence of a firm\u27s accounting reporting complexity (ARC) on financial statement audit quality. We predict and find that there is a non‐linear relationship between a firm\u27s ARC and audit quality. Specifically, a more complex accounting environment—measured by ARC—leads to higher quality audits, but this effect diminishes when ARC continues to increase. Further analyses reveal that the effect is more salient among client firms that do not purchase non‐audit services (NAS). We also examine whether ARC affects audit quality in the circumstance of mandatory audit partner rotation. Empirical results show a moderating effect of ARC on the negative influence of audit partner rotation on audit quality. Our study extends the literature by illustrating how a firm\u27s ARC influences audit quality in a special manner