Mastering chance has, for a long time, been a preoccupation of mathematical research. Today, we possess a predictive approach to the evolution of systems based on the theory of probabilities. Even so, uncovering this subject is sometimes complex, because it necessitates a good knowledge of the underlying mathematics. This book offers an introduction to the processes linked to the fluctuations in chance and the use of numerical methods to approach solutions that are difficult to obtain through an analytical approach. It takes classic examples of inventory and queueing management, and addresses more diverse subjects such as equipment reliability, genetics, population dynamics, physics and even market finance. It is addressed to those at Master�s level, at university, engineering school or management school, but also to an audience of those in continuing education, in order that they may discover the vast field of decision support.
Those tasked with the planning and construction of infrastructure and development operations face an increasingly uncertain context in which they must address risks across a number of different fields. These range from the environmental and archaeological to the social, political and financial. As a consequence, the formal and informal practices of stakeholders often incorporate projections of risk and opportunity. Project Risks analyzes this paradigm shift. It reviews the origin and nature of these uncertainties, and the practices implemented by the actors to mitigate or take advantage of them. Paradoxically, these practices generate new risks and power relations that are not compatible with the collaborative planning model. These paradoxes force the rethinking of practices such as project territorialization, risk taking in planning and the responsibility of actors, as well as the societal and political choices that must be made between the realization of projects and the protection of the environment.
This book is an introduction to the linguistic concepts of argumentation relevant for argument mining, an important research and development activity which can be viewed as a highly complex form of information retrieval, requiring high-level natural language processing technology. While the first four chapters develop the linguistic and conceptual aspects of argument expression, the last four are devoted to their application to argument mining. These chapters investigate the facets of argument annotation, as well as argument mining system architectures and evaluation. How annotations may be used to develop linguistic data and how to train learning algorithms is outlined. A simple implementation is then proposed. The book ends with an analysis of non-verbal argumentative discourse. Argument Mining is an introductory book for engineers or students of linguistics, artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Most, if not all, the concepts of argumentation crucial for argument mining are carefully introduced and illustrated in a simple manner.
Mobile Robotics presents the different tools and methods that enable the design of mobile robots; a discipline booming with the emergence of flying drones, underwater mine-detector robots, robot sailboats and vacuum cleaners. Illustrated with simulations, exercises and examples, this book describes the fundamentals of modeling robots, developing the concepts of actuators, sensors, control and guidance. Three-dimensional simulation tools are also explored, as well as the theoretical basis for the reliable localization of robots within their environment. This revised and updated edition contains additional exercises and a completely new chapter on the Bayes filter, an observer that enhances our understanding of the Kalman filter and facilitates certain proofs.
Estimation of Stochastic Processes is intended for researchers in the field of econometrics, financial mathematics, statistics or signal processing. This book gives a deep understanding of spectral theory and estimation techniques for stochastic processes with stationary increments. It focuses on the estimation of functionals of unobserved values for stochastic processes with stationary increments, including ARIMA processes, seasonal time series and a class of cointegrated sequences. Furthermore, this book presents solutions to extrapolation (forecast), interpolation (missed values estimation) and filtering (smoothing) problems based on observations with and without noise, in discrete and continuous time domains. Extending the classical approach applied when the spectral densities of the processes are known, the minimax method of estimation is developed for a case where the spectral information is incomplete and the relations that determine the least favorable spectral densities for the optimal estimations are found.
The scientific expedition of H.M.S. Challenger in the 1870s marks the starting point of physical oceanography. This ship traveled the seas of the globe pursuing a dual objective: to conduct an in-depth study of animal life and to observe the physical properties of ocean waters. Volume 3 focuses on measurements and modeling of liquid compressibility. Based on the work initiated by the physicist Peter Tait, a detailed presentation of liquid equations-of-state is proposed. The physical interpretation of the parameters of these equations is discussed, leading to a description of the "structure" of liquid media. From Deep Sea to Laboratory is available in three volumes for curious readers drawn to travel, history and science. Students, researchers and teachers of physics, fluid mechanics and oceanography will find material to deepen their knowledge.
For chemists, attempting to mimic nature by synthesizing complex natural products from raw material is a challenge that is fraught with pitfalls. To tackle this unique but potentially rewarding task, researchers can rely on well-established reactions and methods of practice, or apply their own synthesis methods to verify their potential. Whatever the goal and its complexity, there are multiple ways of achieving it. We must now establish a strategic and effective plan that requires the minimum number of steps, but lends itself to widespread use. This book is structured around the study of a dozen target products (butyrolactone, macrolide, indole compound, cyclobutanic terpene, spiro- and polycyclic derivatives, etc.). For each product, the different disconnections are presented and the associated syntheses are analyzed step by step. The key reactions are described explicitly, followed by diagrams showing the range of impact of certain transformations. This set of data alone is conducive to understanding syntheses and indulging in this difficult, but worthwhile activity.
