Books published by Springer

This book offers important insights into the intricacies of energy trading and risk management to students and professionals in the liberalized electricity and natural gas markets. In its opening chapter, the book delves into fundamental concepts, including price formation on wholesale markets. The various market places and trading products are presented, and the distinguishing characteristics of electricity and natural gas compared to other commodities are emphasised. Moving forward, the next chapter concentrates on portfolio management, offering insights into the trading process through the perspectives of various agents. It begins with proprietary traders and progresses to encompass the portfolio management activities of integrated companies responsible for both generation assets and a retail client base. The book then looks at risk management, explaining the diverse risks that impact the value of energy portfolios inthe market. It places emphasis on credit risk, price risk, quantity risk, and product liquidity risk as the most influential factors and presents effective practices for their management. Furthermore, readers will gain a comprehensive understanding of how to manage quantity risk and its interconnectedness with price risk. Additionally, the book addresses the measurement of product liquidity and its disparities across different energy market products. In summary, this book is an accessible introduction and a concise reference for students and professionals across all fields of energy.

The two open access volumes LNCS 14574 and 14575 constitute the proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures, FOSSACS 2024, which took place in Luxembourg in April 2024.The 24 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: Infinite games; categorical semantics; automata and synthesis; Part II: Types and programming languages; logic and proofs; infinite-state systems.

This open access book investigates from a life-course perspective the individualization process and the challenges faced by young adults in post-collectivist China, where people are enjoined to "liberate" (jiefang) their individual capacities, to "rely on themselves" (kao ziji) and to no longer "depend on the state" (kao guojia). Based on unique quantitative and qualitative data, this book provides a solid empirical portrait of Chinese youths and transformation of social policies in post-collectivist ChinaThis book will be a great resource to students, academics as well as social scientists and policy-makers who wish not only to understand how, in such a short period of time, young adults and their families have managed to navigate from a relatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal, but also how the articulation between socialist and neoliberal ideologies is reconfiguring social and economic relations as well as women's and men's life-course.The basis of the English translation of this book from its French original manuscript was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision and rewriting of the content was done by the author.

This book explores toric topology, polyhedral products and related mathematics from a wide range of perspectives, collectively giving an overview of the potential of the areas while contributing original research to drive the subject forward in interesting new directions. Contributions to this volume were written in connection to the thematic program Toric Topology and Polyhedral Products held at the Fields Institute from January-June 2020. 16 original conributions were inspired or influenced by the program.Toric Topology arose as a subject in its own right about twenty-five years ago. It sits at the intersection of commutative algebra, topology, combinatorics, algebraic geometry, and symplectic and convex geometry. Polyhedral products are a functorial generalization of a construction that is at the centre of Toric Topology. They are of independent interest and unify several constructions that arise in a diverse range of areas, such as geometric group theory, homotopy theory, algebraic combinatorics and subspace arrangements.

This book concentrates on the famous Grothendieck inequality and the continued search for the still unknown best possible value of the real and complex Grothendieck constant (an open problem since 1953). It describes in detail the state of the art in research on this fundamental inequality, including Krivine's recent contributions, and sheds light on related questions in mathematics, physics and computer science, particularly with respect to the foundations of quantum theory and quantum information theory. Unifying the real and complex cases as much as possible, the monograph introduces the reader to a rich collection of results in functional analysis and probability. In particular, it includes a detailed, self-contained analysis of the multivariate distribution of complex Gaussian random vectors. The notion of Completely Correlation Preserving (CCP) functions plays a particularly important role in the exposition.The prerequisites are a basic knowledge of standard functional analysis, complex analysis, probability, optimisation and some number theory and combinatorics. However, readers missing some background will be able to consult the generous bibliography, which contains numerous references to useful textbooks. The book will be of interest to PhD students and researchers in functional analysis, complex analysis, probability, optimisation, number theory and combinatorics, in physics (particularly in relation to the foundations of quantum mechanics) and in computer science (quantum information and complexity theory).

This book offers guidance on capturing the creative forces of the faculty, staff and students at universities. Given their unique and central role in America and the world, it examines how university research, learning and service can be integrated to address the needs of society as it is both enabled and changed by technology. In turn, the book assesses the challenges and opportunities for universities to be more successful and impactful through innovation, viewing universities as integrated systems. It demonstrates how change can occur both within the "knowledge economy" and because of innovations within it. In doing so, the book provides insights into how universities can prosper and lead in a world that is constantly changed by the innovations that universities and industry jointly create. The book serves as a guide for higher education policymakers, funders, donors, board members, stakeholders and leaders (chairs, deans, provosts, presidents) through its systematic vision for university innovation and service to society. It will also benefit researchers studying innovation in organizations, illustrating how systematic approaches arising from management science and operations research can be used toward positive change. Lastly, strategic partners in industry, government and foundations seeking opportunities for partnerships and collaboration with universities will also find it useful.

Nowadays, sustainability is one of the main pillars for organizations' revamp and growth. Sustainability can be summarized as the set of actions based on the mutual respect of economic, environmental, and social interests. No action should be taken unless it simultaneously respects the interests of these three spheres.The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) developed by the United Nations for the 2030 Agenda are moving in this direction. Among them, reducing diversity and strengthening women's empowerment are the main targets of Goal 5 "Gender Equality."This edited volume discusses three main topics: Diversity Management for Sustainable Governance of Organisation, Innovation and New Technologies for Sustainable Development of Enterprises Led by Women and Agri-food, Fashion, Luxury and Made in Italy in Sustainable Female Firms.

This book offers a thorough review of studies on climate change and urban adaptation strategies and plans. It takes the moves from the identification of three primary barriers to adaptation, including the uncertainty surrounding climate change and its evolution, the complexity of human systems, and the widespread perception that climate change impacts are improbable. From this analysis arises the idea of the need to adopt a new approach to the climate issue: the soft approach. This approach focuses on the intangible and organizational aspects of systems and is proposed as a valid alternative in contexts of high uncertainty. It complements the structural (hard) option in response to emerging risks. Furthermore, soft solutions have intrinsic characteristics of flexibility, reversibility, adaptability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, making them often low-regret and co-benefit. Based on these principles, the book suggests that a climate-wise reorganization of urban services couldconstitute an effective soft strategy to help cities tackle the impacts of climate change and investigates the potential for Urban Facility Management services to evolve through their integration with climate information. The concept of urban Adaptation services, which integrate knowledge and practices of climate services into urban services management processes, is an innovative perspective which stems from a reading of reality through the lens of specific needs.

Since the emergence of 2022's monkeypox virus (MPXV) outbreak, it has been the heading of news and research articles that MPXV is being involving non-endemic areas after about its 80-year presence in endemic areas. Efforts are concentrated on understanding how MPXV has evolved to cause an epidemic. The book provides a comprehensive compendium of chapters on poxviruses in different domains. It concludes that the main problem we should deal with is not to address how MPXV has overcome the distance between non-endemic and endemic areas, but it is the non-cooperativity of logistics, research, and science in managing poxviruses' outbreaks.

This open access book directs attention to the safety implications of disruptive, sustainability-driven changes in sociotechnical systems resulting from climate-change considerations in high-risk industries. It addresses not only the dismantling of currently prevalent systems and structures and the achievement of a stable future state but also the management of processes for establishing new practices in a safe and reliable manner without undue interruption of important functions and services.Leading scholars from various fields of research have contributed to this brief by analyzing case studies as well as through conceptual and methodological work. They propose strategies for coping with new kinds of risk at local and organizational levels. The oil and gas and nuclear industries are two cases investigated here. They present a challenging mixture of continuity and disruption and require strategies for coping with safety and sustainability issues at the same time. Innovativemethods such as real-world experimentation and computer-based simulation are discussed as means of investigating the issues at stake. Climate Change and Safety in High-Risk Industries brings together critical appraisals of the challenges that will be faced by industry, regulatory bodies and decision-makers in coming decades. It analyzes whether safety and sustainability are accurately thought of as competing imperatives or, rather, offer possibilities for a more cooperative approach to the necessary adaptations in our modes of production and consumption.

