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Chalcogenide-based semiconductors have recently emerged as promising candidates for optoelectronic devices, benefiting from their low-cost, solution processability, excellent stability and tunable optoelectronic properties. However, the understanding of their fundamental optoelectronic properties is far behind the success of device performance and starts to limit their further development. To fill this gap, we conduct a comparative study of chalcogenide absorbers across a wide material space, in order to assess their suitability for different types of applications. We utilize optical-pump terahertz-probe spectroscopy and time-resolved microwave conductivity techniques to fully analyze their charge-carrier dynamics. We show that antimony-based chalcogenide thin films exhibit relatively low charge-carrier mobilities and short lifetimes, compared with bismuth-based chalcogenides. In particular, AgBiS2 thin films possess the highest mobility, and Sb2S3 thin films have less energetic disorder, which are beneficial for photovoltaic devices. On the contrary, Bi2S3 showed ultralong carrier lifetime and high photoconductive gain, which is beneficial for designing photoconductors.

Silver antimony sulfide, as a ternary chalcogenide, has attracted great attention in the field of optoelectronics in recent years. In particular, it has appealing properties, such as excellent stability, solution processability, and versatile composition tunability. Benefiting from the recent development of processing techniques, AgSbS

Bismuth sulfide possesses an extremely high absorption coefficient, a relatively small bandgap, and high charge carrier mobility, which are favorable for photovoltaics and photodetection. However, the device performance of binary Bi2S3 is still limited by the poor charge transport and complicated trap features caused by the stoichiometric imbalance, as both sulfur vacancy and bismuth vacancy could result in tremendous trap states. In this work, we incorporate a small amount of extrinsic elements in the solution-processed Bi2S3 thin films and systematically investigate the influence of extrinsic doping on the charge transport properties of Bi2S3 thin films via time-resolved microwave conductivity and field-effect transistors. We also fabricate photodetectors based on these Zn2+ incorporated Bi2S3 thin films and achieve state-of-the-art device performance, including relatively high on/off ratio, high responsivity, and extremely low dark current and noise, which is promising for next-generation solution-processed photodetection.

Adoptive cell therapy has shown clinical success in patients with hematological malignancies. Immune cell engineering is critical for production, research, and development of cell therapy; however, current approaches for generation of therapeutic immune cells face various limitations. Here, we establish a composite gene delivery system for the highly efficient engineering of therapeutic immune cells. This system, termed MAJESTIC (mRNAAAV-Sleeping-BeautyJointEngineering ofStableTherapeuticImmuneCells), combines the merits of mRNA, AAV vector, and transposon into one composite system. In MAJESTIC, the transient mRNA component encodes a transposase that mediates permanent genomic integration of theSleeping Beauty(SB) transposon, which carries the gene-of-interest and is embedded within the AAV vector. This system can transduce diverse immune cell types with low cellular toxicity and achieve highly efficient and stable therapeutic cargo delivery. Compared with conventional gene delivery systems, such as lentiviral vector, DNA transposon plasmid, or minicircle electroporation, MAJESTIC shows higher cell viability, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) transgene expression, therapeutic cell yield, as well as prolonged transgene expression. CAR-T cells generated by MAJESTIC are functional and have strong anti-tumor activityin vivo. This system also demonstrates versatility for engineering different cell therapy constructs such as canonical CAR, bi-specific CAR, kill switch CAR, and synthetic TCR; and for CAR delivery into various immune cells, including T cells, natural killer cells, myeloid cells, and induced pluripotent stem cells.

