Vlist and Ering: compact data structures for simplicial 2-complexes

Various data structures have been proposed for representing the connectivity of manifold triangle meshes. For example, the Extended Corner Table (ECT) stores V+6T references, where V and T respectively denote the vertex and triangle counts. ECT supports Random Access and Traversal (RAT) operators at Constant Amortized Time (CAT) cost. We propose two novel variations of ECT that also support RAT operations at CAT cost, but can be used to represent and process Simplicial 2-Complexes (S2Cs), which may represent star-connecting, non-orientable, and non-manifold triangulations along with dangling edges, which we call sticks. Vlist stores V+3T+3S+3(C+S-N) references, where S denotes the stick count, C denotes the number of edge-connected components and N denotes the number of star-connecting vertices. Ering stores 6T+3S+3(C+S-N) references, but has two advantages over Vlist: the Ering implementation of the operators is faster and is purely topological (i.e., it does not perform geometric queries). Vlist and Ering representations have two principal advantages over previously proposed representations for simplicial complexes: (1) Lower storage cost, at least for meshes with significantly more triangles than sticks, and (2) explicit support of side-respecting traversal operators which each walks from a corner on the face of a triangle t across an edge or a vertex of t, to a corner on a faces of a triangle or to an end of a stick that share a vertex with t, and this without ever piercing through the surface of a triangle.M.S

5IDER: Unified Query Rewriting for Steering, Intent Carryover, Disfluencies, Entity Carryover and Repair

Providing voice assistants the ability to navigate multi-turn conversations is a challenging problem. Handling multi-turn interactions requires the system to understand various conversational use-cases, such as steering, intent carryover, disfluencies, entity carryover, and repair. The complexity of this problem is compounded by the fact that these use-cases mix with each other, often appearing simultaneously in natural language. This work proposes a non-autoregressive query rewriting architecture that can handle not only the five aforementioned tasks, but also complex compositions of these use-cases. We show that our proposed model has competitive single task performance compared to the baseline approach, and even outperforms a fine-tuned T5 model in use-case compositions, despite being 15 times smaller in parameters and 25 times faster in latency.Comment: Interspeech 202

Epidemiology and clinical course of COVID-19 in Shanghai, China.

Background: Novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) is prevalent around the world. We aimed to describe epidemiological features and clinical course in Shanghai. Methods: We retrospectively analysed 325 cases admitted at Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, between January 20 and February 29, 2020. Results: 47.4% (154/325) had visited Wuhan within 2 weeks of illness onset. 57.2% occurred in 67 clusters; 40% were situated within 53 family clusters. 83.7% developed fever during the disease course. Median times from onset to first medical care, hospitalization and negative detection of nucleic acid by nasopharyngeal swab were 1, 4 and 8 days. Patients with mild disease using glucocorticoid tended to have longer viral shedding in blood and feces. At admission, 69.8% presented with lymphopenia and 38.8% had elevated D-dimers. Pneumonia was identified in 97.5% (314/322) of cases by chest CT scan. Severe-critical patients were 8% with a median time from onset to critical disease of 10.5 days. Half required oxygen therapy and 7.1% high-flow nasal oxygen. The case fatality rate was 0.92% with median time from onset to death of 16 days. Conclusion: COVID-19 cases in Shanghai were imported. Rapid identification, and effective control measures helped to contain the outbreak and prevent community transmission

Microfluidic Flexible Substrate Integrated Microstrip Antenna Sensor for Sensing of Moisture Content in Lubricating Oil

In this paper, a flexible microstrip patch antenna sensor is proposed for monitoring of the moisture content of lubricating oil. The sensor identifies liquids having different effective dielectric constants by detecting changes in the resonance frequency. The proposed antenna comprises a radiation patch, a metal ground plane, and a PDMS substrate with microchannels. The microchannels are etched on the PDMS substrate. When the relative permittivity of the microfluidic channel is 1.8∼12.5, the operating frequency of the proposed antenna changes from 2.230 to 2.116 GHz, and the amplitude of the reflection coefficient is greater than −26.3 dB. The simulation and measurement results show that the proposed sensor can monitor the lubricating oil with different moisture contents, which can cause frequency separation of at least 20 MHz and achieve a good linear response. Therefore, the proposed sensor has the feasibility of monitoring the quality of lubricating oil

