Multilevel Interactions Research Articles

Overview and prospect of information and communication technology development in virtual power plants

AbstractAs a new energy‐supply service solution to address massive, distributed energy access to the power system, a virtual power plant has higher transmission reliability and real‐time communication requirements. To achieve collaborative optimisation, distributed load and energy resources must be aggregated using new information and communication technology. This study analyses underlying communication technologies for virtual power plant interaction from the perspective of standardisation, efficiency, reliability, and security, summarises the application of blockchain, cloud‐edge collaboration, machine learning, and other new information and communication technologies in virtual power plant energy trading, interaction, and scheduling, and proposes ideas for addressing shortcomings in interaction. To improve virtual power plant interaction, performance parameter mapping between communication and business technology, and multilevel virtual power plant interaction technology are proposed.

Enhanced access to the human phosphoproteome with genetically encoded phosphothreonine

Protein phosphorylation is a ubiquitous post-translational modification used to regulate cellular processes and proteome architecture by modulating protein-protein interactions. The identification of phosphorylation events through proteomic surveillance has dramatically outpaced our capacity for functional assignment using traditional strategies, which often require knowledge of the upstream kinase a priori. The development of phospho-amino-acid-specific orthogonal translation systems, evolutionarily divergent aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase and tRNA pairs that enable co-translational insertion of a phospho-amino acids, has rapidly improved our ability to assess the physiological function of phosphorylation by providing kinase-independent methods of phosphoprotein production. Despite this utility, broad deployment has been hindered by technical limitations and an inability to reconstruct complex phopho-regulatory networks. Here, we address these challenges by optimizing genetically encoded phosphothreonine translation to characterize phospho-dependent kinase activation mechanisms and, subsequently, develop a multi-level protein interaction platform to directly assess the overlap of kinase and phospho-binding protein substrate networks with phosphosite-level resolution.

Phenotypic and Differential Gene Expression Analyses of Phase Transition in Oedaleus asiaticus under High-Density Population Stress.

The high-density-dependent phase change from solitary to gregarious individuals in locusts is a typical example of phenotypic plasticity. However, the underlying molecular mechanism is not clear. In this study, first, Oedaleus asiaticus were treated with high-density population stress and then analyzed by Illumina sequencing on days 1, 3, 5, and 7 of the body color change to identify the stage-specific differentially expressed genes (DEGs). The KEGG pathway enrichment analysis of the identified DEGs revealed their role in metabolic pathways. Furthermore, the expression patterns of the nine key DEGs were studied in detail; this showed that the material change in locusts began on the third day of the high-density treatment, with the number of DEGs being the largest, indicating the importance of this period in the phase transition. In addition, the phenotypic change involved several key genes of important regulatory pathways, possibly working in a complex network. Phenotypic plasticity in locusts is multifactorial, involving multilevel material network interactions. This study improves the mechanistic understanding of phenotypic variation in insects at the genetic level.

Experimental state rescaling, goal-oriented governance, and urban transformation in China: The case of Lanzhou

This study views decentralization and centralization as complementary strategies for balancing state control and local autonomy, with the goal of exploring effective governance under authoritarian regimes. We examine the governance framework the central government employs to balance “encouraging local autonomy” and “protecting the centrality of regulation,” analyzing urban development and the central-local interaction under this governance framework. We believe that goal-oriented governance with information transmission at its core is the key to reaching such equilibrium, accompanied by two critical governance techniques: hierarchical planning systems and decentralized experimentation. The hierarchical planning system, with the auxiliary evaluation mechanism, passes down national goals and provides administrative guidance to local governors. Meanwhile, the procedural and experimental nature of plan formation has encouraged local policy innovation and bottom-up information feedback. Under goal-oriented governance and manageable experimentation, urban development decisions are formulated, and urban transformation takes place. The study deepens our understanding of the tentative nature of China's state rescaling, i.e., the search for a balance between state control and local autonomy to defuse governance problems at a given time. It also broadens our understanding of China’s policy-making and urban governance as a wavering multi-level interaction rather than a dichotomous process of centralization and decentralization.

