Cells and Robots : Modeling and Control of Large-Size Agent Populations
Cells and Robots is an outcome of the multidisciplinary research extending over Biology, Robotics and Hybrid Systems Theory. It is inspired by modeling reactive behavior of the immune system cell population, where each cell is considered as an independent agent. In our modeling approach, there is no difference if the cells are naturally or artificially created agents, such as robots. This appears even more evident when we introduce a case study concerning a large-size robotic population scenario. Under this scenario, we also formulate the optimal control of maximizing the probability of robotic presence in a given region and discuss the application of the Minimum Principle for partial differential equations to this problem. Simultaneous consideration of cell and robotic populations is of mutual benefit for Biology and Robotics, as well as for the general understanding of multi-agent system dynamics.The text of this monograph is based on the PhD thesis of the first author. The work was a runner-up for the fifth edition of the Georges Giralt Award for the best European PhD thesis in Robotics, annually awarded by the European Robotics Research Network (EURON).
Cell Motility
Cell motility is a fascinating example of cell behavior which is fundamentally important to a number of biological and pathological processes. It is based on a complex self-organized mechano-chemical machine consisting of cytoskeletal filaments and molecular motors. In general, the cytoskeleton is responsible for the movement of the entire cell and for movements within the cell. The main challenge in the field of cell motility is to develop a complete physical description on how and why cells move. For this purpose new ways of modeling the properties of biological cells have to be found. This long term goal can only be achieved if new experimental techniques are developed to extract physical information from these living systems and if theoretical models are found which bridge the gap between molecular and mesoscopic length scales. Cell Motility gives an authoritative overview of the fundamental biological facts, theoretical models, and current experimental developments in this fascinating area.
CCD Image Sensors in Deep-Ultraviolet : Degradation Behavior and Damage Mechanisms
As the deep-ultraviolet (DUV) laser technology continues to mature, an increasing number of industrial and manufacturing applications are emerging. For example, the new generation of semiconductor inspection systems is being pushed to image at increasingly shorter DUV wavelengths to facilitate inspection of deep sub-micron features in integrated circuits. DUV-sensitive charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras are in demand for these applications. Although CCD cameras that are responsive at DUV wavelengths are now available, their long-term stability is still a major concern. This book describes the degradation mechanisms and long-term performance of CCDs in the DUV, along with new results of device performance at these wavelengths.
Causality of Psychological Injury : Presenting Evidence in Court
This sequel to the authors’ Psychological Knowledge in Court offers a welcome expansion on key concepts, terms, and issues in causality, bringing much needed clarity to psychological injury assessments and the legal contexts that employ them. Focusing on PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and chronic pain (and grounding readers in salient U.S. and Canadian case law), Causality sets out a multifactorial causality framework to facilitate admissibility of psychological evidence in court. Issues concerning malingering are examined in depth, as are clinical gray areas that can jeopardize validity. At the same time, the book clearly explains what lawyers and clinicians need to understand about each other’s work—of crucial importance since the two sides often seem to speak at cross-purposes.
Case Studies in Environmental Archaeology
Environmental archaeology encompasses the application of biological and geological techniques to the study of human/environmental interactions. Each chapter is an original or revised work by internationally-recognized geoarchaeologists, human biologists, paleoethnobotanists, and zooarchaeologists. Each study demonstrates how and why the information obtained using environmental techniques is important to anthropologists instead of describing, critiquing, or advocating a method. These ethnographic, geological, and biological case studies successfully demonstrate the application of environmental science toward the resolution of questions related to human behavior in the past.
Cardiovascular prevention and rehabilitation
Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation is a timely and thorough review of prevention, lifestyle counseling and rehabilitation for cardiologists and all physicians and other health professionals in cardiac rehabilitation teams. The Editors have gathered over 60 experts from all parts of the globe, each highlighting the role of cardiac rehabilitation and preventative cardiology from exercise testing and training, through nutrition, smoking cessation, behavioral and social support to adapted programs for newer groups with specific demands, such as the elderly, patients with implantable devices and patients after cardiac transplantation.
Cardiac Rehabilitation
Cardiac rehabilitation can be extremely complex art. In Cardiac Rehabilitation, expert authors provide state-of-the-art information that serves as a manual to the multidisciplinary nature of cardiac rehabilitation in the current era, the current state of cardiac rehabilitation, and the issues facing current CR programs. Covering the major components of a CR program, including medical therapy, exercise, nutrition, and behavioral therapy, from referral to testing to individualizing the program for the participants, the volume is a thorough, vital guide to this important field.
