Books published by Springer

This book presents parts of the iM3F 2022 proceedings from the mechatronics as well as the intelligent manufacturing tracks. It highlights recent trends and key challenges in mechatronics as well as the advent of intelligent manufacturing engineering and technology that are non-trivial in embracing Industry 4.0 as well as addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The book deliberates on conventional as well as advanced solutions that are utilized in the variety of mechatronics and intelligent manufacturing-based applications. The readers are envisaged to gain an insightful view on the current trends, issues, mitigating factors as well as solutions from this book.

The book spans across the research domains of mechanisation and automation, agrobusiness, food processing and value addition, climate smart agriculture, rural sanitation, agro biotechnology, and rural energy.

This book is the first coherent presentation of the latest research and practices concerned with how recent advances in mobile information and communication technology (ICT) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are utilized to enhance the value of the city and change the way that city planning and management are carried out. Its salient feature is the pursuit of the individual-oriented evaluative point of view regarding the city. This view considers the value of the city to be the total of visit-values individuals feel and appreciate when they visit the city. The visit-value is conceptualized as the intangible asset value of the attractiveness of the city that visitors form in their minds based on their experiences and activities in the city, transactions with city space, and communications with other people. Visitors to the city may well be quite heterogeneous individuals with different motives and preferences. Thus, to enhance the value of the city, quite different visit values of heterogeneous individuals should be enhanced simultaneously, which necessitates the use of ICT and IoT in living spaces. Based on this view, the city utilizing ICT and IoT to enhance the value of the city is called the social city. Whereas many other books deal with the impacts of the advances in mobile ICT on the city, they only discuss how these advances change the infrastructure of the city but do not discuss how these technological advances can be utilized to enhance the city's value. This book first develops the concept of the social city based on an individual micro-behavioral approach. Then, it presents the latest studies on technological components of the social city, such as the human-sensing technology for estimating individual behavior, decision making, and mood; the visualizing technology of the thermal 3-dimensional environment of the city; and the social-sensing technology using social networking service (SNS) for measuring and creating an atmosphere of city space. Finally, it envisages the future of the social city.

This book contains select chapters on support vector algorithms from different perspectives, including mathematical background, properties of various kernel functions, and several applications. The main focus of this book is on orthogonal kernel functions, and the properties of the classical kernel functions-Chebyshev, Legendre, Gegenbauer, and Jacobi-are reviewed in some chapters. Moreover, the fractional form of these kernel functions is introduced in the same chapters, and for ease of use for these kernel functions, a tutorial on a Python package named ORSVM is presented. The book also exhibits a variety of applications for support vector algorithms, and in addition to the classification, these algorithms along with the introduced kernel functions are utilized for solving ordinary, partial, integro, and fractional differential equations.On the other hand, nowadays, the real-time and big data applications of support vector algorithms are growing. Consequently, the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) parallelizing the procedure of support vector algorithms based on orthogonal kernel functions is presented. The book sheds light on how to use support vector algorithms based on orthogonal kernel functions in different situations and gives a significant perspective to all machine learning and scientific machine learning researchers all around the world to utilize fractional orthogonal kernel functions in their pattern recognition or scientific computing problems.

This book introduces the geological background of sandstone-type uranium deposits in the Ordos Basin, Northwest China. Through comparative study of a large number of practical data such as uranium, coal and oil boreholes, the research system takes sedimentary basin as a unit and fully utilizes geologicalprinciples and test analysis to study the basic geological, geophysical, geochemical and remote sensing image characteristics of the basin, and to restores the favorable uranium-forming geological background brought by the change of the cognitive sedimentary environment conditions. It can be used as a reference for researchers, practitioners and as well as teachers and graduate students working in uranium deposit geology, sedimentary geology and related areas

This book perfects the theoretical system of fracture mechanics of nonhomogeneous materials through the establishment of the piecewise exponential model and expands the fracture research scope to nonhomogeneous materials containing complex interfaces through proposing the domain-independent interaction integral concept. The piecewise exponential model has overcome the problem of fracture mechanics of nonhomogeneous materials and clarified the doubt of traditional exponential models in recent 30 years. The domain-independent interaction integral method is not affected by material nonhomogeneity and discontinuity, which greatly facilitates its numerical implementation in the investigation of fracture behaviors of nonhomogeneous materials with complex interfaces.

