Advancing Quality of Life in a Turbulent World
Environmental issues continued to loom large in the last decade of the twentieth century,especially environmental problems related to rising levels of CO emissions and 2 other greenhouse gases on the planet’s average temperatures and, subsequently, storm patterns. Floods and droughts, in combination with unseasonably high and low temperatures became the norm rather than the exception for large expanses of Africa,Asia and Oceania. Even large areas of Europe and NorthAmerica were s- jected to recurrent floods and droughts and experienced unseasonable extremes of hot and cold temperatures associated with man-made intrusions into the natural environment. And, still, a global plan of action to haltman-related patterns of def- estation, desertification, and over-fishing of the seas has yet to come into being. At the same time, the number of regional conflicts and civil wars increased and, with them, the lives of many women, children, old people and other n- combatants were lost in these conflicts.
Advancing Energy Policy : Lessons on the integration of Social Sciences and Humanities
Advocates for the Social Sciences and Humanities to be more involved in energy policymaking. It forms part of the European platform for energy-related Social Sciences and Humanities’ activities, and works on the premise that crossing disciplines is essential. All of its contributions are highly interdisciplinary, with each chapter grounded in at least three different Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines. These varying perspectives come together to cover an array of issues relevant to the energy transition, including: energy poverty, justice, political ecology, governance, behaviours, imaginaries, systems approaches, modelling, as well as the particular challenges faced by interdisciplinary work. As a whole, the book presents new ideas for future energy policy, particularly at the European level. It is a valuable resource for energy researchers interested in interdisciplinary and society-relevant perspectives. Those working outside the Social Sciences and Humanities will find this book an accessible way of learning more about how these subjects can constructively contribute to energy policy.
Advances in Web Intelligence and Data Mining
The new Web-related research directions include intelligent methods usually associated with the fields of computational intelligence, soft computing, and data mining. This book presents state-of-the-art developments in the area of computationally intelligent methods applied to various aspects and ways of Web exploration and Web mining. Some novel data mining algorithms that can lead to more effective and intelligent Web-based systems are also described. Scientists, engineers, and research students are expected to find many inspiring ideas in this volume.
Advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles : State of the Art and the Road to Autonomy
There has been tremendous emphasis in unmanned aerial vehicles, both of fixed (airplanes) and rotary wing (vertical take off and landing, helicopters) types over the past ten years. Applications span both civilian and military domains, the latter being the most important at this stage. This edited book provides a solid and diversified reference source related to basic, applied research and development on small and miniature unmanned aerial vehicles, both fixed and rotary wing. As such, the book offers background information on the evolution of such vehicles over the years, followed by modeling and control fundamentals that are of paramount importance due to unmanned aerial vehicle model complexity, nonlinearity, coupling, inhirent instability and parameter values uncertainty. Aspects of navigation, including visual-based navigation and target tracking are discussed, followed by applications to attitude estimation on micro unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous solar unmanned aerial vehicle, biomimetic sensing for autonomous flights in near-earth environments, localization of air-ground wireless sensor networks, decentralized formation tracking, design of an unmanned aerial vehicle for volcanic gas sampling and design of an on-board processing controller for miniature helicopters.
Advances in the Geological Storage of Carbon Dioxide : International Approaches to Reduce Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas Emissions
As is now generally accepted mankind’s burning of fossil fuels has resulted in the mass transfer of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, a modification of the delicately-balanced global carbon cycle, and a measurable change in world-wide temperatures and climate. Although not the most powerful greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO) drives climate 2 change due to the enormous volumes of this gas pumped into the atmosphere every day. Produced in almost equal parts by the transportation, industrial and energy-generating sectors, atmospheric CO concentrations have 2 increased by about 50% over the last 300 years, and according to some sources are predicted to increase by up to 200% over pre-industrial levels during the next 100 years. If we are to reverse this trend, in order to prevent significant environmental change in the future, action must be taken immediately.
