The book presents selected papers at the 8th Conference on Sound and Music Technology (CSMT) held in November 2020, at Taiyuan, Shanxi, China. CSMT is a multidisciplinary conference focusing on audio processing and understanding with bias on music and acoustic signals. The primary aim of the conference is to promote the collaboration between art society and technical society in China. In this proceeding, the paper included covers a wide range topic from speech, signal processing, music understanding, machine learning and signal processing for advanced medical diagnosis and treatment applications; which demonstrates the target of CSMT merging arts and science research together.its content caters to scholars, researchers, engineers, artists, and education practitioners not only from academia but also industry, who are interested in audio/acoustics analysis signal processing, music, sound, and artificial intelligence (AI).

This book systematically reviews the experiences and problems encountered in the development of China's rural areas over the past three decades since the start of the country's economic reform. As such, it addresses the most important aspects in terms of China's rural communities, farmers and agriculture from the perspective of development, such as the agricultural management system, rural land tenure system, rural fiscal and taxation system, financial system, science and technology system, rural governance structure, poverty alleviation, environmental protection, etc. The approach employed combines essential theories, laws, and policy strategies with rural development practice in order to analyze the success stories and lingering problems, to explore the causes of both, and to offer an outlook on the future of rural development.

Despite the recent development and interest in the photonics of metallic wire structures, the relatively simple concepts and physics often remain obscured or poorly explained to those who do not specialize in the field. Electromagnetic Behaviour of Metallic Wire Structures provides a clear and coherent guide to understanding these phenomena without excessive numerical calculations. Including both background material and detailed derivations of the various different formulae applied, Electromagnetic Behaviour of Metallic Wire Structures describes how to extend basic circuit theory relating to voltages, currents, and resistances of metallic wire networks to include situations where the currents are no longer spatially uniform along the wire. This lays a foundation for a deeper understanding of the many new phenomena observed in meta-electromagnetic materials. Examples of applications are included to support this new approach making Electromagnetic Behaviour of Metallic Wire Structures a comprehensive and self-contained volume suitable for use by specialists, non-specialist, researchers and professionals in other relevant fields and even students.

- Presents the first research by a major Asian university on the seismic shift to online learning in higher education due to the pandemic - Offers insights direct from global university leaders on the leadership of higher education institutes through the pandemic - Provides students, academics and policy makers with research and policy implications for the wider higher education sector.

This book is a compilation of selected papers from the 8th International Multidisciplinary Conference on Optofluidics (IMCO 2018) held in Shanghai on August 5-8, 2018, as well as papers from the IMCO 2019 held in Hong Kong on June 14-17, 2019. The work focuses on the current development in the fields of optofluidics, microfluidics, silicon photonics, optical metamaterials and other related areas. Readers from both academia and industry will benefit from the experts' opinion and the lasted development in the multidisciplinary field of optofluidics.

The book presents selected papers at the 8th Conference on Sound and Music Technology (CSMT) held in November 2020, at Taiyuan, Shanxi, China. CSMT is a multidisciplinary conference focusing on audio processing and understanding with bias on music and acoustic signals. The primary aim of the conference is to promote the collaboration between art society and technical society in China. In this proceeding, the paper included covers a wide range topic from speech, signal processing, music understanding, machine learning and signal processing for advanced medical diagnosis and treatment applications; which demonstrates the target of CSMT merging arts and science research together.its content caters to scholars, researchers, engineers, artists, and education practitioners not only from academia but also industry, who are interested in audio/acoustics analysis signal processing, music, sound, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Despite the recent development and interest in the photonics of metallic wire structures, the relatively simple concepts and physics often remain obscured or poorly explained to those who do not specialize in the field. Electromagnetic Behaviour of Metallic Wire Structures provides a clear and coherent guide to understanding these phenomena without excessive numerical calculations. Including both background material and detailed derivations of the various different formulae applied, Electromagnetic Behaviour of Metallic Wire Structures describes how to extend basic circuit theory relating to voltages, currents, and resistances of metallic wire networks to include situations where the currents are no longer spatially uniform along the wire. This lays a foundation for a deeper understanding of the many new phenomena observed in meta-electromagnetic materials. Examples of applications are included to support this new approach making Electromagnetic Behaviour of Metallic Wire Structures a comprehensive and self-contained volume suitable for use by specialists, non-specialist, researchers and professionals in other relevant fields and even students.