This book systematically outlines the development of ancient Chinese. Consisting of 20 chapters, the self-contained work presents macro-level discussions on a broad range of topics, including: philology, phonology, exegetics, certain words' special meanings, sentence types, the flexible use of words, different grammars in ancient and modern times, and rhetoric. Though chiefly focusing on vocabulary, the book also addresses grammar, and points out grammar problems that differ considerably from those in modern Chinese, in addition to combining morphology and syntax. Further, unlike the majority of textbooks on the subject, it pays more attention to the rhetoric used in ancient Chinese literary works. Rather than simply analyzing linguistic phenomena, the book also (and more importantly) provides a meaningful approach to the study of ancient Chinese. Accordingly, it offers a valuable asset for researchers, graduate students, and everyone else who is interested in ancient Chinese.

Cryptography is now ubiquitous - moving beyond the traditional environments, such as government communications and banking systems, we see cryptographic techniques realized in Web browsers, e-mail programs, cell phones, manufacturing systems, embedded software, smart buildings, cars, and even medical implants. Today's designers need a comprehensive understanding of applied cryptography. After an introduction to cryptography and data security, the authors explain the main techniques in modern cryptography, with chapters addressing stream ciphers, the Data Encryption Standard (DES) and 3DES, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), block ciphers, the RSA cryptosystem, public-key cryptosystems based on the discrete logarithm problem, elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC), digital signatures, hash functions, Message Authentication Codes (MACs), and methods for key establishment, including certificates and public-key infrastructure (PKI). Throughout the book, the authors focus on communicating the essentials and keeping the mathematics to a minimum, and they move quickly from explaining the foundations to describing practical implementations, including recent topics such as lightweight ciphers for RFIDs and mobile devices, and current key-length recommendations. The authors have considerable experience teaching applied cryptography to engineering and computer science students and to professionals, and they make extensive use of examples, problems, and chapter reviews, while the book's website offers slides, projects and links to further resources. This is a suitable textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses and also for self-study by engineers.

This book offers a philosophical account of violence, engaged with both empirical and theoretical debates in disciplines such as cognitive science, sociology, psychiatry, anthropology, political theory, evolutionary biology, and theology. The primary thesis is that violence is intertwined with morality and typically enacted for "moral" reasons. To show this, the book compellingly demonstrates how morality operates to trigger and justify violence and how people, in their violent behaviors, can engage and disengage with discrete moralities. The author's fundamental account of language, and in particular its normative aspects, is particularly insightful as regards extending the range of what is to be understood as violence beyond the domain of physical harm. By employing concepts such as "coalition enforcement", "moral bubbles", "cognitive niches", "overmoralization", and "military intelligence", the book aims to spell out how perpetrators and victims of violence systematically disagree about the very nature of violence. The author's original claim is that disagreement can be understood naturalistically, described by an account of morality informed by evolutionary perspectives as well. This book helps us come to terms with the fact that we are intrinsically "violent beings". To acknowledge this condition, and our stupefying capacity to inflict harm, is a responsibility we must face up to: such understanding could ultimately be of help in order to achieve a safer ownership of our destinies, by individuating and reinforcing those cognitive firewalls that would prevent violence from always escalating and overflowing. This second edition is thoroughly revised and integrated with two new chapters to cover new aspects of violence and its understanding, such as the role of looting finance in facilitating violent outcomes and the attack to scientific cognition and human creativity.

This book examines the processes and dynamics of cooperation between different actors in civil peace service projects in Kenya, Sierra Leone and Liberia. The joint handling of conflicts and peacebuilding challenges by local and international actors has a long tradition in German peace work and is becoming increasingly important in a globalized world. Therefore, the book explores the question, relevant for both academia and peace practitioners, to what extent an equal partnership can exist in the context of civil conflict transformation. By focusing on the opportunities and challenges of cooperation, the work succeeds in focusing on everyday activities, analyzing the actual processes and frictions of peace work, and making a valuable contribution to critical peace research and the discussion of hybridity and friction.

Since its existence in the 1950s, consumer policy in Germany has been understood and pursued primarily as a bundle of actions and measures initiated and institutionalised by the state. In many cases, the state has also issued corresponding mandates and set up support models, which has created the impression that we are basically dealing with a 'consumer policy from above' imposed by macro-politics. Not that there have not been repeated attempts in the past decades to give impetus to consumer policy from the middle of civil society - often in the form of small citizens' initiatives. And in recent years in particular, a number of new consumer organisations have emerged which operate much closer to the grass roots. Nevertheless, the impression seems to have taken root among the large, government-related 'players' in the field, who have been in the 'business' for decades, not to mention government-internal consumer policy, that consumer policy concerns a policy field that is essentially ordered by a collaboration of the state on the one hand, and consumer protection organisations representing all consumers equally on the other, while the many small consumer initiatives, not even started by individual committed consumers, regularly fall behind in comparison. This perspective refers largely to the view of and from the centre of politics. This volume is intended to go some way towards countering the institutionally prevailing impression that, in principle, there is only 'consumer policy from above' that is really effective and assertive.The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.

