This book is intended to be used as a textbook for graduate students studying theoretical computer science. It can also be used as a reference book for researchers in the area of design and analysis of approximation algorithms. Design and Analysis of Approximation Algorithms is a graduate course in theoretical computer science taught widely in the universities, both in the United States and abroad. There are, however, very few textbooks available for this course. Among those available in the market, most books follow a problem-oriented format; that is, they collected many important combinatorial optimization problems and their approximation algorithms, and organized them based on the types, or applications, of problems, such as geometric-type problems, algebraic-type problems, etc. Such arrangement of materials is perhaps convenient for a researcher to look for the problems and algorithms related to his/her work, but is difficult for a student to capture the ideas underlying the various algorithms. In the new book proposed here, we follow a more structured, technique-oriented presentation. We organize approximation algorithms into different chapters, based on the design techniques for the algorithms, so that the reader can study approximation algorithms of the same nature together. It helps the reader to better understand the design and analysis techniques for approximation algorithms, and also helps the teacher to present the ideas and techniques of approximation algorithms in a more unified way.
The Steiner tree problem is one of the most important combinatorial optimization problems. It has a long history that can be traced back to the famous mathematician Fermat (1601-1665). This book studies three significant breakthroughs on the Steiner tree problem that were achieved in the 1990s, and some important applications of Steiner tree problems in computer communication networks researched in the past fifteen years. It not only covers some of the most recent developments in Steiner tree problems, but also discusses various combinatorial optimization methods, thus providing a balance between theory and practice.
Introductory courses in combinatorial optimization are popular at the upper undergraduate/graduate levels in computer science, industrial engineering, and business management/OR, owed to its wide applications in these fields. There are several published textbooks that treat this course and the authors have used many of them in their own teaching experiences. This present text fills a gap and is organized with a stress on methodology and relevant content, providing a step-by-step approach for the student to become proficient in solving combinatorial optimization problems. Applications and problems are considered via recent technology developments including wireless communication, cloud computing, social networks, and machine learning, to name several, and the reader is led to the frontiers of combinatorial optimization. Each chapter presents common problems, such as minimum spanning tree, shortest path, maximum matching, network flow, set-cover, as well as key algorithms, such as greedy algorithm, dynamic programming, augmenting path, and divide-and-conquer. Historical notes, ample exercises in every chapter, strategically placed graphics, and an extensive bibliography are amongst the gems of this textbook.
This book explores the intelligent autonomous control problems for spacecraft with multiple constraints, such as pointing/path constraints, linear/angular velocity constraints, performance constraints, etc. It provides an almost self-contained presentation of dynamics modeling, controller design and analysis, as well as simulation studies. The book aims to offer a valuable guide for researchers and aerospace engineers to address the theoretical and technical difficulties in different applications, ranging from spacecraft attitude reorientation and tracking to spacecraft proximity operations, and is mainly intended for technical and engineering staff engaged in spacecraft dyanmics and control areas.
The refereed proceedings of the 14th Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference, COCOON 2008, held in Dalian, China, in June 2008. The 66 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 172 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on algorithms and data structures, algorithmic game theory and online algorithms, automata, languages, logic, and computability, combinatorics related to algorithms and complexity, complexity theory, cryptography, reliability and security, and database theory, computational biology and bioinformatics, computational algebra, geometry, and number theory, graph drawing and information visualization, graph theory and algorithms, communication networks, and optimization, wireless network, network optimization, and scheduling problem.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications, COCOA 2009, held in Huangshan, China, in June 2009. The 50 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 103 submissions. The papers feature original research in the areas of combinatorial optimization - both theoretical issues and and applications motivated by real-world problems thus showing convincingly the usefulness and efficiency of the algorithms discussed in a practical setting.
Using the well-honed tools of nanotechnology, this book presents breakthrough results in soft matter research, benefitting from the synergies between the chemistry, physics, biology, materials science, and engineering communities. The team of international authors delves beyond mere structure-making and places the emphasis firmly on imparting functionality to soft nanomaterials with a focus on devices and applications. Alongside reviewing the current level of knowledge, they also put forward novel ideas to foster research and development in such expanding fields as nanobiotechnology and nanomedicine. As such, the book covers DNA-induced nanoparticle assembly, nanostructured substrates for circulating tumor cell capturing, and organic nano field effect transistors, as well as advanced dynamic gels and self-healing electronic nanodevices. With its interdisciplinary approach this book gives readers a complete picture of nanotechnology with soft matter.
This book provides essential information on emergency management. It is composed of two parts, addressing the basic theory and related methods of emergency management, including risk management, coordination management, crisis management and disaster management. By putting the emphasis on interdisciplinary, systematic perspectives and building a bridge between basic knowledge and further research, it is well suited as an emergency management textbook and offers a valuable guide to prepare readers for their future emergency management careers.
Examining creativity in Chinese societies from both a personal and contextual standpoint, this ground-breaking book offers readers a unique insight into the Chinese mind. It provides a review of the nature, origins, and consequences of creativity, deriving from empirical evidence in the Chinese context. Specifically, the book unravels the conceptualization of creativity and its relationships with various demographic and dispositional factors in Chinese societies. The book proceeds to give readers an understanding of how creativity maintains reciprocal relationships with various forms of well-being. The content of the book brings together empirical evidence and theory grounded on Chinese societies to offer researchers and students a unique realistic view of the nature of creativity there. This book will be a must read for any researcher or practitioner interested in this fascinating topic.
This book addresses a controversial issue regarding SL-TL transfer in the translation process, namely the question as to the dominant route in English-Chinese and Chinese-English professional consecutive interpretations, respectively: the form-based processing route or meaning-based processing route. It presents a corpus-assisted product study, in which the interpreting processing patterns of culture-specific items (CSIs) are analyzed. The study reveals that the dominant route in English vs. Chinese consecutive interpreting varies under different circumstances. Four factors are proposed to account for such differences: linguistic variables (e.g., grammatical complexity of the unit), type of CSI, language direction, and extra-linguistic variables (e.g., multilateral or bilateral settings). In summary, the book systematically introduces a corpus-assisted approach to translation process research, which will benefit all readers who are interested in translation process research but cannot employ neuroscientific measures.
The post-Mao period has witnessed rapid social and economic transformation in all walks of Chinese life – much of it fuelled by, or reflected in, changes to the country’s education system. This book analyses the development of that system since the abandonment of radical Maoism and the inauguration of ‘Reform and Opening’ in the late 1970s. The principal focus is on formal education in schools and conventional institutions of tertiary education, but there is also some discussion of preschools, vocational training, and learning in non-formal contexts. The book begins with a discussion of the historical and comparative context for evaluating China’s educational ‘achievements’, followed by an extensive discussion of the key transitions in education policymaking during the ‘Reform and Opening’ period. This informs the subsequent examination of changes affecting the different phases of education from preschool to tertiary level. There are also chapters dealing specifically with the financing and administration of schooling, curriculum development, the public examinations system, the teaching profession, the phenomenon of marketisation, and the ‘international dimension’ of Chinese education. The book concludes with an assessment of the social consequences of educational change in the post-Mao era and a critical discussion of the recent fashion in certain Western countries for hailing China as an educational model. The analysis is supported by a wealth of sources – primary and secondary, textual and statistical – and is informed by both authors’ wide-ranging experience of Chinese education. As the first monograph on China's educational development during the forty years of the post-Mao era, this book will be essential reading for all those seeking to understand the world’s largest education system. It will also be crucial reference for educational comparativists, and for scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds researching contemporary Chinese society.
Visual Question Answering (VQA) usually combines visual inputs like image and video with a natural language question concerning the input and generates a natural language answer as the output. This is by nature a multi-disciplinary research problem, involving computer vision (CV), natural language processing (NLP), knowledge representation and reasoning (KR), etc. Further, VQA is an ambitious undertaking, as it must overcome the challenges of general image understanding and the question-answering task, as well as the difficulties entailed by using large-scale databases with mixed-quality inputs. However, with the advent of deep learning (DL) and driven by the existence of advanced techniques in both CV and NLP and the availability of relevant large-scale datasets, we have recently seen enormous strides in VQA, with more systems and promising results emerging. This book provides a comprehensive overview of VQA, covering fundamental theories, models, datasets, and promising future directions. Given its scope, it can be used as a textbook on computer vision and natural language processing, especially for researchers and students in the area of visual question answering. It also highlights the key models used in VQA.
This book addresses psychological studies of humour in Chinese societies. It starts by reviewing how the concept of humour evolves in Chinese history, and how it is perceived by Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism respectively. It then compares differences in the Western and the Chinese perceptions of humor and discusses empirical studies that were conducted to examine such differences. It also discusses the cultural origin and empirical evidence of the Chinese ambivalence about humor and presents empirical findings that illustrate its existence. Having done these, it proceeds to discuss psychological studies that examine how humour is related to various demographic, dispositional variables as well as how humour is related to creativity in Chinese societies. It also discusses how humour is related to emotional expressions and mental health in Chinese society as well. It concludes with a discussion on how workplace humor is reflected and developed in Chinese contexts. Taken together, this book attempts to bring together the theoretical propositions, empirical studies, and cultural analyses of humor in Chinese societies.
This book covers exploration and evaluation practices for various types of complex reservoirs, and summarizes a series of practical and effective techniques and methods. For example, it shows how, by integrating multiple types of new logging technology, complex reservoir petrophysics evaluation can be performed using high-precision core experiment data and quantitative logging interpretation; and demonstrates how the technology of sporopollen assemblage and palynofacies analysis can improve the time precision of sequence stratigraphy and the quantitative study level of sedimentary facies, respectively. It discusses how reservoir lateral prediction and vertical resolution can be substantially improved by integrating fracture prediction and geostatistical inversion; and presents innovative log interpretation charts for the lithological identification of metamorphic rocks, e.g. GR-DEN crossplot and Impedance-Resistivity crossplot. To support the main content, the book features a wealth of high-resolution, thin- section images, quantitative illustrations of palynofacies composition, multi-property overlapping map set and quantitative tables. It offers an essential reference guide for researchers in geological exploration and evaluation, and will also appeal to a broad readership, from engineering technicians to advanced graduate students in related areas.
This book introduces the current state of research on dark energy. It consists of three parts. The first part is for preliminary knowledge, including general relativity, modern cosmology, etc. The second part reviews major theoretical ideas and models of dark energy. The third part reviews some observational and numerical works. The aim of this book is to provide a sufficient level of understanding of dark energy problems, so that the reader can both get familiar with this area quickly and also be prepared to tackle the scientific literature on this subject. It will be useful for graduate students and researchers who are interested in dark energy.
This book addresses the sustainability of happiness and well-being in Chinese societies. It starts by introducing the various conceptions of well-being, particularly in the Chinese sociocultural context. The book then proceeds with the examination of the sustainability of well-being by scrutinizing the effects of sociocultural, contextual, and personal factors on well-being. The contextual factors are the aggregates or averages of personal factors at the contextual levels of the regions and colleges in Mainland China, its special administrative region, and Taiwan. These factors cover personality traits, strengths, orientations, beliefs, values, and idolizing. By bringing together empirical studies and theoretical perspectives applied to Chinese societies, this book offers researchers in social science and humanities a valuable reference work on happiness and well-being in Chinese societies.