Suppression of Crosstalk in Quantum Circuit Based on Instruction Exchange Rules and Duration

Crosstalk is the primary source of noise in quantum computing equipment. The parallel execution of multiple instructions in quantum computation causes crosstalk, which causes coupling between signal lines and mutual inductance and capacitance between signal lines, destroying the quantum state and causing the program to fail to execute correctly. Overcoming crosstalk is a critical prerequisite for quantum error correction and large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing. This paper provides an approach for suppressing crosstalk in quantum computers based on multiple instruction exchange rules and duration. Firstly, for the majority of the quantum gates that can be executed on quantum computing devices, a multiple instruction exchange rule is proposed. The multiple instruction exchange rule reorders quantum gates in quantum circuits and separates double quantum gates with high crosstalk on quantum circuits. Then, time stakes are inserted based on the duration of different quantum gates, and quantum gates with high crosstalk are carefully separated in the process of quantum circuit execution by quantum computing equipment to reduce the influence of crosstalk on circuit fidelity. Several benchmark experiments verify the proposed method’s effectiveness. In comparison to previous techniques, the proposed method improves fidelity by 15.97% on average

Effective photodegradation of 4-nitrophenol with CuO nano particles prepared by ionic liquids/water system

The hydrophobic ionic liquids/water two-phase system was developed to prepare CuO nano particles. The catalytic activity of the synthesized CuO was investigated by photodegradation of 4-nitrophenol (4-NP) in the presence of H2O2 under visible light irradiation. The optical properties of the synthesized CuO were characterized by ultraviolet–visible (UV–Vis) diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS). Experimental results indicated that the band gap energy (Eg), conduction band edge potential (ECB) and valence band edge potential (EVB) of the synthesized CuO were 1.37 eV, 0.625 eV and 1.995 eV, respectively. A degradation efficiency of 4-NP (4.8 mmol L−1) as high as 95.3% could be achieved under the conditions of pH 6.0, 0.48 g L−1 of CuO dosage, 1.4% of H2O2 dosage and 90 min of degradation time. The synthesized CuO exhibited poor catalytic activity under alkaline conditions due to the disassociation of 4-NP, which elevated the repulsion between CuO and the 4-NP anions. The synthesized CuO nano particles exhibited higher catalytic activity compared with the catalysts reported in literature. Furthermore, the synthesized CuO nano particles could be reused at least six times without decreasing their catalytic activity. Compared with the traditional hydrothermal method, mild operating conditions and time saving are the advantages of the developed method for the preparation of CuO

Evaluation and Impact Factors of the Mechanical Properties of Phloem Bundle Fibers Obtained from Kenaf Germplasm

The mechanical properties of kenaf phloem bundle fibers are valuable for reinforced composites or boards, more so than similar materials also used in textile or papermaking applications. 55 kenaf germplasm studied here showed an average phloem bundle fiber tensile strength of 643.6 MPa and an average elastic modulus of 23.3 GPa after chemical retting treatment. 19 of these kenaf germplasm had fiber tensile strengths >700 MPa, which can be attributed to intensive breeding programs. The fiber tensile strength and elastic modulus of kenaf germplasm had a significant positive correlation, but there was no such correlation between a fiber’s mechanical properties and its diameter or agronomic characteristics. Among 56 hybridized combination F1 generations, the highest tensile strength was 928.3 MPa from a combination of No.30 of Xinan Wuchi × Guatemala 4. Therefore, breeding and screening are both useful for improving the mechanical properties of kenaf phloem bundle fibers. However, the effects of the used bundle fiber preparation method or cultivation year on the fiber’s mechanical properties were more pronounced than those of the type of kenaf germplasm or breeding operation used. The mechanical properties of kenaf phloem bundle fibers treated by chemical retting were superior to those treated using natural retting