A supplier review system as part of the government procurement system for China

A supplier review system can play a significant role in ensuring the enforcement of procurement rules through its deterrent and redress effects. This thesis aims at providing a critical analysis of the current Chinese supplier review system and identifying and evaluating options for improvement of the Chinese system, based on the analysis of provisions on supplier review contained in the UNCITRAL Model Law on Procurement, the GPA, the EU Remedies Directives and APEC Non-Binding Principles on Government Procurement. This thesis first discusses key characteristics of national supplier review system, concerning forum for review, standing and procedures, and the remedies, provided in the Model Law and the other three international instruments; and then examines these main aspects of the current Chinese supplier review system. After critically analysing the current Chinese system, it has been found there are a number of important deficiencies in this system, in particular, there is uncertainty over the forum for review, the whole dispute resolution process can be quite lengthy and the available remedies are ineffective. These problems have hampered the effectiveness of the system and made it inconsistent with the international standards which may soon apply or currently actually apply to China, namely the GPA and APEC NBPs. To make the Chinese supplier review system truly effective and also comply with the existing/forthcoming international obligations, the author recommends reforms that aim to be effective yet capable of realistic achievement and also workable in the particular context of Chinese circumstances and the existing position in China. These include providing a unified supplier review system to all complaints regarding government procurement process, improving the current sequential tiered review system, revising the current provisions on standing and the time limit for initiation, offering clear rules on remedies and deleting unreasonable sanctions on the complaining supplier

A supplier review system as part of the government procurement system for China

A supplier review system can play a significant role in ensuring the enforcement of procurement rules through its deterrent and redress effects. This thesis aims at providing a critical analysis of the current Chinese supplier review system and identifying and evaluating options for improvement of the Chinese system, based on the analysis of provisions on supplier review contained in the UNCITRAL Model Law on Procurement, the GPA, the EU Remedies Directives and APEC Non-Binding Principles on Government Procurement. This thesis first discusses key characteristics of national supplier review system, concerning forum for review, standing and procedures, and the remedies, provided in the Model Law and the other three international instruments; and then examines these main aspects of the current Chinese supplier review system. After critically analysing the current Chinese system, it has been found there are a number of important deficiencies in this system, in particular, there is uncertainty over the forum for review, the whole dispute resolution process can be quite lengthy and the available remedies are ineffective. These problems have hampered the effectiveness of the system and made it inconsistent with the international standards which may soon apply or currently actually apply to China, namely the GPA and APEC NBPs. To make the Chinese supplier review system truly effective and also comply with the existing/forthcoming international obligations, the author recommends reforms that aim to be effective yet capable of realistic achievement and also workable in the particular context of Chinese circumstances and the existing position in China. These include providing a unified supplier review system to all complaints regarding government procurement process, improving the current sequential tiered review system, revising the current provisions on standing and the time limit for initiation, offering clear rules on remedies and deleting unreasonable sanctions on the complaining supplier

ChatTraffic: Text-to-Traffic Generation via Diffusion Model

Traffic prediction is one of the most significant foundations in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Traditional traffic prediction methods rely only on historical traffic data to predict traffic trends and face two main challenges. 1) insensitivity to unusual events. 2) limited performance in long-term prediction. In this work, we explore how generative models combined with text describing the traffic system can be applied for traffic generation, and name the task Text-to-Traffic Generation (TTG). The key challenge of the TTG task is how to associate text with the spatial structure of the road network and traffic data for generating traffic situations. To this end, we propose ChatTraffic, the first diffusion model for text-to-traffic generation. To guarantee the consistency between synthetic and real data, we augment a diffusion model with the Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to extract spatial correlations of traffic data. In addition, we construct a large dataset containing text-traffic pairs for the TTG task. We benchmarked our model qualitatively and quantitatively on the released dataset. The experimental results indicate that ChatTraffic can generate realistic traffic situations from the text. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ChyaZhang/ChatTraffic

Mobility increases localizability: A survey on wireless indoor localization using inertial sensors

Wireless indoor positioning has been extensively studied for the past 2 decades and continuously attracted growing research efforts in mobile computing context. As the integration of multiple inertial sensors (e.g., accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer) to nowadays smartphones in recent years, human-centric mobility sensing is emerging and coming into vogue. Mobility information, as a new dimension in addition to wireless signals, can benefit localization in a number of ways, since location and mobility are by nature related in the physical world. In this article, we survey this new trend of mobility enhancing smartphone-based indoor localization. Specifically, we first study how to measure human mobility: what types of sensors we can use and what types of mobility information we can acquire. Next, we discuss how mobility assists localization with respect to enhancing location accuracy, decreasing deployment cost, and enriching location context. Moreover, considering the quality and cost of smartphone built-in sensors, handling measurement errors is essential and accordingly investigated. Combining existing work and our own working experiences, we emphasize the principles and conduct comparative study of the mainstream technologies. Finally, we conclude this survey by addressing future research directions and opportunities in this new and largely open area.</jats:p

DeMPT: Decoding-enhanced Multi-phase Prompt Tuning for Making LLMs Be Better Context-aware Translators

Generally, the decoder-only large language models (LLMs) are adapted to context-aware neural machine translation (NMT) in a concatenating way, where LLMs take the concatenation of the source sentence (i.e., intra-sentence context) and the inter-sentence context as the input, and then to generate the target tokens sequentially. This adaptation strategy, i.e., concatenation mode, considers intra-sentence and inter-sentence contexts with the same priority, despite an apparent difference between the two kinds of contexts. In this paper, we propose an alternative adaptation approach, named Decoding-enhanced Multi-phase Prompt Tuning (DeMPT), to make LLMs discriminately model and utilize the inter- and intra-sentence context and more effectively adapt LLMs to context-aware NMT. First, DeMPT divides the context-aware NMT process into three separate phases. During each phase, different continuous prompts are introduced to make LLMs discriminately model various information. Second, DeMPT employs a heuristic way to further discriminately enhance the utilization of the source-side inter- and intra-sentence information at the final decoding phase. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms the concatenation method, and further improves the performance of LLMs in discourse modeling.Comment: under reviewin

Lego DNA assembling, a simple in vitro method for constructing DNA molecule

Digestion-ligation based and recombination based methods for constructing recombinant DNA are the basic techniques in molecular biology and thus built one of the foundations for the modern life sciences. Here we describe a new strategy that can radically simplify some of the same task. The lego DNA assembling, based on strand annealing, allows in vitro assembly of multi DNA fragments in one step with precise junctions and excludes the need for any enzyme. As a proof of concept, we rapidly constructed plasmids from 4, 6 and 8 fragments with very high efficiencies (100%). And we found this method a powerful tool for synthetic biology, constructing a partial isoprene biosynthesis pathway (consisting of four genes) in 2 days. We also assembled a customized expression vector to show its modularity

Study on Application of T-S Fuzzy Observer in Speed Switching Control of AUVs Driven by States

Considering the inherent strongly nonlinear and coupling performance of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), the speed switching control method for AUV driven by states is presented. By using T-S fuzzy observer to estimate the states of AUV, the speed control strategies in lever plane, vertical plane, and speed kept are established, respectively. Then the adaptive switching law is introduced to switch the speed control strategies designed in real time. In the simulation, acoustic Doppler current profile/side scan sonar (ADCP/SSS) observation case is employed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that the efficiency of AUV was improved, the trajectory tracking error was reduced, and the steady-state ability was enhanced