To formalize the dynamics of living things is to search for invariants in a system that contains an irreducible aspect of "fuzziness", because biological processes are characterized by their large statistical variability, and strong dependence on temporal and environmental factors. What is essential is the identification of what remains stable in a "living being" that is highly fluctuating. The use of mathematics is not limited to the use of calculating tools to simulate and predict results. It also allows us to adopt a way of thinking that is founded on concepts and hypotheses, leading to their discussion and validation. Instruments of mathematical intelligibility and coherence have gradually "fashioned" the view we now have of biological systems. Teaching and research, fundamental or applied, are now dependent on this new order known as Integrative Biology or Systems Biology.
Information, Knowledge and Agile Creativity will enlighten entrepreneurs, and is ideal for facilitating an organization's ability to react and adapt to its environment. Creativity is a system that engenders innovation. While integral at the conception stage, it is also important before and after this phase. This book offers a collection of tools, as well as a methodology, to estimate the agility of an organization to generate and transform ideas into solutions that are not only new but also adapted to their users. To this end, this book presents strategic foresight and problem comprehension methods; tools of sharing and visual information formatting; animation tips for creativity workshops; techniques for generating ideas; and tools for visualizing and mapping ideas, information, and knowledge.
Statistical tools are indispensable for the environmental sciences. They have become an integral part of the scientific process, from the development of the sampling plan to the obtainment of results. Statistics in Environmental Sciences provides the foundation for the interpretation of quantitative data (basic vocabulary, main laws of probabilities, etc.) and the thinking behind sampling and experimental methodology. It also introduces the principles of statistical tests such as decision theory and examines the key choices in statistical tests, while keeping the established objectives in mind. The book examines the most used statistics in the field of environmental sciences. Detailed descriptions based on concrete examples are given, as well as descriptions obtained through the use of the free software R (whose usage is also presented).
The legitimacy of environmental policies is an issue of increasing concern for analysts. Ecological stakes are deemed to be global, but global public decisions are rare and implemented with difficulty. Dissensus prevails on environmental ethics and there is little evidence of any greening of policy tools. The global framing of the environment fails to account for how people relate to the ecological realities which surround them. Rather than placing the environment at a distance, Politicization of Ecological Issues advocates for building legitimacy from people's perceptions of singular forms and patterns in their environment. Based on scholarly literature in political ecology and empirical cases of water policy in Europe, the book shows how the qualification of environmental realities has been politicized and translated into motives for public action. Similarly, it argues that theoretical debates addressing the ecological crisis are not only dealing with ideas, but rather advocating for specific environmental forms that are deemed to be motives of hope or worry.
As time goes on, big companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple become increasingly interested in virtual assistants. The interest and development of social robots has put research into affective and social computing at the forefront of the scene. The aim of Opinion Analysis in Interactions is to present methods based on artificial intelligence through a combination of machine learning models and symbolic approaches. Also discussed are natural language processing and affective computing, via the analysis and generation of socio-emotional signals. The book explores the analysis of opinions in human-human interaction and tackles the less-explored (yet crucial) challenges related to the analysis methods of user opinions within the context of human-agent interaction. It also illustrates the implementation of strategies for selecting and generating agent utterances in response to user opinions, and opens up perspectives on the agent's multimodal generation of utterances that hold attitudes.
Business Intelligence (BI) has emerged as a field which seeks to support managers in decision-making. It encompasses the techniques, methods and tools for conducting analytically-based IT solutions, which are referred to as OLAP (OnLine Analytical Processing). Within this field, SQL has a role as a leader and is continuously evolving to cover both transactional and analytical data management. This book discusses the functions provided by Microsoft(R) SQL Server 2014/2016 in terms of business intelligence. The analytic functions are considered as an enrichment of the SQL language. They combine a series of practical functions to answer complex analysis requests with all the simplicity, elegance and acquired performance of the SQL language. Drawing on the wide experience of the author in teaching and research, as well as insights from contacts in the industry, this book focuses on the issues and difficulties faced by academics (students and teachers) and professionals engaged in data analysis with the SQL Server 2014/2016 database management system.
Building Information Modeling (BIM) is the digital and graphical representation of the physical and functional characteristics of a structure. It provides a reliable basis for decisions throughout a building's lifecycle, and with BIM it is possible to design, plan, build and track projects. In particular, BIM has sparked a transformation of the railway sector. Railway Information Modeling RIM is a compilation of two years' worth of academic, conceptual and practical research on the integration of BIM into railway. It summarizes and focuses on a survey carried out by the authors, who are experts in the field. The book also contains a literature review and a case study to demonstrate the benefits and sustainability of BIM integration, and finishes with the practical steps and considerations for the successful management of the integration process.
