Engineering

Article | 2020-10-28

Buying Time for an Effective Epidemic Response: The Impact of a Public Holiday for Outbreak Control on COVID-19 Epidemic Spread

Rapid responses in the early stage of a new epidemic are crucial in outbreak control. Public holidays for outbreak control could provide a critical time window for a rapid rollout of social distancing and other control measures at a large population scale. The objective of our study was to explore the impact of the timing and duration of outbreak-control holidays on the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic spread during the early stage in China. We developed a compartment model to simulate the dynamic transmission of COVID-19 in China starting from January 2020. We projected and compared epidemic trajectories with and without an outbreak-control holiday that started during the Chinese Lunar New Year. We considered multiple scenarios of the outbreak-control holiday with different durations and starting times, and under different assumptions about viral transmission rates. We estimated the delays in days to reach certain thresholds of infections under different scenarios. Our results show that the outbreak-control holiday in China likely stalled the spread of COVID-19 for several days. The base case outbreak-control holiday (21 d for Hubei Province and 10 d for all other provinces) delayed the time to reach 100 000 confirmed infections by 7.54 d. A longer outbreak-control holiday would have had stronger effects. A nationwide outbreak-control holiday of 21 d would have delayed the time to 100000 confirmed infections by nearly 10 d. Furthermore, we find that outbreak-control holidays that start earlier in the course of a new epidemic are more effective in stalling epidemic spread than later holidays and that additional control measures during the holidays can boost the holiday effect. In conclusion, an outbreak-control holiday can likely effectively delay the transmission of epidemics that spread through social contacts. The temporary delay in the epidemic trajectory buys time, which scientists can use to discover transmission routes and identify effective public health interventions and which governments can use to build physical infrastructure, organize medical supplies, and deploy human resources for longterm epidemic mitigation and control efforts.

Simiao Chen , Qiushi Chen et al.

Article | 2020-10-28

Can Masks Be Reused After Hot Water Decontamination During the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Masks have become one of the most indispensable pieces of personal protective equipment and are important strategic products during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Due to the huge mask demand–supply gap all over the world, the development of user-friendly technologies and methods is urgently needed to effectively extend the service time of masks. In this article, we report a very simple approach for the decontamination of masks for multiple reuse during the COVID-19 pandemic. Used masks were soaked in hot water at a temperature greater than 56 °C for 30 min, based on a recommended method to kill COVID-19 virus by the National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China. The masks were then dried using an ordinary household hair dryer to recharge the masks with electrostatic charge to recover their filtration function (the so-called "hot water decontamination + charge regeneration" method). Three kinds of typical masks (disposable medical masks, surgical masks, and KN95-grade masks) were treated and tested. The filtration efficiencies of the regenerated masks were almost maintained and met the requirements of the respective standards. These findings should have important implications for the reuse of polypropylene masks during the COVID-19 pandemic. The performance evolution of masks during human wear was further studied, and a company (Zhejiang Runtu Co., Ltd.) applied this method to enable their workers to extend the use of masks. Mask use at the company was reduced from one mask per day per person to one mask every three days per person, and 122 500 masks were saved during the period from 20 February to 30 March 2020. Furthermore, a new method for detection of faulty masks based on the penetrant inspection of fluorescent nanoparticles was established, which may provide scientific guidance and technical methods for the future development of reusable masks, structural optimization, and the formulation of comprehensive performance evaluation standards.

Dan Wang , Bao-Chang Sun et al.

Article | 2020-10-14

Artificial intelligence and wireless communications

The applications of (AI) and (ML) technologies in have drawn significant attention recently. AI has demonstrated real success in speech understanding, image identification, and natural language processing domains, thus exhibiting its great potential in solving problems that cannot be easily modeled. AI techniques have become an enabler in to fulfill the increasing and diverse requirements across a large range of application scenarios. In this paper, we elaborate on several typical wireless scenarios, such as channel modeling, channel decoding and signal detection, and channel coding design, in which AI plays an important role in . Then, AI and information theory are discussed from the viewpoint of the information bottleneck. Finally, we discuss some ideas about how AI techniques can be deeply integrated with wireless communication systems.

Jun Wang , Rong Li et al.

Article | 2020-10-14

Multi-dimensional optimization for approximate near-threshold computing

The demise of Dennard’s scaling has created both power and utilization wall challenges for computer systems. As transistors operating in the near-threshold region are able to obtain flexible trade-offs between power and , it is regarded as an alternative solution to the scaling challenge. A reduction in supply voltage will nevertheless generate significant reliability challenges, while maintaining an error-free system that generates high costs in both and consumption. The main purpose of research on computer architecture has therefore shifted from improvement to complex multi-objective optimization. In this paper, we propose a three-dimensional optimization approach which can effectively identify the best system configuration to establish a balance among , , and reliability. We use a dynamic programming algorithm to determine the proper voltage and approximate level based on three predictors: system , consumption, and output quality. We propose an which uses a hardware/software co-design fault injection platform to evaluate the impact of the error on output quality under (NTC). Evaluation results demonstrate that our approach can lead to a 28% improvement in output quality with a 10% drop in overall efficiency; this translates to an approximately 20% average improvement in accuracy, power, and .

Jing Wang , Wei-wei Liang et al.

Article | 2020-10-14

A low-overhead asynchronous consensus framework for distributed bundle adjustment

Generally, the (DBA) method uses multiple worker nodes to solve the bundle adjustment problems and overcomes the computation and memory storage limitations of a single computer. However, the performance considerably degrades owing to the introduced by the additional block partitioning step and synchronous waiting. Therefore, we propose a low- consensus framework. A based asynchronous method is proposed to early achieve consensus with respect to the faster worker nodes to avoid waiting for the slower ones. A scene summarization procedure is designed and integrated into the block partitioning step to ensure that clustering can be performed on the small summarized scene. Experiments conducted on public datasets show that our method can improve the worker node utilization rate and reduce the block partitioning time. Also, sample applications are demonstrated using our large-scale culture heritage datasets.

Zhuo-hao Liu , Chang-yu Diao et al.

Article | 2020-10-14

Automatic synthesis of advertising images according to a specified style

Images are widely used by companies to advertise their products and promote awareness of their brands. The automatic synthesis of advertising images is challenging because the advertising message must be clearly conveyed while complying with the style required for the product, brand, or target audience. In this study, we proposed a to capture individual design attributes and the relationships between elements in advertising images with the aim of automatically synthesizing the input of elements into an advertising image according to a specified style. To achieve this multi-format advertisement design, we created a dataset containing 13 280 advertising images with rich annotations that encompassed the outlines and colors of the elements, in addition to the classes and goals of the advertisements. Using our probabilistic models, users guided the style of synthesized advertisements via additional constraints (e.g., context-based keywords). We applied our method to a variety of design tasks, and the results were evaluated in several perceptual studies, which showed that our method improved users’ satisfaction by 7.1% compared to designs generated by nonprofessional students, and that more users preferred the coloring results of our designs to those generated by the color harmony model and Colormind.

Wei-tao You , Hao Jiang et al.

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