Carbon in the Geobiosphere : Earth's outer shell
Carbon and carbon dioxide always played an important role in the geobiosphere that is part of the Earth’s outer shell and surface environment. The book’s eleven chapters cover the fundamentals of the biogeochemical behavior of carbon near the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere, minerals, waters, air-sea exchange, and inorganic and biological processes fractionating the carbon isotopes, and its role in the evolution of inorganic and biogenic sediments, ocean water, the coupling to nutrient nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and the future of the carbon cycle in the Anthropocene. This book is mainly a reference text for Earth and environmental scientists; it presents an overview of the origins and behavior of the carbon cycle and atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the human effects on them. The book can also be used for a one-semester course at an intermediate to advanced level addressing the behavior of the carbon and related cycles.
Cancer : Cell Structures, Carcinogens and Genomic Instability
Tumors can be induced by a variety of physical and chemical carcinogens. The resulting tumor cells are usually abnormal in their morphology and behavior and transmit their abnormalities to their daughter tumor cells. Most theories of the pathogenesis of tumors suggest that carcinogens in some way cause alterations either of the genomes or of inheritable patterns of gene expression in normal cells, which then cause morphological and behavioral changes. This volume presents a collection of articles aimed at the question by what genetic or epigenetic mechanisms carcinogens can cause morphological abnormalities of tumor cells. It includes reviews of cellular targets of known carcinogens, and presents varying viewpoints of how morphological abnormalities and the actions of carcinogens might be related.
Business ethics from the 19th century to today : An economist's view
Combines elements of economic and business history to study business ethics from the nineteenth century to today. It concentrates on American and British business history, delving into issues such as slavery, industrialization, firm behavior and monopolies, and Ponzi schemes. This book draws on the work of economists and historians to highlight the importance of changing technologies, religious beliefs, and cultural attitudes, showing that what is considered ethical differs across time and place.
Business and Professional Ethics
Learn why ethical behavior is so important and how to recognize potential pitfalls that involve much more than memorizing rules. You master the skills to develop a corporate culture of integrity that maintains stakeholder support and enables directors and auditors to complete their jobs. You also learn how to use ethical strategies to make decisions, as this edition examines the latest information on governance scandals, legal liability and professional accounting and auditing issues.
Business agility and information technology diffusion ; IFIP TC8 WG 8.6 International working Conference, May 8-11, 2005, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Addresses issues related to business agility and the diffusion of Information Technology (IT). Success, even survival, in today's business environment has been made complex and difficult by technologically-based competitive pressure. One promising strategy is to be agile and ready to adapt quickly to changes in the environment or market. Such strategy takes shape as an agile software development, agile manufacturing, agile modeling and agile iterations. In contrast, successful IT diffusion is known to be a process that takes time and careful effort. Many IT projects that succeeded in developing a product have subsequently failed in changing the behavior of the target group when diffusion just didn't happen. Therefore this volume responds to the question: What is the relationship between agility and IT diffusion? The book's scope will cover information systems and technology issues, as well as organizational and managerial issues, related to agility and IT diffusion. The planned perspectives include topics such as diffusion of agile methods, enabling business agility with IT, creating agile environments that facilitate diffusion of IT, theories and frameworks for understanding diffusion and agility issues, best practices relating to business agility and IT diffusion, software process improvement and agility, diffusion studies of specific agile technologies, and impacts of diffusion of IT agile methods.
Bulk Metallic Glasses : An Overview
Bulk Metallic Glasses explores an emerging field of materials known as bulk metallic glasses. It summarizes the rapid development of these materials over the last decade and includes documentation on diverse applications of bulk metallic glasses; from structural applications to microcomponents. Some of the applications covered are pressure sensors, microgears for motors, magnetic cores for power supplies, and nano-dies for replacing next generation DVDs. The chapters cover current theories and recent research including an atomistic theory of local topological fluctuations, atomistic simulations, and unique microstructures of these amorphous materials. Other topics include glass formation, glass forming ability, and the underlying mechanisms and physical insights of these criteria. The mechanical deformation of bulk metallic glasses, fatigue, fracture, and corrosion behaviors of these materials are also reviewed.
