Otome games (also known as romantic video games, or RVGs) are story-based video games that are designed for young women, simulating the experience of a romantic relationship. Players are invited to adopt the female avatar’s perspective in the story and date one or more of the male characters. Our empirical study focuses on the different types of social support among the players of the Chinese otome game Mr. Love: Queen’s Choice. We discovered that although the game was initially designed to be a consumer product aiming to profit from a largely marginalized and stigmatized group of gamers, i.e., young female gamers, the game has created a gaming community in which the players seek and provide each other with social support. We primarily use ethnographic methods, including participant observation and in-depth interviews. Our study contributes to HCI research on mediated social support in game.

The rate-distortion optimized quantization (RDOQ) provides significant coding gain in the third generation of Audio Video coding Standard (AVS3). However, the high computational complexity and strong data dependency in RDOQ impede the hardware implementation. To address these issues, we propose a zig-zag scanline-level parallelized RDOQ algorithm and its fully pipelined hardware architecture for AVS3 video coding. For algorithm optimization, we update the run-level context for rate estimation in the inner zig-zag scanline and propose an efficient RD cost calculation form in the optimal coefficient level (OCL) decision step. In the last significant coefficient (LSC) position decision step, a greedy strategy based algorithm is proposed to optimize the determination process in parallel. Moreover, the proposed parallelized RDOQ algorithm is accelerated by single instruction multiple data (SIMD) on the Intel X86 platform. For hardware architecture design, a fully pipelined hardware architecture is proposed with nine pipeline stages. This design can process multiple transform units in parallel when the height is less than 32. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves 31.37%, 28.58%, and 28.53% time-saving by 0.25%, 0.26%, and 0.27% Bjøntegaard delta rate (BD-Rate) increase on average under all intra (AI), random access (RA), and low delay B (LDB) configurations, respectively. The hardware implementation achieves 32 coefficients per cycle, and the area consumption is 1223.2K logic gates when working at 471.2MHz. It is proven that the proposed algorithm and hardware architecture design achieve a good trade-off between coding efficiency and hardware throughput.

Online communities support the well-being of their members by encouraging their social identity formation. In the context of an online community, online activism in the form of identity struggles can be particularly helpful for marginalized individuals or groups. Since May 2020, students from the 985 universities, an elite educational project in China, have been coming to an online community named "The Inviting Plan for 985 Fives" on Douban, an interest-based Social Network Site (SNS), to discuss their failure and dissatisfaction in life. Students who were once recognized for their academic excellence now identify as "fives" (or "garbage"). The present study examines how the Douban group, as a social network and collaborative system, supports the group members in their identity struggles in the context of increasingly fierce peer competition in China. We employ a qualitative approach, combining ethnographic methods such as participant observation and semi-structured interviews, with in-depth analysis of the top discussion threads. We discover that while peer competition and social stratification in contemporary China cause students at the top universities to feel anxious and lost, the online community they build collectively supports them to create a new social identity, the identity of "five," which is the basis of their online activism. Through this new identity, they seek unofficial democracy, civic participation, and possibilities of social change.

ABSTRACT A service‐oriented application is composed of multiple Web services to fulfill complex functionality that cannot be provided by individual Web service. The combination of services is not random. In many cases, a set of services are repetitively used together in various applications. We treat such a set of services as a service composition pattern. The quality of the patterns is desirable because of the extensive uses and testing in the large number of applications. Therefore, the service composition patterns record the best practices in designing and developing reliable service‐oriented applications. The execution log tracks the execution of services in a service‐oriented application. To document the service composition patterns, we propose an approach that automatically identifies service composition patterns from various applications using execution logs. We locate a set of associated services using Apriori algorithm and recover the control flows among the services by analyzing the order of service invocation events in the execution logs. We also identify structurally and functionally similar patterns to represent such patterns in a higher level of abstraction regardless of the actual services. A case study shows that our approach can effectively detect service composition patterns. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A service-oriented application is composed of several web services to provide complex functionality that a single web service cannot provide. A set of services along with their control flows can be frequently used in multiple applications. Such services form a service composition pattern which is well tested in the numerous adoptions. Reusing service composition patterns in service composition provides an efficient way to improve the quality of new applications. To facilitate the documentation of service composition patterns, we propose an approach to automatically recognize service composition patterns from various applications. We identify service composition patterns by locating a set of associated services commonly used by different applications and recovering the control flows among the set of associated services.