Natural killer (NK) cells are an innate immune cell type that serves at the first level of defense against pathogens and cancer. NK cells have clinical potential, however, multiple current limitations exist that naturally hinder the successful implementation of NK cell therapy against cancer, including their effector function, persistence, and tumor infiltration. To unbiasedly reveal the functional genetic landscape underlying critical NK cell characteristics against cancer, we perform perturbomics mapping of tumor infiltrating NK cells by jointin vivoAAV-CRISPR screens and single cell sequencing. We establish a strategy with AAV-SleepingBeauty(SB)- CRISPR screening leveraging a custom high-density sgRNA library targeting cell surface genes, and perform four independentin vivotumor infiltration screens in mouse models of melanoma, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, and glioblastoma. In parallel, we characterize single-cell transcriptomic landscapes of tumor-infiltrating NK cells, which identifies previously unexplored sub-populations of NK cells with distinct expression profiles, a shift from immature to mature NK (mNK) cells in the tumor microenvironment (TME), and decreased expression of mature marker genes in mNK cells.CALHM2,a calcium homeostasis modulator that emerges from both screen and single cell analyses, shows bothin vitroandin vivoefficacy enhancement when perturbed in chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-NK cells. Differential gene expression analysis reveals thatCALHM2knockout reshapes cytokine production, cell adhesion, and signaling pathways in CAR- NKs. These data directly and systematically map out endogenous factors that naturally limit NK cell function in the TME to offer a broad range of cellular genetic checkpoints as candidates for future engineering to enhance NK cell-based immunotherapies.

This review summarizes the processing techniques and optoelectronic design of the perovskite thick-junctions and X-ray detectors, and also points out the key challenges and opportunities, which are promising to explore.

Optoelectronic properties of metal halide perovskites were modulated using Sn-doping. Photoconductors were fabricated based on the Sn-doped perovskite films, and the devices were optimized to present weak temperature-dependent performance metrics.

Antimony sulfide, as a binary chalcogenide, has attracted great attention in the field of optoelectronics in recent years, particularly in photovoltaics, because of its striking merits such as earth elements abundance, excellent stability, chemical versatility, and solution processability. With the rapid development of fabrication techniques and device engineering, the device performance of Sb

The main objective of yoga pose grading is to assess the input yoga pose and compare it to a standard pose in order to provide a quantitative evaluation as a grade. In this paper, a computer vision-based yoga pose grading approach is proposed using contrastive skeleton feature representations. First, the proposed approach extracts human body skeleton keypoints from the input yoga pose image and then feeds their coordinates into a pose feature encoder, which is trained using contrastive triplet examples; finally, a comparison of similar encoded pose features is made. Furthermore, to tackle the inherent challenge of composing contrastive examples in pose feature encoding, this paper proposes a new strategy to use both a coarse triplet example—comprised of an anchor, a positive example from the same category, and a negative example from a different category, and a fine triplet example—comprised of an anchor, a positive example, and a negative example from the same category with different pose qualities. Extensive experiments are conducted using two benchmark datasets to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach.

Perovskite solar cells are one of the most promising thin-film photovoltaic techniques, which have an unprecedented progress in the last decade. It is well-recognized in the perovskite community that nonradiative recombination losses and the open-circuit voltage deficit are the dominant limiting factors to further improve the device efficiency. Recently, multiple groups have reported that lead iodide can effectively passivate both perovskite grain boundaries and the interfaces between perovskite and charge transport layers. However, most of the excess PbI2 was processed with solution methods and formed PbI2 grains, which cannot cover perovskite layers completely. It is also very challenging to spin-coat PbI2 layers directly on perovskites, which requires orthogonal solvents. In this work, we deposit additional PbI2 thin layers directly on perovskite thin films via thermal evaporation. The impact of PbI2 layers on the perovskite thin films and devices is systematically investigated. It was found that the evaporated PbI2 thin films can effectively reduce the nonradiative recombination and enhance the device performance. The optimized thickness of the PbI2 layer was determined to be around 10 nm, which results in a relatively high Voc of 1.18 V and power conversion efficiency of 21.52%.

A flexible scintillator screen of Rb2CuBr3@polymer has been developed for X-ray imaging with good quality, exhibiting a high spatial resolution of 27.9 lp mm−1 and a low detection limit of 63 nGyair s−1.

p-Type inorganic nickel oxide (NiOx) exhibits high transparency, tunable-optoelectronic properties, and a work function (

Despite extensive study, the bandgap characteristics of lead halide perovskites are not well understood. Usually, these materials are considered as direct bandgap semiconductors, while their photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) is very low in the solid state or single crystal (SC) state. Some researchers have noted a weak indirect bandgap below the direct bandgap transition in these perovskites. Herein, application of pressure to a CsPbBr

