Satellite Multi-Temporal Data and Cropping Pattern Approach for Green Gram Crop Management in the Lower Midland Zone IV and V in Kenya

Creation of a spectral signature reflectance data, which aids in the identification of the crops is important in determining size and location crop fields. Therefore, we developed a spectral signature reflectance for the vegetative stage of the green gram (Vigna. radiata L.) over 5 years (2020, 2018, 2017, 2015, and 2013) for agroecological zone IV and V in Kenya. The years chosen were those whose satellite resolution data was available for the vegetative stage of crop growth in the short rain season (October, November, December (OND)). We used Landsat 8 OLI satellite imagery in this study. Cropping pattern data for the study area were evaluated by calculating the Top of Atmosphere reflectance. Farms geo-referencing, along with field data collection, was undertaken to extract Top of Atmosphere reflectance for bands 2, 3, 4 and 7. We also carried a spectral similarity assessment on the various cropping patterns. The spectral reflectance ranged from 0.07696 - 0.09632, 0.07466 - 0.09467, 0.0704047 - 0.12188,0.19822 - 0.24387, 0.19269 - 0.26900, and 0.11354 - 0.20815 for bands 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 for green gram, respectively. The results showed a dissimilarity among the various cropping patterns. The lowest dissimilarity index was 0.027 for the maize (Zea mays L.) bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) versus the maize-pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan) crop, while the highest dissimilarity index was 0.443 for the maize bean versus the maize bean and cowpea cropping patterns. High crop dissimilarities experienced across the cropping pattern through these spectral reflectance values confirm that the green gram was potentially identifiable. The results can be used in crop type identification in agroecological lower midland zone IV and V for mung bean management. This study therefore suggests that use of reflectance data in remote sensing of agricultural ecosystems would aid in planning, management, and crop allocation to different ecozones.

From Control to Empowerment:A Paradigm Shift in the Discourse of Educational Supervision

As educational reforms intensify and societal emphasis shifts towards empowerment,the traditional discourse paradigm of management and control in educational supervision faces growing challenges.This paper explores the transformation of this discourse paradigm through the lens of empowerment,analyzing its distinct characteristics,potential pathways,and effective strategies.This paper begins by reviewing the concept of empowerment and examining the current research landscape surrounding the discourse paradigm in educational supervision.Subsequently,we conduct a comparative analysis of the“control”and“empowerment”paradigms,highlighting their essential differences.This analysis illuminates the key characteristics of an empowerment-oriented approach to educational supervision,particularly its emphasis on dialogue,collaboration,participation,and,crucially,empowerment itself.Ultimately,this research advocates for a shift in educational supervision towards an empowerment-oriented discourse system.This entails a multi-pronged approach:transforming ingrained beliefs,embracing renewed pedagogical concepts,fostering methodological innovation,and optimizing existing mechanisms and strategies within educational supervision.These changes are proposed to facilitate the more effective alignment of educational supervision with the pursuit of high-quality education.

Study on Independent Supervision Function of Design Assurance System

The effective operation of a design assurance system cannot be achieved without the effective performance of the independent supervision function.As one of the core functions of the design assurance system,the purpose of the independent supervision function is to ensure that the system operates within the scope of procedures and manuals.At present,the function of independent supervision is a difficult and confusing issue for various original equipment manufacturers as well as suppliers,and there is an urgent requirement to put forward relevant requirements and form relevant methods.Based on the above mentioned objective,the basic requirements of the independent supervision function of design assurance system were studied,the problems and deficiencies in the organization,staffing,and methods existing in the current independent supervision function were analyzed,the improvement suggestions and measures for the performance of the independent supervision function from the aspects of the organization,staffing,procedures,and suppliers were put forward.The present work and conclusions provide guidance and direction for the effective operation of the design assurance system.

