This study investigates the enablers and barriers influencing the acceptance of Agentic AI in the hospitality sector using a mixed-methods research design. In the first phase, thirty-two in-depth interviews were conducted with hospitality managers to identify the key drivers and barriers of Agentic AI adoption. Based on these insights, a theoretical model grounded in Behavioral Reasoning Theory (BRT) was developed and subsequently validated through a survey of 980 consumers. The findings reveal that autonomy, personalization, social influence, and perceived usefulness are the primary drivers of Agentic AI adoption, whereas technological anxiety, perceived privacy risk, perceived hallucination, and traditional barriers impede its acceptance. This study contributes to the literature on advanced technology adoption in hospitality by extending the application of BRT to the context of Agentic AI. It also offers practical insights for hospitality managers and technology developers seeking to design and implement Agentic AI solutions that effectively promote consumer adoption.
Debates on urban density have long been shaped by a tension between quantitative and qualitative assessments – often treated as oppositional – prompting the search for ideal forms, thresholds, or indices defining optimal densification. Empirical evidence, however, consistently demonstrates that such models frequently underperform once implemented, producing uneven social, spatial, functional, or environmental outcomes across contexts. This paper advances the hypothesis that neither quantitative metrics nor qualitative indicators alone are sufficient to evaluate high-density environments, as density is inherently context-dependent and shaped by place-specific planning, design, and governance conditions. Drawing on an extensive review of secondary findings, this paper proposes a comprehensive procedural framework for the planning and assessment of high-density urban environments that integrates quantitative, qualitative, and contextual dimensions. Conceptualised as ‘integral density’, the framework reframes density as a relational and networked phenomenon shaped by urban form, spatial experience, socio-political conditions, and environmental performance, rather than as a fixed numerical value or a proxy for liveability. In contrast to existing density, liveability, or compact city indices, which typically privilege either measurable outputs or experiential qualities, the proposed approach embeds context as a constitutive evaluative domain. The framework introduces an assessment matrix capable of supporting both the conception and post-implementation appraisal of high-density environments, allowing density to be evaluated dynamically and comparatively across places and over time. By positioning urban design and spatial planning as mediating fields, the paper contributes a methodological toolkit that translates multidimensional density into actionable and context-sensitive insights, supporting adaptive, inclusive, and spatially coherent high-density urban development.
Sustainable multicarbon production through syngas electroreduction is particularly attractive, as products such as ethanol, acetaldehyde, and ethylene offer significantly higher economic value and broader functional applications than single-carbon products. In this study, Ag/ZnO nanoparticles were synthesized and characterized with high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (TEM) coupled with an electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) detector to confirm the nanoparticles size in the 10 nm range, in which Ag nanoparticles were located on the surface of ZnO nanoparticles. The electrocatalytic activity of Ag/ZnO nanoparticles was enhanced by the effective electron transfer between ZnO and Ag, promoting the multicarbon Faradaic efficiency (FE) from (8 +/- 1)% for ZnO to (17 +/- 3)% for ZnAg1.5 over 10 min of chronopotentiometry. Operando diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy (DRIFTS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) directly linked this enhancement to dynamic surface chemistry, revealing ZnO as the primary active site, while Ag can facilitate electron transfer and stabilize reaction intermediates. Both techniques also suggested that surface-adsorbed water/OH- can act as a catalyst deactivator, leading to catalyst dissolution. Based on these insights, the potential was pulsed between 0.82 and -0.63 V vs RHE to remove accumulated water/OH- and regenerate active sites. This increased the single-pass FE to (54 +/- 5)% with (37 +/- 2)% selectivity toward ethanol. Together, these results demonstrate that rational interface design combined with dynamic potential modulation offers a powerful strategy for advancing syngas to multicarbon electrocatalysis.
This paper concentrates on Multi-modal Referring Video Segmentation task, where a well optimized model is able to recognize and segment the target objects referred by the given guidance signals, e.g., language description. Early approaches model this task as a sequence prediction problem. The lack of a global view of video content leads to difficulties in effectively utilizing inter-frame relationships. Some recent works propose to perform temporal modeling with vanilla attention mechanism. However, the condensed visual representation tends to be messy about target information due to occlusion or motion blur. Unlimited non-local operation would spread such noise to all the sequences and interfere with the extraction of global representations. To address the above issue, we present Semantic-assisted Object Cluster network (SOC) and the improved SOC++ in this paper. Our method unifies temporally selective interaction and cross-modal alignment to achieve video-level understanding. In SOC++, a proxy-assisted multi-modal fusion module is introduced to perform preliminary bidirectional activation. Then a semantic integration module with progressive frame-to-video structure facilitates joint space learning across modalities and time steps. Considering that potential noisy visual embeddings would impair the overall representation of target objects in unconstrained inter-frame interactions, we propose to perform tendentious video aggregation through emphasizing the indicative role of the informative frames with lower entropy in this part. A multi-modal query contrastive supervision is also utilized to help construct well-aligned joint space at the video level. Moreover, to integrate the advantage of high-level video information and the low-level details of each frame, we introduce a dynamic query fusion module that performs joint updating of these embeddings. We conduct extensive experiments on popular referring video segmentation benchmarks, and our method outperforms state-of-the-art competitors on all benchmarks by a remarkable margin. Besides, the emphasis on temporal coherence enhances the segmentation stability and adaptability of our method in processing text expressions with temporal variations..
This paper examines the processes involved in leveraging institutional change to facilitate SMEs’ access to international markets. Drawing on institutional theory and rich qualitative data from 70 interviews in Kyrgyzstan across two time periods, it reveals a nuanced interplay between the reinforcement of formal institutions and the decline of outdated informal practices, as well as the influence of these changes on SMEs’ actions. We find that SMEs’ successful access to international markets stems from their distinct adaptive responses to simultaneous improvements in formal institutions and the reshuffling of informal ones. This enables SMEs to channel institutional change through deliberate behavioral responses toward access to international markets. The study suggests that the evolution of formal institutions alone may not suffice; tackling entrenched, historically embedded, and detrimental informal institutions inherited from the Soviet past is crucial to overcoming barriers to accessing international markets. With more transparent formal and informal institutions and practices, exporting SMEs gain access to resources and capabilities, further enabling their progression from exporting to contracted participation in GVCs. Our study, therefore, contributes to discussions in international business literature on the role of context-specific institutions in local SMEs’ internationalization behavior. It highlights the importance of considering the combined role of formal and informal institutional change in providing adequate conditions for accessing international markets, particularly in transition countries, thereby providing policymakers and businesses operating in these contexts with empirically grounded practical insights.