In the last few decades, metamaterials have revolutionized the ways in which waves are controlled, and applied in physics and practical situations. The extraordinary properties of metamaterials, such as their locally resonant structure with deep subwavelength band gaps and their ranges of frequency where propagation is impossible, have opened the way to a host of applications that were previously unavailable. Acoustic metamaterials have been able to replace traditional treatments in several sectors, due to their better performance in targeted and tunable frequency ranges with strongly reduced dimensions. This is a training book composed of nine chapters written by experts in the field, giving a broad overview of acoustic metamaterials and their uses. The book is divided into three parts, covering the state-of-the-art, the fundamentals and the real-life applications of acoustic metamaterials.
Lagrangian Mechanics explains the subtleties of analytical mechanics and its applications in rigid body mechanics. The authors demonstrate the primordial role of parameterization, which conditions the equations and thus the information obtained; the essential notions of virtual kinematics, such as the virtual derivative and the dependence of the virtual quantities with respect to a reference frame; and the key concept of perfect joints and their intrinsic character, namely the invariance of the fields of compatible virtual velocities with respect to the parameterization. Throughout the book, any demonstrated results are stated with the respective hypotheses, clearly indicating the applicability conditions for the results to be ready for use. Numerous examples accompany the text, facilitating the understanding of the calculation mechanisms. The book is mainly intended for Bachelor's, Master's or engineering students who are interested in an in-depth study of analytical mechanics and its applications.
This book presents LTE evolution towards 5G mobile communication and the emergence of new requirements for MBB, MTC and LLC services.As LTE technologies evolve, LTE Advanced Pro dramatically increases cell capacity and user data rates for the MBB unicast service. Such requirements are obtained using full-dimension MIMO, carrier aggregation (on either licensed or unlicensed frequency bands) and dual connectivity.To improve the efficiency of same-content delivery to multiple users, 3GPP proposes a group communications service over LTE and defines mission critical push-to-talk (MCPTT) for dedicated public safety services.Complementary low-cost and low-power modems with enhanced coverage and massive connectivity are emerging. Thus, this book also discusses the need for LTE to support low-rate transmission and high-latency communication for MTC services.
Digital Identities in Tension deals with the ambivalence of universal digitalization. While this transformation opens up new possibilities, it also redistributes the interplay of constraints and incentives, and tends insidiously to create a greater malleability of individuals. Today, companies and states are increasingly engaged in the surveillance and management of our digital identities. In response, we must study the effects that the new industrial, economic and political logics have on ethical issues and our ability to act. This book examines the effects of digitalization on new modes of existence and subjectivation in many spheres: digital identity management systems, Big Data and machine learning, the Internet of Things, smart cities, etc. The study of these transformations is one of the major conditions for more responsible modes of data governance to emerge.
The dominance of trusted intermediaries could be weakened by blockchain, a distributed ledger technology, one of the functions of which is to constitute timestamped proofs by replacing inter-individual trust with algorithmic trust. Blockchain self-executing smart contracts allow us to rethink the practice in the domain of e-commerce, interbank communication, fundraising (and ICOs), justice (timestamping evidence, acts authenticated by blockchain) and businesses in numerous sectors (entertainment, AI, health, real estate, tourism, transport, etc.) which attempt to propose new services by benefiting from blockchains. This book aims to put into perspective the technical innovations and the uses brought about by blockchain, by identifying that which has a medium- or long-term impact, all while taking into account the social, economic, judicial and administrative resistances that are likely to develop.
The peaceful use of atomic energy has given rise to a variety of nuclear accidents from the start. This concerns all forms of use, industrial and medical. For each accident, Industrial and Medical Nuclear Accidents details the contamination of the environment, flora and fauna, and quantifies the effects of ionizing radiation. The book also examines the adverse effects on the health, both physical and mental, of the human populations concerned. The monetary cost is also evaluated. The research presented in this book is based on scientifically recognized publications and on the reports of national and international organizations competent in this field (IAEA, WHO, UNSCEAR, IRSN, etc.). The book contains chapters devoted to the most recent accidents (Chernobyl and Fukushima), with a large body of institutional and academic literature.
In order to survive in their market and differentiate themselves from the competition, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which represent more than 90% of companies worldwide, need to be creative and innovative. This book presents a conceptual framework for thinking about innovation and creativity in SMEs. It takes into account their strategic relation to their environment and the economic, technological and social changes that they face. Their ability to enhance their creativity with new ideas and to legitimize them during their implementation is also taken into account
Geomatics is a field of science that has been intimately intertwined with our daily lives for almost 30 years, to the point where we often forget all the challenges it entails. Who does not have a navigation application on their phone or regularly engage with geolocated data? What is more, in the coming decades, the accumulation of geo-referenced data is expected to increase significantly. This book focuses on the notion of the imperfection of geographic data, an important topic in geomatics. It is essential to be able to define and represent the imperfections that are encountered in geographical data. Ignoring these imperfections can lead to many risks, for example in the use of maps which may be rendered inaccurate. It is, therefore, essential to know how to model and treat the different categories of imperfection. A better awareness of these imperfections will improve the analysis and the use of this type of data.