Advances in solid state physics ; Vol. 47
The present volume 47 of the Advances in Solid State Physics contains the written version of a large number of the invited talks of the 2007 Spring Meeting of the Arbeitskreis Festkörperphysik which was held in Regensburg, Germany, from March 26 to 30, 2007 in conjunction with the 71st Annual Meeting of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.It gives an overview of the present status of solid state physics where low-dimensional systems such as quantum dots and quantum wires are dominating. The importance of magnetic materials is reflected by the large number of contributions in the part dealing with ferromagnetic films and particles. One of the most exciting achievements of the last couple of years is the successful application of electrical contacts to and the investigation of single layers of graphene.
Advances in solid state physics ; Vol. 45
The book presents, to some extent, the status of the field of solid-state physics in 2005 not only in Germany but also internationally. It is ''nanoscience'', namely the physics of quantum dots and wires, electrical transport, optical properties, spin transport in nanostructures, and magnetism on the nanoscale, that is of central interest to the physics community. Also, soft matter and biological systems are covered.
Advances in Ranking and Selection, Multiple Comparisons, and Reliability: Methodology and Applications
S. Panchapakesan has made significant contributions to ranking and selection and has published in many other areas of statistics, including order statistics, reliability theory, stochastic inequalities, and inference. Written in his honor, the twenty invited articles in this volume reflect recent advances in these fields and form a tribute to Panchapakesan’s influence and impact on these areas. Thematically organized, the chapters cover a broad range of topics from: Inference / Ranking and Selection / Multiple Comparisons and Tests / Agreement Assessment / Reliability / Biostatistics
Advances in Probabilistic Graphical Models
This carefully edited book brings together in one volume some of the most important topics of current research in probabilistic graphical modelling, learning from data and probabilistic inference. This includes topics such as the characterisation of conditional independence, the sensitivity of the underlying probability distribution of a Bayesian network to variation in its parameters, the learning of graphical models with latent variables and extensions to the influence diagram formalism. In addition, attention is given to important application fields of probabilistic graphical models, such as the control of vehicles, bioinformatics and medicine.
Advances in Open Domain Question Answering
This book gives a comprehensive and detailed look at the current approaches to automated question answering. The book can serve as a "how-to" handbook for IT practitioners and system developers.
Advances in Natural Multimodal Dialogue Systems
The chapters in this book jointly contribute to what we shall call the fieldof natural and multimodal interactive systems engineering. This is not yet awell-established field of research and commercial development but, rather, anemerging one in all respects. It brings together, in a process that, arguably, wasbound to happen, contributors from many different, and often far more estab-lished, fields of research and industrial development. To mention but a few,these include speech technology, computer graphics and computer vision. Thefield’s rapid expansion seems driven by a shared vision of the potential of newinteractive modalities of information representation and exchange for radicallytransforming the world of computer systems, networks, devices, applications,etc.
Advances in Meshfree Techniques
In recent years meshless/meshfree methods have gained a considerable attention in engineering and applied mathematics. The variety of problems that are now being addressed by these techniques continues to expand and the quality of the results obtained demonstrates the effectiveness of many of the methods currently available. The book presents a significant sample of the state of the art in the field with methods that have reached a certain level of maturity while also addressing many open issues.The book collects extended original contributions presented at the first ECCOMAS Conference on Meshless Methods held in 2005 in Lisbon. The list of contributors reveals a mix of highly distinguished authors as well as quite young but very active and promising researchers, thus giving the reader an interesting and updated view of different mesh reduction methods and its range of applications. The material presented is appropriate for researchers, engineers, physicists, applied mathematicians and graduate students interested in this active research area.
Advances in Material Forming ; Esaform 10 years on
This book groups the main advances in material forming, considering different p- cesses (conventional and non-conventional) focusing in polymers, composites and metals, that are analyzed from the state of the art, describing the most significant recent advances and identifying the present challenges from the experimental, modeling and numerical points of view. Chapters include a large list of references and have been wr- ten by recognized specialists. Special emphasis is devoted to the contributions of the European Scientific Association on Material Forming (ESAFORM) during the last 10 years (1998-2007) and in particular the ones coming from its annual international conference. The first chapter includes an excellent introduction to the Esaform association.
