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This book includes extended and revised versions of a set of selected papers from the 17th International Conference on Software Technologies, ICSOFT 2022, held in Lisbon, Portugal, during July 11¿13, 2022. The 10 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 102 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: tool assisted empirical approach to reusability models assessment; functional programming; three forms of mutant subsumption: basic, strict and broad; and on the efficiency of building large collections of software: modeling, algorithms, and experimental results.

This book reports on advances in human modeling techniques, covering cutting-edge algorithms and their practical implementation in health and medicine, automotive, clothing, virtual reality simulations, robotics, and assistive technologies. Gathering the proceedings of the 8th International Digital Human Modeling Symposium, held on September 4-6, 2023, in Antwerp, Belgium, it offers a timely snapshot on interdisciplinary, applied research, at the interface between computer science, ergonomics, engineering, design, health and technologies.

This two-volume set provides a comprehensive overview of modern nanoscience, and encompasses advanced techniques of nanocomposite materials that make their way from the laboratory to the field for the revival of energy and environmental systems in a sustainable manner. It includes the design and the sophisticated fabrication of nanomaterials along with their potential energy and environmental applications, while looking at how nanoscience and nanotechnology can be used to promote environmentally friendly processes and strategies. The books' purpose is to promote eco-friendly methods and techniques by covering many elements of both the synthesis and uses of nanoparticles and nanofluids for energy and environmental engineering. They provide an up-to-date synthesis of nanocomposite materials for modern nanotechnology applications in the fields of environment protection, heterogeneous catalysis, wastewater treatment, fuel cells, electrochemical energy conversion, and storage applications. The set is designed for environmental scientists, nanotechnologists, chemists, engineers, and individuals seeking current research on nanotechnology and its applications in environmental engineering. Graduate students working in these fields will also find it a valuable resource.Volume 2 focuses on toxicological assessment, negative impacts of nanomaterials, green synthesis, energy conversion, and storage applications.

This book aims to enrich the banking and finance literature by gathering insights in new research topics being undertaken in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. The book spans all the major research fields in finance and banking with a particular focus on corporate governance, sustainability and innovation.The book brings together academics at a range of European universities and stems from research presented at the 2022 Annual Conference of the Wolpertinger Club. The first part focuses on the impact of banks¿ corporate governance practice on their performance, including pay gaps as well as diversity and ESG policies. The second part examines how banks are conducting their green transition with topics including reputational risk, greenwashing, green bonds, and ESG scores. The final section of the book considers the role of digitalization and innovative technologies in creating unprecedented disruption in the banking sector.This edited collection is valuable tothose researching in finance, banking and business, as well as policymakers and operational decision makers at financial institutions.

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) gained world-wide fame by his incompleteness theorem of 1931. Later, he set as his aim to solve what are known as Hilbert's first and second problems, namely Cantor's continuum hypothesis about the cardinality of real numbers, and secondly the consistency of the theory of real numbers and functions. By 1940, he was halfway through the first problem, in what was his last published result in logic and foundations. His intense attempts thereafter at solving these two problems have remained behind the veil of a forgotten German shorthand he used in all of his writing. Results on Foundations is a set of four shorthand notebooks written in 1940-42 that collect results Gödel considered finished. Its main topic is set theory in which Gödel anticipated several decades of development. Secondly, Gödel completed his 1933 program of establishing the connections between intuitionistic and modal logic, by methods and results that today are at the same time new and 80 years old.The present edition of Gödel's four notebooks encompasses the 368 numbered pages and 126 numbered theorems of the Results on Foundations, together with a list of 74 problems on set theory Gödel prepared in 1946, and a list of an unknown date titled "The grand program of my research in ca. hundred questions.''

This book explores the potential of magnetic superconductors in storage systems, specifically focusing on superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) systems and using the Spanish electricity system, controlled by Red Eléctrica de España (REE), as an example.The book provides a comprehensive analysis of the economic costs associated with the manufacture and maintenance of SMES systems, as well as a regulatory analysis for their implementation in the complex Spanish electrical system. The analysis also compares this system with the regulations of other countries, providing a comprehensive case study.The book examines the possible economic and environmental benefits of using magnetic superconductors in electrical systems and provides a technical study of the use of these systems in hybrid storage systems that complement each other to optimize network performance. The study is conducted from the perspective of new distribution networks, distributed generation, and the concepts of the smart city. The book also explores potential applications and developments, such as electric vehicles.Overall, this book offers an insightful and comprehensive analysis of the potential of magnetic superconductors in storage systems. It will be an invaluable resource for researchers, engineers, and policymakers interested in the future of energy storage systems