Osteosarcopenia in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases: Which Pathophysiologic Implications for Rehabilitation?

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a burdensome condition affecting a growing number of people worldwide, frequently related to major comorbidities and functional impairment. In these patients, several factors might have a role in promoting both bone and muscle loss, including systemic inflammation, corticosteroid therapies, sedentary behaviours, deconditioning, malnutrition, smoking habits, and alcohol consumption. On the other hand, bone and muscle tissues share several linkages from functional, embryological, and biochemical points of view. Osteosarcopenia has been recently defined by the coexistence of osteoporosis and sarcopenia, but the precise mechanisms underpinning osteosarcopenia in patients with COPD are still unknown. In this scenario, a deeper understanding of the molecular basis of osteosarcopenia might guide clinicians in a personalized approach integrating skeletal muscle health with the pulmonary rehabilitation framework in COPD. Taken together, our results summarized the currently available evidence about the multilevel interactions between osteosarcopenia and COPD to pave the way for a comprehensive approach targeting the most common risk factors of these pathological conditions. Further studies are needed to clarify the role of modern clinical strategies and telemedicine solutions to optimize healthcare delivery in patients with COPD, including osteopenia, osteoporosis, and sarcopenia screening in these subjects.

Drivers of success in collaborative monitoring in forest landscape restoration: an indicative assessment from Latin America

Despite growing global attention on forest landscape restoration (FLR) as an integrated approach to enhancing environmental and human well‐being, the potential for leveraging monitoring to catalyze learning and improve management outcomes is not being fully realized. We assessed the extent to which collaborative monitoring, a process that embraces cross‐scale multilevel actors and interactions in the collection and use of information, is considered across FLR projects in Latin America by applying a diagnostic of 54 “success factors” scored from 1 (factor not in place) to 5 (factor fully in place). Responses were collected from 36 projects across 12 countries. Although respondents generally understood monitoring as crucial to FLR success, local participation scored as insufficient. Several of the lowest‐ranked success factors related to training for local people in the use of tools, forms, and technology for data collection, and to interpreting data to promote understanding of management outcomes. The most notable finding related to the paucity of networks or entities to leverage information into knowledge‐sharing and learning opportunities from the top‐down and the bottom‐up. Our results provide a preliminary indication of how to promote collaborative monitoring approaches in the context of FLR projects in Latin America. First, it requires enhanced integration among academics, local communities and governmental and nongovernmental organizations. Second, it requires a minimum level of harmonization with current policy and normative forest conservation and restoration instruments. Finally, it needs bridging organizations or individuals to share results and learning as well as dedicated resources for information infrastructures to facilitate knowledge sharing.

EU–Central Asian interactions: perceptions, interests and practices

ABSTRACT By shifting the study of European Union (EU)–Central Asian relations from its fixed category of black-boxing both the EU and Central Asia, this article advances the case for the approach of examining multi-level and multi-actor interactions that identify the dynamic processes of reciprocal action and meaning-making that characterize the mutual cooperation. It distinguishes perceptions, interests and practices, pointing to the rationales and modes of behaviour of multiple EU and Central Asian actors. The article also advances five reasons why EU studies should take more interest in Central Asia, given that the EU’s larger external relations and security agenda extends to this region. Similarly, it shows that Central Asian studies can benefit from the analysis of the region’s interactions with external actors, including the EU, given that external actors contribute to reshaping national policy agendas and influence everyday life.

Weakly Supervised Domain Adaptation for Aspect Extraction via Multilevel Interaction Transfer.

Fine-grained aspect term extraction is an essential subtask in aspect-based opinion analysis. It aims to identify the aspect terms (also known as opinion targets) of a product or service in each sentence. To learn a good aspect extraction model, an expensive annotation process is usually involved to acquire sufficient token-level labels for each domain, which is not realistic. To address this limitation, some previous works propose domain adaptation strategies to transfer knowledge from a sufficiently labeled source domain to unlabeled target domains. However, due to both the difficulty of fine-grained prediction problems and the large domain gap between different domains, the performance is still far from satisfactory. In this work, we conduct a pioneer study on leveraging sentence-level aspect category labels that can be usually available in commercial services, such as review sites or social media to promote token-level transfer for extraction purpose. Specifically, the aspect category information can be used to construct pivot knowledge for transfer with the assumption that the interactions between the sentence-level aspect category and the token-level aspect terms are invariant across domains. To this end, we propose a novel multilevel reconstruction mechanism that aligns both the fine- and coarse-grained information in multiple levels of abstractions. Comprehensive experiments over several benchmark data sets clearly demonstrate that our approach can fully utilize the sentence-level aspect category labels to improve cross-domain aspect term extraction with a large performance gain.

