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Fire is one of the most frequent disasters in the world. As bamboo is combustible material, its fire performance greatly limited its structural application. However, study shows that fire safety of bamboo structures can be ensured through reasonable fire design. In this paper, the charring properties of two types of engineered bamboo: laminated bamboo and bamboo scrimber were carefully investigated through numerical study with commercial software ABAQUS. Charring rate was calculated from the simulated 300oC isotherm. The influence of cross-section dimension, fire duration on the charring rate was studied. Two types of engineered bamboo showed similar development rule of charring rate. The charring rate of engineered bamboo decreased slightly with the increase of fire duration.

A coherent, short-length reference arm reflectometer, which utilizes a 76-MHz repetition rate mode-locked fiber laser, was investigated experimentally for long fiber links (> 10 km). The reflectometer combines the advantages of optical time-domain and frequency-domain reflectometry without the need for high-speed photodetectors and electronics to achieve high spatial resolution of 2.5 mm at 10 km. To our knowledge, this is the highest resolution reported for fiber reflectometry at this distance for reflective type event using non-photon-counting detection. Phase and polarization diversity detection, combined with spectral compression using frequency-chirp, are proposed to improve sensitivity and discrimination against the fiber Rayleigh backscattering background., 12 pages, 7 figures

We Microsoft Research Asia made submissions to 11 language directions in the WMT19 news translation tasks. We won the first place for 8 of the 11 directions and the second place for the other three. Our basic systems are built on Transformer, back translation and knowledge distillation. We integrate several of our rececent techniques to enhance the baseline systems: multi-agent dual learning (MADL), masked sequence-to-sequence pre-training (MASS), neural architecture optimization (NAO), and soft contextual data augmentation (SCA)., Comment: Accepted to "Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT19)"