This book demonstrates that our daily relations, like our most recognized institutions, are based on a symbolic foundation put in place by rituals. Rituals are present at every level of society and are an expression of the sacredness of society, as much as they are an expression of the cultures and eras that communicate through them.
This book introduces an original fractional calculus methodology ('the infinite state approach') which is applied to the modeling of fractional order differential equations (FDEs) and systems (FDSs). Its modeling is based on the frequency distributed fractional integrator, while the resulting model corresponds to an integer order and infinite dimension state space representation. This original modeling allows the theoretical concepts of integer order systems to be generalized to fractional systems, with a particular emphasis on a convolution formulation.
The Vlasov equation is the master equation which provides a statistical description for the collective behavior of large numbers of charged particles in mutual, long-range interaction. In other words, a low collision (or "Vlasov") plasma. Plasma physics is itself a relatively young discipline, whose "birth" can be ascribed to the 1920s. The origin of the Vlasov model, however, is even more recent, dating back to the late 1940s. This "young age" is due to the rare occurrence of Vlasov plasma on Earth, despite the fact it characterizes most of the visible matter in the universe. This book - addressed to students, young researchers and to whoever wants a good understanding of Vlasov plasmas - discusses this model with a pedagogical presentation, focusing on the general properties and historical development of the applications of the Vlasov equation. The milestone developments discussed in the first two chapters serve as an introduction to more recent works (characterization of wave propagation and nonlinear properties of the electrostatic limit).
Discourse is not just a means of expressing thought; it is also an autonomous body, an act through which we aim to achieve a certain effect. Modern linguistics proposes a broader definition of discourse, as a discrete and unique enunciative process, where the speaker or author makes language concrete through speech (in the Saussurian sense), and describes the various acts (oral, illocutionary, perlocutionary) that discourse performs. This book examines discourse, an object of analysis and criticism, from a wide range of perspectives. Among the concepts explored are the contributions of rhetoric in the art of discourse, the evolution of multiple approaches and the main methods of discourse analysis conducted by a variety of researchers. The book deepens our knowledge and understanding of discourse, a concept on which any research related to information and communication can be based.
Food is a major health issue; the links between diet and health are dominant in nutrition discourse and practice. Food and Health: Actor Strategies in Information and Communication identifies the informational practices of nutrition professionals and consumers to study the structural elements of food and health. It analyzes the communication strategies of actors and the dissemination and use of information related to both food for health and health through food. The book considers nutrition from the point of view of public policies, educational organizations, preventive measures, consumers and patients.
Inside industrial furnaces and combustion chambers, energy is essentially exchanged by radiation. It is through the same mechanism that the energy emitted by the Sun spreads through different media to reach the Earth. Developing a sound understanding of the laws underlying energy exchanges by radiation is therefore essential, not only for establishing design equations for industrial equipment, but also for an optimal harvesting of solar energy and a better understanding of climate change phenomena such as the greenhouse effect. Energy Transfers by Radiation establishes the basic laws and equations which support the quantification of energy fluxes transferred between surfaces for situations similar to those usually encountered in industrial processes or in solar energy applications.
It may seem obvious that the human being has always been present in anthropology. This book, however, reveals that he has never really been a part of it. Theoretical Anthropology or How to Observe a Human Being establishes the foundations and conditions, both theoretical and methodological, which make it possible to consider the human being as a topic of observation and analysis, for himself as an entity, and not in the perspective of understanding social and cultural phenomena. In debate with both anthropologists and philosophers, this book describes and analyzes the human being as a "volume". To this end, a specific lexicon is built around the notions of volume, volumography and volumology. These notions are further illustrated and enriched by several drawings.
Digital transformation is shaping a new landscape for businesses and their customers. For marketing professionals, advancing technology (artificial intelligence, robots, chatbots, etc.) and the explosion of personal data available present great opportunities to offer customers experiences that are ever richer, more fluid and more connected. For customers, this ecosystem is synonymous with new roles. They are more autonomous and have power alongside the company: they influence, innovate, punish and more. These developments push companies to implement new customer strategies. It is in this context, marked by pitfalls and paradoxes, that the authors of this book reflect on the customer relationship, what it has become and what it will be tomorrow. The book provides practitioners, teacher-researchers and Master's students with a state of the art and a prospective vision of customer relations in a digital world. It is aimed at those who want to gain an up-to-date understanding of the field and find all the keys needed to project themselves into the future.
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