(De-)activating the growth machine for redevelopment: the case of Liede urban village in Guangzhou

This research investigates the mechanism of urban village redevelopment in south China. Through a revised typology of place entrepreneurs based on the growth machine thesis and a case study of Liede village in central Guangzhou, it illustrates how land-based interests embedded in an imbalanced power relationship can (de-)activate urban village redevelopment. The study reveals that while urban villagers, as represented by the village collective, have entrenched interests in the redevelopment process, the city government – as monopolistic land manager and place entrepreneur – plays the deciding role in forging and halting a growth machine geared towards urban village redevelopment. Although developers are also part of the process, the (de-)activation of redevelopment growth machine/coalition in Guangzhou has largely been dominated by the city government. With a comparative view on the original growth machine model, it is hoped that this study would furnish both theoretical and practical thoughts for future research

Non-local Attention Optimized Deep Image Compression

This paper proposes a novel Non-Local Attention Optimized Deep Image Compression (NLAIC) framework, which is built on top of the popular variational auto-encoder (VAE) structure. Our NLAIC framework embeds non-local operations in the encoders and decoders for both image and latent feature probability information (known as hyperprior) to capture both local and global correlations, and apply attention mechanism to generate masks that are used to weigh the features for the image and hyperprior, which implicitly adapt bit allocation for different features based on their importance. Furthermore, both hyperpriors and spatial-channel neighbors of the latent features are used to improve entropy coding. The proposed model outperforms the existing methods on Kodak dataset, including learned (e.g., Balle2019, Balle2018) and conventional (e.g., BPG, JPEG2000, JPEG) image compression methods, for both PSNR and MS-SSIM distortion metrics

Research on the Organizational Development Model for Intercultural Communication Competence

On the basis of the three factors theory composed of knowledge, motivation and skills in intercultural communication competence, constructed index system of intercultural communication competence. Through the survey of 350 DL University’s undergraduates, the overall level of their intercultural communication competence is 3.34 by SPSS software，Knowledge factor, motivation factor and skills factor are 3.16, 3.62 and 3.24. The data shows that the DL University’s undergraduates’ intercultural communication competence is at the medium level，and the attitude or requirement of the undergraduates in DL University to expect or participate in intercultural communication are relatively strong, but the knowledge and skills of intercultural communication are inefficient. Finally, put forward the organizational development model with the integration of knowledge, motivation and skills based on the data analysis results