Relationships between early childhood education and care environments, daily movement behaviours and adiposity in toddlers

The overall purpose of this Doctorate was to add to the evidence base on the relationships between the environment in early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres, movement behaviour (physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep), and adiposity, in young children. This thesis comprises a literature review, followed by six studies: the first study (Environmental Characteristics of Early Childhood Education and Care Centres and Young Children’s Weight Status: A Systematic Review) systematically reviewed ECEC environmental correlates of weight status in children under the age of 6 years using a socio-environmental framework. From the eight included studies, 22 environmental characteristics were identified and classified into four domains (physical, political, economic, and sociocultural); of these, six correlates were found. ‘Active environment’ ‘sedentary opportunities’, ‘active play time’, ‘high sugar and high fat served’, ‘educators’ weight status’ and ‘educators’ habitual physical activity level’ were associated with weight status in young children

Towards Omni-generalizable Neural Methods for Vehicle Routing Problems

Learning heuristics for vehicle routing problems (VRPs) has gained much attention due to the less reliance on hand-crafted rules. However, existing methods are typically trained and tested on the same task with a fixed size and distribution (of nodes), and hence suffer from limited generalization performance. This paper studies a challenging yet realistic setting, which considers generalization across both size and distribution in VRPs. We propose a generic meta-learning framework, which enables effective training of an initialized model with the capability of fast adaptation to new tasks during inference. We further develop a simple yet efficient approximation method to reduce the training overhead. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and benchmark instances of the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at: https://github.com/RoyalSkye/Omni-VRP.Comment: Accepted at ICML 202