The diary notes that Ludger Kühnhardt took while visiting or staying in 235 countries and territories around the world create a fascinating panorama, reflected in the personal impressions, encounters and experiences of a political scientist and journalist working all over the world. The book reconstructs the connections between Europe's transformations and the emerging global era over six decades from 1960 to the threshold of the post-Corona world of 2020.

The notes that Ludger Kühnhardt wrote in 235 countries and territories around the world create a fascinating panorama, reflected in the personal impressions, encounters and experiences of a political scientist and journalist working all over the world. The book reconstructs the connections between Europe's transformations and the emerging global era over six decades from 1960 to the threshold of the post-Corona world of 2020.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 2023 iteration of the ISPGAYA meeting, titled "Digital Sustainability: Inclusion and Transformation" and held in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal. The conference and resulting book intend to explore the involvement of Portugal, a country on the semi-periphery of the world system, in developments regarding the understanding of and progress toward sustainability. The conference was organized by ISPGAYA, an institution belonging to the private polytechnic higher education system in Portugal, and brought together participants from around the world. This volume intends to establish a milestone in the multidimensional approach to the theme of sustainability, affirming the concept's multi and interdisciplinary nature and bringing together scholars across disciplines.

This book expands our understanding of art markets and their impact on art creation through interdisciplinary contributions by economists and art historians. The study of art history has been traditionally focused on the description of artistic innovations, the role of the artists that made them and the meaning of the artworks they created. It has often neglected the broader reasons why certain innovations took place in certain places, in specific times and in particular ways. Exploring old, modern and contemporary art markets, the book shows that the impact of institutional and economic factors has been critical in shaping the evolution of art history, and quantitative methods can be useful to improve our understanding of the history of figurative arts and the relationship between market structure and creativity. It is of great interest to cultural economists, art historians and students and scholars interested in understanding art markets.

This two-volume set, CCIS 2068 and 2069, constitutes selected papers presented during the Second Pan-African Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PanAfriCon AI 2023, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in October 2023. The set goal of the conference is to exchange the best practices of joint Pan-African efforts to provide solutions for Africa's key 21st century challenges in the social, economic and ecologic domains. The 29 papers were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: Medical AI; Natural Language Processing, Text and Speech Processing; AI in Finance and Cyber Security; Autonomous Vehicles; AI Ethics and Life Sciences.

This edited volume brings together papers by both eminent and rising scholars to celebrate Saul Kripke¿s singular contributions to modal logic. Kripke¿s work on modal logic helped usher in a new semantic epoch for the field and made facility with modal logic indispensable not only to technically oriented philosophers but to theoretical computer scientists and others as well. This volume features previously unpublished work of Kripke¿s as well as a brief intellectual biography recounting the story of how Kripke became interested in, and made his first contributions to, modal logic. However, the majority of the volume¿s contributions are forward-looking, and produce new philosophical and technical insights by engaging with ideas tracing back to Kripke.

This two-volume set, CCIS 2068 and 2069, constitutes selected papers presented during the Second Pan-African Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PanAfriCon AI 2023, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in October 2023. The set goal of the conference is to exchange the best practices of joint Pan-African efforts to provide solutions for Africa's key 21st century challenges in the social, economic and ecologic domains. The 29 papers were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: Medical AI; Natural Language Processing, Text and Speech Processing; AI in Finance and Cyber Security; Autonomous Vehicles; AI Ethics and Life Sciences.

Since its beginning the International Conference on Applied Sciences and Advanced Technology (ICASAT) was planned as a multidisciplinary space and as a platform to explore the frontiers of knowledge in different areas such as Machine Vision, Biotechnology, Computer Sciences, Mechatronics and, Sustainability. Also, a multidisciplinary perspective is required in all aspects of science, engineering, and research, moving towards a more complete overview of recent advances. On its third edition, ICASAT received works focused on the Trends and Challenges for Global Sustainable Development. This book is a collection of the works presented during ICASAT 2023.