The book discusses various aspects of the technical support of underwater archaeological research in marine and freshwater areas. This book considers the relevance, specificity, and artifacts of underwater archaeological research, stating the factors of flooding of archaeological artifacts. The authors describe the basic equipment for underwater work, as well as the equipment for remote study of the bottom and underwater archaeological research. This book presents the usage of instrumentation in underwater archaeology. Case studies included in this book correspond to the flooded ancient Greek cities of Fanagoria and Patraeus in the Taman Bay of the Black Sea, flooded Neolithic settlements on Lake Sennitsa in the Pskov region of Russia, sunken ships in the north of the Black Sea and sunken liner "Titanic" in the Atlantic Ocean. The book is intended for students, graduate students and archaeologists who are interested in the specifics of underwater archaeological research and are planning to conduct it.

The book is a true knowledge-enhancing project, dealing with the forms of rationality at work in social life, which are so many, varied and complex. Published already in Spanish and Italian, it analyses the role played by rationality through the lens of social theories in order to propose a problematic interpretation of human action. Since there is nothing more practical than a good theory when seeking to understand our society, the book reflects on the theoretical approaches that provide useful categories by means of which to understand and interpret individual, organizational, and institutional action. It proposes an analysis of a wide variety of classics by eminent European and Anglo-American thinkers, such as Dahrendorf, Mannheim, Marx, Popper, Weber, Habermas, Luhmann, Machiavelli, Pareto, Ardigò, Cesareo, Parsons, Schütz, Alexander, Bauman, Beck, Sennett, Antiseri, Boudon, Sen, Simon, to shed light on the relationship between rationality, difficulties in thinking and extra-rationality. Finally, the reasons for unexpected action are investigated as well as the strategic role played by ethics, rationality and skills in postmodern societies on the basis of the contributions of Nussbaum and Piketty.

This book offers innovative ideas and solutions from tropical fruits and crops for engineering problems. It covers a wide range of topics related to science, engineering, and technologies. The topics shared in this book enable practitioners and innovators to develop subsequent novel ideas and methods for solving engineering and technological problems for organizations to sustain its operation in global challenges.

This book explores how power relationships, measured through qualitative social network analysis, impact planning participation and livelihood strategies of a marginalized group of farmers cultivating the Yamuna River floodplain in Delhi, India. Through an in-depth study of 165 farming households facing land development, this book offers insights from the ground-up into how social dynamics enable and constrain agency. A novel mixed-methods approach was used to measure social networks and access to resources based on the different types of people farmers might interact with as part of their livelihoods: hired laborers, vendors, other farmers, etc. Digging deeper into social network patterns, typologies of power are illustrated as they manifest household agency through diverse pathways. More broadly, a political ecology lens is used to link together the multiple and fragmented Yamuna farmers' stories with broader social, ecological, infrastructural, and economic contexts to suggest future directions for inquiry and policy related to localized urban food systems and sustainable development. This monograph will be of interest to academic faculty and graduate students in critical geography, cultural anthropology, food studies, landscape architecture/urban planning, and sociology.

This book describes new techniques for making decisions in situations with uncertainty and new applications of decision-making techniques. The main emphasis is on situations when it is difficult to decrease uncertainty. For example, it is very difficult to accurately predict human economic behavior, so in economics, it is very important to take this uncertainty into account when making decisions. Other areas where it is difficult to decrease uncertainty are geosciences and teaching. The book analyzes the general problem of decision making and shows how its results can be applied to economics, geosciences, and teaching. Since all these applications involve computing, the book also shows how these results can be applied to computing, including deep learning and quantum computing. The book is recommended to researchers, practitioners, and students who want to learn more about decision making under uncertainty--and who want to work on remaining challenges.

This book covers image and video color editing research advances over the last two decades. Bringing readers up to speed on digital image and video editing techniques and research, the book delves into an area that has attracted much attention from researchers due to the rapid development of computer graphics and the widespread prevalence of digital cameras and mobile phones in daily life. Readers will get a comprehensive overview of the theory and application of color transfer, emotional color transfer, colorization, decolorization, and style transfer in altering still and moving digital images. Despite the existence of professional image editing software that can complete complex image editing work, the skills required to achieve satisfactory editing results can be prohibitive, and even professional image editors need to spend a lot of time developing and maintaining aptitude in a niche tool. Instead, the book explores image and video editing techniques that are simple and effective alternatives to such editing software that professional and amateur image editors can utilize. The book focuses on color as one of the most important features of an image or video. Image and video color editing aims to dramatically alter source images suitable for a wide range of applications.

Degrowth Decolonization and Development reveals common underlying cultural roots to the multiple current crises. It shows that culture is an essential sphere to initiate fundamental changes and solutions as it brings about transformative imaginaries on a theoretical, political and practical level. The book focusses on the interplay between culture and the environment, society and the economy. It provides a critique of concepts associated with the term ¿Development¿ and reveals knowledge and theories outside the comfort zone of the mainstream Western theoretical landscape, which will certainly be instrumental in the decolonization of both development theories and practices. The book convincingly reveals the large array of domains, which, when interpreted from a decolonization and Degrowth perspective, can be managed through logics of environmental justice, social equity and equality, and generate societally more desirable outcomes. The book presents a multidisciplinary perspective on the contemporary global crises and features interdisciplinary analyses thereof through the lenses of cultural studies, critical development studies, political economy, eco-feminist political ecology, anthropology and sociology. Degrowth Decolonization and Development unveils the fundamental role of the dichotomies characterizing the Western modern development paradigm in shaping today¿s actions, and especially the dichotomies of Global North and Global South, Centre and Periphery, Developed and Developing/Underdeveloped, Man and Nature. Degrowth Decolonization and Development addresses all researchers and activists interested in sustainability transformation and decolonization processes in Development studies.Degrowth Decolonization and Development is structured as a collection of seven original case studies. These are authored by researchers who met when presenting their work in Decolonization and Degrowth panels from the ISEE-ESEE-Degrowth Conference, Manchester, July 5-8, 2021, and the 8th International Degrowth Conference in The Hague, Netherlands, August 24-28, 2021. The concluding chapter proposes a synthesis identifying key concepts and steps in cultural change for the decolonization of the Western worldview towards ¿pluriverse¿ alternatives. The book traces future imaginaries for modelling future new systemic solutions and a needed radical change.

This book presents a combination of chapters assembled in different fields of expertise. The book examines different aspects of business knowledge from a philosophical and practical standpoint. This data helps modern organizations by providing valuable insights and suggestions for future research and results. The increasing number of business disciplines studied necessitates implementing effective analytics practices within organizations. This book explores disciplinary and multidisciplinary concepts and practical techniques to help analyze the evolving field.

This book provides a comprehensive mathematical description and analysis of the delegate allocation processes in the US Democratic and Republican presidential primaries, focusing on the role of apportionment methods and the effect of thresholds--the minimum levels of support required to receive delegates. The analysis involves a variety of techniques, including theoretical arguments, simplicial geometry, Monte Carlo simulation, and examination of presidential primary data from 2004 to 2020. The book is divided into two parts: Part I defines the classical apportionment problem and explains how the implementation and goals of delegate apportionment differ from those of apportionment for state representation in the US House of Representatives and for party representation in legislatures based on proportional representation. The authors then describe how delegates are assigned to states and congressional districts and formally define the delegate apportionment methods usedin each state by the two major parties to allocate delegates to presidential candidates. Part II analyzes and compares the apportionment methods introduced in Part I based on their level of bias and adherence to various notions of proportionality. It explores how often the methods satisfy the quota condition and quantifies their biases in favor or against the strongest and weakest candidates. Because the methods are quota-based, they are susceptible to classical paradoxes like the Alabama and population paradoxes. They also suffer from other paradoxes that are more relevant in the context of delegate apportionment such as the elimination and aggregation paradoxes. The book evaluates the extent to which each method is susceptible to each paradox. Finally, it discusses the appointment of delegates based on divisor methods and notions of regressive proportionality.This book appeals to scholars and students interested in mathematical economics and political science, with an emphasis on apportionment and social choice theory.