In recent years, we have witnessed a rapid expansion of using super-thin metasurfaces to manipulate light or electromagnetic wave in a subwavelength scale. However, most designs are confined to a passive scheme and monofunctional operation, which hinders considerably the promising applications of the metasurfaces. Specifically, the tunable and multifunctional metasurfaces enable to facilitate switchable functionalities and multiple functionalities which are extremely essential and useful for integrated optics and microwaves, well alleviating aforementioned issues. In this book, we introduce our efforts in exploring the physics principles, design approaches, and numerical and experimental demonstrations on the fascinating functionalities realized. We start by introducing in Chapter 2 the "merging" scheme in constructing multi-functional metadevices, paying particular attention to its shortcomings issues. Having understood the merits and disadvantages of the "merging" scheme, we then introduce in Chapter 3 another approach to realize bifunctional metadevices under linearly polarized excitations, working in both reflection and transmission geometries or even in the full space. As a step further, we summarizes our efforts in Chapter 4 on making multifunctional devices under circularly polarized excitations, again including designing principles and devices fabrications/characterizations. Starting from Chapter 5, we turn to introduce our efforts on using the "active" scheme to construct multifunctional metadevices under linearly polarized wave operation. Chapter 6 further concentrates on how to employ the tunable strategy to achieve helicity/frequency controls of the circularly polarized waves in reflection geometry. We finally conclude this book in Chapter 7 by presenting our perspectives on future directions of metasurfaces and metadevices.

- Presents the first research by a major Asian university on the seismic shift to online learning in higher education due to the pandemic - Offers insights direct from global university leaders on the leadership of higher education institutes through the pandemic - Provides students, academics and policy makers with research and policy implications for the wider higher education sector.

Master's Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - Economic Policy, grade: 1,7, University of Hamburg, 109 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Education is in itself a fundamental human right. As an important determinant of economic growth and human development, education also constitutes an indispensable means of realizing other human rights, particularly rights associated with employment and social security. With the unleashed force of globalization sweeping all aspects of social and economic life, national governments throughout the world increasingly understand the strategic importance of education in enhancing and maintaining international competitiveness, and its crucial role in developing economic and social viability on the long run. On the other hand, the convergent impacts of globalization also bring new impetus for cross-boarder education, and affect the shape and mode of the operation of national education systems more influentially than ever. Over the last two decades trade in cross-border education has been increasing steadily in all forms: not only the numbers of students enrolled in educational institutions outside their home country has been rapidly increasing, but also more and more education providers operate abroad, providing their educational services to foreign students who remain at home. Accelerated development of the new information and communication technologies also facilitate cross-border education and encourage new forms of educational internationalization. According to the statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), export revenue related to international student mobility amounted to an estimated minimum of US$30 billion in 1998, or 3% of global services exports (OECD, 2004a). With the rapid growth of trade in education, a number of bilateral, regional and multilateral trade agreements and regulations have incorporated provisions on trade and investment in

With the rapid progress of deep neural models and the explosion of data resources, dialogue systems that supports extensive topics and chit-chat conversations are emerging in natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR), and machine learning (ML). To facilitate the development of both retrieval-based chit-chat systems and IR tasks supported by them, the authors survey chit-chat systems from two perspectives: (1) techniques to build chit-chat systems, and (2) chit-chat components in completing IR tasks.The main contributions of this survey are: surveying the deep neural models; connecting the recently resurgent chit-chat systems and task-oriented system; introducing various solutions for challenges from different perspectives, including dataside and model-side solutions and utilization of extra resources; presenting data resources and evaluation methods for building retrieval-based and generation-based chit-chat systems. The authors also analyze the main challenges, possible new exploration directions and rising trends, which will shed light on building human-like systems.This survey is intended to bridge the researchers of IR and the NLP community to move chit-chat systems forward and support more IR tasks. It will be of interest to IR or NLP researchers who want to study chit-chat from different perspectives, IR researchers who need to complete their tasks with the assistance of chit-chat systems, engineers with hands-on experience in building these systems to leverage advanced chit-chat modeling techniques, or anyone who wants keep up with the frontier of chit-chat systems or learn how to build them with deep neural architectures.