Perennial

The adjective “perennial” suggests something enduring or perpetually renewing. The spirit of the perennial can be found in many traditional Chinese families. Despite illnesses, hardships and separations, being perennial means that one will always find the means to re-root and persevere. Perennial (2020) arrives in two parts. The frontal part interlaces spoken memories of the artist’s grandmother with gestures of returning home captured in Super 8 and 35mm stills and processed digitally. The back of the work weaves together a fictitious narrative using writings found or made on the backs of the photographs, providing the work with an alternative ending

Spectrally and Energy Efficient Wireless Communications: Signal and System Design, Mathematical Modelling and Optimisation

This thesis explores engineering studies and designs aiming to meeting the requirements of enhancing capacity and energy efficiency for next generation communication networks. Challenges of spectrum scarcity and energy constraints are addressed and new technologies are proposed, analytically investigated and examined. The thesis commences by reviewing studies on spectrally and energy-efficient techniques, with a special focus on non-orthogonal multicarrier modulation, particularly spectrally efficient frequency division multiplexing (SEFDM). Rigorous theoretical and mathematical modelling studies of SEFDM are presented. Moreover, to address the potential application of SEFDM under the 5th generation new radio (5G NR) heterogeneous numerologies, simulation-based studies of SEFDM coexisting with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are conducted. New signal formats and corresponding transceiver structure are designed, using a Hilbert transform filter pair for shaping pulses. Detailed modelling and numerical investigations show that the proposed signal doubles spectral efficiency without performance degradation, with studies of two signal formats; uncoded narrow-band internet of things (NB-IoT) signals and unframed turbo coded multi-carrier signals. The thesis also considers using constellation shaping techniques and SEFDM for capacity enhancement in 5G system. Probabilistic shaping for SEFDM is proposed and modelled to show both transmission energy reduction and bandwidth saving with advantageous flexibility for data rate adaptation. Expanding on constellation shaping to improve performance further, a comparative study of multidimensional modulation techniques is carried out. A four-dimensional signal, with better noise immunity is investigated, for which metaheuristic optimisation algorithms are studied, developed, and conducted to optimise bit-to-symbol mapping. Finally, a specially designed machine learning technique for signal and system design in physical layer communications is proposed, utilising the application of autoencoder-based end-to-end learning. Multidimensional signal modulation with multidimensional constellation shaping is proposed and optimised by using machine learning techniques, demonstrating significant improvement in spectral and energy efficiencies

Signed Distance-based Deep Memory Recommender

Personalized recommendation algorithms learn a user's preference for an item by measuring a distance/similarity between them. However, some of the existing recommendation models (e.g., matrix factorization) assume a linear relationship between the user and item. This approach limits the capacity of recommender systems, since the interactions between users and items in real-world applications are much more complex than the linear relationship. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we design and propose a deep learning framework called Signed Distance-based Deep Memory Recommender, which captures non-linear relationships between users and items explicitly and implicitly, and work well in both general recommendation task and shopping basket-based recommendation task. Through an extensive empirical study on six real-world datasets in the two recommendation tasks, our proposed approach achieved significant improvement over ten state-of-the-art recommendation models

Effect Analysis of banning of motorbikes and limiting of electric scooters

This paper establishes the optimization model of the policy of banning of motorbikes and limiting of electric scooters in China, so that the traffic situation in Shenzhen can meet the requirements of public travel and the total amount of traffic resources. Under the condition of ensuring road traffic safety, traffic efficiency and environmental protection requirements, giving the ideal time schedule. Through a three-day traffic index of Shenzhen urban area statistical analysis, software is used to match the speed of the vehicle to capture the speed and the relationship between each time period. Then, the speed of each day is analyzed to know the impact on traffic in Shenzhen. Using the model, we can get the impact of different sections of electric vehicles on the traffic conditions. It can be concluded that the policy of banning of motorbikes and limiting of electric scooters has a significant improvement effect on the traffic in Shen-zhen. In the case of people, the impact of traffic on the case of small and appropriate to relax the restrictions on the motorcycle. The necessity and practicability of banning of motorbikes and limiting of electric scooters are analyzed by the situation of casualties in motorcycle and electric car accidents with the trend and prediction of data. By quantita-tive analysis, time, place, cause, casualty rate, trend of motorcycle and electric car accident, optimal time and place arrangement are obtained. Through the physical pollutant index of Shenzhen, the water pollution index mathematical analysis, its function trend is observed from the intuitive chart to see the above three indicators in the ban and power. After the promulgation of the policy, it has a more significant downward trend. The policy should be pursued as it had a positive impact on the environment and contributes to environmental protection

Exploration of students’ information behaviour and experience of assignment completion process

Assignments play an important role in consolidating knowledge for university students. Understanding students’ information behaviour and experience in this type of work task, i.e., students’ assignments, would be beneficial to the design of learning platforms or search systems to better support effective and efficient information behaviours. A 37-day online observation of 14 university students in China, working on one assignment through client logging, combined with questionnaires and interviews were conducted in this study. This study used descriptive analysis to describe students’ information behaviours and experiences during the assignment completion processes at different stages. According to the proportion of efforts devoted to seeking information and working for the assignment in four evenly distributed periods, the students could be divided into four time-allocation types, namely 'Ninjas', 'Turtles', 'Time wasters' and 'Pursuers'. Different types of students had different information behaviours and experiences during assignment completion process. When applying Information Seeking Process model to analysis students’ information behaviours for the assignment completion, it is necessary to combine the time context and examine how each time allocation type of students would allocate their information seeking effort in task completion behaviours.Peer Reviewe

New Approach to Observer-Based Finite-Time H∞ Control of Discrete-Time One-Sided Lipschitz Systems with Uncertainties

This paper investigates the finite-time H∞ control problem for a class of nonlinear discrete-time one-sided Lipschitz systems with uncertainties. Using the one-sided Lipschitz and quadratically inner-bounded conditions, the authors derive less conservative criterion for the controller design and observer design. A new criterion is proposed to ensure the closedloop system is finite-time bounded (FTB). The sufficient conditions are established to ensure the closed-loop system is H∞ finite-time bounded (H∞ FTB) in terms of matrix inequalities. The controller gains and observer gains are given. A numerical example is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed results