Böcker utgivna av Springer Nature Switzerland AG

This volume discusses recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in smart, internet-connected societies, highlighting three key focus areas. The first focus is on intelligent sensing applications. This section details the integration of Wireless Sensing Networks (WSN) and the use of intelligent platforms for WSN applications in urban infrastructures, and discusses AI techniques on hardware and software systems such as machine learning, pattern recognition, expert systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and intelligent control in transportation and communications systems. The second focus is on AI-based Internet of Things (IoT) systems, which addresses applications in traffic management, medical health, smart homes and energy. Readers will also learn about how AI can extract useful information from Big Data in IoT systems. The third focus is on crowdsourcing (CS) and computing for smart cities. this section discusses how CS via GPS devices, GIStools, traffic cameras, smart cards, smart phones and road deceleration devices enables citizens to collect and share data to make cities smart, and how these data can be applied to address urban issues including pollution, traffic congestion, public safety and increased energy consumption. This book will of interest to academics, researchers and students studying AI, cloud computing, IoT and crowdsourcing in urban applications.

This book is a multichapter introduction to spiritual formation within the Christian tradition. Corneliu C. Simü discusses spiritual formation from the views of several Christian thinkers, with a chapter devoted to each thinker. The concluding chapter notes common themes shared by each thinker. The author presents some key Patristic, Medieval, Early Modern, Modern, and Contemporary theologians in a way that is characterized by brevity, concision, and clarity. Thus, this small book is a useful introduction to spiritual formation from a Christian perspective. It would be helpful for a college student or young adult who seeks to be educated on the subject. The conciseness of the book is a benefit. Yet the book raises interesting questions for further pursuit. A very succinct ¿ but comprehensive ¿ historical presentation of sanctification through the lens of spiritual formation, a concept which has been revived in the past two decades, especially in Evangelical circles, this text is useful for a college course in spiritual formation or religion.

This book provides state-of-the-art descriptions of smart service innovations in the industry, supported by novel scientific approaches. It gathers findings and insights presented at the fourth Smart Services Summit, held in Zurich, Switzerland, in October 2021, which primarily focused on how smart services have enabled companies to adapt during and to the COVID-19 pandemic.The book includes examples of remote and collaborative working that actively involve customers in service processes, requiring a change in mindset for more traditional firms. Moreover, it explores how services can be delivered faster and more affordable with the aid of new technologies and in collaboration with the customers, leading to new value propositions and business models and thus an evolution of smart services. Given its scope, the book offers an essential guide for practitioners andadvanced students alike.

This book discusses problems, challenges, and mitigation strategies in the wake of environmental degradation. It suggests proactive solutions to problems of environmental degradation for strategic planning as well as their effective delivery, and problems arising due to growth in population, industry, and land use change. The uniqueness of the book is its broader spectrum of coverage with related interconnections and interdependence of various aspects. Presenting a wide spectrum of viewpoints and approaches, the book covers topics, such as deforestation impacts (land use and land cover, soil erosion); impacts on climate change and human health; treatment of industrial, municipal, biological waste disposal and their impacts on soil, water, and air; recovery/remediation processes and technologies; impacts of pesticides and chemical fertilizers on soil degradation and groundwater; socio-economic environmental sustainability; and socio-economic health impacts. Particularfocus is placed on strategic planning and methodological handling of environmental degradation and remediation through various processes and treatment technologies. This book will be useful to researchers, professionals, policy makers, and environmental engineers.

This book analyses how and why we are living at a critical moment in the history of human life on earth and explores how we find grounds for the hopes that will enable us to address the challenges and crises of our time. The author analyses hope both practically and philosophically as a generative virtue to realistically discern the situations in which we find ourselves, and imaginatively to anticipate possibilities when the future is unknown and uncertain. The author argues that hope is a mean between anomy, disillusionment, and despair, on the one hand, and wishful thinking, dreaming, and fanaticizing, on the other hand. The book not only examines ¿ and analyzes from a historical perspective - the contemporary crises such as climate change, environmental degradation and its effects such as the social costs of these developments, but also further analyzes the character and micro-dynamics of hope and how it makes a difference in how we manage the crises which inevitably emerge.Though contemporary crises are those we tend to focus on, the author also engages with what is involved in a due regard for history and the relevance of a sense of history for addressing the crises of our time. He shows us what we can learn from revisiting some thoughtful reflections by thinkers like Niebuhr, Jaspers, Camus, and Arendt. Finally, the author shows us what is involved practically in anticipating possibilities, by looking at hope as a social practice and noting how hopeful people make a difference.

This book analyses the transformation of European Education Policy from 1973 to 2020. In doing so, it offers a unique insight into the changes of European education from a predominantly national concern to a supranational policy framework, driven by an economic discourse concerning productivity and employability. The book shows that the idea of the ¿Europe of Knowledge¿ did not originate in the Lisbon Strategy of 2000, but rather was the result of a gradual development that started in the mid-1980s. This begun with the establishment of a specific problem definition of education as a solution for Europe¿s lack of competitiveness, a definition that was incrementally constructed by the European Commission and the European business community. Highlighting significant and unexplored questions such as the role of European transnational business in education and the role of the ¿problem entrepreneur¿ in defining policy issues, this book will provide a comprehensive perspective on European Education Policy that will be of interest to all students of European Politics, Education Policy, and Public Policy.

The remarkable progress in computer vision over the last few years is, by and large, attributed to deep learning, fueled by the availability of huge sets of labeled data, and paired with the explosive growth of the GPU paradigm. While subscribing to this view, this work criticizes the supposed scientific progress in the field, and proposes the investigation of vision within the framework of information-based laws of nature.This work poses fundamental questions about vision that remain far from understood, leading the reader on a journey populated by novel challenges resonating with the foundations of machine learning. The central thesis proposed is that for a deeper understanding of visual computational processes, it is necessary to look beyond the applications of general purpose machine learning algorithms, and focus instead on appropriate learning theories that take into account the spatiotemporal nature of the visual signal.Serving to inspire and stimulate critical reflection and discussion, yet requiring no prior advanced technical knowledge, the text can naturally be paired with classic textbooks on computer vision to better frame the current state of the art, open problems, and novel potential solutions. As such, it will be of great benefit to graduate and advanced undergraduate students in computer science, computational neuroscience, physics, and other related disciplines.