Organic-inorganic halide perovskites have excellent intrinsic properties, such as long carrier lifetime, high photoluminescence quantum yield, and high gain, in whispering gallery mode (WGM) cavities by facile vapor self-assembly or solution process, which make them competitive for high-performance microlasers. However, the performance of perovskite-based microlasers is severely limited by the fabrication of microcavities, which results in poor reproducibility and uncontrolled morphology. Herein, we explore a reproducible method which combined thermal co-evaporation with femtosecond (fs) laser direct writing for formamidinium lead iodide (FAPbI3) perovskite polygon-shaped WGM microcavities. The microlasers pumped with the fs laser had a low threshold of 4.0-12.3 μJ/cm2 and narrow full width at half-maximum of 0.62-1.05 nm. Moreover, size- and shape-dependent WGM lasing performances are also investigated systematically. The results prove that FAPbI3 polygonal microcavities can serve as promising WGM lasers and have great potential for practical optoelectronic applications.

Blade coating offers a low-cost production method for fabricating perovskite thick-film x-ray detectors. However, due to the preferential nucleation at the gas–liquid interface of a perovskite solution, high-quality perovskite thick films are in such a dilemma, sacrificing either the density of the thick film by forming a porous structure or the thickness of the film through depositing a compact structure. The porous structure will lead to carrier recombination and ion migration while low thickness will cause insufficient x-ray absorption, which will increase the dark current or reduce the sensitivity of the corresponding x-ray detector. In the present work, a scalable ferroelectric dipole–methylamine lead iodide (MAPbI3) coupled x-ray detector is proposed, where the x-ray photoconductor in situ formed on indium tin oxide shows a dense fibrous mesoscopic structure oriented along the charge-carriers transport direction. It is demonstrated that ferroelectric dipoles promise not only strong coupling effects with MAPbI3, driving better crystallinity and denser assemblies, but also excellent passivation to MAPbI3 interfaces, decreasing trap-state densities, leading to improved direct x-ray detection performance. In addition, the enhanced operational stability of the corresponding device suggests a strategy of introducing the localized polarization field for stable perovskite direct x-ray detectors.

Metal halide perovskites have emerged as promising candidates for next-generation optoelectronics. However, the present understanding of their recombination processes and trap states within the devices are still limited, which is also inevitable in the state-of-the-art perovskite solar cells with multiple passivation strategies and various additives involved. Recent works have also demonstrated that metal cations incorporated perovskites could potentially reduce the non-radiative losses and improve the device performance to some extent. However, the underlying “doping” mechanism is not clear. In this work, we systematically investigated the trap-induced ultra-long carrier lifetime of the metal cation incorporated perovskites and found that some specific cations could extend the carrier lifetime up to ∼100 μs, which could be correlated with the formation of shallow trap states. In addition, such shallow trap-mediated charge dynamics could be effectively probed with light-biased time-resolved microwave conductivity technique, which provides additional information to conventional time-resolved photoluminescence.

Recently, two-dimensional layered perovskites have emerged as effective additives for stabilizing conventional three-dimensional metal halide perovskites. With the addition of layered perovskites, the perovskite-based devices also exhibited enhanced optoelectronic properties, such as reduced nonradiative recombination and ionic migration, strengthened crystallinity, and anisotropic charge transport. However, the influence of the large organic cations on the performance metrics of the photodiodes is not fully understood. In this work, we systematically investigate the device performance and related optoelectronic features of the layered perovskite-enhanced perovskite photodiodes. In particular, with the addition of large organic cations to the FA

Quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-2D) Ruddlesden–Popper (RP) perovskites such as BA2Csn–1PbnBr3n+1 (BA = butylammonium, n > 1) are promising emitters, but their electroluminescence performance is limited by a severe non-radiative recombination during the energy transfer process. Here, we make use of methanesulfonate (MeS) that can interact with the spacer BA cations via strong hydrogen bonding interaction to reconstruct the quasi-2D perovskite structure, which increases the energy acceptor-to-donor ratio and enhances the energy transfer in perovskite films, thus improving the light emission efficiency. MeS additives also lower the defect density in RP perovskites, which is due to the elimination of uncoordinated Pb2+ by the electron-rich Lewis base MeS and the weakened adsorbate blocking effect. As a result, green light-emitting diodes fabricated using these quasi-2D RP perovskite films reach current efficiency of 63 cd A−1 and 20.5% external quantum efficiency, which are the best reported performance for devices based on quasi-2D perovskites so far., Owing to large exciton binding energy, quasi-2D perovskite is promising for light-emitting application, yet inhomogeneous phases distribution limits the potential. Here, the authors improve the performance by using MeS additive to regulate the phase distribution and to reduce defect density in the films.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the acute effect of ambient temperature on hospitalization due to acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (AECOPD), stroke, and myocardial infarction (MI) in Shenyang, China. We used the distributed delayed nonlinear model to evaluate the impact of ambient temperature on respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The study population was divided into four groups: < 65 group and ≥ 65 age groups, female and male groups. The < 65 age group of AECOPD patients was more likely to be affected by high ambient temperature, while the ≥ 65 age group of AECOPD patients was more sensitive to low ambient temperature. The hospitalization risk of MI admission increased in the ≥ 65 age group at 1–8 days delay under low ambient temperature conditions. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11356-020-11934-2.

X-ray detection is widely utilized in our daily life, such as in medical diagnosis, security checking, and environmental monitoring. However, most of the commercial X-ray detectors are based on inorganic semiconductors, e.g., Si, CdTe, and Ge, which require complex and costly fabrication processes. Metal halide perovskites have recently emerged as a set of promising candidates for ionizing radiation detection, owing to the high attenuation coefficient, long carrier lifetime, and excellent charge transport properties. Perovskite single crystals have been successfully implemented in X-ray detection, but the fragile single crystals limit the device fabrication and the integration with a read-out circuit. In addition, it is hard to reach inch-size single crystals for real application. Flexible devices based on perovskite films or composite films have also been reported, but either the thickness or charge transport properties are limited by the solution processes. In this work, we introduced thermal co-evaporation to deposit highly efficient formamidinium lead iodide perovskite films. Considering the trade-off between X-ray absorption and charge transport, we optimized the active layer thickness and achieved large-area and flexible X-ray detectors with state-of-the-art device performance, including extremely low dark current and noise, fast response, and high sensitivity of 142.1 μC Gyair-1 cm-2.

In recent years, AgBiS2 has received great attention in optoelectronics thanks to its fascinating merits, including a suitable bandgap, large absorption coefficient from ultraviolet to near-infrared and remarkable material stability. However, the poor carrier transport properties limit its further development and applications. To address this issue, we propose a composite strategy to facilitate the carrier transport of AgBiS2 QD films. The AgBiS2–organic hybrid films demonstrated enhanced photoconductivity. Then, we fabricated phototransistors based on these blend films, and achieved a high photosensitivity (Ilight/Idark) of 1.5 × 103, a decent responsivity of up to 20 A W−1, an excellent specific detectivity of 4 × 1013 Jones under low UV illumination and remarkable device stability. These results again demonstrate the great potential of AgBiS2 for next generation solution-processed photodetectors.

Although successful COVID-19 vaccines have been developed, multiple pathogenic coronavirus species exist, urging for development of multi-species coronavirus vaccines. Here we developed prototype LNP-mRNA vaccine candidates against SARS-CoV-2 (Delta variant), SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, and test how multiplexing of these LNP-mRNAs can induce effective immune responses in animal models. A triplex scheme of LNP-mRNA vaccination induced antigen-specific antibody responses against SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, with a relatively weaker MERS-CoV response in this setting. Single cell RNA-seq profiled the global systemic immune repertoires and the respective transcriptome signatures of multiplexed vaccinated animals, which revealed a systemic increase in activated B cells, as well as differential gene expression signatures across major adaptive immune cells. Sequential vaccination showed potent antibody responses against all three species, significantly stronger than simultaneous vaccination in mixture. These data demonstrated the feasibility, antibody responses and single cell immune profiles of multi-species coronavirus vaccination. The direct comparison between simultaneous and sequential vaccination offers insights on optimization of vaccination schedules to provide broad and potent antibody immunity against three major pathogenic coronavirus species.One sentence summaryMultiplexed mRNA vaccination in simultaneous and sequential modes provide broad and potent immunity against pathogenic coronavirus species.

