COVER STORY Ximending: A Shopper's Heaven with a Dash of Tradition and Trendiness Ximending stands out as one of Taipei's most representative and lively areas. Once selected by Time Out as one of the "51 Coolest Neighborhoods in the World," it’s a must-visit for every tourist. While exuding a youthful and trendy vibe, Ximending still manages to encapsulate a fusion of tradition and modernity, contrasting historical sites with current fashions. Our cover story delves into this dynamic mix.

The underlying structure, incentives and costs shaping international relations, state behaviour and the nature of power are profoundly different today to how they were in the past, in ways that are scarcely recognised and widely misunderstood. For much of history, world politics was marked by profound scarcity in resources, information and security. A series of historical revolutions has largely tamed this scarcity in ways few could have imagined. These revolutions, however, have generated new, potentially catastrophic challenges for the world – the problems of plenty. In this Adelphi book, Francis J. Gavin argues that the institutions, practices, theories and policies that helped explain and largely tamed scarcity by generating massive prosperity, and which were sometimes used to justify punishing conquest, are often unsuitable for addressing the problems of plenty. Successful grand strategy in this new age of abundance requires new thinking. New conceptual lenses, innovative policies and processes, and transformed institutions will be essential for confronting and solving the problems of plenty, without undermining the expanding efforts against scarcity.

Augmented Reality (AR) uses information in the form of text, graphics, audio, and other virtual enhancements that are registered with real-world objects in real-time. AR enhances the user's interaction with the real world and provides added value over virtual reality. This book presents various AR applications ranging from real-time information display and applications in the construction industry and architecture to medical applications. It provides an overview of how AR is applied in these areas and showcases the current state of the art. This book is essential reading not only for researchers and technology developers but also for students (both graduates and undergraduates) and anyone who is interested in the application of AR technology in practice.

This is a pioneering book on Taiwan's cultural diplomacy. It argues that cultural diplomacy is a subset of public diplomacy aiming to utilize useful cultural resources to demonstrate Taiwan's soft power so to increase the public's understanding and create positive impression toward Taiwan in the like-minded countries. It then identifies three effective areas to implement cultural diplomacy: films, music, and the academic field of Taiwan studies. Dr. Astrid Lipinsky is Managing Director of the Vienna Center for Taiwan Studies at University of Vienna, Austria.

The four-volume set LNCS 14369 until 14372 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Theory of Cryptography, TCC 2023, held in Taipei, Taiwan, in November/December 2023. The total of 68 full papers presented in the proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 168 submissions. They focus on topics such as proofs and outsourcing; theoretical foundations; multi-party computation; encryption; secret sharing, PIR and memory checking; anonymity, surveillance and tampering; lower bounds; IOPs and succinctness; lattices; quantum cryptography; Byzantine agreement, consensus and composability.

The eight-volume set LNCS 14438 until 14445 constitutes the proceedings of the 29th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, ASIACRYPT 2023, held in Guangzhou, China, during December 4-8, 2023. The total of 106 full papers presented in these proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 375 submissions. The papers were organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: Secure Multi-party computation; threshold cryptography; . Part II: proof systems - succinctness and foundations; anonymity; Part III: quantum cryptanalysis; symmetric-key cryptanalysis; Part IV: cryptanalysis of post-quantum and public-key systems; side-channels; quantum random oracle model; Part V: functional encryption, commitments and proofs; secure messaging and broadcast; Part VI: homomorphic encryption; encryption with special functionalities; security proofs and security models; Part VII: post-quantum cryptography; Part VIII: quantum cryptography; key exchange; symmetric-key design.

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, TACAS 2023, which was held as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2023, during April 22-27, 2023, in Paris, France. The 56 full papers and 6 short tool demonstration papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 169 submissions. The proceedings also contain 1 invited talk in full paper length, 13 tool papers of the affiliated competition SV-Comp and 1 paper consisting of the competition report. TACAS is a forum for researchers, developers, and users interested in rigorously based tools and algorithms for the construction and analysis of systems. The conference aims to bridge the gaps between different communities with this common interest and to support them in their quest to improve the utility, reliability, flexibility, and efficiency of tools and algorithms for building computer-controlled systems.

Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered presents diverse approaches to the vibrant commercial film industry known as Taiwanese-language cinema (taiyupian). After a long period of neglect, films are being restored and made available with subtitles.Taiwanese-language cinema was a cycle of over 1,000 dramatic feature films produced between the mid-50s and early 70s in the local Minnanhua Chinese language most commonly spoken on the island, also known as "e;Taiwanese"e; (taiyu). The rediscovery of Taiwanese-language cinema is stimulating new scholarship, both in Chinese in Taiwan and in other languages, which challenges our conventional understandings of Taiwanese film history and opens up new approaches to the films themselves. This volume includes a mix of new English-language scholarship material with key essays by Taiwanese scholars newly translated from Chinese for the volume.

This comprehensive volume integrates the history of late imperial China with the history of education over three centuries, revealing the significance of education in Chinese social, political, and intellectual life. A collaboration between social and intellectual historians, these fifteen essays provide the most wide-ranging study in English on China's education in the centuries before the modern revolution.