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We propose Dual Attention Networks (DANs) which jointly leverage visual and textual attention mechanisms to capture fine-grained interplay between vision and language. DANs attend to specific regions in images and words in text through multiple steps and gather essential information from both modalities. Based on this framework, we introduce two types of DANs for multimodal reasoning and matching, respectively. The reasoning model allows visual and textual attentions to steer each other during collaborative inference, which is useful for tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). In addition, the matching model exploits the two attention mechanisms to estimate the similarity between images and sentences by focusing on their shared semantics. Our extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of DANs in combining vision and language, achieving the state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks for VQA and image-text matching.

Recently, it has been noticed that surface plasmon resonance of metal nanoparticles can alter the intrinsic properties of nearby fluorophores. Field enhancement and radiative decay engineering are major principles for understanding a number of experimental observations such as enhanced and quenched emission of fluorophores in the vicinity of metal nanoparticles. At the same time, there are apparent similarities between surface-plasmon-coupled fluorescence and fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), as both are near-field through-space interactions. From this perspective, we hypothesize that donor-acceptor interaction in the FRET can be altered by metal nanoparticles. Our approach is based on diblock copolymer micelles, which have been widely applied for nanoscale arrangement of functionalities. By applying self-assembling techniques of copolymer micelles to organize the spatial location of semiconductor quantum dots, fluorescent dyes, and metal nanoparticles, the FRET in hybrid assemblies can be switched off by plasmonic effects.

Directional attraction with lateral repulsion between colloidal nanoparticles can create their supracolloidal chains. Here, we demonstrate supracolloidal polymers of diblock copolymer micelles, which were polymerized by adjusting the polarity of the solvent. We also synthesized supracolloidal random and block copolymer chains.

The growing number of alternative schools seems to correlate with the mounting population of disenfranchised students. The higher the number of disenfranchised students, the more alternative schools are being built. This correlation may be caused by social, economic, and political issues that bring about pervasive social injustice, which reinforces the cycle of educational inequality. In this qualitative study, the authors examined 1 alternative high school from a critical perspective to determine whether the school benefited students to the extent that it broke the cycle of educational inequality. Using critical theory as a theoretical framework, the authors found that the school provided a caring environment for students and gained their trust. However, the school did not offer a meaningful and equitable alternative education that benefited the students. This failure led the authors to question for whom this school is truly an alternative.