Calculation of carbon emissions in wastewater treatment and its neutralization measures: A review.

As the pursuit of "carbon neutrality" gains momentum, the emphasis on low-carbon solutions, emphasizing energy conservation and resource reuse, has introduced fresh challenges to conventional wastewater treatment approaches. Precisely evaluating carbon emissions in urban water supply and drainage systems, wastewater treatment plants, and establishing carbon-neutral operating models has become a pivotal concern in the future of wastewater treatment. Regrettably, limited research has been devoted to carbon accounting and the development of carbon-neutral strategies for wastewater treatment. In this review, to facilitate comprehensive carbon accounting, we initially recognizes direct and indirect carbon emission sources in the wastewater treatment process. We then provide an overview of several major carbon accounting methods and propose a carbon accounting framework. Furthermore, we advocate for a systemic perspective, highlighting that achieving carbon neutrality in wastewater treatment extends beyond the boundaries of wastewater treatment plants. We assess current technical measures both within and outside the plants that contribute to achieving carbon-neutral operations. Encouraging the application of intelligent algorithms for the multifaceted monitoring and control of wastewater treatment processes is paramount. Supporting resource and energy recycling is also essential, as is recognizing the benefits of synergistic wastewater treatment technologies. We advocate a systematic, multi-level planning approach that takes into account a wide range of factors. Our goal is to offer valuable insights and support for the practical implementation of water environment management within the framework of carbon neutrality, and to advance sustainable socio-economic development and contribute to a more environmentally responsible future.

The multi-modal fusion in visual question answering: a review of attention mechanisms.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a significant cross-disciplinary issue in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing that requires a computer to output a natural language answer based on pictures and questions posed based on the pictures. This requires simultaneous processing of multimodal fusion of text features and visual features, and the key task that can ensure its success is the attention mechanism. Bringing in attention mechanisms makes it better to integrate text features and image features into a compact multi-modal representation. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify the development status of attention mechanism, understand the most advanced attention mechanism methods, and look forward to its future development direction. In this article, we first conduct a bibliometric analysis of the correlation through CiteSpace, then we find and reasonably speculate that the attention mechanism has great development potential in cross-modal retrieval. Secondly, we discuss the classification and application of existing attention mechanisms in VQA tasks, analysis their shortcomings, and summarize current improvement methods. Finally, through the continuous exploration of attention mechanisms, we believe that VQA will evolve in a smarter and more human direction.