High Thermal Stability and Color Purity of Y2SrAl4SiO12: Eu3+ Garnet-Variant-Structured Phosphor for Warm White Light LED-Lamp

Red LEDs with a high color purity and high color rendering index are often used to compensate for the lack of red-light components in current white LEDs. Therefore, the new type of garnet-structured high color purity red phosphor Y2−xSrAl4SiO12: xEu3+ was synthesized by the solid-state method. The band gap structure of the host matrix was studied through the DFT calculation and found that the matrix belongs to a direct band gap structure with a band gap size of 4.535 ev. The phosphor exhibits a wide excitation spectrum under the monitoring of 710 nm. The strongest excitation wavelength is 393 nm, and it exhibits bright red light under the excitation of 393 nm, and the emission peak positions are located at 570 nm, 597 nm, 613 nm, 650 nm, 710 nm and 748 nm, respectively, which are attributed to the 5D0→7Fj of Eu3+ (j = 0–5) electronic transitions. In the crystal structure of Y2SrAl4SiO12, Eu3+ occupies a symmetry site. The compositional changes and thermal studies found favorable at 20% mol. At this concentration, the luminescence intensity gradually weakened due to the Eu3+ electric multi-level interaction. It is worth noting that the emission intensity of Y2SrAl4SiO12: 20%Eu3+ at 433 K can be maintained to 92% of that at 293 K. Finally, we combined it with the NUV chip and packaged it into a red LED with a color purity of up to 90% and a correlated color temperature of 1492 K. The high purity, low color temperature and thermal stability indicate that it has a place in LED applications.

Framing rehabilitation through health policy and systems research: priorities for strengthening rehabilitation

BackgroundRecent estimates report that 2.4 billion people with health conditions globally could benefit from rehabilitation. While the benefits of rehabilitation for individuals and society have been described in the literature, many individuals, especially in low- and middle-income countries do not have access to quality rehabilitation. As the need for rehabilitation continues to increase, it is crucial that health systems are adequately prepared to meet this need. Practice- and policy-relevant evidence plays an important role in health systems strengthening efforts. The aim of this paper is to report on the outcome of a global consultative process to advance the development of a research framework to stimulate health policy and systems research (HPSR) for rehabilitation, in order to generate evidence needed by key stakeholders.MethodsA multi-stakeholder participatory technical consultation was convened by WHO to develop a research framework. This meeting included participants from selected Member States, rehabilitation experts, HPSR experts, public health researchers, civil society and other stakeholders from around the world. The meeting focused on introducing systems approaches to stakeholders and deliberating on priority rehabilitation issues in health systems. Participants were allocated to one of four multi-stakeholder groups with a facilitator to guide the structured technical consultations. Qualitative data in the form of written responses to guiding questions were collected during the structured technical consultations. A technical working group was then established to analyse the data and extract its emerging themes. This informed the development of the HPSR framework for rehabilitation and a selection of preliminary research questions that exemplify how the framework might be used.ResultsA total of 123 individuals participated in the multi-stakeholder technical consultations. The elaborated framework is informed by an ecological model and puts forth elements of the six WHO traditional building blocks of the health system, while emphasizing additional components pertinent to rehabilitation, such as political priority, engagement and participatory approaches, and considerations regarding demand and access. Importantly, the framework highlights the multilevel interactions needed across health systems in order to strengthen rehabilitation. Additionally, an initial set of research questions was proposed as a primer for how the framework might be used.ConclusionsStrengthening health systems to meet the increasing need for rehabilitation will require undertaking more HPSR to inform the integration of rehabilitation into health systems globally. We anticipate that the proposed framework and the emerging research questions will support countries in their quest to increase access to rehabilitation for their populations.

