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This paper surveys innovative protocols that enhance the programming functionality of the Bitcoin blockchain, a key part of the "Bitcoin Ecosystem." Bitcoin utilizes the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model and a stack-based script language for efficient peer-to-peer payments, but it faces limitations in programming capability and throughput. The 2021 Taproot upgrade introduced the Schnorr signature algorithm and P2TR transaction type, significantly improving Bitcoin's privacy and programming capabilities. This upgrade has led to the development of protocols like Ordinals, Atomicals, and BitVM, which enhance Bitcoin's programming functionality and enrich its ecosystem. We explore the technical aspects of the Taproot upgrade and examine Bitcoin Layer 1 protocols that leverage Taproot's features to program non-fungible tokens (NFTs) into transactions, including Ordinals and Atomicals, along with the fungible token standards BRC-20 and ARC-20. Additionally, we categorize certain Bitcoin ecosystem protocols as Layer 2 solutions similar to Ethereum's, analyzing their impact on Bitcoin's performance. By analyzing data from the Bitcoin blockchain, we gather metrics on block capacity, miner fees, and the growth of Taproot transactions. Our findings confirm the positive effects of these protocols on Bitcoin's mainnet, bridging gaps in the literature regarding Bitcoin's programming capabilities and ecosystem protocols and providing valuable insights for practitioners and researchers.

Chirality, a fundamental concept describing an object cannot superpose with its mirror image, is crucial in optics and photonics and leads to various exotic phenomena, such as circular dichroism, and optical activity. Recent findings reveal that, besides electric and magnetic dipoles, toroidal dipoles, an elusive part of dynamic multipoles, can also contribute significantly to chirality. However, as toroidal dipoles are typically represented by solenoidal currents circulating on a three-dimensional (3D) torus, toroidal circular dichroism is usually observed in 3D intricate microstructures. Facing corresponding challenges in fabrication, integration and application, it is generally difficult to employ toroidal circular dichroism in compact metasurfaces for flexible modulation of chiral interactions between electromagnetic waves and matter. To overcome these stringent challenges, we propose and experimentally demonstrate the giant toroidal circular dichroism in a bilayer metasurface that is comprised of only planar layers, effectively bypassing various restrictions imposed by 3D microstructures. With the introduction of a displacement, or bilayer offset, between the opposite layers, we experimentally achieve giant chiral responses with the intrinsic circular dichroism (CD) reaching 0.69 in measurements, and the CD can be quantitatively manipulated in a simple manner. The giant intrinsic chirality primarily originates from distinct excitations of in-plane toroidal dipole moments under circular polarized incidences, and the toroidal chiral response is quantitatively controlled by the bilayer offset. Therefore, our work provides a straightforward and versatile approach for development of giant and flexible intrinsic chirality through toroidal dipoles with inherently planar layers, important for applications in communications, sensing, and chiroptical devices.

Topological photonics has revolutionized manipulations of electromagnetic waves by leveraging various topological phases proposed originally in condensed matters, leading to robust and error-immune signal processing. Despite considerable efforts, a critical challenge remains in devising frequency routers operating at a broadband frequency range with limited crosstalk. Previous designs usually relied on fine tuning of parameters and are difficult to be integrated efficiently and compactly. Here, targeting the demand for frequency-selective applications in on-chip photonics, we explore a topological approach to photonic frequency router via valley-Hall metacrystals. Diverging from the majority of studies which focuses on zigzag interfaces, our research shifts the attention to armchair interfaces within an ABA sandwich-like structure, where a single column of type-B metacrystal acts as a perturbation in the background type-A metacrystal. Essentially, through tuning a single geometric parameter of the type-B metacrystal, this configuration gives rise to interface states within a customized frequency band, enabling signal routing with limited crosstalk to meet specified demands. Moreover, this concept is practically demonstrated through a photonic frequency router with three distinct channels, experimentally exhibiting robust wave transmissions with excellent agreement with the design. This investigation manifests possible applications of the armchair interfaces in valley-Hall photonic systems and advances development of photonic devices that are both compact and efficient. Notably, the approach is naturally compatible with on-chip photonics and integration, which could benefit telecommunications and optical computing applications.