This book provides a comprehensive, detailed, and coherent spatio-temporal account of Caribbean mangrove evolution from its evolutionary origins to the present that is not available for any mangrove region in the world. Mangroves are intertidal wetland forests that play a crucial role in the maintenance of terrestrial and marine biodiversity, and in the functioning of global biogeochemical cycles (especially the carbon cycle). These ecosystems dominate the tropical/subtropical coasts of all continents and are among the most threatened ecosystems in the world. This book combines all temporal scales, from the geological to the ecological, to provide an integrated picture of mangrove history and the natural and anthropogenic drivers of ecological and evolutionary change. This may be useful not only for understanding the current ecological status of these emblematic ecosystems, but also for informing their conservation in the face of ongoing global change.

Combinatorial Optimization represents a major component of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, and, in a broader sense, the development of digital intelligence (and society). It covers, in particular, such important areas as network design, location, routing, and scheduling, with major applications in transportation, logistics, health systems, production, communications, and energy.Starting from the exceptional contribution Professor Bernard Gendron made to combinatorial optimization and its applications in multiple areas, the book presents a state-of-the-art view on the field through a combination of surveys, expository articles, and focused methodological and applied research. The authors hail from various Operations Research areas and institutions around the world. Having collaborated closely with Professor Gendron, they drew on his foundational work to showcase a variety of models and algorithms that draw a living picture of the multifaceted word of applied combinatorial optimization.

This text gives a comprehensive, largely self-contained treatment of multivariate heavy tail analysis. Emphasizing regular variation of measures means theory can be presented systematically and without regard to dimension. Tools are developed that allow a flexible definition of "extreme" in higher dimensions and permit different heavy tails to coexist on the same state space leading to "hidden regular variation" and "steroidal regular variation". This emphasizes when estimating risks, it is important to choose the appropriate heavy tail. Theoretical foundations lead naturally to statistical techniques; examples are drawn from risk estimation, finance, climatology and network analysis. Treatments target a broad audience in insurance, finance, data analysis, network science and probability modeling. The prerequisites are modest knowledge of analysis and familiarity with the definition of a measure; regular variation of functions is reviewed but is not a focal point.

This textbook introduces readers to international law by linking it to the Harry Potter universe. Given the current changes in the international sphere away from a state-centric system to a multitude of non-state actors, it tests the legal regime by applying it to the out-of-the-box concept of wizards and thus rids the doctrinal debate of political factors. More specifically, the book explains core concepts of public international law, covering the elements of a state, state responsibility, jurisdiction, enforcement of international law and immunity. In the wizarding world, it addresses questions of statehood by discussing when a wizarding state is responsible for the crimes committed by its wizards, who has jurisdiction over crimes, and how international law is enforced. In addition, it introduces and explains the fundamentals of international humanitarian law, international human rights law, international criminal law, and air law by applying them to the wizarding world. The textbook is intended for anyone looking for an accessible introduction to public international law and its application.

This book focuses on a wide range of distributed machine learning and computing algorithms and their applications in healthcare and engineering systems. The contributors explore how these techniques can be applied to different real-world problems. It is suitable for students and researchers interested in conducting research in multidisciplinary areas that rely on distributed machine learning and computing techniques.

Since the last edition of this book (2014), progress has been astonishing in all areas of Natural Language Processing, with recent achievements in Text Generation that spurred a media interest going beyond the traditional academic circles. Text Processing has meanwhile become a mainstream industrial tool that is used, to various extents, by countless companies. As such, a revision of this book was deemed necessary to catch up with the recent breakthroughs, and the author discusses models and architectures that have been instrumental in the recent progress of Natural Language Processing.As in the first two editions, the intention is to expose the reader to the theories used in Natural Language Processing, and to programming examples that are essential for a deep understanding of the concepts. Although present in the previous two editions, Machine Learning is now even more pregnant, having replaced many of the earlier techniques to process text. Many new techniques build on the availability of text. Using Python notebooks, the reader will be able to load small corpora, format text, apply the models through executing pieces of code, gradually discover the theoretical parts by possibly modifying the code or the parameters, and traverse theories and concrete problems through a constant interaction between the user and the machine. The data sizes and hardware requirements are kept to a reasonable minimum so that a user can see instantly, or at least quickly, the results of most experiments on most machines.The book does not assume a deep knowledge of Python, and an introduction to this language aimed at Text Processing is given in Ch. 2, which will enable the reader to touch all the programming concepts, including NumPy arrays and PyTorch tensors as fundamental structures to represent and process numerical data in Python, or Keras for training Neural Networks to classify texts. Covering topics like Word Segmentation and Part-of-Speech and Sequence Annotation, the textbook also gives an in-depth overview of Transformers (for instance, BERT), Self-Attention and Sequence-to-Sequence Architectures.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Foundations and Practice of Security, FPS 2023, held in Bordeaux, France, during December 11-13, 2023. The 27 regular and 8 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: Part I: AI and cybersecurity, security analysis, phishing and social network, vulnerabilities and exploits, network and system threat, malware analysis.Part II: security design, short papers.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Foundations and Practice of Security, FPS 2023, held in Bordeaux, France, during December 11-13, 2023.The 27 regular and 8 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: Part I: AI and cybersecurity, security analysis, phishing and social network, vulnerabilities and exploits, network and system threat, malware analysis.Part II: security design, short papers.