The Omicron sub-lineage BA.2 of SARS-CoV-2 has recently become dominant across many areas in the world in the on-going waves of COVID-19. Compared to the ancestral/wild-type (WT) virus, Omicron lineage variants, both BA.1 and BA.2, contain high number of mutations, especially in the spike protein, causing significant immune escape that leads to substantial reduction of vaccine and antibody efficacy. Because of this antigenic drift, BA.2 exhibited differential resistance profile to monoclonal antibodies than BA.1. Thus, it is important to understand whether the immunity elicited by currently available vaccines are effective against the BA.2 subvariant. We directly tested the heterotypic vaccination responses against Omicron BA.2, using vaccinated serum from animals receiving WT- and variant-specific mRNA vaccine in lipid nanoparticle (LNP) formulations. Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 antigen showed similar reactivity to serum antibodies elicited by two doses of WT, B.1.351 and B.1.617 LNP-mRNAs. Neutralizing antibody titers of B.1.351 and B.1.617 LNP-mRNA were ~2-fold higher than that of WT LNP-mRNA. Both homologous boosting with WT LNP-mRNA and heterologous boosting with BA.1 LNP-mRNA substantially increased waning immunity of WT vaccinated mice against both BA.1 and BA.2 subvariants. The BA.1 LNP-mRNA booster was ~3-fold more efficient than WT LNP-mRNA at elevating neutralizing antibody titers of BA.2. Together, these data provided a direct preclinical evaluation of WT and variant-specific LNP-mRNAs in standard two-dose and as boosters against BA.1 and BA.2 subvariants.

The Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) of SARS-CoV-2 rapidly becomes dominant globally. Its extensive mutations confer severe efficacy reduction to most of existing antibodies or vaccines. Here, we developed RAMIHM, a highly efficient strategy to generate fully human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), directly applied it with Omicron-mRNA immunization, and isolated three potent and specific clones against Omicron. Rapid mRNA immunization elicited strong anti-Omicron antibody response in humanized mice, along with broader anti-coronavirus activity. Customized single cell BCR sequencing mapped the clonal repertoires. Top-ranked clones collectively from peripheral blood, plasma B and memory B cell populations showed high rate of Omicron-specificity (93.3%) from RAMIHM-scBCRseq. Clone-screening identified three highly potent neutralizing antibodies that have low nanomolar affinity for Omicron RBD, and low ng/mL level IC50 in neutralization, more potent than majority of currently approved or authorized clinical RBD-targeting mAbs. These lead mAbs are fully human and ready for downstream IND-enabling and/or translational studies.

Hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) of bio-oil is a crucial step for improving the bio-fuel quality, but developing highly dispersed Pt-based catalysts with high selectivity for target alkanes remains a great...

Organic solar cells have attracted academic and industrial interests due to the advantages like lightweight, flexibility and roll-to-roll fabrication. Nowadays, 18% power conversion efficiency has been achieved in the state-of-the-art organic solar cells. The recent rapid progress in organic solar cells relies on the continuously emerging new materials, device fabrication technologies, and the deep understanding on film morphology, molecular packing and device physics. Donor and acceptor materials are the key materials for organic solar cells since they determine the device performance. The past 25 years have witnessed an odyssey in developing high-performance donors and acceptors. In this review, we focus on those star materials and milestone work, and introduce the molecular structure evolution of the key materials. These key materials include homopolymer donors, D-A copolymer donors, A-D-A small molecule donors, fullerene acceptors and nonfullerene acceptors. At last, we outlook the challenges and very important directions in key materials development.

For the first time, we report an interesting transition from conventional core–shell polymer/SiO2 particles to self-stable snowman-like particles, which can be achieved by adding a low-boiling point oil-soluble monomer because the volatile monomer not only plays a lubrication role, but also acts as a gas “motor” to drive the silica precursor polycondensate migration.