Improved Yield Prediction of Ratoon Rice Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Based Multi-Temporal Feature Method

Pre-harvest yield prediction of ratoon rice is critical for guiding crop interventions in precision agriculture.However,the unique agronomic practice(i.e.,varied stubble height treatment)in rice ratooning could lead to inconsistent rice phenology,which had a significant impact on yield prediction of ratoon rice.Multi-temporal unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)-based remote sensing can likely monitor ratoon rice productivity and reflect maximum yield potential across growing seasons for improving the yield prediction compared with previous methods.Thus,in this study,we explored the performance of combination of agronomic practice information(API)and single-phase,multi-spectral features[vegetation indices(VIs)and texture(Tex)features]in predicting ratoon rice yield,and developed a new UAV-based method to retrieve yield formation process by using multi-temporal features which were effective in improving yield forecasting accuracy of ratoon rice.The results showed that the integrated use of VIs,Tex and API(VIs&Tex+API)improved the accuracy of yield prediction than single-phase UAV imagery-based feature,with the panicle initiation stage being the best period for yield prediction(R^(2) as 0.732,RMSE as 0.406,RRMSE as 0.101).More importantly,compared with previous multi-temporal UAV-based methods,our proposed multi-temporal method(multi-temporal model VIs&Tex:R^(2) as 0.795,RMSE as 0.298,RRMSE as 0.072)can increase R^(2) by 0.020-0.111 and decrease RMSE by 0.020-0.080 in crop yield forecasting.This study provides an effective method for accurate pre-harvest yield prediction of ratoon rice in precision agriculture,which is of great significance to take timely means for ensuring ratoon rice production and food security.

Foodborne doping and supervision in sports

Cases of foodborne doping are frequently reported in sports events and can cause severe consequences for athletes.The foodborne doping can be divided into natural endogenous and artifi cially added foods according to the sources,including anabolic agents,stimulants,diuretics,β-blockers,β2 agonists and others.In order to control foodborne doping,chromatographic technique,immunoassay,nuclear magnetic resonance,biosensor technology,pyrolytic spectroscopy,comprehensive analysis and electrochemical analysis have usually used as analytical and inspection strategies.Meanwhile,the legislation of anti-doping,the improvement of testing standard and technology,and the prevention and control of food safety,as well as the improvement of risk perception of athletes are highly necessary for achieving the effective risk control and supervision of foodborne doping,which will be benefi cial for athletes,doctors and administrators to avoid the risks of foodborne doping test and reduce foodborne doping risks for the health of athletes.

Research on the intelligent supervision and operation platform of railway real estate

Railway real estate is the fundamental element of railway transportation production and operation.Effective management and rational utilization of railway real estate is essential for railway asset operation.Based on the investigation of the requirements of railway real estate management and operation,combined with Beidou positioning,GIS(Geographic Information System),multi-source data fusion and other cutting-edge technologies,this paper puts forward the multi-dimensional dynamic statistical method of real estate information,the identification method of railway land occupation and the comprehensive evaluation method of real estate development and utilization potential,and build the railway real estate supervision and operation platform,design the function of the platform,so as to provide intelligent solutions for the railway real estate operation.

Routine Supportive Supervision and Management of Medicines and Other Health Products and Technologies in Vihiga County, Kenya

Health Products and Technologies (HPTs) are pivotal for an efficient health system. Availability and accessibility to affordable health products are critical indicators towards achieving universal health coverage. Routine supportive supervision, performance monitoring, recognition of efforts and client feedback are vital activities toward health supply chain system strengthening. This is a descriptive paper that describes a model of integrated commodity supportive supervision, and mentorship and its impact on various outcomes of health commodity management. Data were abstracted from the standardized scored checklists used during integrated commodity supportive supervision and supply chain audit in public health facilities in Vihiga County. Scores for the period 2020 to 2022 were analyzed on the eight key areas of interest. The analysis was done using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS version 26). Results are interpreted at 95% Confidence interval. This paper also shares findings from both quantitative and qualitative data from client exit and facility managers’ interviews. Six complete rounds of supervisions, three clients and service providers’ interviews, and three annual award events have been conducted. We observed trends across six data collections points and compared the results at first point or baseline (January-June 2020) to the results at the last point or end line (April-June 2022). Findings show significant improvements on the eight parameters in terms of mean scores as follows: resolution of issues from previous visits by 35.06% (46.75% - 81.81%);storage of HPTs by 17.41% (68.72% - 86.13%);inventory management by 28.16% (42.67% - 70.83%);availability and use of commodity data management information systems (MIS) tools by 22.39% (74.40% - 96.79%);verification of commodity data by 25.61% (65.56% - 91.17%);availability of guidelines and job aids for commodity management by 46.28% (36.65% - 82.93%). There was an improvement on the mean score on accountability by 20.22% (58.58% - 83.51%). The composite (final) score improved by 28.33% (56.19% - 84.52%). There was progressive narrowing of the standard deviations on all the indicators across the study period. This demonstrates that there is standardization of practices and positive competition among all the public health facilities. There were significant improvements on all the eight indicators. Routine integrated commodity supportive supervision has proven to be an effective high impact intervention in improving management of health products and technologies in Vihiga County, Kenya.

