Suzhou is one of China’s model cities due to its economic development in recent decades. Although the city deserves recognition for its efforts in urban heritage conservation, the current preservation strategy only targets the ancient city and neglects the separation of the entire urban landscape. This has become a huge hidden problem in the process of Suzhou’s sustainable development. This study, based on this background, explores the development process of Suzhou and the problems in the current urban planning, and then proposes suggestions for optimization. The historic urban landscape approach provides a solution to this problem by analyzing the urban form and urban landscape features of Suzhou in three important historical periods: pre-1949, 1949–1978, and post-1978. This study discusses the development process of Suzhou and the problems in the current urban planning, and makes the following contributions: (1) the dichotomy between modernity and tradition in the urban landscape of Suzhou is shown from a morphological perspective, revealing that this dichotomy is based on rapid urbanization and the one-sided pursuit of economic development, (2) revisits the role of Suzhou traditional gardens in order to better integrate them as structural elements in urban planning, (3) proposes the intangible value of urban heritage and combined with the historic urban landscape of looking beyond the notion of the “historic center” or “ensemble” to help all Suzhou residents form a more coherent place attachment and local identity.

With continuous developments in the integration of culture and tourism, adaptive reuse has highlighted the vitality of historic conservation areas while simultaneously causing great challenges to urban life, local economy, and cultural sustainability. Current studies focus on the adaptive reuse of historic buildings, with little focus on historic conservation areas. To expand this understanding further, this study investigated and analyzed the challenges faced by Chengdu historic conservation areas in the context of adapting to the tourism environment, from multiple perspectives, and proposed corresponding protection and development strategies. The results of the study obtained using field investigation and semi-structured interviews contribute to the literature on the adaptive reuse of historic conservation areas; they deepen our understanding of the identified factors and provide in-depth knowledge. These findings provide a reference for future practices and promote the sustainable development of historic conservation areas for improved conservation and economic returns.

Social participation is an important tool in heritage conservation, but levels remain low in developing countries. To increase social-participation awareness of urban-heritage conservation, this study aimed to find an effective method to determine the factors that affect participation awareness, with a focus on the magnitude of each influence. Through literature analysis we developed hypotheses about the factors affecting participation awareness, and then developed a linear regression model. In order to test the reliability of the model, we selected Suzhou as the research object and obtained the following conclusions: (1) Suzhou’s social-participation awareness was positively correlated with place identity, urban memory, subjective cognition, objective knowledge, and place identity. (2) The factor that had the strongest impact on Suzhou’s place identity was public space, with residence time and community sentiment also influencing place identity. (3) The factors that influenced the urban memory of Suzhou were residence time, urban transformation, and urban events with the most influential factor being lifestyle transformation. (4) Urban-heritage conservation social-participation awareness was higher among Suzhou people living in the old city than in the new city.

Numerous studies have shown that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) can be the key factors in causing a variety of human diseases, such as cancers. Predicting the potential associations between lncRNAs and diseases can be highly beneficial for pathogenesis investigation and understanding the functionalities of lncRNAs in disease development. Existing computational methods for lncRNAs-disease association (LDA) prediction focuses on integrating heterogeneous information from given data including associations of various biological elements. However, many of them do not fully utilize the topological information obtained from graph-structured frameworks, such as heterogeneous graphs consisting of different biological variables including lncRNA, disease, miRNA, and others. We proposed a novel method, named HSELDA, that utilized a relational graph convolutional neural network based on a link prediction technique via subgraphs extraction to predict the potential lncRNAs-disease associations. In this method, we first constructed a heterogeneous graph consisting of three types of nodes: lncRNAs, miRNAs, and disease, with their known associations between each node pair as edges. Then, we extracted a list of local subgraphs around each target link, where the subgraphs preserve rich heuristic information related to link existence with the neighbor nodes directly connected to the target links. We employed a relational graph convolutional network to identify the most promising lncRNAs-diseases associations based on local subgraphs. The experimental results showed that HSELDA was superior to several state-of-the-art methods. Of note, our proposed model shows significant superiority over other compared baseline approaches in AUPRC.

The nuclear steam generator (SG) is an important component for nuclear power plant which transfers heat from the primary side coolant to the secondary side water. Water supply system is composed of water supply pump and feed water adjusting valve, and the water level of the steam generator is adjusted by the change of feed water flow rate. Changes in regulating valve opening and feed pump speed can both affect changes of feed water flow, and unrelated regulation of the two control variables will lead to mutual effects on the regulating effect, which makes the regulating time longer and the flow control deviation larger. In order to solve the coupling problem of feed pump and feed regulating valve of feed water system, the coupling characteristic of feed pump and feed regulating valve are studied in this paper. The paper analyzes the dynamic impact characteristics of feed pump speed on feed water flow rate and pressure difference of water supply adjusting valve, and also the dynamic impact characteristics of the opening of the water supply adjusting valve on feed water flow rate and pressure difference of water supply valve. A feedforward control scheme of water supply adjusting valve is further proposed for feedwater system decoupling, and the control simulation is conducted based on a flow rate step process. The simulation results show that the feed water flow response speed after decoupling is significantly improved, and the steady-state regulation time is shortened by more than 40%. Meanwhile, the maximum control difference of the feed water regulating valve is reduced by more than 60%.