Urban tree community: living with tree spirits

In my thesis, I want to discuss the problem of how to use landscape design to change people’s attitudes toward nature through demonstrating the interconnectedness of all living and non-living parts of the Earth, and with hope, changing people’s behavior—starting with studying trees in the urban area and people’s relationship with them. The project aims to introduce a new lifestyle for people living in the urban areas to engage more with trees by developing more opportunities for people to interact with trees through design. I hope to build an urban tree community where people live with tree spirits and make friends with trees. They can learn more about trees and also learn from the trees. I hope that by changing people’s views on trees, people will rethink their place in nature

Finite-size analysis of continuous-variable measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution

We study the impact of the finite-size effect on the continuous-variable measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (CV-MDI QKD) protocol, mainly considering the finite-size effect on the parameter estimation procedure. The central-limit theorem and maximum likelihood estimation theorem are used to estimate the parameters. We also analyze the relationship between the number of exchanged signals and the optimal modulation variance in the protocol. It is proved that when Charlie's position is close to Bob, the CV-MDI QKD protocol has the farthest transmission distance in the finite-size scenario. Finally, we discuss the impact of finite-size effects related to the practical detection in the CV-MDI QKD protocol. The overall results indicate that the finite-size effect has a great influence on the secret key rate of the CV-MDI QKD protocol and should not be ignored.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

What Kind of Innovation Ecosystem Is Conducive to Innovation Performance

Universities have gathered abundant innovation resources, which are important carriers for innovation implementation and an important component of the national innovation system. Studying how to achieve high innovation performance in universities is of great significance. Based on the innovation ecological systems theory, this paper examines how the combination of intellectual resources, financial support, evaluation system, collaboration system, talent attraction, and peer pressure can lead to high innovation performance of universities. This paper constructs an analytical framework of “factor-system-space” and uses necessary condition analysis (NCA) methods and Fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to empirically analyze the data of 40 universities in China. This article finds that at a lower level of funding and intellectual resources, intellectual resources and financial support are necessary for high talent innovation performance, and different levels of innovation performance have different requirements for conditions. There are three types of configurations that generate high innovation performance, namely institutional boosting under spatial dependence, institutional boosting under factor dependence, and factor-spatial dual drive

Efficient Attribute-Based Smart Contract Access Control Enhanced by Reputation Assessment

Blockchain's immutability can resist unauthorized changes of ledgers, thus it can be used as a trust enhancement mechanism to a shared system. Indeed, blockchain has been considered to solve the security and privacy issues of the Internet of Things (IoT). In this regard, most researches currently focus on the realization of various access control models and architectures, and are working towards making full use of the blockchain to secure IoT systems. It is worth noting that there has been an increasingly heavy pressure on the blockchain storage caused by dealing with massive IoT data and handling malicious access behaviors in the system, and not many countermeasures have been seen to curb the increase. However, this problem has not been paid enough attention. In this paper, we implement an attribute-based access control scheme using smart contracts in Quorum blockchain. It provides basic access control functions and conserves storage by reducing the number of smart contracts. In addition, a reputation-based technique is introduced to cope with malicious behaviors. Certain illegal transactions can be blocked by the credit-assessment algorithm, which deters possibly malicious nodes and gives more chance to well-behaved nodes. The feasibility of our proposed scheme is demonstrated by doing experiment on a testbed and conducting a case study. Finally, the system performance is assessed based on experimental measurement

Multi-Encoder U-Net for Automatic Kidney Tumor Segmentation

Kidney tumor segmentation is a difficult yet critical task for medical image analysis. In recent years, deep learning based methods have achieved many excellent performances in the field of medical image segmentation. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Encoder U-Net segmentation method to tackle the challenging problem of kidney tumor segmentation from CT images. Our Multi-Encoder U-Net method uses three different depth networks as encoders for kidney tumor segmentation: VGG16, ResNet34, ResNet50, a feature fusion networkFED-Net is also used simultaneously, finally fusing the four results. We tested our method on the dataset of MICCAI 2019 Kidney Tumor Segmentation Challenge(KiTS)