¿This book examines the governance and institutional dimensions of the global value chain (GVC) and the barriers of local firms to participate in chains. Focusing on Latin America, this collection analyzes agribusiness and agri-food chains in order to evaluate the common challenges in the production and trade of coffee, cocoa, maize, sugar, Tequila and Mezcal in Mexico and Central America. Additionally, there are studies of knowledge-intensive industries of aerospace and automotive.Addressing the need for sustainable economic development in developing countries from the study of value chains, this work presents a conceptual framework and empirical cases that highlight the impact of GVC in the Latin American region and will appeal to international business and international trade researchers.

Our current concept of matter, one of scientific research¿s greatest successes, represents a long journey, from questions posed during the birth of philosophy in Ancient Greece to recent advances in physics and chemistry, including Quantum Physics. This book outlines that journey. The book has three parts, each detailing a phase of the journey. The first saw the development of a conception based on "classical" physics; the second saw the construction of the "old" quantum theory attempting to explain the mysterious properties of matter, resulting in formulation of the "new" quantum theory; the third saw the formation of the modern conception of matter, based on quantum mechanics. Along the way, various topics are discussed, including: rediscovery and appropriation of antiquity by Western culture in the modern era; the subsequent revision process in the 16th and 17th centuries and the new experiments and theories of the 18th; attempts to understand the mysterious properties of matterthat could not be explained by classical physics; the first quantization hypotheses; discovery of new purely "quantum-mechanical" properties of matter; and the ultimate clarification of atomic structure. This book is aimed at anyone who wants a clear picture of how we arrived at the modern conception of matter.

This book comprises high-quality refereed research papers presented at the 3rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Logistics Engineering (ICAILE2023), held in Wuhan, China, on March 11¿12, 2023, organized jointly by Wuhan University of Technology, Nanning University, the National Technical University of Ukraine "Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute", Huazhong University of Science and Technology, the Polish Operational and Systems Society, Wuhan Technology and Business University, and the International Research Association of Modern Education and Computer Science. The topics discussed in the book include state-of-the-art papers in artificial intelligence and logistics engineering. It is an excellent source of references for researchers, graduate students, engineers, management practitioners, and undergraduate students interested in artificial intelligence and its applications in logistics engineering.

This book introduces a novel perspective on machine learning, offering distinct advantages over neural network-based techniques. This approach boasts a reduced hardware requirement, lower power consumption, and enhanced interpretability. The applications of this approach encompass high-speed classifications, including packet classification, network intrusion detection, and exotic particle detection in high-energy physics. Moreover, it finds utility in medical diagnosis scenarios characterized by small training sets and imbalanced data. The resulting rule generated by this method can be implemented either in software or hardware. In the case of hardware implementation, circuit design can employ look-up tables (memory), rather than threshold gates.The methodology described in this book involves extracting a set of rules from a training set, composed of categorical variable vectors and their corresponding classes. Unnecessary variables are eliminated, and the rules are simplified before being transformed into a sum-of-products (SOP) form. The resulting SOP exhibits the ability to generalize and predict outputs for new inputs. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through numerous examples and experimental results using the University of California-Irvine (UCI) dataset.This book is primarily intended for graduate students and researchers in the fields of logic synthesis, machine learning, and data mining. It assumes a foundational understanding of logic synthesis, while familiarity with linear algebra and statistics would be beneficial for readers.

This book discusses the unique and unusual characteristics of the blockchain and the industries and markets affected by this technology in the Global South. Its main objectives are to 1) provide a comprehensive review of economic, health, social, political, entrepreneurial, and environmental impacts of blockchain, 2) present evidence from countries, industries, and firms to broaden the understanding of the contexts, mechanisms, and outcomes associated with blockchain projects, and 3) analyze the enablers and opportunities that can be tapped and barriers that may impede the implementation of blockchain projects in these economies.Given that in many way blockchain has a much higher value proposition for economies in the Global South than for their counterparts in the more developed Global North, it has the potential to make up for the lack of effective formal institutions ¿ rules, laws, regulations, and their enforcement ¿ as well as improve administrative aspects, such as maintenance of standards, monitoring and compliance. This work fills a gap in scholarly research and will appeal to researchers interested in the potential of blockchain to boost entrepreneurship, reshape governance, improve supply chain efficiency, and curb corruption in emerging economies.

This book rethinks the anthropology of friendship from the perspective of theology and disability, and suggests the respect for human dignity and the person¿s vulnerability as the criterion in reconsidering such an anthropology. The reality of disability is not only the reality of being in the world, but also concerns the concept of the meaning of otherness and being created as an image of God. The constructive critique that the emergence of disability as a human condition posits to theo-anthropological and ethical concepts is the quest of the renewal of theo-anthropological and ethical knowledge on the meaning of disability, otherness and friendship. The theological and anthropological entities, such as disability and friendship, are interconnected in a sense that the meaning of the one needs to be explained in the light of the other, and vice versa. The renewal of certain anthropological categories in such regard is a search for a deeper understanding of humanity, not apart from, butin light of, the presence of disability.The book examines the anthropological and theological systems regarding the theme of friendship and disability.

This volume collects peer-reviewed short papers presented at the Optimization and Decision Science conference (ODS 2022) held in Florence (Italy) from August 30th to September 2nd, 2022, organized by the Global Optimization Laboratory within the University of Florence and AIRO (the Italian Association for Operations Research).The book includes contributions in the fields of operations research, optimization, problem solving, decision making and their applications in the most diverse domains. Moreover, a special focus is set on the challenging theme Operations Research: inclusion and equity.The work offers 30 contributions, covering a wide spectrum of methodologies and applications. Specifically, they feature the following topics: (i) Variational Inequalities, Equilibria and Games, (ii) Optimization and Machine Learning, (iii) Global Optimization, (iv) Optimization under Uncertainty, (v) Combinatorial Optimization, (vi) Transportationand Mobility, (vii) Health Care Management, and (viii) Applications.This book is primarily addressed to researchers and PhD students of the operations research community. However, due to its interdisciplinary content, it will be of high interest for other closely related research communities.

Great power competition is the watermark of the current global scenario. In this regard, the maritime and naval dimension have a particular relevance on the struggle for regional and global hegemony. This book has the potential to engage with multiple audiences, since develops an analytic approach to understand naval great power competition in the maritime spaces of the Global South. It is set within a neoclassical realism approach, while engaging literature from international relations, international security, and studies on the Indo-Pacific and the South Atlantic security dynamics. The book offers a unique conceptual framework to understand how great powers select their maritime strategies, presents a series of regional and global maritime strategies by the United States, China, Russia and India, while assess their impact in the Southern Oceans, focusing in the Indo-Pacific realm and the South Atlantic.

This book introduces the Topological Weighed Centroid approach and describes some applications in the study of the dynamics of various spatial phenomena with a special emphasis on the spatial analysis of the relationship, influence, and dynamics of geographical phenomena. Offering a comprehensive introduction to the theory and illustrative examples from various kinds of geographical data, this book also takes an in-depth look at more complex case studies, such as the applications of the topological weighed centroid approach in the study of epidemic patterns, cultural processes, criminality, and environmental phenomena.

This book thus explores the role of African epistemologies in addressing the myriad challenges posed by the inclusive education system in Africa and other contexts.In recent years, the shift from special education to inclusive education has had a significant impact on the provision of education and the education system as a whole in Africa. The impact has been felt in all institutions of learning from low to high, public and private, government, and across departments of education. Inclusive education, if shaped correctly by using African epistemologies, would empower learners to attain the relevant skills, knowledge, values, and attitudes for their own intellectual growth and personal development.

This open access book examines how the form of the list features as a tool for meaning-making in the genre of detective fiction from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The book analyzes how both readers and detectives rely on listing as an ordering and structuring tool, and highlights the crucial role that lists assume in the reading process. It extends the boundaries of an emerging field dedicated to the study of lists in literature and caters to a newly revived interest in form and New Formalist approaches in narratological research. The central aim of this book is to show how detective fiction makes use of lists in order to frame various conceptions of knowledge. The frames created by these lists are crucial to decoding the texts, and they can be used to demonstrate how readers can be engaged in the act of detection or manipulated into accepting certain propositions in the text.

This book argues that fans¿ creative works form a cognitive system; fanfic, fanvids, and gifs are not simply evidence of thinking, but acts of thinking. Drawing on work in cognitive linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive philosophy, and psychology¿particularly focused on 4-E cognition, which rejects Cartesian dualism¿this project demonstrates that cognition is an embodied, emotional, and distributed act that emerges from fans¿ interactions with media texts, technological interfaces, and fan collectives. This mode of textual engagement is deeply physical, emotional, and social and is enacted through fanworks. By developing a theory of critical closeness, this book proposes a methodology for fruitfully putting cognitive science in conversation with fan studies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Reversible Computation, RC 2023, held in Giessen, Germany, during July 18¿19, 2023.The 11 full papers and 3 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 19 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows:¿ Foundations; Reversible Programming; Quantum Computing; and Quantum Circuits.

The book aims to deal with the main advances in the study of artificial intelligence, the digital and circular economy, and innovation from a multidisciplinary perspective.Whoever governs the artificial intelligence will hold the keys to the world and the future. This book explains the growing role of artificial intelligence in our lives and the need to understand its mechanisms.The book presents original research articles addressing various aspects of artificial intelligence applied to economics, law, management, and optimization. The topics discussed include economics, territorial policies, law, resource allocation strategies, information technology, and learning for inclusion.Combining the input of contributing professors and researchers from Italian and other foreign universities, the book is of interest to students, researchers, and practitioners, as well as members of the public in general, interested in the world of the artificial intelligence and economics.

Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are a class of chemicals that are persistent, bio accumulative and toxic (PBT), which are restricted for use under the Stockholm Convention. They adversely impact the environment, human and animal health. Most of the POPs are semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs) and known to have a long-range transport potential and are often deposited in colder climate and found in places away from the regions they are produced. POPs are usually hydrophobic (i.e., ¿water-hating¿) and lipophilic (i.e., ¿fat-loving¿) chemicals, due to which they bind to solids, particularly organic matter, and fatty tissues in both marine and terrestrial environments. As a result, POPs may move up the food chain. This book focuses on determining the sources, fate, analytical techniques of detecting POPs as well as their health impacts. It further dwells on the regulatory aspects, management of POPs, best environmental practices (BEPs), Indian and international case studies, gaps in understanding the regulatory aspects. A few key recommendations for the way forward form the concluding chapters of this book.

The textbook is intended for the undergraduate and postgraduate students of chemistry, biology and medicine. It covers diverse topics of biophysical chemistry ranging from the structure of cells, lipids, and proteins to nonequilibrium thermodynamics, enzyme catalysis, and fast reaction kinetics. The book discusses the fundamental structural concepts in the first part and provides a systematic account of different experimental techniques such as chromatography, electrophoresis, and gel filtration that are extensively employed in biochemical research in the second part. It also includes typical applications using NMR, ESR, and SPR to comprehend the power of spectroscopic tools in biophysical chemistry. This textbook also deals with advanced topics of entropy production and biosensors. It consists of a large number of schematic diagrams as well as tabular compilations of kinetic, electrochemical, and thermochemical data. It includes multiple-choice questions, numerical examples, and descriptive questions in various chapters to aid self-learning among students. In view of the diverse coverage of topics, this textbook is a valuable asset to undergraduate and postgraduate students. It is also a useful reference for researchers and professionals in chemistry, biology, and medicine.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, PAAMS 2023, held in Guimaraes, Portugal, in July 2023.The 32 full papers in this book were reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. 5 demonstration papers are also included in this volume. The papers deal with the application and validation of agent-based models, methods, and technologies in a number of key applications areas, including: advanced models and learning, agent-based programming, decision-making, education and social interactions, formal and theoretic models, health and safety, mobility and the city, swarms and task allocation.

This volume LNCS 13942 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 37th Annual IFIP WG 11.3 Conference, DBSec 2023, in Sophia-Antipolis, France, July 19¿21, 2023. The 19 full papers presented together with 5 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 56 submissions. The conference focuses on secure data sharing; access control and vulnerability assessment; machine learning; and mobile applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Business Intelligence, CBI 2023, which held in Istanbul, Turkey, during July 19¿21, 2023.The 15 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: artificial intelligence and business intelligence; and optimization and decision support.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th Annual RECOMB Satellite Workshop on Comparative Genomics, RECOMB-CG 2023 which took place in Istanbul, Turkey, in April 2023. The 15 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 25 submissions. The papers present cutting edge research in comparative genomics, with an emphasis on computational approaches and novel experimental results.Chapters "Inferring Clusters of Orthologous and Paralogous Transcripts" and "Gene Order Phylogeny via Ancestral Genome Reconstruction under Dollo" are published Open Access under Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0).