An Edge-assisted, Object-oriented Random Forest Approach for Refined Extraction of Tea Plantations Using Multi-temporal Sentinel-2 and High-resolution Gaofen-2 Imagery

As a consumed and influential natural plant beverage,tea is widely planted in subtropical and tropical areas all over the world.Affected by(sub)tropical climate characteristics,the underlying surface of the tea distribution area is extremely complex,with a variety of vegetation types.In addition,tea distribution is scattered and fragmentized in most of China.Therefore,it is difficult to obtain accurate tea information based on coarse resolution remote sensing data and existing feature extraction methods.This study proposed a boundary-enhanced,object-oriented random forest method on the basis of high-resolution GF-2 and multi-temporal Sentinel-2 data.This method uses multispectral indexes,textures,vegetable indices,and variation characteristics of time-series NDVI from the multi-temporal Sentinel-2 imageries to obtain abundant features related to the growth of tea plantations.To reduce feature redundancy and computation time,the feature elimination algorithm based on Mean Decrease Accuracy(MDA)was used to generate the optimal feature set.Considering the serious boundary inconsistency problem caused by the complex and fragmented land cover types,high resolution GF-2 image was segmented based on the MultiResolution Segmentation(MRS)algorithm to assist the segmentation of Sentinel-2,which contributes to delineating meaningful objects and enhancing the reliability of the boundary for tea plantations.Finally,the object-oriented random forest method was utilized to extract the tea information based on the optimal feature combination in the Jingmai Mountain,Yunnan Province.The resulting tea plantation map had high accuracy,with a 95.38%overall accuracy and 0.91 kappa coefficient.We conclude that the proposed method is effective for mapping tea plantations in high heterogeneity mountainous areas and has the potential for mapping tea plantations in large areas.

Model-constrained and data-driven double-supervision acoustic impedance inversion

Seismic impedance inversion is an important technique for structure identification and reservoir prediction.Model-based and data-driven impedance inversion are the commonly used inversion methods.In practice,the geophysical inversion problem is essentially an ill-posedness problem,which means that there are many solutions corresponding to the same seismic data.Therefore,regularization schemes,which can provide stable and unique inversion results to some extent,have been introduced into the objective function as constrain terms.Among them,given a low-frequency initial impedance model is the most commonly used regularization method,which can provide a smooth and stable solution.However,this model-based inversion method relies heavily on the initial model and the inversion result is band limited to the effective frequency bandwidth of seismic data,which cannot effectively improve the seismic vertical resolution and is difficult to be applied to complex structural regions.Therefore,we propose a data-driven approach for high-resolution impedance inversion based on the bidirectional long short-term memory recurrent neural network,which regards seismic data as time-series rather than image-like patches.Compared with the model-based inversion method,the data-driven approach provides higher resolution inversion results,which demonstrates the effectiveness of the data-driven method for recovering the high-frequency components.However,judging from the inversion results for characterization the spatial distribution of thin-layer sands,the accuracy of high-frequency components is difficult to guarantee.Therefore,we add the model constraint to the objective function to overcome the shortages of relying only on the data-driven schemes.First,constructing the supervisor1 based on the bidirectional long short-term memory recurrent neural network,which provides the predicted impedance with higher resolution.Then,convolution constraint as supervisor2 is introduced into the objective function to guarantee the reliability and accuracy of the inversion results,which makes the synthetic seismic data obtained from the inversion result consistent with the input data.Finally,we test the proposed scheme based on the synthetic and field seismic data.Compared to model-based and purely data-driven impedance inversion methods,the proposed approach provides more accurate and reliable inversion results while with higher vertical resolution and better spatial continuity.The inversion results accurately characterize the spatial distribution relationship of thin sands.The model tests demonstrate that the model-constrained and data-driven impedance inversion scheme can effectively improve the thin-layer structure characterization based on the seismic data.Moreover,tests on the oil field data indicate the practicality and adaptability of the proposed method.

