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My PhD project intends to explore the importance of play in child development. To examine the longitudinal influence of play on children's learning and mental health development, I conduct three studies by using the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children population cohort and the National Education Panel Study (in Germany). These three studies all intend to understand whether children’s play experiences and skills at around age 2/3 would affect their language, mathematical and mental health outcomes at around age 6/7. My study one explores the relation between symbolic play skills and structural language development among autistic and non-autistic. Through propensity score matching, I matched 92 autistic children and their 92 non-autistic peers in the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children population cohort. These two groups of children had exact same sociodemographic backgrounds and development levels. Through correlational and hierarchical regression analyses, I discovered that autistic children’s symbolic play skills at age 3 significantly contributed towards their semantics, syntax, and coherence skills at age 7. My study two explores the role of playful home mathematics environment activities on children’s mathematical development. I used structural equation modelling and mediational analyses with bootstrapping on 1,184 children in the National Education Panel Study. My study two shows that a mathematically and linguistically stimulating, attentive and responsive home learning environment at age 2, alongside with more frequent formal and informal home mathematics at age 5 were essential for children’s mathematical development between age 4 and 6. My study three explores the role of peer play abilities in children’s mental health development. I conducted analyses on 1,676 children from the general population in the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children population cohort, as well as on 243 children from the high-reactivity group and 270 children from low-persistence group, who tended to be at higher risks for mental health problems. Through structural equation modelling, I demonstrated that better peer play abilities at age 3 predicted lower risks of internalising and externalising problems at age 7 for the general population. Better peer play abilities at age 3 also predicted lower risks of hyperactivity problems for the high-reactivity group, whereas better peer play abilities at age 3 predicted lower risks of hyperactivity, emotional and peer problems for the low-persistence group. These studies all together suggest that play in early years could generate positive growth in children’s language, mathematical and mental health development, for both neurotypical and neurodivergent children. Educational and practical implications are provided, alongside with suggested future directions., LEGO Foundation Cambridge Trust

We endow Large Language Models (LLMs) with fine-grained self-evaluation to refine multi-step reasoning inference. We propose an effective prompting approach that integrates self-evaluation guidance through stochastic beam search. Our approach explores the reasoning search space using a well-calibrated automatic criterion. This enables an efficient search to produce higher-quality final predictions. With the self-evaluation guided stochastic beam search, we also balance the quality-diversity trade-off in the generation of reasoning chains. This allows our approach to adapt well with majority voting and surpass the corresponding Codex-backboned baselines by $6.34\%$, $9.56\%$, and $5.46\%$ on the GSM8K, AQuA, and StrategyQA benchmarks, respectively, in few-shot accuracy. Analysis of our decompositional reasoning finds it pinpoints logic failures and leads to higher consistency and robustness. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YuxiXie/SelfEval-Guided-Decoding., Comment: Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YuxiXie/SelfEval-Guided-Decoding

International audience; Widely investigated in the 70’s and 80’s, photo-electrochemistry of semiconductors (SC-PEC) has regained a huge interest in the context of global warming, especially with the quest of solar fuel production. Considerable advances have indeed been made from those days to understand and tailor the physics of semiconductor photoelectrodes, with the development of protection and catalytic coatings for aqueous operation,[1] and the development of novel electrochemical schemes such as photo-induced electrochemiluminescence.[2]Compared to photovoltaics where solar spectrum harvesting and carrier transport are the main challenges, PEC devices also require the management of the electrolyte/SC interface. In most photoelectrodes, this Schottky-like interface is the heart of the device, enabling to feed the electrolyte with the ad-hoc photo-carrier, depending on the intended chemical reaction. Still, it is also the place where harmful effects can appearsuch as surface trapping and corrosion. Engineering of this interface is thus crucial in view of chemical stability, photovoltage and overpotential optimization.In this talk, we will first introduce the basics of SC photo-electrodes, emphasizing on the conceptual gaps between experiments and numerical simulations of the devices. This will allow us to address the concept of III-V thin films on silicon for PEC where the physics of the device not only depends on the electrolyte/III-V interface but also on the III-V/silicon one and on structural defects with semimetal properties which cross the III-V layer.[3] These novel heterojunctions show promising performances at both poles of PEC cells for solar hydrogen production (see Figure 1).

Additional file 1 Supplementary Table 1. The information of reference strains in the study.

The plant-specific TCP transcription factor plays important roles in plant development and environment adaptation. Setaria italica and Setaria viridis, the C4 model plants, can grow on drought or arid soils. However, there is no systematic information about the genomic dissection and the expression of Setaria TCP genes. A total of 22 TCP genes were both identified from S. italica and S. viridis genomes. They all contained bHLH domain and were grouped into three main clades (PCF, CIN, and CYC/TB1). The TCP genes in the same clades shared similar gene structures. Cis-element in the TCP promoter regions were analyzed and associated with hormones and stress responsiveness. Ten TCP genes were predicted to be targets of miRNA319. Moreover, gene ontology analysis indicated three SiTCP and three SvTCP genes were involved in the regulation of shoot development, and SiTCP16/SvTCP16 were clustered together with tillering controlling gene TB1. The TCP genes were differentially expressed in the organs, but SiTCP/SvTCP orthologs shared similar expression patterns. Ten SiTCP members were downregulated under drought or salinity stresses, indicating they may play regulatory roles in abiotic stresses. The study provides detailed information regarding Setaria TCP genes, providing the theoretical basis for agricultural applications.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-dli-10.1177_23969415211063822 for Solitary symbolic play, object substitution and peer role play skills at age 3 predict different aspects of age 7 structural language abilities in a matched sample of autistic and non-autistic children by Yiran Vicky Zhao and Jenny Louise Gibson in Autism & Developmental Language Impairments