Chalcogenides have attracted great attention in the past few decades because of their excellent processability and outstanding optoelectronic properties. Particularly, AgBiS2 has been the frontier of the photovoltaic field in the past few years. AgBiS2 possesses fascinating merits, such as a high absorption coefficient, suitable bandgap, decent charge transport properties and superior material stability. However, most of the efficient AgBiS2-based devices are fabricated with AgBiS2 quantum dots, which require long fabrication time and complicated synthetic steps. Moreover, most of the reports focused on photovoltaic devices, and AgBiS2-based photodetectors have not been reported yet. Based on the challenges listed above, we developed AgBiS2 photodetectors based on a molecular precursor method with a p–i–n device structure. These photodetectors exhibited broadband spectral response with decent detectivity and fast response time of 700 ns. In addition, these devices also demonstrated outstanding air, light and water stability.

Hybrid perovskites have recently attracted attention in both materials science and opto-electronics research, because of their excellent opto-electronic properties and facile fabrication. Perovskite-based photovoltaic devices, photodetectors, and light-emitting diodes have exhibited unprecedented success. Moreover, optically pumped perovskite lasers have been reported with various crystal shapes. However, most of these lasers are fabricated from solution-grown micro/nano crystals, and thus lack reproducibility. Here, we present controllable fabrication of formamidinium lead iodide (FAPbI3) perovskite microdisks by thermal co-evaporation, coupled with femtosecond laser direct writing. After careful investigation of dimensional effects, including the impact of diameter and thickness, we achieved an ultra-low threshold of ∼3 μJ cm−2. Furthermore, we investigated the relationship of lasing performance with carrier dynamics by transient absorption. We found that a longer carrier lifetime can reduce the pump threshold. These microdisk lasers based on femtosecond laser fabrication of evaporated perovskite thin films show exceptional reproducibility, rendering them extremely suitable for mass production; hence, they offer a promising method for low-cost, on-chip coherent light sources.

The Omicron variant of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has high transmissibility and recently swept the globe. Due to the extensive number of mutations, this variant has high level of immune evasion, which drastically reduced the efficacy of existing antibodies and vaccines. Thus, it is important to test an Omicron-specific vaccine, evaluate its immune response against Omicron and other variants, and compare its immunogenicity as boosters with existing vaccine designed against the reference wildtype virus (WT). Here, we generated an Omicron-specific lipid nanoparticle (LNP) mRNA vaccine candidate, and tested its activity in animals, both alone and as a heterologous booster to existing WT mRNA vaccine. Our Omicron-specific LNP-mRNA vaccine elicited strong and specific antibody response in vaccination-naïve mice. Mice that received two-dose WT LNP-mRNA, the one mimicking the commonly used Pfizer/Moderna mRNA vaccine, showed a >40-fold reduction in neutralization potency against Omicron variant than that against WT two weeks post second dose, which further reduced to background level >3 months post second dose. As a booster shot for two-dose WT mRNA vaccinated mice, a single dose of either a homologous booster with WT LNP-mRNA or a heterologous booster with Omicron LNP-mRNA restored the waning antibody response against Omicron, with over 40-fold increase at two weeks post injection as compared to right before booster. Interestingly, the heterologous Omicron LNP-mRNA booster elicited neutralizing titers 10-20 fold higher than the homologous WT booster against the Omicron variant, with comparable titers against the Delta variant. All three types of vaccination, including Omicron mRNA alone, WT mRNA homologous booster, and Omicron heterologous booster, elicited broad binding antibody responses against SARS-CoV-2 WA-1, Beta, and Delta variants, as well as other Betacoronavirus species such as SARS-CoV, but not Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). These data provided direct proof-of-concept assessments of an Omicron-specific mRNA vaccination in vivo, both alone and as a heterologous booster to the existing widely-used WT mRNA vaccine form.

This paper aims to discover the problems encountered in conducting design thinking workshops online, which is also the starting point and the anchor point of the online teaching platform design. Through literature research, the problems existing in the existing teaching platform were obtained, and the competitive analysis was carried out to obtain the most suitable teaching platform for conducting online design thinking workshops. An online teaching experiment was carried out to explore the specific problems existing in the online design thinking workshop. The results show that the problems of online design thinking workshops can be summarized in four areas: technology, collaboration between groups, insufficient interaction between teachers and students, and lack of atmosphere. The findings of this study can be translated into user requirements in the future, and then transform the functionality of the teaching platform and carry out the design of the teaching platform.