This book covers a range of leading-edge topics. It is suitable for teaching specialists for advanced lectures in the domains of systems architecture and distributed platforms. Furthermore, it serves as a basis for undergraduates as well as an inspiration for interesting postgraduates, looking for new challenges. It addresses a holistic view of QoS, which becomes nowadays via Digital Transformations less technically and more socially driven. This includes IoT, energy efficiency, secure transactions, blockchains, and smart contracting.Under the term Emerging Networking (EmN), we cover the steadily growing diversity of smart mobile and robotic apps and unmanned scenarios (UAV). EmN supports distributed intelligence across the combined mobile, wireless, and fixed networks in the edge-to-cloud continuum. The 6G driving factors and potentials in the mid-term are examined. Operative (emergency) networking, which assists rescue troops at sites, also belongs to the above-mentionedproblems. The EmN architecture includes the components of SDN, blockchain, and AI with efficient slicing and cloud support.The design peculiarities in dynamically changing domains, such as Smart Shopping/Office/Home, Context-Sensitive Intelligent apps, are discussed. Altogether, the provided content is technically interesting while still being rather practically oriented and therefore straightforward to understand.This book originated from the close cooperation of scientists from Germany, Ukraine, Israel, Switzerland, Slovak Republic, Poland, Czech Republic, South Korea, China, Italy, North Macedonia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, France, Latvia, Greece, Romania, USA, Finland, Morocco, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.We wish all readers success and lots of inspiration from this useful book!

Data science is a new field that touches on almost every domain of our lives, and thus it is taught in a variety of environments. Accordingly, the book is suitable for teachers and lecturers in all educational frameworks: K-12, academia and industry.This book aims at closing a significant gap in the literature on the pedagogy of data science. While there are many articles and white papers dealing with the curriculum of data science (i.e., what to teach?), the pedagogical aspect of the field (i.e., how to teach?) is almost neglected. At the same time, the importance of the pedagogical aspects of data science increases as more and more programs are currently open to a variety of people.This book provides a variety of pedagogical discussions and specific teaching methods and frameworks, as well as includes exercises, and guidelines related to many data science concepts (e.g., data thinking and the data science workflow), main machine learning algorithms and concepts (e.g., KNN, SVM, Neural Networks, performance metrics, confusion matrix, and biases) and data science professional topics (e.g., ethics, skills and research approach).Professor Orit Hazzan is a faculty member at the Technion¿s Department of Education in Science and Technology since October 2000. Her research focuses on computer science, software engineering and data science education. Within this framework, she studies the cognitive and social processes on the individual, the team and the organization levels, in all kinds of organizations.Dr. Koby Mike is a Ph.D. graduate from the Technion's Department of Education in Science and Technology under the supervision of Professor Orit Hazzan. He continued his post-doc research on data science education at the Bar-Ilan University, and obtained a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University.

This book investigates whether legislative institutions, state and national, in Nigeriäs Fourth Republic have been able to harness constitutional powers to impact public policy. Presenting how the Nigerian state has not been able to showcase the expected dividends of presidential democracy since 1999, it analyzes the crisis of governance and its impact on political stability, social cohesion, and the livelihood of citizens. The book further discusses the depreciating infrastructure, corruption, and mismanagement of public resources, and shows how defiant attitudes of public political and bureaucratic officials define the new wave of corruption and profligacy in Nigeria, presenting this development as a result of a weakened legislature. The book displays the necessity of implementing a culture of accountability and discusses oversight mechanisms to make the executive accountable. These mechanisms are designed to ensure effective public service delivery. Finally, the book situates the legislative institutions in Nigeria within the context of the contributions of the National Assembly and the Assemblies of the State Houses to the development of this emerging democracy in Africa. The book will appeal to students and scholars of political science and public administration, as well as policy-makers and practitioners interested in a better understanding of democracy, separation of powers, governance, and Nigerian politics.

