Great Walls from Mao to Now: A Biographical Perspective on Adult Education Inside Chinese Communist Revolution

From 1921 onwards, adult education was a vital corollary of Chinese Communist revolution. In 1954 Yao Zhongda lived near Mao in the Zhongnanhai and became Chief of the Bureau of Workers’ and Peasants Education. He is now 86 years old. The purpose of this study was to capture his biography and reflect on what it means for 21st century China. Data was secured during a 10-day Beijing interview session. Yao is an outstanding figure in Chinese adult education and today’s scholar-officials could learn a lot from him

Efficient Gradient Approximation Method for Constrained Bilevel Optimization

Bilevel optimization has been developed for many machine learning tasks with large-scale and high-dimensional data. This paper considers a constrained bilevel optimization problem, where the lower-level optimization problem is convex with equality and inequality constraints and the upper-level optimization problem is non-convex. The overall objective function is non-convex and non-differentiable. To solve the problem, we develop a gradient-based approach, called gradient approximation method, which determines the descent direction by computing several representative gradients of the objective function inside a neighborhood of the current estimate. We show that the algorithm asymptotically converges to the set of Clarke stationary points, and demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm by the experiments on hyperparameter optimization and meta-learning

Research on the Effectiveness of the Confucius Institute (Classroom) Based on Linear Regression Models

China has invested heavily in development of the Confucius Institute (Classroom) for the going-global of Chinese language and culture. And its effectiveness evaluation is an essential reference to the reinvestment on the Confucius Institute (Classroom) development as well as to its budget reallocation. Considering that there were basically no such researches in this field ever before, linear regression models (LRMs) were employed in this paper to research the effectiveness of Confucius Institute and establish fitting function models between inputs and outputs, which could provide a tool to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness in the future. And in this way, the conclusions could be more objective and bases of resource redistribution more scientific. Based on current data, it is found that the growth of the number of government-sponsored Chinese teachers and volunteers lags behind that of the "rigid Chinese language learners" for more than 2 years; If China invests 1,000 Yuan in the project of "the Salary and Training Fee of Chinese Deans and Teachers (including Volunteers) " , the number of the "rigid Chinese language learners" will rise by 10 to 13; if there is an additional overseas test center in the Confucius Institute (Classroom), the "rigid Chinese language learners" of this semester will rise by more than 5,927; and if there is an additional registered student in the Confucius Institute (Classroom), it will rise by more than 6

A New Paradigm for the Etymology and Trend Study from the Perspective of Culturomics

As an emerging discipline in 2011, culturomics belongs to cultural studies mainly by way of diachronic research and large-scale corpora, so it could be significative for the etymology and trend studies. In this paper, a large-scale diachronic corpus was established based on culturomics, and the condition and quality basic-level category vocabulary (BLCV) is taken as examples for analyses, so as to obtain relevant data and conclusions. It is shown that about 90% of the condition and quality BLCV was originated earlier than Sui, Tang and the Five Dynasties, and the first-level BLCV is earlier than the second-level and the third-level in aspect of origin time. The higher BLCV level, the greater the use rate increase, with more obvious stable development in the diachronic respect. Thus, culturomics, as a new paradigm in linguistic researches, is confirmed to be feasible, distinctive and irreplaceable in an era of big data