A stochastic user-operator assignment game for microtransit service evaluation: A case study of Kussbus in Luxembourg

This paper proposes a stochastic variant of the stable matching model from Rasulkhani and Chow [1] which allows microtransit operators to evaluate their operation policy and resource allocations. The proposed model takes into account the stochastic nature of users' travel utility perception, resulting in a probabilistic stable operation cost allocation outcome to design ticket price and ridership forecasting. We applied the model for the operation policy evaluation of a microtransit service in Luxembourg and its border area. The methodology for the model parameters estimation and calibration is developed. The results provide useful insights for the operator and the government to improve the ridership of the service.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1912.0198

A user-operator assignment game with heterogeneous user groups for empirical evaluation of a microtransit service in Luxembourg

We tackle the problem of evaluating the impact of different operation policies on the performance of a microtransit service. This study is the first empirical application using the stable matching modeling framework to evaluate different operation cost allocation and pricing mechanisms on microtransit service. We extend the deterministic stable matching model to a stochastic reliability-based one to consider user's heterogeneous perceptions of utility on the service routes. The proposed model is applied to the evaluation of Kussbus microtransit service in Luxembourg. We found that the current Kussbus operation is not a stable outcome. By reducing their route operating costs of 50%, it is expected to increase the ridership of 10%. If Kussbus can reduce in-vehicle travel time on their own by 20%, they can significantly increase profit several folds from the baseline

Does urbanization have spatial spillover effect on poverty reduction: empirical evidence from rural China

In light of a scarcity of research on the spatial effects of urbanization on poverty reduction, this study uses panel data on 30 provinces in China from 2009 to 2019 to construct a system of indices to assess poverty that spans the four dimensions of the economy, education, health, and living. We use the spatial autocorrelation test and the spatial Durbin model (SDM) to analyze the spatial effects of urbanization on poverty reduction in these different dimensions. The main conclusions are as follows: (a) China’s urbanization has the characteristics of spatial aggregation and a spatial spillover effect. (b) Different dimensions of poverty had the attributes of spatial agglomeration, and Moran’s index of a reduction in economic poverty was the highest. Under the SDM, the different dimensions of poverty also showed a significant positive spatial correlation. (c) Urbanization has a significant effect on poverty reduction along the dimensions of the economy, education, and living, but has little effect on reducing health poverty. It has a spatial spillover effect on poverty reduction in economic and living contexts. (d) There were spatial differences in the effect of urbanization on relieving economic and living-related poverty

Molecular Basis of PIP2-dependent Conformational Switching of Phosphorylated CD44 in binding FERM

Association of the cellular adhesive protein CD44 and the N-terminal (FERM) domain of cytoskeleton adaptors is critical for cell proliferation, migration and signaling. Phosphorylation of the cytoplasmic domain (CTD) of CD44 acts as an important regulator of the protein association, but the structural transformation and dynamics mechanism remain enigmatic. In this study, extensive coarse-grained simulations were employed to explore the molecular details in the formation of CD44-FERM complex under S291 and S325 phosphorylation, a modification path known to exert reciprocal effects on the protein association. We find that phosphorylation of S291 inhibits complexation by causing the CTD of CD44 to adopt a more closed structure. In contrast, S325 phosphorylation liberates the CD44-CTD from the membrane surface and promotes the linkage with FERM. The phosphorylation-driven transformation is found to occur in a PIP2-dependent manner, with PIP2 effecting the relative stability of the closed and open conformation, and a replacement of PIP2 by POPS greatly abrogates this effect. The revealed interdependent regulation mechanism by phosphorylation and PIP2 in the association of CD44 and FERM further strengthens our understanding of the molecular basis of cellular signaling and migration.</p

AiM: Taking Answers in Mind to Correct Chinese Cloze Tests in Educational Applications

To automatically correct handwritten assignments, the traditional approach is to use an OCR model to recognize characters and compare them to answers. The OCR model easily gets confused on recognizing handwritten Chinese characters, and the textual information of the answers is missing during the model inference. However, teachers always have these answers in mind to review and correct assignments. In this paper, we focus on the Chinese cloze tests correction and propose a multimodal approach (named AiM). The encoded representations of answers interact with the visual information of students' handwriting. Instead of predicting 'right' or 'wrong', we perform the sequence labeling on the answer text to infer which answer character differs from the handwritten content in a fine-grained way. We take samples of OCR datasets as the positive samples for this task, and develop a negative sample augmentation method to scale up the training data. Experimental results show that AiM outperforms OCR-based methods by a large margin. Extensive studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our multimodal approach.Comment: Accepted to COLING 202