Advances in Land Remote Sensing : System, Modeling, Inversion and Application
It systematically summarizes the past achievements and identifies the frontier issues as the research agenda for the near future. It covers all aspects of land remote sensing, from sensor systems, physical modeling, inversion algorithms, to various applications. The papers on remote sensing system evaluate the capabilities of different sensor systems for estimating key land surface variables and how they can best be improved and integrated effectively in the future.
Advances in Information Technologies for Electromagnetics
Simple tutorial chapters introduce the reader to cutting edge technologies, such as parallel and distributed computing, object-oriented technologies, grid computing, semantic grids, agent based computing and service-oriented architectures. On such bases, a variety of EM applications is proposed: 1) parallel FDTD codes (both for antenna analysis and for metamaterial applications), 2) grid computing for computational EM (CEM) (with applications to antenna arrays, wireless and remote-sensing systems) 3) mobile agents for parametric CEM modeling 4) complex/hybrid EM software environments (with applications to planar circuits, quasi-optical systems,…) 5) semantic grids for CAE of antennas arrays.
Advances in Human-Robot Interaction
The book addresses key issues of human-robot interaction concerned with perception, modelling, control, planning and cognition, covering a wide spectrum of applications. This includes interaction and communication with robots in manufacturing environments and the collaboration and co-existence with assistive robots in domestic environments. Among the presented examples are a robotic bartender, a new programming paradigm for a cleaning robot, or an approach to interactive teaching of a robot assistant in manufacturing environment. This carefully edited book reports on contributions from leading German academic institutions and industrial companies brought together within MORPHA, a 4 year project on interaction and communication between humans and anthropomorphic robot assistants
Advances in Evolutionary Computing for System Design
Evolutionary computing paradigms offer robust and powerful adaptive search mechanisms for system design. This book includes thirteen chapters covering a wide area of topics in evolutionary computing and applications including: -Introduction to evolutionary computing in system design - Evolutionary neuro-fuzzy systems - Evolution of fuzzy controllers - Genetic algorithms for multi-classifier design -Evolutionary grooming of traffic -Evolutionary particle swarms -Fuzzy logic systems using genetic algorithms - Evolutionary algorithms and immune learning for neural network-based controller design - Distributed problem solving using evolutionary learning -Evolutionary computing within grid environment -Evolutionary game theory in wireless mesh networks - Hybrid multiobjective evolutionary algorithms for the sailor assignment problem - Evolutionary techniques in hardware optimization
Advances in Dynamic Game Theory : Numerical Methods, Algorithms, and Applications to Ecology and Economics
This collection of selected contributions gives an account of recent developments in dynamic game theory and its applications, covering both theoretical advances and new applications of dynamic games in such areas as pursuit-evasion games, ecology, and economics.
Advances in Distribution Theory, Order Statistics, and Inference
Barry Arnold has made fundamental contributions to many different areas of statistics, including distribution theory, Bayesian inference, multivariate analysis, bounds and orderings, and characterization problems. Organized to honor Arnold’s significant contributions to the field, this volume is an outgrowth of the "International Conference on Distribution Theory, Order Statistics, and Inference," held at the University of Cantabria, Santander, Spain.Several distinguished and active researchers highlight some of the recent developments in statistical distribution theory, order statistics and their properties, as well as inferential methods associated with them. Applications to survival analysis, reliability, quality control, and environmental problems are emphasized.
Advances in Discrete Tomography and its Applications
Advances in Discrete Tomography and Its Applications is a unified presentation of new methods, algorithms, and select applications that are the foundations of multidimensional image reconstruction by discrete tomographic methods. The self-contained chapters, written by leading mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists, present cutting-edge research and results in the field.Three main areas are covered: foundations, algorithms, and practical applications. Following an introduction that reports the recent literature of the field, the book explores various mathematical and computational problems of discrete tomography including new applications.



