Medical image segmentation has witnessed significant advancements with the emergence of deep learning. However, the reliance of most neural network models on a substantial amount of annotated data remains a challenge for medical image segmentation. To address this issue, few-shot segmentation methods based on meta-learning have been employed. Presently, the methods primarily focus on aligning the support set and query set to enhance performance, but this approach hinders further improvement of the model's effectiveness. In this paper, our objective is to propose a few-shot medical segmentation model that acquire comprehensive feature representation capabilities, which will boost segmentation accuracy by capturing both local and long-range features. To achieve this, we introduce a plug-and-play attention module that dynamically enhances both query and support features, thereby improving the representativeness of the extracted features. Our model comprises four key modules: a dual-path feature extractor, an attention module, an adaptive prototype prediction module, and a multi-scale prediction fusion module. Specifically, the dual-path feature extractor acquires multi-scale features by obtaining features of 32{\times}32 size and 64{\times}64 size. The attention module follows the feature extractor and captures local and long-range information. The adaptive prototype prediction module automatically adjusts the anomaly score threshold to predict prototypes, while the multi-scale fusion prediction module integrates prediction masks of various scales to produce the final segmentation result. We conducted experiments on publicly available MRI datasets, namely CHAOS and CMR, and compared our method with other advanced techniques. The results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

In driving scenarios, automobile active safety systems are increasingly incorporating deep learning technology. These systems typically need to handle multiple tasks simultaneously, such as detecting fatigue driving and recognizing the driver's identity. However, the traditional parallel-style approach of combining multiple single-task models tends to waste resources when dealing with similar tasks. Therefore, we propose a novel tree-style multi-task modeling approach for multi-task learning, which rooted at a shared backbone, more dedicated separate module branches are appended as the model pipeline goes deeper. Following the tree-style approach, we propose a multi-task learning model for simultaneously performing driver fatigue detection and face recognition for identifying a driver. This model shares a common feature extraction backbone module, with further separated feature extraction and classification module branches. The dedicated branches exploit and combine spatial and channel attention mechanisms to generate space-channel fused-attention enhanced features, leading to improved detection performance. As only single-task datasets are available, we introduce techniques including alternating updation and gradient accumulation for training our multi-task model using only the single-task datasets. The effectiveness of our tree-style multi-task learning model is verified through extensive validations.

In recent years, deep learning based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has achieved remarkable success in many applications. However, their heavy reliance on extensive labeled data and limited generalization ability to unseen classes pose challenges to their suitability for medical image processing tasks. Few-shot learning, which utilizes a small amount of labeled data to generalize to unseen classes, has emerged as a critical research area, attracting substantial attention. Currently, most studies employ a prototype-based approach, in which prototypical networks are used to construct prototypes from the support set, guiding the processing of the query set to obtain the final results. While effective, this approach heavily relies on the support set while neglecting the query set, resulting in notable disparities within the model classes. To mitigate this drawback, we propose a novel Support-Query Prototype Fusion Network (SQPFNet). SQPFNet initially generates several support prototypes for the foreground areas of the support images, thus producing a coarse segmentation mask. Subsequently, a query prototype is constructed based on the coarse segmentation mask, additionally exploiting pattern information in the query set. Thus, SQPFNet constructs high-quality support-query fused prototypes, upon which the query image is segmented to obtain the final refined query mask. Evaluation results on two public datasets, SABS and CMR, show that SQPFNet achieves state-of-the-art performance., Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables

Simultaneously concentrating EM waves and heat fluxes to the same target region within an on-chip system carries substantial academic research importance and practical application value. Nevertheless, existing researches are primarily aimed at the design and experimentation of concentrators for individual EM waves or temperature fields. In this work, a thermal-EM concentrator, capable of simultaneously concentrating EM waves and heat fluxes, is designed using transformation optics/thermodynamics and fabricated with engineered EM-thermal metamaterials. The concentrating effects of the proposed thermal-EM concentrator on the thermal fluxes and EM waves are verified through numerical simulations and experimental measurements, respectively, which are in good agreement with each other. Both numerically simulated and experimentally measured results demonstrate the concentrating capability of the proposed thermal-EM concentrator, which can concentrate broadband TM-polarized EM waves ranging from 8-12 GHz and heat/cold flows to the same target region within an on-chip operating environment. The thermal-EM concentrator exhibits a thermal focusing efficiency close to 100% and more than three times enhancement of the magnetic field at the designed center frequency of 10 GHz. The proposed thermal-EM concentrator can be utilized for efficient cooling for the specified component and simultaneously enhancing the EM antenna's radiation/reception efficiency within an on-chip system., Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures

Drowsy driving represents a major contributor to traffic accidents, and the implementation of driver drowsy driving detection systems has been proven to significantly reduce the occurrence of such accidents. Despite the development of numerous drowsy driving detection algorithms, many of them impose specific prerequisites such as the availability of complete facial images, optimal lighting conditions, and the use of RGB images. In our study, we introduce a novel approach called the Multi-Attention Fusion Drowsy Driving Detection Model (MAF). MAF is aimed at significantly enhancing classification performance, especially in scenarios involving partial facial occlusion and low lighting conditions. It accomplishes this by capitalizing on the local feature extraction capabilities provided by multi-attention fusion, thereby enhancing the algorithm's overall robustness. To enhance our dataset, we collected real-world data that includes both occluded and unoccluded faces captured under nighttime and daytime lighting conditions. We conducted a comprehensive series of experiments using both publicly available datasets and our self-built data. The results of these experiments demonstrate that our proposed model achieves an impressive driver drowsiness detection accuracy of 96.8%., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures

Recently, higher-order topological phases have endowed materials many exotic topological phases. For three-dimensional (3D) higher-order topologies, it hosts topologically protected 1D hinge states or 0D corner states, which extend the bulk-boundary correspondence of 3D topological phases. Meanwhile, the enrichment of group symmetries with exploration of projective symmetry algebras redefined the fundamentals of nontrivial topological matter with artificial gauge fields, leading to the discovery of new topological phases in classical wave systems. In this Letter, we construct an acoustic topological semimetal characterized by both the first and the second Stiefel-Whitney (SW) topological charges by utilizing the projective symmetry. Different from conventional high-order topologies with multiple bulk-boundary correspondences protected by different class topological invariants, acoustic high-order Stiefel-Whitney semimetal (HOSWS) has two different bulk-edge correspondences protected by only one class (SW class) topological invariant. Two types of topological hinge and surface states are embedded in bulk bands at the same frequency, featuring similar characteristics of bound states in the continuum (BICs). In experiments, we demonstrate the existence of high-quality surface state and hinge state at the interested frequency window with polarized intensity field distributions.

As a disruptive technology that originates from cryptocurrency, blockchain provides a trusted platform to facilitate industrial IoT (IIoT) applications. However, implementing a blockchain platform in IIoT scenarios confronts various security challenges due to the rigorous deployment condition. To this end, we present a novel design of secure blockchain based on trusted computing hardware for IIoT applications. Specifically, we employ the trusted execution environment (TEE) module and a customized security chip to safeguard the blockchain against different attacking vectors. Furthermore, we implement the proposed secure IIoT blockchain on the ARM-based embedded device and build a small-scale IIoT network to evaluate its performance. Our experimental results show that the secure blockchain platform achieves a high throughput (150TPS) with low transaction confirmation delay (below 66ms), demonstrating its feasibility in practical IIoT scenarios. Finally, we outline the open challenges and future research directions.

This work presents the design and implementation of a blockchain system that enables the trustable transactive energy management for distributed energy resources (DERs). We model the interactions among DERs, including energy trading and flexible appliance scheduling, as a cost minimization problem. Considering the dispersed nature and diverse ownership of DERs, we develop a distributed algorithm to solve the optimization problem using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) method. Furthermore, we develop a blockchain system, on which we implement the proposed algorithm with the smart contract, to guarantee the transparency and correctness of the energy management. We prototype the blockchain in a small-scale test network and evaluate it through experiments using real-world data. The experimental results validate the feasibility and effectiveness of our design., Comment: ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (ACM e-Energy) 2021. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2105.00174

The advent of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as distributed renewables, energy storage, electric vehicles, and controllable loads, \rv{brings} a significantly disruptive and transformational impact on the centralized power system. It is widely accepted that a paradigm shift to a decentralized power system with bidirectional power flow is necessary to the integration of DERs. The virtual power plant (VPP) emerges as a promising paradigm for managing DERs to participate in the power system. In this paper, we develop a blockchain-based VPP energy management platform to facilitate a rich set of transactive energy activities among residential users with renewables, energy storage, and flexible loads in a VPP. Specifically, users can interact with each other to trade energy for mutual benefits and provide network services, such as feed-in energy, reserve, and demand response, through the VPP. To respect the users' independence and preserve their privacy, we design a decentralized optimization algorithm to optimize the users' energy scheduling, energy trading, and network services. Then we develop a prototype blockchain network for VPP energy management and implement the proposed algorithm on the blockchain network. By experiments using real-world data-trace, we validated the feasibility and effectiveness of our algorithm and the blockchain system. The simulation results demonstrate that our blockchain-based VPP energy management platform reduces the users' cost by up to 38.6% and reduces the overall system cost by 11.2%.

For most acoustic metamaterials, once they have been fabricated, their operating frequencies and functions cannot be adjusted, which is an intrinsic barrier for development of realistic applications. The study to overcome this limit has become a significant issue in acoustic metamaterial engineering. Although with the advance of metamaterials in the past two decades, a series of methods such as electric or magnetic control have been proposed, most of them can only work in the condition of no fluid passage. Some metamaterials with large transmission losses have been proposed, but the sounds are essentially reflected rather than absorbed. Here, to overcome this intrinsic difficulty, we propose a ventilated sound absorber that can be manually tuned in a large range after being manufactured. During the tuning which is achieved through an intricately designed slider, high-performance absorption and ventilation are both ensured. The tunable ventilated sound absorber is demonstrated experimentally and the effective model of coupled lossy oscillators can be employed to understand its mechanism. The manually tunable ventilated metamaterial has the potential application values in various complicated pipe systems that require frequency adjustment and it also establishes the foundation for future development of active tunable ventilated acoustic metamaterials.