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...

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...

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...

In-depth exploration of machine learning techniques applied to UAV operations and communications, highlighting areas of potential growth and research gapsArtificial Intelligence for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles provides a comprehensive overview of machine learning (ML) techniques used in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operations, communications, sensing, and computing. It emphasizes key components of UAV activity to which ML can significantly contribute includi...

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...

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 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 ...

With the rapid advancement of sensor technology and digital system, the capabilities of network communication have significantly improved, allowing multiple computing nodes to exchange information and collaborate seamlessly through networks. This progress has accelerated the development of distributed optimization theory and its applications in emerging fields such as low altitude economy, big data, and artificial intelligence. These emerging domains usually involve solving complex large-s...

Making polymers into nanoparticles as an essential step in polymer solution processing is of key importance for many applications of polymers. This book seeks to uncover the basics and recent advances in polymer nanoparticles, including polymer synthesis, self-assembly, properties, and applications. It encompasses the various preparation methods of polymer nanoparticles, broadly ranged from single chain collapse to polymerization methods and solution self-assembly. It showcases a wide rang...

This book is written based on authors' research on cement hydration during the past decade. It establishes simulation model to evaluate the influence of crystal defects on the dissolution of tricalcium silicate and morphology change of particles and explores the hydration kinetics and microstructure development of tricalcium silicate under the mixed control of dissolution, diffusion, as well as boundary nucleation and growth. It also provides a theoretical basis for regulating the microstr...