Human-pose estimation based on weak supervision

Background In computer vision,simultaneously estimating human pose,shape,and clothing is a practical issue in real life,but remains a challenging task owing to the variety of clothing,complexity of de-formation,shortage of large-scale datasets,and difficulty in estimating clothing style.Methods We propose a multistage weakly supervised method that makes full use of data with less labeled information for learning to estimate human body shape,pose,and clothing deformation.In the first stage,the SMPL human-body model parameters were regressed using the multi-view 2D key points of the human body.Using multi-view information as weakly supervised information can avoid the deep ambiguity problem of a single view,obtain a more accurate human posture,and access supervisory information easily.In the second stage,clothing is represented by a PCA-based model that uses two-dimensional key points of clothing as supervised information to regress the parameters.In the third stage,we predefine an embedding graph for each type of clothing to describe the deformation.Then,the mask information of the clothing is used to further adjust the deformation of the clothing.To facilitate training,we constructed a multi-view synthetic dataset that included BCNet and SURREAL.Results The Experiments show that the accuracy of our method reaches the same level as that of SOTA methods using strong supervision information while only using weakly supervised information.Because this study uses only weakly supervised information,which is much easier to obtain,it has the advantage of utilizing existing data as training data.Experiments on the DeepFashion2 dataset show that our method can make full use of the existing weak supervision information for fine-tuning on a dataset with little supervision information,compared with the strong supervision information that cannot be trained or adjusted owing to the lack of exact annotation information.Conclusions Our weak supervision method can accurately estimate human body size,pose,and several common types of clothing and overcome the issues of the current shortage of clothing data.

Strategic interaction between institutional investors and supervision department:a theoretical analysis of low‑price collusion in SBIC

We introduce evolutionary game method to analyze low-price collusion in inquiry market of Sci-Tech Innovation Board of China(SIBC)from the perspective of strategic interaction between large institutional investors(LIIs),small and medium-sized institutional investors(SMIIs),and supervision department(SD).The results show that supervision behaviors of SD,and quotation behaviors of institutional investors,are subject to supervision conditions.Under the condition that benefits of tough supervision are lower a lot than minimum benefits of light supervision(light supervision condition),SD will choose light supervision and institutional investors will turn to illegal quotation in response.Finally,a steady-state equilibrium with low-price collusion will form in SIBC’s inquiry market even with a large supervision penalty for illegal quotation.On the contrary,under the condition that benefits of tough supervision are higher a lot than maximum benefits of light supervision(tough supervision condition)and with a large penalty for illegal quotation,SD and institutional investors will choose tough supervision and legal quotation.Further numerical simulations under light supervision condition show that:(1)High-price culling rule will become a booster for low-price collusion and accelerate SMIIs’evolutionary process to imitative quotation.(2)Blindly increasing penalties for illegal quotation or reducing the culling rate is not an appropriate approach to solve the problem of low-price collusion since it cannot shift supervision condition from light into tough and make SD supervise toughly.(3)Institutional investors’choices of quotation strategies are more volatile and highly susceptible to supervision behaviors of SD when facing exogenous uncertainty.Therefore,the keys to solving the problem of low-price collusion are shifting supervision condition from light into tough through increasing incremental benefits of tough supervision,and providing institutional investors with a stable and predictable supervision policy.In conclusion,the creation of a fair inquiry market doesn’t only depend on restraint and punishment to institutional investors,but also requires the establishment of supervision mechanism those are compatible with market-based inquiry.

