On the fifth anniversary of the establishment of the Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize through the generosity of her colleagues, students, and friends, the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University is pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 Prize.

This article summarizes relevant historical developments involving Taiwan and Okinawa in Asia-Pacific multilateral relations over the longue durée, and suggests future prospects.

1. Both Taiwan and the Ryukyus are within the Kuroshio (Black Tide) Current Civilization Zone (from approximately the beginning of the 3rd Century): At that time, crops such as cassava and yams traveled northbound with the Kuroshio Currents, which ran from the Philippines to Taiwan and the Ryukyus to Kyushu, while crops such as millet in northern parts of South East Asia traveled to Taiwan via the South Sea and further traveled to the Ryukyus and Kyushu. Together with the path of rice from south of China's Yangtze River via Korea to Kyushu, Japan these were two important sea-borne cultural exchange paths in the Asia-Pacific. However, by the 3rd Century, the direct route from south of the Yangzi to central Japan, as well as the Silk Road from Chang'an in Northwest China to Central Asia, and the shipping route from Guangzhou to India superseded the aforesaid routes. As a result, Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands became isolated on the international stage for about one thousand years (Ts'ao, 1988).

The Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project was a five-year state-sponsored project, carried out between 1995–2000, to determine an absolute chronology of the Western Zhou dynasty and approximate chronologies of the Xia and Shang dynasties. At the end of the five years, the Project issued a provisional report entitled Report on the 1996–2000 Provisional Results of the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project: Brief Edition detailing its results. A promised full report was finally published in 2022: Report on the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project. Although numerous discoveries in the more than twenty years between the publications of the Brief Edition and the Report have revealed that the Project's absolute chronology of the Western Zhou is fundamentally flawed, and some of the problems are acknowledged by the Report, still the Report maintains the Project's chronology without any correction. In the review, I present four of these discoveries, from four different periods of the Western Zhou, discussing their implications for the Project's chronology. I conclude with a call for some sort of authoritative statement acknowledging the errors in the report.

Liquid-solid and solid state phase equilibria in the ternary system Ti-Al-V have been studied using a combination of several experimental techniques. A likely surface of primary seperation (i.e., the liquidus surface) is proposed in the form of the usual projection on the triangular base and the directions of the monovariant lines are defined. Four ternary invariant reactions have been identified in this system. Solid state equilibria have been determined at 900°C and are presented in the form of an isothermal section through the phase diagram. These are very similar to the relationships reported at 800°C by Hashimoto et al. [1].

This paper investigates the role of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in academic settings, focusing on its effectiveness in providing feedback during the brainstorming phase of the design process. A controlled study with 25 students (n=25) compared feedback from Generative AI (GPT-4) to that from six human educators. Findings reveal that AI-generated feedback enhances student motivation during ideation and facilitates iterative idea refinement. Generative AI’s ability to deliver rapid, scalable feedback proves advantageous in resource-constrained contexts, supporting more effective design processes. This research highlights the potential for AI-driven feedback mechanisms to transform human-AI collaboration in design education, addressing key challenges in personalized and scalable feedback delivery.

With the increasing implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in the design process, it is crucial to understand how users will accept AI-designed products. This work studies how the public currently perceives an AI's design capability as compared to a human designer's capability by conducting an online survey of 205 people via Amazon Mechanical Turk. The survey collects the respondents' perception on 16 specific bicycle design goals, demographic information, and self-reported level of design and AI/ML knowledge. Findings reveal that people think an AI would perform worse than a human designer on most design goals, particularly the goals that are user-dependent. This work also shows that the higher people's self-reported level of knowledge in design and the older they are, the more likely they are to think an AI's design capability would exceed a human designer's capability. The insights from this work add to the understanding of user acceptance of AI-designed products, as well as human designers' acceptance of AI input in human-AI teams.

Decomposition of quasicrystalline phase formed in a rapidly solidified Al-Fe-V-Si alloy has been studied by TEM. The as-cast microstructure varies through the thickness of melt-spun ribbon; microeutectic precipitation of the bcc silicide near the wheel side, formation of globular quasicrystalline icosahedral phase with the microeutectic silicide phase at the middle of the ribbon, and the decomposition of quasicrystalline phase near the air side of the ribbon. During heating, as observed by annealing studies and by in-situ TEM studies, quasicrystalline phase decomposes into various phases such as aluminum, silicide and other unidentified phases. It has been shown that the preferential sites for the transformation are either at the center of quasicrystalline particles or at the quasicrystal/matrix interface, depending on the location of quasicrystalline particles.

Stress-induced voiding in microelectronics chips has been reported to exhibit a variety of dependencies on temperature and on passivation stress. The dependence of line failure is reported here at four different temperatures (150, 225, 285, and 315 °C) for AI-0.5%Cu-2%Si, AI-0.5%Cu and AI-1%Si lines with passivation thicknesses (silicon oxide or silicon nitride) ranging from 0.1 to 2.5 times the metal thickness. Failure distributions change in a complex manner with changing passivation thickness, and with temperature for a specific passivation thickness, raising questions on the validity of using the conventional median time to failure (t50) and lognormal slope (σ) to project field failure rates from data generated by accelerated life testing.

A natural question is why AI in design? Although the design applications written about in the journal vary widely, the common thread is that researchers use AI techniques to implement their ideas. The use of AI techniques for design applications, at least when AI EDAM was started, was partially a reaction against the predominant design methods based on some form of optimization. Knowledge-based techniques, particularly rule-based systems of various sorts, were very popular. One of the draws of these methods, I believe, was their ability to represent knowledge that is hard or awkward to represent in traditional optimization frameworks. This mirrors my experience: at the time, I was working in configuration with components that had a large number compatibility and resource constraints. Although many constraints could be represented in mixed integer linear programming systems, it was not easy to conceptualize, write, and most importantly, maintain the constraints in those systems.