Brand hate : Navigating consumer negativity in the digital world, 2nd
Focuses on the concept of “brand hate” and consumer negativity in today’s digital markets. It explores the emotional detachment consumers generate against valued brands and how negative experiences affect their and other consumers' loyalty. The book defines consumer brand hate and discusses its dimensions, antecedents, and consequences as well as the semiotics and legality of such brand hate activities based on current brand dilution arguments. It describes the situations which lead to anti-branding and how consumers choose to express their dissatisfaction with a company on individual and social levels. This newly updated edition discusses recent research findings from brand hate literature with new cases and extended managerial analysis.
Brain tumor pathology : Current diagnostic hotspots and pitfalls
Since Bailey and Cushing (1926), all brain tumor classifications have been called histogenetic. The nosographic position that the tumor types progressively acquired in the classification systems derived from the resemblance of tumor cells to those of the cytogenesis, modified whenever new information became available from different biological research fields and especially from molecular genetics. Classically, on the basis of the rough correspondence between the mature/immature aspect of tumor cells and the benign/malignant biological behavior of the tumors, the histological labels contained a prognostic significance. The supposed origin of the tumors was thus a factor for prognosis. Later on, with the concept of anaplasia (Cox, 1933; Kernohan et al., 1949) new criteria were introduced for establishing the malignancy grades of tumors. Immunohistochemistry and later molecular genetics further refined the prognostic diagnoses, substantially increasing the opportunities to recognize the cell origin of tumors, beside revealing the pathogenetic mechanisms. Prognoses became more accurate, as required by the greater and more targeted possibilities of therapy.
Brain research in language
processing with precise temporal and spatial resolutions, respectively. This book presents data obtained from various studies employing behavioral, electrophysiological and imaging methodologies in different languages focusing on the regular reading process and the dyslexic population.Educators and researchers within neuroscience, literacy, and special education will benefit from Brain Research in Language.
Blockchain and crypto currency : Building a high quality marketplace for crypto data
This book contributes to the creation of a cyber ecosystem supported by blockchain technology in which technology and people can coexist in harmony. Blockchains have shown that trusted records, or ledgers, of permanent data can be stored on the Internet in a decentralized manner.
Bipolar disorder
Mood" is defined as a ubiquitous and sustained feeling or emotion that dominates a person’s behavior and affects his perception. Mood disorders also known as affective disorders include unipolar and bipolar disorders. Manic-depressive disorder--more contemporarily identified as bipolar disorder (BD)--is a chronic and complex disorder of mood that is characterized by a combination of manic, hypomanic, and depressive episodes, with subsyndromal symptoms extant in between the mood episodes. It is one of the leading causes of worldwide disability and morbidity.
Biomimetic neural learning for intelligent robots : Intelligent systems, cognitive robotics, and neuroscience
This book presents research performed as part of the EU project on biomimeticmultimodal learning in a mirror neuron-based robot (MirrorBot) and contribu-tions presented at the International AI-Workshop on NeuroBotics. The over-all aim of the book is to present a broad spectrum of current research intobiomimetic neural learning for intelligent autonomous robots. In this book we show the development of newtechniques using cell assemblies, associative neural networks, and Hebbian-typelearning in order to associate vision, language and motor concepts. We havedeveloped biomimetic multimodal learning and language instruction in a robotto investigate the task of searching for objects. As well as the research performedin this area for the MirrorBot project, the second part of this book incorporatessignificant contributions from other research in the field of biomimetic robotics.This second part of the book concentrates on the progress made in neuroscienceinspired robotic learning approaches (in short: NeuroBotics). We hope that this book stimulates and encourages new research in this in-teresting and dynamic area.
Biometric User Authentication for IT Security : From Fundamentals to Handwriting
Biometric User Authentication for IT Security: From Fundamentals to Handwriting conveys general principals of passive (physiological trait like fingerprint, iris, face) and active (learned and trained behavior like voice, handwriting and gait) biometric recognition techniques to the reader. This professional book, unlike other publications in this area which concentrate on passive schemes, reflects a more comprehensive analysis of one particular active biometric technique: handwriting. Aspects which are thoroughly discussed include sensor characteristic dependency, attack scenarios, and the generation of cryptographic keys from handwriting.



















