Exclusive (Dis)harmonies in Mandarin Chinese

The paper discusses two types of exclusive (dis)harmonies in Mandarin. Exclusive-(dis)harmony-A—only is compatible with few but not many, and exclusive-(dis)harmony-B—only is compatible with less than n but not more than n. We suggest Exclusive-(dis)harmony-A can be explained along the lines of Chen 2005. We further propose that Exclusive-disharmony-B can be ex- plained by Maximization failure (Fox 2007). But Maximization failure rules out Exclusive-harmony-B as well. We then propose to use a scalar presupposition of jiu/zhi/only to restrict the standard Rooth-style focus alternative set. This presupposition achieves two things: it captures the scalar meaning of only, and it allows maximization to work with less than n, by filtering out problematic alternatives

Unifying Universal and Existential wh's in Mandarin

The paper aims at a unified account of Mandarin non-interrogative wh's that have both universal and existential uses. Wh's are argued to uniformly denote existentials obligatorily triggering alternatives, exhaustifying different types of alternatives strengthens the existential into either universal or existential free choice items corresponding to the two uses of wh's, as is in the framework of Chierchia 2013b. Distribution and interpretation of the two types of wh's follow from their interaction with an even-like particle dou and competition between the two.

Mandarin Resultative Verb Compound Involves VP Complementation

Mandarin Resultative Verb Compounds (RVCs) are verbal complexes of the form V1-V2, where V1 denotes an activity and V2 the result of that activity. Previous literature either assigns to RVCs a Complex Verb structure [V V1-V2] (Li 1990, Williams 2012) or a Small Clause structure [V1P V1 [SCV2]] (Sybesma 1999). In the paper, I will propose a VP Complementation syntax for Mandarin RVC [V1P V1 [V2PV2P]] (similar to Sybesma 1999 but contra Williams 2011,see (1) (Also, in (1) there are multiple V-to-v movements, see Collins 2002)) and present new data to support it. Specifically, the data involves two types of Event Modifiers Duratives and Locatives, and I will show those event modifiers can modify either V1 or V2, independently; also, the positions of these modifiers determine their interpretations and that certain positions of Duratives are not allowed, all of which are predicted by the VP Complementation syntax

Parallel Toolkit for Measuring the Quality of Network Community Structure

Many networks display community structure which identifies groups of nodes within which connections are denser than between them. Detecting and characterizing such community structure, which is known as community detection, is one of the fundamental issues in the study of network systems. It has received a considerable attention in the last years. Numerous techniques have been developed for both efficient and effective community detection. Among them, the most efficient algorithm is the label propagation algorithm whose computational complexity is O(|E|). Although it is linear in the number of edges, the running time is still too long for very large networks, creating the need for parallel community detection. Also, computing community quality metrics for community structure is computationally expensive both with and without ground truth. However, to date we are not aware of any effort to introduce parallelism for this problem. In this paper, we provide a parallel toolkit to calculate the values of such metrics. We evaluate the parallel algorithms on both distributed memory machine and shared memory machine. The experimental results show that they yield a significant performance gain over sequential execution in terms of total running time, speedup, and efficiency.Comment: 8 pages; in Network Intelligence Conference (ENIC), 2014 Europea

Topics in Electromobility and Related Applications

In this thesis, we mainly discuss four topics on Electric Vehicles (EVs) in the context of smart grid and smart transportation systems. The first topic focuses on investigating the impacts of different EV charging strategies on the grid. In Chapter 3, we present a mathematical framework for formulating different EV charging problems and investigate a range of typical EV charging strategies with respect to different actors in the power system. Using this framework, we compare the performances of all charging strategies on a common power system simulation testbed, highlighting in each case positive and negative characteristics. The second topic is concerned with the applications of EVs with Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) capabilities. In Chapter 4, we apply certain ideas from cooperative control techniques to two V2G applications in different scenarios. In the first scenario, we harness the power of V2G technologies to reduce current imbalance in a three-phase power network. In the second scenario, we design a fair V2G programme to optimally determine the power dispatch from EVs in a microgrid scenario. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms are verified through a variety of simulation studies. The third topic discusses an optimal distributed energy management strategy for power generation in a microgrid scenario. In Chapter 5, we adapt the synchronised version of the Additive-Increase-Multiplicative-Decrease (AIMD) algorithms to minimise a cost utility function related to the power generation costs of distributed resources. We investigate the AIMD based strategy through simulation studies and we illustrate that the performance of the proposed method is very close to the full communication centralised case. Finally, we show that this idea can be easily extended to another application including thermal balancing requirements. The last topic focuses on a new design of the Speed Advisory System (SAS) for optimising both conventional and electric vehicles networks. In Chapter 6, we demonstrate that, by using simple ideas, one can design an effective SAS for electric vehicles to minimise group energy consumption in a distributed and privacy-aware manner; Matlab simulation are give to illustrate the effectiveness of this approach. Further, we extend this idea to conventional vehicles in Chapter 7 and we show that by using some of the ideas introduced in Chapter 6, group emissions of conventional vehicles can also be minimised under the same SAS framework. SUMO simulation and Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) tests involving real vehicles are given to illustrate user acceptability and ease of deployment. Finally, note that many applications in this thesis are based on the theories of a class of nonlinear iterative feedback systems. For completeness, we present a rigorous proof on global convergence of consensus of such systems in Chapter 2