“One Country, Two Systems,” Three Law Families, and Four Legal Regions: The Emerging Inter-Regional Conflicts of Law in China

With accumulation of sovereign debt in many large OECD countries it seems that attention is heightened on how to manage public resources more effectively. High levels of sovereign debt are partly related to the aftermath of the latest financial crisis, where resolution for many big economies was to intervene and use public resources to put an end to the expansion of the crisis. Public real estate is one of those resources, which’s efficient management has high importance on general public sector efficacy. It seems that governments around the world have a way to go toward efficiency in public real estate management. There seem to be rather wide differences in management practices and quality. This thesis is an attempt to quantify some choices Estonian government could take in terms of its public real estate management. Four different scenarios are compared and Monte Carlo Simulation tool is used for that purpose. Two of the scenarios are related to private sector involvement and two are not. Privatization of public assets does not only mean cashing out for the government. It has wider consequences by introducing market forces where they weren’t before. One of the most important points of interest in this thesis is what effect can market forces and change in incentives have on public real estate management. There can be both, positive and negative effects, but which ones would prevail? The model built during the process of the thesis tries to measure those effects with aggregate net present value and its volatility by looking at 30 years ahead. Simulation analyses is used to vary input variables in the range that seems to be supported by the observations made in the literature and in some cases, where data is not available, also according to more subjective view that of the author’s. As input and their characteristics are different for scenarios, it is of interest to document how do the main outputs, mean NPV and its volatility, vary along with inputs

Etalon Array Reconstructive Spectrometry.

Compact spectrometers are crucial in areas where size and weight may need to be minimized. These types of spectrometers often contain no moving parts, which makes for an instrument that can be highly durable. With the recent proliferation in low-cost and high-resolution cameras, camera-based spectrometry methods have the potential to make portable spectrometers small, ubiquitous, and cheap. Here, we demonstrate a novel method for compact spectrometry that uses an array of etalons to perform spectral encoding, and uses a reconstruction algorithm to recover the incident spectrum. This spectrometer has the unique capability for both high resolution and a large working bandwidth without sacrificing sensitivity, and we anticipate that its simplicity makes it an excellent candidate whenever a compact, robust, and flexible spectrometry solution is needed

Studies on Utilizing the Three Famous International Index Systems to Evaluate Scientific Research Level of Higher Learning Institutions

Science Citation Index (SCI), The Engineering Index (EI) and Index to Scientific & Technical Proceeding (ISTP) are widely accepted and used to evaluate the scientific research level of higher learning institutions by many country's science and technology field currently. After research, we point out the blemishes in this method and put forward the problems that need to be noticed, and then, under current conditions, bring forward brand-new standard and method to estimate research level, efficiency, fund exploitation and so on. One shouldn't over-emphasize the total amount of papers collected in SCI, EI & ISTP when evaluating the scientific research level of higher learning institutions, whereas using ‘comprehensive factor’ analysis method can make it more scientific and efficient

ECGadv: Generating Adversarial Electrocardiogram to Misguide Arrhythmia Classification System

Deep neural networks (DNNs)-powered Electrocardiogram (ECG) diagnosis systems recently achieve promising progress to take over tedious examinations by cardiologists. However, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks still lack comprehensive investigation. The existing attacks in image domain could not be directly applicable due to the distinct properties of ECGs in visualization and dynamic properties. Thus, this paper takes a step to thoroughly explore adversarial attacks on the DNN-powered ECG diagnosis system. We analyze the properties of ECGs to design effective attacks schemes under two attacks models respectively. Our results demonstrate the blind spots of DNN-powered diagnosis systems under adversarial attacks, which calls attention to adequate countermeasures.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 202

Time and Location Aware Mobile Data Pricing

Mobile users' correlated mobility and data consumption patterns often lead to severe cellular network congestion in peak hours and hot spots. This paper presents an optimal design of time and location aware mobile data pricing, which incentivizes users to smooth traffic and reduce network congestion. We derive the optimal pricing scheme through analyzing a two-stage decision process, where the operator determines the time and location aware prices by minimizing his total cost in Stage I, and each mobile user schedules his mobile traffic by maximizing his payoff (i.e., utility minus payment) in Stage II. We formulate the two-stage decision problem as a bilevel optimization problem, and propose a derivative-free algorithm to solve the problem for any increasing concave user utility functions. We further develop low complexity algorithms for the commonly used logarithmic and linear utility functions. The optimal pricing scheme ensures a win-win situation for the operator and users. Simulations show that the operator can reduce the cost by up to 97.52% in the logarithmic utility case and 98.70% in the linear utility case, and users can increase their payoff by up to 79.69% and 106.10% for the two types of utilities, respectively, comparing with a time and location independent pricing benchmark. Our study suggests that the operator should provide price discounts at less crowded time slots and locations, and the discounts need to be significant when the operator's cost of provisioning excessive traffic is high or users' willingness to delay traffic is low.Comment: This manuscript serves as the online technical report of the article accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computin