On the Expansion and Realization of the Right to Environmental Information in Environmental Protection Supervision

As an innovation in the environmental governance system that breaks the traditional hierarchical structure,environmental protection supervision has not only played a significant role in protecting tangible environmental rights but also expanded the basic scope of the right to environmental information—part of procedural environmental rights.In the supervision of environmental protection,the objects of the right to environmental information and the subjects of the obligation to provide environmental information have been both expanded,with the focus shifting from government information to Party information and from administrative organs to Party organs.This vividly demonstrates the Communist Party of China’s concrete efforts to protect human rights in the field of the endeavor to build an ecological civilization.At present,the realization of the right to environmental information in environmental protection supervision still faces problems such as insufficient standards and norms,disordered practice and operation,and lack of liability guarantee.In this context,based on renewing relevant subjects’cognition of the right to know in environmental protection supervision,we should further improve and specify the rule for disclosing information about environmental protection supervision,rationally distribute the obligations for information disclosure in environmental protection supervision,and clarify the accountability rules for violating relevant requirements for information disclosure,so as to promote the overall development of the environmental protection supervision system while guaranteeing the realization of the right to environmental information.

Weakly Supervised Network with Scribble-Supervised and Edge-Mask for Road Extraction from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Significant advancements have been achieved in road surface extraction based on high-resolution remote sensingimage processing. Most current methods rely on fully supervised learning, which necessitates enormous humaneffort to label the image. Within this field, other research endeavors utilize weakly supervised methods. Theseapproaches aim to reduce the expenses associated with annotation by leveraging sparsely annotated data, such asscribbles. This paper presents a novel technique called a weakly supervised network using scribble-supervised andedge-mask (WSSE-net). This network is a three-branch network architecture, whereby each branch is equippedwith a distinct decoder module dedicated to road extraction tasks. One of the branches is dedicated to generatingedge masks using edge detection algorithms and optimizing road edge details. The other two branches supervise themodel’s training by employing scribble labels and spreading scribble information throughout the image. To addressthe historical flaw that created pseudo-labels that are not updated with network training, we use mixup to blendprediction results dynamically and continually update new pseudo-labels to steer network training. Our solutiondemonstrates efficient operation by simultaneously considering both edge-mask aid and dynamic pseudo-labelsupport. The studies are conducted on three separate road datasets, which consist primarily of high-resolutionremote-sensing satellite photos and drone images. The experimental findings suggest that our methodologyperforms better than advanced scribble-supervised approaches and specific traditional fully supervised methods.

Local saliency consistency-based label inference for weakly supervised salient object detection using scribble annotations

Recently,weak supervision has received growing attention in the field of salient object detection due to the convenience of labelling.However,there is a large performance gap between weakly supervised and fully supervised salient object detectors because the scribble annotation can only provide very limited foreground/background information.Therefore,an intuitive idea is to infer annotations that cover more complete object and background regions for training.To this end,a label inference strategy is proposed based on the assumption that pixels with similar colours and close positions should have consistent labels.Specifically,k-means clustering algorithm was first performed on both colours and coordinates of original annotations,and then assigned the same labels to points having similar colours with colour cluster centres and near coordinate cluster centres.Next,the same annotations for pixels with similar colours within each kernel neighbourhood was set further.Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the performance and achieve the state-of-the-art results.

Relational Turkish Text Classification Using Distant Supervised Entities and Relations

Text classification,by automatically categorizing texts,is one of the foundational elements of natural language processing applications.This study investigates how text classification performance can be improved through the integration of entity-relation information obtained from the Wikidata(Wikipedia database)database and BERTbased pre-trained Named Entity Recognition(NER)models.Focusing on a significant challenge in the field of natural language processing(NLP),the research evaluates the potential of using entity and relational information to extract deeper meaning from texts.The adopted methodology encompasses a comprehensive approach that includes text preprocessing,entity detection,and the integration of relational information.Experiments conducted on text datasets in both Turkish and English assess the performance of various classification algorithms,such as Support Vector Machine,Logistic Regression,Deep Neural Network,and Convolutional Neural Network.The results indicate that the integration of entity-relation information can significantly enhance algorithmperformance in text classification tasks and offer new perspectives for information extraction and semantic analysis in NLP applications.Contributions of this work include the utilization of distant supervised entity-relation information in Turkish text classification,the development of a Turkish relational text classification approach,and the creation of a relational database.By demonstrating potential performance improvements through the integration of distant supervised entity-relation information into Turkish text classification,this research aims to support the effectiveness of text-based artificial intelligence(AI)tools.Additionally,it makes significant contributions to the development ofmultilingual text classification systems by adding deeper meaning to text content,thereby providing a valuable addition to current NLP studies and setting an important reference point for future research.