Human digital twin (HDT) is a transformative technology poised to transform various human-centric systems. With its potential applications in personalized healthcare, HDT promises swift, precise, and efficient healthcare services through the integration of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, data analytics, internet of things, cybersecurity as well as virtual and augmented reality. This book addresses the critical gap in the existing literature by offering a comprehensive exploration of connectivity solutions for HDT while prioritizing reliability, security, and privacy. Key topics covered include the foundational concept of HDT, its design requirements and associated challenges, edge-assisted human-to-virtual solutions, blockchain-enabled data-sharing mechanisms, and differentially private federated multi-task learning (DPFML) methodologies tailored for HDT.The discussion on the concept of HDT encompasses an overview of its applications and its specific characteristics when compared to the conventional digital twin models. In addressing the design requirements and challenges of HDT, the text delves into the complexities of securing high-quality data, ensuring ultra-reliable and low-latency communication, data privacy and integrity, while managing storage, computation and analytics. Exploring edge-assisted human-to-virtual solutions, the book also introduces a connectivity framework and details the modeling process for human-to-virtual twin connectivity. The book later presents an in-depth examination of the practical Byzantine fault tolerance framework, followed by a discussion on shard-based Byzantine fault-tolerant schemes tailored for HDT, along with analyses of latency and throughput.Furthermore, the book outlines the framework for DPFML-assisted human-to-virtual twin connectivity, accompanied by a novel consensus algorithm known as the proof of model quality. Finally, it presents future research directions aimed at addressing communication challenges hindering the seamless design and development of HDT. By offering this comprehensive exploration, the book serves as a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers seeking to navigate the evolving landscape of HDT and its transformative potential in various domains.

This proceedings constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques, SIMUTools 2023, held in Seville, Spain, in December 2023. The 23 revised full papers were carefully selected from 58 submissions. The papers focus on various areas such as Simulation Tools and Methods; Artificial Intelligence and Simulation; Transportation and Logistics; Medical Sciences; and Network Simulations.

Written for students and practising engineers working in automotive engineering, this book provides a fundamental yet comprehensive understanding of chassis systems and requires little prior knowledge on the part of the reader. It presents the material in a practical and realistic manner, using reverse engineering as a basis for examples to reinforce understanding of the topics. The specifications and characteristics of vehicles currently on the market are used to exemplify the theory's application, and care is taken to connect the various topics covered, so as to clearly demonstrate their interrelationships. This second edition is fully updated and revised throughout and includes a new chapter on vehicle deceleration behaviour. The book opens with a chapter on basic vehicle mechanics, which includes the forces acting on a vehicle in motion, assuming a rigid body. The new chapter on vehicle deceleration behaviour introduces the basic concepts of a conventional foundation braking system before considering means of optimising the deceleration performance of any wheel-braked vehicle based on the tyre-road adhesion characteristics. The next chapter focuses on vehicle dynamics by considering suspension systems and how the important components of the system, the tyres, linkages, springs, dampers, etc., interact to give the required peformance characteristics for the vehicle. The book then proceeds to a chapter on steering systems, which provides readers with a firm understanding of the principles and forces involved under static and dynamic loading. The chapter on chassis structures and materials outlines analysis tools (typically, finite element analysis) and design features that are used to reduce mass and increase occupant safety in modern vehicles. The final chapter on noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) includes a basic overview of acoustic and vibration theory and makes use of extensive research investigations and practical experience asa means of addressing NVH issues. In all subject areas, the authors take into account the latest trends, anticipating the move towards electric vehicles, on-board diagnostic monitoring, active systems and performance optimisation. The book features a number of worked examples and case studies based on recent research projects. All students, including those on Master level degree courses in automotive engineering, and professionals in industry who want to gain a better understanding of vehicle chassis engineering, will benefit from this book.