Long-term Exposure to Particulate matter and cardiovascular disease in South Korea: investigating multi-level interaction with individual- and area-level factors

Background and aim: It has been well known that individuals or groups are not equally vulnerable to air pollution. However, few studies have investigated whether individual susceptibility to air pollution varies across different community environments. This study aimed to estimate the effects of long-term PM₁₀ exposure on cardiovascular disease (CVD) in South Korea and to examine whether individual status of underlying disease and area-level medical infrastructure modify the effect. Methods: The study population comprised 392,104 subjects from the National Health Insurance Service-National Sample Cohort (2006-2015) residing in 120 districts in South Korea. The CVD event was defined as the first occurrence of a hospital visit or admission from 2006 to 2015. Time‐varying Cox proportional-hazards models were used to estimate the association between five-year moving averages of PM₁₀ and CVD events. Effect modifications by the individual status of underlying disease (cancer, diabetes, and hypertension) were determined by two-way interaction, stratifying by area-level medical index (calculated with the number of hospitals, hospital beds, and medical personnel). Results: Long-term exposure to PM₁₀ was positively associated with the risk of CVD events (HR per 10 μg/m³, 1.04; 95% CI, 1.02-1.06). In areas with a low medical index, PM₁₀‐associated CVD risks were higher among those with cancer (HR 1.19; 95% CI, 1.00-1.42) as compared to those without (HR, 1.07; 95% CI, 1.02-1.12). In areas with a low medical index, subjects with cancer showed a lower risk of CVD associated with PM₁₀ than those without. Conclusions: This study suggests that the individual-level status of an underlying disease and area-level medical infrastructure could be interrelated in determining the health effect of PM₁₀. Consideration of this multi-level interaction in population vulnerability to air pollution can help understand the complex mechanisms by which air pollution creates health disparities. Keywords: Particulate matter, cardiovascular disease, effect modification, underlying disease, medical infrastructure

Versatile Inorganic Subnanometer Nanowire Adhesive.

Adhesives are applied extensively in daily life and industries, and people have developed numerous commercial polymeric adhesives. However, in most cases, these adhesives work on dry surfaces in air and form permanent bonds with the substrates, limiting the applications of adhesives. Inspired by the innate adhesive functions of some animals, such as geckos, spiders, mussels, and clingfish, scientists have developed various adhesive compositions and structures to meet various conditions. Here, we show a versatile subnanometer nanowire (SNW) adhesive with high strength and great reversibility, which could be prepared at a large scale through a facile room-temperature reaction. The SNW adhesive contacts the substrates at multiple sites due to the ultrahigh flexibility, and meanwhile, the multilevel interactions among the SNWs endow them with strong cohesion, so they exhibit good adhesive performance. This adhesive is applicable to various substrates, such as metals, polymers, and glass, and not only possesses good stability at room temperature in air but also is suitable for underwater environments and ultralow temperatures. Moreover, this adhesive could be easily recycled and removed from the substrates without any residue and damage. The SNW adhesive not only inspires the design of hierarchical adhesive structures with new contact modes but also has potential for practical applications.

Exploring the antecedents of shared leadership in event organisations

This research explores the antecedents of sharing leadership throughout an event management organisation. Previous research into shared leadership has been shown to improve team performance and effectiveness in organisations with team-based structures, involved in knowledge work and operating within high pressured environments. We propose therefore that shared leadership offers a useful solution to the problems presented by the rapidly changing and challenging event industry environment. However, little is known about how shared leadership happens within project multi-teams and research into the antecedents of shared leadership is still in its infancy. To enrich the current understanding, we employed exploratory qualitative research involving three case study organisations. Our findings were drawn from 34 in-depth interviews and 33 h of observation with participants from all layers of the management hierarchy and employees from across experiential event management agencies. We identified the antecedents of shared leadership at all levels of management: at the leadership team level, organisational leaders must communicate a clear vision, and act with transparency whilst empowering staff to enact leadership. At the project multi-team level, team members must be willing to collaborate with, and recognise the expertise of other team members and, at an individual level, employees must interact with empathy and good communication. Our findings illuminate how the sharing of leadership relies on multi-level interactions in which management, teams and individuals participate. Based on the findings, the implications for both theory and management practice are discussed and, given the exploratory, qualitative, nature of the study, future research directions are recommended.