It is well known that “fuzziness”—informationgranulesand fuzzy sets as one of its formal manifestations— is one of important characteristics of human cognitionandcomprehensionofreality. Fuzzy phenomena existinnature and are encountered quite vividly within human society. The notion of a fuzzy set has been introduced by L. A. , Zadeh in 1965 in order to formalize human concepts, in connection with the representation of human natural language and computing with words. Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic are used for mod- ing imprecise modes of reasoning that play a pivotal role in the remarkable human abilities to make rational decisions in an environment a?ected by - certainty and imprecision. A growing number of applications of fuzzy sets originated from the “empirical-semantic” approach. From this perspective, we were focused on some practical interpretations of fuzzy sets rather than being oriented towards investigations of the underlying mathematical str- tures of fuzzy sets themselves. For instance, in the context of control theory where fuzzy sets have played an interesting and practically relevant function, the practical facet of fuzzy sets has been stressed quite signi?cantly. However, fuzzy sets can be sought as an abstract concept with all formal underpinnings stemming from this more formal perspective. In the context of applications, it is worth underlying that membership functions do not convey the same meaning at the operational level when being cast in various contexts.
Wireless Communication Systems: Advanced Techniques for Signal Receptionoffers a unified frameworkfor understanding today's newest techniques for signal processing in communication systems - andusing them to design receivers for emerging wireless systems. Two leading researchers cover a fullrange of physical-layer issues, including multipath, dispersion, interference, dynamism, andmultiple-antenna systems. Topics include blind, group-blind, space-time, and turbo multiuserdetection; narrowband interference suppression; Monte Carlo Bayesian signal processing; fast fadingchannels; advanced signal processing in coded OFDM systems, and more.
This book introduces readers to using the simple but effective Zhang-gradient (ZG) method to solve tracking-control problems concerning various nonlinear systems, while also highlighting the applications of the ZG method to tracking control for practical systems, e.g. an inverted-pendulum-on-a-cart (IPC) system and a two-wheeled mobile robot (showing its potential applications). In addition to detailed theoretical analyses of ZG controllers, the book presents a wealth of computer simulations to demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of the controllers discussed (as well as the method itself). More importantly, the superiority of ZG controllers in overcoming the division-by-zero (DBZ) problem is also illustrated. Given its scope and format, the book is well suited for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as academic and industrial researchers in the fields of neural dynamics/neural networks, nonlinear control, computer mathematics, time-varying problem solving, modeling and simulation, analog hardware, and robotics.
This book explores the intelligent autonomous control problems for spacecraft with multiple constraints, such as pointing/path constraints, linear/angular velocity constraints, performance constraints, etc. It provides an almost self-contained presentation of dynamics modeling, controller design and analysis, as well as simulation studies. The book aims to offer a valuable guide for researchers and aerospace engineers to address the theoretical and technical difficulties in different applications, ranging from spacecraft attitude reorientation and tracking to spacecraft proximity operations, and is mainly intended for technical and engineering staff engaged in spacecraft dyanmics and control areas.
This book systematically discusses the modeling and application of transfer manipulation for flexible electronics packaging, presenting multiple processes according to the geometric sizes of the chips and devices as well as the detailed modeling and computation steps for each process. It also illustrates the experimental design of the equipment to help readers easily learn how to use it. This book is a valuable resource for scholars and graduate students in the research field of microelectronics.
