Wood-Inspired Morphologically Tunable Aligned Hydrogel for High-Performance Flexible All-Solid-State Supercapacitors

Oriented microstructures are widely found in various biological systems for multiple functions. Such anisotropic structures provide low tortuosity and sufficient surface area, desirable for the design of high-performance energy storage devices. Despite significant efforts to develop supercapacitors with aligned morphology, challenges remain due to the predefined pore sizes, limited mechanical flexibility, and low mass loading. Herein, a wood-inspired flexible all-solid-state hydrogel supercapacitor is demonstrated by morphologically tuning the aligned hydrogel matrix toward high electrode-materials loading and high areal capacitance. The highly aligned matrix exhibits broad morphological tunability (47–12 µm), mechanical flexibility (0°–180° bending), and uniform polypyrrole loading up to 7 mm thick matrix. After being assembled into a solid-state supercapacitor, the areal capacitance reaches 831 mF cm−2 for the 12 µm matrix, which is 259% times of the 47 µm matrix and 403% times of nonaligned matrix. The supercapacitor also exhibits a high energy density of 73.8 µWh cm−2, power density of 4960 µW cm−2, capacitance retention of 86.5% after 1000 cycles, and bending stability of 95% after 5000 cycles. The principle to structurally design the oriented matrices for high electrode material loading opens up the possibility for advanced energy storage applications

To be or not to be: why do transaction partners in construction industry avoid formulating agreements into contract documents?

Designing the construction contracts efficiently and effectively is vital for project success since contracts can not only motivate and regulate behaviours in projects, but also plays a crucial part in managing interfirm relationship. In practice, however, transaction partners in construction industry sometimes avoid formulating all the agreements into contract documents, which is contradictory to common logic. The aim of this research is to prove the existence of such phenomenon and to investigate the reasons for why it happens. Both questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were conducted in construction industry in China for data collection since China provides fertile context to explore the research questions. The questionnaire was used to prove the existence of such phenomenon and the interviews were used to explore the logic behind. The results show that in nearly 50% of the construction projects in China, the phenomenon of the transaction partners deliberately avoid formulating some agreements into contract documents exist. Given explanations as for why this happens include: 1) showing trust towards the other partner, 2) reducing risks in transaction, 3) increasing the possibility of further collaboration in the future, 4) bypassing the contract check in their own legal departments, and 5) preventing other competitor companies in the market from stealing technology through the contract documents. A comprehensive understanding for designing contract documents is generated in this research, which will not only help project managers for project success but also provides insights into drafting contract terms

A privacy preserved and credible network protocol

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordThe identities of packet senders and receivers are treated as important privacy information in communication networks. Any packet can be attributed to its sender for evaluating its credibility. Existing studies mainly rely on third-party agents that contain the packet sender's identity to ensure the sender's privacy preservation and credibility. In this case, packet senders run the risk that their privacy might be leaked by the agent. To this end, this paper proposes a Privacy Preserved and Credible Network Protocol (PCNP), which authorizes the agent to hide the identities of senders and receivers, while guaranteeing the credibility of a packet. The feasibility of the PCNP deployment is analyzed, and its performance is evaluated through extensive experiments.Ministry of Science and Technology of ChinaChinese Academy of Scienc

Improving Person Re-Identification Performance Using Body Mask Via Cross-Learning Strategy

© 2019 IEEE. The task of person re-identification (re-id) is to find the same pedestrian across non-overlapping cameras. Normally, the performance of person re-id can be affected by background clutters. However, existing segmentation algorithms are hard to obtain perfect foreground person images. To effectively leverage the body (foreground) cue, and in the meantime pay attention to discriminative information in the background (e.g., companion or vehicle), we propose to use a cross-learning strategy to take both foreground and other discriminative information into account. In addition, since currently existing foreground segmentation result always involves noise, we use Label Smoothing Regularization (LSR) to strengthen the generalization capability during our learning process. In experiments, we pick up two state-of-The-Art person re-id methods to verify the effectiveness of our proposed cross-learning strategy. Our experiments are carried out on two publicly available person re-id datasets. Obvious performance improvements can be observed on both datasets