ACLMHA and FML: A brain-inspired kinship verification framework.

As an extended research direction of face recognition, kinship verification based on the face image is an interesting yet challenging task, which aims to determine whether two individuals are kin-related based on their facial images. Face image-based kinship verification benefits many applications in real life, including: missing children search, family photo classification, kinship information mining, family privacy protection, etc. Studies presented thus far provide evidence that face kinship verification still offers many challenges. Hence in this paper, we propose a novel kinship verification architecture, the main contributions of which are as follows: To boost the deep model to capture various and abundant local features from different local face regions, we propose an attention center learning guided multi-head attention mechanism to supervise the learning of attention weights and make different attention heads notice the characteristics of different regions. To combat the misclassification caused by single feature center loss, we propose a family-level multi-center loss to ensure a more proper intra/inter-class distance measurement for kinship verification. To measure the potential similarity of features among relatives better, we propose to introduce the relation comparison module to measure the similarity among features at a deeper level. Extensive experiments are conducted on the widely used kinship verification dataset-Family in the Wild (FIW) dataset. Compared with other state-of-art (SOTA) methods, encouraging results are obtained, which verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.

The Skills Wastage of Contract Court Clerks in China: Assessment and Countermeasures.

Skills wastage among contract court clerks in China is becoming a concern for the court system, as it raises the turnover of essential personnel. This article explores how and why highly educated recruits ('talents') are attracted to, and often leave, this job through interviews with 79 newly recruited clerks of two courts of a provincial capital. The interviews reveal that underemployment-a common cause of dissatisfaction-reflects rigid recruitment policies, an inefficient talent allocation mechanism, and fundamental institutional changes to career progression in this specific occupation. To alleviate the problem, the data collected suggest encouraging employers to adjust their recruitment policies and provide more employment and career guidance. As many of the new recruits leave provincial towns to seek fortune in the capital, and this raises the incidence of under-employment among newly appointed court clerks through fiercer job competition, skills wastage among court clerks could also be reduced by narrowing the gap among cities to make talents evenly distributed across space.

Mucosa-Like Conformal Hydrogel Coating for Aqueous Lubrication.

Mucosa is a protective and lubricating barrier in biological tissue, which has a great clinical inspiration because of its slippery, soft, and hydrophilic surface. However, mimicking mucosal traits on complex surface remains an enormous challenge. Herein, a novel approach to create mucosa-like conformal hydrogel coating is developed. A thin conformal hydrogel layer mimicking the epithelial layer is obtained by first absorbing micelles, followed by forming covalent interlinks with the polymer substrate via interface-initiated hydrogel polymerization. The resulting coating exhibits uniform thickness (≈15 µm), mucosa-matched compliance (Young's modulus = 1.1 ± 0.1 kPa) and lubrication (coefficients of friction = 0.018 ± 0.003), robust interfacial bonding against peeling (peeling strength = 1218.0 ± 187.9 J m-2 ), as well as high water absorption capacity. It effectively resists adhesion of proteins and bacteria without compromising biocompatibility. As demonstrated by an in vivo cynomolgus monkey model and clinical trial, applications of the mucosa-like conformal hydrogel coating on the endotracheal tube significantly reduce intubation-related complications, such as invasive stimuli, mucosal lesions, laryngeal edema, inflammation, and postoperative pain. This work offers a promising prototype for surface decoration of biomedical devices and holds great prospects for clinical translation to enable interventional operations with minimally invasive impacts.