Supervision of Public Opinion under the Background of Social Co-governance-Take the Changsheng Vaccine Incident as an Example

Objective To provide reference for the news media to give play to the role of public opinion supervision in time based on the background of drug safety and social co-governance.Methods The method of case analysis was used to make a retrospective study on the Changsheng vaccine incident in 2018.Then the role of mainstream media,pharmaceutical media,and self-media in the supervision of public opinion was investigated.Results and Conclusion Both mainstream and pharmaceutical media played an excellent role in supervising the Changchun Changsheng vaccine incident.However,the content published by some pharmaceutical media was hard to understand by ordinary people.Besides,the role of self-media in public opinion supervision was polarized.Some self-media closely kept pace with mainstream media in public opinion supervision.Other self-media unilaterally pursued the click rate,publishing false information to guide wrong public opinion.The news media should optimize the supervision efficiency of drug safety.On the one hand,pharmaceutical media should pay attention to the fact that readers may not understand the difficult terms because they are not professional.On the other hand,self-media practitioners should improve their professional quality so that they will not publish some fake news to mislead public opinion.

Unsupervised change detection of man-made objects using coherent and incoherent features of multi-temporal SAR images

Constrained by complex imaging mechanism and extraordinary visual appearance,change detection with synthetic aperture radar(SAR)images has been a difficult research topic,especially in urban areas.Although existing studies have extended from bi-temporal data pair to multi-temporal datasets to derive more plentiful information,there are still two problems to be solved in practical applications.First,change indicators constructed from incoherent feature only cannot characterize the change objects accurately.Second,the results of pixel-level methods are usually presented in the form of the noisy binary map,making the spatial change not intuitive and the temporal change of a single pixel meaningless.In this study,we propose an unsupervised man-made objects change detection framework using both coherent and incoherent features derived from multi-temporal SAR images.The coefficients of variation in timeseries incoherent features and the man-made object index(MOI)defined with coherent features are first combined to identify the initial change pixels.Afterwards,an improved spatiotemporal clustering algorithm is developed based on density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise(DBSCAN)and dynamic time warping(DTW),which can transform the initial results into noiseless object-level patches,and take the cluster center as a representative of the man-made object to determine the change pattern of each patch.An experiment with a stack of 10 TerraSAR-X images in Stripmap mode demonstrated that this method is effective in urban scenes and has the potential applicability to wide area change detection.

Edge-Federated Self-Supervised Communication Optimization Framework Based on Sparsification and Quantization Compression

The federated self-supervised framework is a distributed machine learning method that combines federated learning and self-supervised learning, which can effectively solve the problem of traditional federated learning being difficult to process large-scale unlabeled data. The existing federated self-supervision framework has problems with low communication efficiency and high communication delay between clients and central servers. Therefore, we added edge servers to the federated self-supervision framework to reduce the pressure on the central server caused by frequent communication between both ends. A communication compression scheme using gradient quantization and sparsification was proposed to optimize the communication of the entire framework, and the algorithm of the sparse communication compression module was improved. Experiments have proved that the learning rate changes of the improved sparse communication compression module are smoother and more stable. Our communication compression scheme effectively reduced the overall communication overhead.

Decentralized Semi-Supervised Learning for Stochastic Configuration Networks Based on the Mean Teacher Method

The aim of this paper is to broaden the application of Stochastic Configuration Network (SCN) in the semi-supervised domain by utilizing common unlabeled data in daily life. It can enhance the classification accuracy of decentralized SCN algorithms while effectively protecting user privacy. To this end, we propose a decentralized semi-supervised learning algorithm for SCN, called DMT-SCN, which introduces teacher and student models by combining the idea of consistency regularization to improve the response speed of model iterations. In order to reduce the possible negative impact of unsupervised data on the model, we purposely change the way of adding noise to the unlabeled data. Simulation results show that the algorithm can effectively utilize unlabeled data to improve the classification accuracy of SCN training and is robust under different ground simulation environments.

Distant Supervision方法中对齐数据的聚类去噪

基于聚类和寻找表达语义关系的句子模式,提出一种基于聚类去噪的distant supervision方法,解决了传统distant supervision方法在知识库和文本集对齐阶段会引入噪声数据的问题,得到了一种改进的distant supervision方法.实验结果表明,该方法可有效提高关系抽取任务的准确率.