Higher Education as a Field of Study in China: Defining Knowledge and Curriculum Structure concerns the complexity of higher education as an academic field-the evolving nature of the field in light of the overall development of higher education in China. It reviews how higher education as a field of study has evolved in China since 1978 and how the field has been shaped by political and social forces, as well as institutional culture.Xin Wang argues that higher education is...

This book provides a systematic and in-depth introduction to distributed optimal adaptive cooperative control for multiagent systems from a theoretical perspective. The major research topics include: adaptive neural networks-based control schemes under multiconstraints, adaptive optimal control, event-triggered adaptive optimal control and data-based reinforcement learning control. The comprehensive and systematic treatment of adaptive optimal control in multiagent systems is one of the ma...

This book consists of two parts: Part I Methodologies for Video Grounding and Part II Generalized Video Grounding and Trending Directions. To make this book self-contained and cutting edge, Part I will cover basic and advanced methodologies for Video Grounding, discussing key comparisons with several representative Vision-Language learning tasks including multimodal understanding and generation. Part II will cover our insights for Generalized Video Grounding and the development of Video Gr...

Angiosperms are the most diversi ed plant group in the world, being represented by ca 300,000 species in about 400 families. Like all of Life, including ourselves, they have had their own history and gone through many evolutionary stages before they arrived at their current forms. The origin of Angiospermae ( owering plants) has been the subject of much dispute because this is a key event in the history of life, and has a far-reaching in uence on our understanding of relationships among se...

This book discusses the controversial and conflicting hypotheses on the origin of angiosperms, which was generally assumed to be restricted to the Cretaceous and later ages. Since publishing the first edition of “The Dawn of Angiosperms” in 2010, several important advances have been made in this field of science, namely 1) the discovery of new fossil angiosperms from the Jurassic; 2) European researchers discovering angiosperm-like pollen from the Triassic; and most importantly 3) the disc...

A dominant epistemological assumption behind Western philosophy is that it is possible to locate some form of commonality between languages, traditions, or cultures - such as a common language or lexicon, or a common notion of rationality - which makes full linguistic communication between them always attainable. Xinli Wang argues that the thesis of incommensurability challenges this assumption by exploring why and how linguistic communication between two conceptually disparate languages, ...

This brief proposes that the keys to internet cross-layer optimization are the development of non-standard implicit primal-dual solvers for underlying optimization problems, and design of jointly optimal network protocols as decomposition of such solvers. Relying on this novel design-space oriented approach, the author develops joint TCP congestion control and wireless-link scheduling schemes for wireless applications over Internet with centralized and distributed (multi-hop) wireless link...

This book offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of embodied artificial intelligence (AI) and its integration with swarm manipulation, navigation, and tracking tasks. It uniquely bridges the gap in the existing literature by providing a thorough review of swarm-embodied AI, focusing on collaborative perception and decision-making methods. Its standout features include a systematic approach, detailed discussions on advanced directions, and a practical case study on multi-robot multi...

This book provides a direct method based on system solutions to address the problems related to the analysis and control of delayed neural networks. The method proposed in this book is important for the following reasons: It does not involve the construct of any Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional (LKF), which overcomes the difficulty in constructing an appropriate and effective LKF; It can provide more simpler sufficient conditions, and hence it possesses less computational complexity; It can ...

This book focuses on the following three topics in the theory of boundary value problems of nonlinear second order elliptic partial differential equations and systems: (i) eigenvalue problem, (ii) upper and lower solutions method, (iii) topological degree method, and deals with the existence of solutions, more specifically non-constant positive solutions, as well as the uniqueness, stability and asymptotic behavior of such solutions.While not all-encompassing, these topics represen...

The parabolic partial differential equations model one of the most important processes in the real-world: diffusion. Whether it is the diffusion of energy in space-time, the diffusion of species in ecology, the diffusion of chemicals in biochemical processes, or the diffusion of information in social networks, diffusion processes are ubiquitous and crucial in the physical and natural world as well as our everyday lives.This book is self-contained and covers key topics such as the L...

Both of her rebirths occurred in the seventies, when technology was still underdeveloped. Lu Xinfei felt that she was born to be unlucky.However, on the second time, Lu Xinfei, who was used to living the life of an unlucky person, came back from the dead end. Although she was reborn into someone else's body, the difference was that this time, she was reborn into a child.Wait a minute, who was that familiar person? Let Lu Xinfei think...