This book presents an overview of geothermal heating systems using ground source heat pumps in different countries. It evaluates the emissions and energy costs generated by the operation of low enthalpy geothermal systems, with heat pumps fed by different energy sources, and assesses, from an international point of view, those policies whose aim is a sustainable, low-carbon economy.The use of low-impact energy sources is gradually growing with the aim of reducing greenhouse gases emission and air pollution. The alternatives offered by geothermal systems are one of the key solutions for a future renewable development, enabling the electrification of heating systems and the use of biofuels.The book will be of interest to energy professionals and researchers.

This book provides that knowledge needed to introduce individuals to the most important research and content on nanotoxicology in nanobiomedicine. Nanotechnology is helping to considerably improve, even revolutionize many technology and industry sectors: information technology, homeland security, medicine, transportation, energy, food safety, and environmental science, among many others. There is an urgent need for a general reference textbook that presents the most recent information on the toxicity and its effects in all these sectors, biomedicine in particular. It includes historical information, nanotoxicology by subject area and or disease, sources of nanomaterials, drug delivery systems and more. Scientists, researchers, and students in all fields that use nanotechnology will find this book essential reading.

This book draws a connection between ethics and research across social sciences, philosophy, medical sciences and legal sciences, and demonstrates that any research activity needs to be conducted by means of rules deriving from the field of ethics. Although having a common core, such rules assume different characteristics depending on the branch of science, as the contributions on philosophy, medicine, dentistry, law, biotechnology, robotics and architecture highlight. It also investigates the more complex ethical concerns and places them in a larger, technological context. Starting with an introduction to common-sense ethical principles, the contributions then guide the reader, helping them develop and understand a comprehensive knowledge on the field. Notably, it appeared interesting to analyze recent events related to the arrival of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic in light of ethical principles, highlighting in what terms their applicability can still be confirmed. Moreover, the book makes these topics accessible to a non-expert audience, while also offering alternative reading pathways to inspire more specialized readers.

This book uniquely explores American cultural values as a factor in maternal health. It looks beyond the social determinants of health as primarily contributing to the escalating maternal morbidity and mortality in the United States. The United States is an outlier with poor maternal health outcomes and high morbidity/mortality in comparison to other high-resource and many mid-level resource nations. While the social determinants of health identify social and environmental conditions affecting maternal health, they do not answer the broader underlying question of why many American women, in a high-resource environment, experience poor maternal health outcomes. Frequent near-misses, high levels of severe childbearing-related morbidity, and high maternal mortality are comparable to those of lower-resource nations. This book includes contributions from recognized medical and cultural anthropologists, and diverse clinical and public health professionals. The authors examine American patterns of decision-making from the perspectives of intersecting social, cultural, and medical values influencing maternal health outcomes. Using an interdisciplinary critical analysis approach, the work draws upon decision-making theory and life course theory. Topics explored include: Cultural values as a basis for decision-makingSocial regard for motherhoodImmigrants, refugees and undocumented mothersCultural conflicts and maternal autonomyHealth outcomes among justice-involved mothers Maternal Health and American Cultural Values: Beyond the Social Determinants is an essential resource for clinical and public health practitioners and their students, providing a framework for graduate-level courses in public health, the health sciences, women's studies, and the social sciences. The book also targets anthropologists, sociologists, and women studies scholars seeking to explain the links between American cultural decision-making and health outcomes. Policy-makers, ethicists, journalists, and advocates for reproductive health justice also would find the text a useful resource.

