SEQUENTIAL APPROACHES IN GRAPHICAL MODELS AND MULTIVARIATE RESPONSE REGRESSION MODELS

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

An Exploration of Career Progression in the Events Industry: From Volunteer to Event Professional

Volunteerism is a major part of the events industry. Many people enter and develop their career in this field through volunteering activities. The events industry in the Auckland region frequently engages with volunteers. Many of the volunteers take part in annual events, such as the Auckland Lantern Festival, Pasifika Festival and the Diwali Festival of Lights. People also volunteer at some of the city?s sporting events, such as national rugby league, netball and basketball matches. However, there seem to be limited opportunities for people to work in this field, due to a difficulty in finding routes by which to enter into the industry. In terms of theory, there is a large research gap in the link between the events industry and volunteerism, especially regarding event volunteerism and motivations towards pursuing a career in the industry. To fill this gap, this study employed a qualitative approach to explore the career pathway of individuals to enter the events industry through volunteering. This study conducted a case study by interviewing event workers who have had volunteer experience within the Auckland region. This study contributes to enriching our understanding of how volunteering facilitates career development in the events industry, and also offers practical suggestions on how to advance professional careers through volunteerism in the field. The current study aimed to review the events industry, volunteer motivations, and volunteerism as an influential factor for career progression. To achieve the stated aims and objectives, the study employed empirical qualitative research to explore events volunteers? career progression. By exploring the events industry in the Auckland region, this dissertation provides evidence gathered from events volunteers and event professional workers. This study aims to identify the events industry and event professionals in the researched area. Also, it draws a picture of the events industry in the real world and reveals the attributes of an event professional in the field. The findings described have refined the events industry literature including the understanding of people?s intentions, expectations and motivations as an event volunteer. Moreover, this study investigated volunteerism as an important part of career progression in the events industry

Recipe instruction semantics corpus (RISeC) : resolving semantic structure and zero anaphora in recipes

We propose a newly annotated dataset for information extraction on recipes. Unlike previous approaches to machine comprehension of procedural texts, we avoid a priori pre-defining domain-specific predicates to recognize (e.g., the primitive instructionsin MILK) and focus on basic understanding of the expressed semantics rather than directly reduce them to a simplified state representation (e.g., ProPara). We thus frame the semantic comprehension of procedural text such as recipes, as fairly generic NLP subtasks, covering (i) entity recognition (ingredients, tools and actions), (ii) relation extraction (what ingredients and tools are involved in the actions), and (iii) zero anaphora resolution (link actions to implicit arguments, e.g., results from previous recipe steps). Further, our Recipe Instruction Semantic Corpus (RISeC) dataset includes textual descriptions for the zero anaphora, to facilitate language generation thereof. Besides the dataset itself, we contribute a pipeline neural architecture that addresses entity and relation extractionas well an identification of zero anaphora. These basic building blocks can facilitate more advanced downstream applications (e.g., question answering, conversational agents)

Research on AR cultural and creative design of Yangming Culture under the background of the integration of culture and technology

The integration of science and technology and culture is a general trend in today’s society, which provides more ways for cultural exchange and interaction and promotes social development. This study analyzes the application value of AR technology in the design of cultural and creative products, and reconstructs the process of AR cultural and creative products through the double drill model, and designs Yangming cultural products based on AR technology. It can be seen from the research that AR technology is gradually integrated with culture, which can bring new breakthroughs in the transmission, preservation, creation and consumption of culture. This has played a better role in the dissemination and protection of other traditional Chinese culture and even intangible cultural heritage, further broadening the design space of cultural and creative products, and making new breakthroughs in the integration of science and technology and culture

Heat Pump-Based Novel Energy System for High-Power LED Lamp Cooling and Waste Heat Recovery

Unlike incandescent light bulb, which radiates heat into the surroundings by infrared rays, light emitting diode (LED) traps heat inside the lamp. This fact increases the difficulty of cooling LED lamps, while it facilitates the recovery of the generated heat. We propose a novel energy system that merges high-power LED lamp cooling with the heat pump use; the heat pump can cool the LED lamp and at the same time recover the waste heat. In this way, a high percentage of the energy consumed by the LED lamp can be utilized. In this work, we developed a prototype of this energy system and conducted a series of experimental studies to determine the effect of several parameters, such as cooling water flow rate and LED power, on the LED leadframe temperature, compressor power consumption, and system performance. The experimental results clearly indicate that the energy system can lead to substantial energy savings

The Multifaceted Impact of Matching Policy on Crowdfunding Platforms: Evidence from DonorsChoose

Donation-based crowdfunding platforms use matching policies where leadership donors match contributions at certain rates. While matching policy have been applied in many crowdfunding platforms, a lot remains unknown about their effectiveness and how they can be optimized to incentivize charitable donations. Leveraging data from donors choose, this study explores the policy in boosting charitable donations. Our findings demonstrate that, at the platform level, matching policy have a positive impact on the overall donation performance of the platform, but also compromise the fairness of donations. At individual level, we find that donors who have made donations on the platform before are less influenced by matching policy, and it has higher utility for less experienced donors. This work provides one of the first systematic analyses that connect micro-level data patterns with macro-level donor behaviors to disentangle the matching policy

Tailoring Intermolecular Interactions Towards High‐Performance Thermoelectric Ionogels at Low Humidity

Development of ionic thermoelectric (iTE) materials is of immense interest for efficient heat-to-electricity conversion due to their giant ionic Seebeck coefficient (Si), but challenges remain in terms of relatively small Si at low humidity, poor stretchability, and ambiguous interaction mechanism in ionogels. Herein, a novel ionogel is reported consisting of polyethylene oxide (PEO), polyethylene oxide-polypropylene oxide-polyethylene oxide (P123), and 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium acetate (Emim:OAC). By delicately designing the interactions between ions and polymers, the migration of anions is restricted due to their strong binding with the hydroxyl groups of polymers, while the transport of cations is facilitated through segmental motions due to the increased amorphous regions, thereby leading to enlarged diffusion difference between the cations and anions. Moreover, the plasticizing effect of P123 and Emim:OAC can increase the elongation at break. As a consequence, the ionogel exhibits excellent properties including high Si (18 mV K−1 at relative humidity of 60%), good ionic conductivity (1.1 mS cm−1), superior stretchability (787%), and high stability (over 80% retention after 600 h). These findings show a promising strategy to obtain multifunctional iTE materials by engineering the intermolecular interactions and demonstrate the great potential of ionogels for harvesting low-grade heat in human-comfortable humidity environments

NewsDialogues: Towards Proactive News Grounded Conversation

Hot news is one of the most popular topics in daily conversations. However, news grounded conversation has long been stymied by the lack of well-designed task definition and scarce data. In this paper, we propose a novel task, Proactive News Grounded Conversation, in which a dialogue system can proactively lead the conversation based on some key topics of the news. In addition, both information-seeking and chit-chat scenarios are included realistically, where the user may ask a series of questions about the news details or express their opinions and be eager to chat. To further develop this novel task, we collect a human-to-human Chinese dialogue dataset \ts{NewsDialogues}, which includes 1K conversations with a total of 14.6K utterances and detailed annotations for target topics and knowledge spans. Furthermore, we propose a method named Predict-Generate-Rank, consisting of a generator for grounded knowledge prediction and response generation, and a ranker for the ranking of multiple responses to alleviate the exposure bias. We conduct comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and further present several key findings and challenges to prompt future research.Comment: Accepted to ACL 2023 Conference (Long Paper; Findings