Ionic liquids modified Cu3(PO4)2 hybrid nanoflower for dehydrogenase immobilization by biomimetic mineralization

Ionic liquid modified organic-inorganic hybrid materials were applied for the immobilization of thermophilic and halophilic phenylalanine dehydrogenase from Natranaerobius thermophiles (NTAaDH). Biosynthesis of L-homophenylalanine by asymmetric reductive amination was studied. ILs modification induced the formation of nanoflowers with different morphologies. The activity of Cu3(PO4)2-[EMIM]BF4-NTAaDH was 1.92-fold of Cu3(PO4)2-NTAaDH, which indicated activity enhancement of ionic liquid modification. The correlation between the logP value of organic solvents and the activity of immobilized enzyme showed that high logP value increased the activity of enzyme. The effect of ionic liquid on the morphology of immobilized enzyme particles was studied by SEM. Mechanism of ionic liquids modification was investigated by multi-level interactions between the enzyme and carrier, and the cage effects enhanced enzyme stability. Ionic liquids modified organic-inorganic hybrid materials have excellent biocompatibility and conductivity, and are expected to expand the application in biocatalysis.

Strategy implementation in the transnational MNC: A critical realist investigation of European and Indian unit collaboration

Inter-unit collaboration in transnational multinational corporations (MNCs) is central to unlocking MNCs' competitive advantage. We find that managing multilevel interaction of macro-level (social structures within and outside the MNC) and micro-level (individual interpretations and behaviors) factors ensures the implementation of strategic goals regarding inter-unit collaboration. In a case study of Finnish, Russian, and Indian unit collaboration in one European-origin transnational MNC, we observe that individual ascriptions of social identity to Indian colleagues (micro-level factor) affect the MNC's strategy implementation (SI) process and outcomes (macro-level factors). Building on the latter observations, critical realist theory of identity, and the idiosyncratic Indian context, we develop the currently inadequate multilevel theorization on the SI process in the MNC and expand perspectives on social identity in International Business literature. For MNC managers from Western countries, the paper offers insights into factors that should be considered to succeed in strategic and operational inter-unit collaboration with India.

Multi-level context-driven interaction modeling for human future trajectory prediction

Human trajectory prediction is a challenging task with important applications such as intelligent surveillance and autonomous driving. We recognize that pedestrians in close and distant neighborhoods have different impacts on the person’s decision of future movements. Local scene context and global scene layout also affect the movement decision differently. Existing methods have not adequately addressed these interactions between humans and the multi-level contexts occurring at different spatial and temporal scales. To this end, we propose a multi-level context-driven interaction modeling (MCDIM) method for human future trajectory learning and prediction. Specifically, we construct a multilayer graph attention network (GAT) to model the hierarchical human–human interactions. An extra set of long short-term memory networks is designed to capture the correlations of these human–human interactions at different temporal scales. To model the human–scene interactions, we explicitly extract and encode the global scene layout features and local context features in the neighborhood of the person at each time step and capture the spatial–temporal information of the interactions between human and the local scene contexts. The human–human and human–scene interactions are incorporated into the multi-level GAT-based network for accurate prediction of future trajectories. We have evaluated the method on benchmark datasets: the walking pedestrians dataset provided by ETH Zurich (ETH) and the crowd data provided by the University of Cyprus. The results demonstrate that our MCDIM method outperforms existing methods, being able to generate more accurate and plausible trajectories for pedestrians. The average performance gain is 2 and 3 percentage points in terms of the average displacement error and final displacement error, respectively.