This book focuses on the computational and theoretical approaches to the coupling of fluid mechanics and solids mechanics. In particular, nonlinear dynamical systems are introduced to the handling of complex fluid-solid interaction systems, For the past few decades, many terminologies have been introduced to this field, namely, flow-induced vibration, aeroelasticity, hydroelasticity, fluid-structure interaction, fluid-solid interaction, and more recently multi-physics problems. Moreover, engineering applications are distributed within different disciplines, such as nuclear, civil, aerospace, ocean, chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineering. Regrettably, while each particular subject is by itself very extensive, it has been difficult for a single book to cover in a reasonable depth and in the mean time to connect various topics. In light of the current multidisciplinary research need in nanotechnology and bioengineering, there is an urgent need for books to provide such a linkage and to lay a foundation for more specialized fields. Interdisciplinary across all types of engineering Comprehensive study of fluid-solid interaction Discusses complex system dynamics derived from interactive systems Provides mathematic modeling of biological systems
This book focuses on three emerging research topics in mobile social networks (MSNs): privacy-preserving profile matching (PPM) protocols, privacy-preserving cooperative data forwarding (PDF) protocols, and trustworthy service evaluation (TSE) systems. The PPM helps two users compare their personal profiles without disclosing the profiles. The PDF helps users forward data to their friends via multiple cooperative relay peers while preserving their identity and location privacy. The TSE enables users to locally share service reviews on the vendors such that users receive more valuable information about the services not only from vendors but also from their trusted social friends. The authors address both theoretic and practical aspects of these topics by introducing the system model, reviewing the related works, and presenting the solutions. Security and Privacy for Mobile Social Networks further provides the security analysis and the performance evaluation based on real-trace simulations. It also summarizes the future research directions for this rapidly growing area of research. The book will be valuable for researchers and practitioners who work with mobile social networks, communication platforms, wireless communication techniques, and internet applications. "Suitable for any type of reader as an introduction to the topic... The chapters are well motivated and presented... It is recommended for researchers." -ACM Computing Reviews, 21 July 2014
In the modern world of ever smaller devices and nanotechnology, electron crystallography emerges as the most important method capable of determining the structure of minute objects down to the size of individual atoms. Crystals of only a few millionths of a millimetre are studied. This is the first textbook explaining how this is done. Great attention is given to symmetry in crystals and how it manifests itself in electron microscopy and electron diffraction, and how this symmetry can be determined and taken advantage of in achieving improved electron microscopy images and solving crystal structures from electron diffraction patterns. Theory and practice are combined; experimental images, diffraction patterns, formulae and numerical data are discussed in parallel, giving the reader a complete understanding of what goes on inside the "black boxes" of computer programs. This up-to-date textbook contains the newest techniques in electron crystallography, including detailed descriptions and explanations of the recent remarkable successes in determining the very complex structures of zeolites and intermetallics. The controversial issue of whether there is phase information present in electron micrsocopy images or not is also resolved once and for all. The extensive appendices include computer labs which have been used at various courses at Stockholm University and international schools in electron crystallography, with applications to the textbook. Students can download image processing programs and follow these lab instructions to get a hands-on experience of electron crystallography.
This invaluable volume, written by an international group of scientists, presents an overview of the AdoMet-dependent methyltransferases, with special emphasis on structure-function relationships. S-adenosyl-L-methionine (AdoMet) is the second most commonly used enzyme cofactor after ATP. The AdoMet-dependent methyltransferases act on a wide variety of target molecules, including DNA, RNA, protein, polysaccharides, lipids and a range of small molecules. The well-conserved architecture of these enzymes, and the implications of this conservation for their evolutionary history, are major themes of this book. The thirteen chapters describe in detail the structures, enzyme kinetics and biological roles of the AdoMet-dependent methyltransferases from a wide range of cell types: plant, animal, bacterial and archaeal.
Rural-urban migration within China has transformed and reshaped rural people’s lives during the past few decades, and has been one of the most visible phenomena of the economic reforms enacted since the late 1970s. Whilst Feminist scholars have addressed rural women’s experience of struggle and empowerment in urban China, in contrast, research on rural men’s experience of migration is a neglected area of study. In response, this book seeks to address the absence of male migrant workers as a gendered category within the current literature on rural-urban migration. Examining Chinese male migrant workers’ identity formation, this book explores their experience of rural-urban migration and their status as an emerging sector of a dislocated urban working class. It seeks to understand issues of gender and class through the rural migrant men’s narratives within the context of China’s modernization, and provides an in-depth analysis of how these men make sense of their new lives in the rapidly modernizing, post-Mao China with its emphasis on progress and development. Further, this book uses the men’s own narratives to challenge the elite assumption that rural men’s low status is a result of their failure to adopt a modern urban identity and lifestyle. Drawing on interviews with 28 male rural migrants, Xiaodong Lin unpacks the gender politics of Chinese men and masculinities, and in turn contributes to a greater understanding of global masculinities in an international context. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars working in the fields of Chinese culture and society, gender studies, migration studies, sociology and social anthropology. Shortlisted for this year's BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.
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