In the current era, evidence-based medicine and various supporting technologies dominate everyday clinical practice, according to a disease-centred, as opposed to patient-centred, approach. They have obviously improved the clinical management of diseases and it is therefore unreasonable to think of a medicine in which they are not considered fundamental. In fact, the strength of the new medicine should be to adapt scientific knowledge to a specific clinical case. This book therefore looks at the prospect of a new 'person' centred medicine, which stands alongside the 'disease' and 'patient' centred medicine, which pays special attention to the subjectivity of scientific knowledge and the relationship between doctor and patient. It is important to emphasise that this book is written by several hands, i.e. by experts from different fields, doctors, philosophers, architects, sociologists, art critics, physicists and engineers. This is with the intention of providing as broad a perspective as possible on the doctor-patient relationship. Due to its translational and multicultural approach to the subject, the book will be of interest to a wide readership, from medical experts to students, psychologists, philosophers and institutional actors.

This book features a collection of high-quality and peer-reviewed papers from the 2022 6th International Conference on Applied Economics and Business (ICAEB), which was held in Stockholm, Sweden, during August 24-26, 2022. ICAEB serves as a platform for presentation of new advances and research results in the fields of applied economics and business. Applied economics is used to improve the quality of practice in business and public policy by thinking meticulously about new ways to approach old problems. Presentations at the conference include the topical areas of development, ecological, financial, forensic, information, institutional, international, labor, managerial, mathematical, monetary, and other related economic aspects. All these topics relate to an overall theme of sustainable development from an economic perspective. The conference brings together scientists from different fields of applied economic research in order to exchange ideas and experiences leading to improved methods of economic analysis.

This book addresses the recent trends and clinical research being reported in last 5 to 10 years in the field of nasal drug delivery systems. In recent years, interest in using nasal passage as drug absorption site has received increased attention from formulation scientists. Nasal passages, even though a small surface area of the body as compared to other absorption passage such as Gastrointestinal tract or skin, show significant possibility for drug absorption at a quicker rate. There is also a possibility of delivering drugs to the brain using this passage and targeting drugs through the nasal passage. The book has 19 chapters addressing various aspects of nasal drug delivery systems such as an overview of anatomy and physiology of the nasal passage from a drug delivery point of view to global market opportunities for nasal drug delivery. In between, it addresses various aspects of nasal drug delivery. There are very few titles exclusively dedicated to nasal drug delivery, covering the formulation and developmental aspects, and addressing the challenges and solutions. The primary audiences for the book are graduate students in field of medicine, pharmacy and also various researchers who are working in the area of nasal drug delivery in addition to students who are specializing in field of medicine in ENT. This book provides comprehensive information on all the aspects related to the nasal drug delivery of various drug molecules.

This book surveys recent advances in Conversational Information Retrieval (CIR), focusing on neural approaches that have been developed in the last few years. Progress in deep learning has brought tremendous improvements in natural language processing (NLP) and conversational AI, leading to a plethora of commercial conversational services that allow naturally spoken and typed interaction, increasing the need for more human-centric interactions in IR.The book contains nine chapters. Chapter 1 motivates the research of CIR by reviewing the studies on how people search and subsequently defines a CIR system and a reference architecture which is described in detail in the rest of the book. Chapter 2 provides a detailed discussion of techniques for evaluating a CIR system - a goal-oriented conversational AI system with a human in the loop. Then Chapters 3 to 7 describe the algorithms and methods for developing the main CIR modules (or sub-systems). In Chapter 3, conversational document search is discussed, which can be viewed as a sub-system of the CIR system. Chapter 4 is about algorithms and methods for query-focused multi-document summarization. Chapter 5 describes various neural models for conversational machine comprehension, which generate a direct answer to a user query based on retrieved query-relevant documents, while Chapter 6 details neural approaches to conversational question answering over knowledge bases, which is fundamental to the knowledge base search module of a CIR system. Chapter 7 elaborates various techniques and models that aim to equip a CIR system with the capability of proactively leading a human-machine conversation. Chapter 8 reviews a variety of commercial systems for CIR and related tasks. It first presents an overview of research platforms and toolkits which enable scientists and practitioners to build conversational experiences, and continues with historical highlights and recent trends in a range of application areas. Chapter 9eventually concludes the book with a brief discussion of research trends and areas for future work. The primary target audience of the book are the IR and NLP research communities. However, audiences with another background, such as machine learning or human-computer interaction, will also find it an accessible introduction to CIR.