FINet: Dual Branches Feature Interaction for Partial-to-Partial Point Cloud Registration

Data association is important in the point cloud registration. In this work, we propose to solve the partial-to-partial registration from a new perspective, by introducing multi-level feature interactions between the source and the reference clouds at the feature extraction stage, such that the registration can be realized without the attentions or explicit mask estimation for the overlapping detection as adopted previously. Specifically, we present FINet, a feature interactionbased structure with the capability to enable and strengthen the information associating between the inputs at multiple stages. To achieve this, we first split the features into two components, one for rotation and one for translation, based on the fact that they belong to different solution spaces, yielding a dual branches structure. Second, we insert several interaction modules at the feature extractor for the data association. Third, we propose a transformation sensitivity loss to obtain rotation-attentive and translation-attentive features. Experiments demonstrate that our method performs higher precision and robustness compared to the state-of-the-art traditional and learning-based methods. Code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/FINet.

Effect of Interaction and Alignment of Continuation Task in Chinese as a Second Language Writing

ABSTRACT Continuation Task, which closely links language inputs and outputs, is considered to be an effective method in foreign language learning. This paper is an empirical research that investigates the effects of interaction and alignment of Continuation Task in Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) writing. The participants are a total of 30 Cambodian native speakers, who are arranged to one continuation group (Group A) and one control group (Group B), with every group consisting of 15 participants. Group A adopts the Continuation Task approach, and providing known texts, the participants are required to first read and then complete writing. The participants in Group B have to finish writing after listening to the known texts, without providing known texts. The results show that: (i) The Continuation Task can trigger Cambodian Chinese learners’ multi-level interaction and alignment effects between continuation compositions and known texts, which are mainly manifested on vocabulary, grammar, discourse cohesion, and situation mode. (ii) The Continuation Task can reduce language errors and improve the writing quality of Cambodian Chinese learners. Therefore, the Continuation Task plays a critical role in promoting learning, which further indicates its adaptability in Chinese learning.

Playing to the audience? Multilevel interactions between stakeholders and institutions around CSR in Bangladesh

PurposeWhile corporate social responsibility (CSR) research and practice has expanded and evolved rapidly in recent years, little is known about how MNC subsidiaries develop their CSR strategies and how they reconcile global and local demands and pressures from both institutions and stakeholders. The paper aims to understand how institutions and stakeholder pressures interact at both national and international levels and how these interactions shape MNC subsidiaries' CSR in Bangladesh.Design/methodology/approachMultiple case studies were used to investigate the CSR practices of 10 MNC subsidiaries operating in Bangladesh. To collect data, twenty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted. For supplementing primary data, secondary data from annual reports and websites were collected.FindingsThe article demonstrates that the practice of CSR in Bangladesh is a result of pressures exerted by parent companies, international institutions and international stakeholders. The article reveals how lack of pressure from local stakeholders and institutions enables subsidiaries to gain traction and use their agency to apply globalised CSR conceptualisations not necessarily applicable to the localised context.Originality/valueThe study has synthesised existing approaches to develop a multilevel framework for understanding how the intricate interactions between institutions and stakeholders from different levels (i.e. national and international levels) determine the trajectory of CSR adopted by subsidiaries in developing countries. This interaction undoubtedly plays a key role in determining the types of CSR strategy being enacted, the potential agency of different actors to shape change and the extent to which such pressures are likely to lead to CSR strategies that actually reflect and respond to the needs of local stakeholders.

The Implication of Latent Information Quality to the Reproducibility of Secondary Use of Electronic Health Records.

Reproducibility is an important quality criterion for the secondary use of electronic health records (EHRs). However, multiple barriers to reproducibility are embedded in the heterogeneous EHR environment. These barriers include complex processes for collecting and organizing EHR data and dynamic multi-level interactions occurring during information use (e.g., inter-personal, inter-system, and cross-institutional). To ensure reproducible use of EHRs, we investigated four information quality dimensions and examine the implications for reproducibility based on a real-world EHR study. Four types of IQ measurements suggested that barriers to reproducibility occurred for all stages of secondary use of EHR data. We discussed our recommendations and emphasized the importance of promoting transparent, high-throughput, and accessible data infrastructures and implementation best practices (e.g., data quality assessment, reporting standard).