This book presents the latest in decision-making tools, techniques, and solutions for policy makers to utilize in overcoming the challenges faced by healthcare systems. With contributions from experts world-wide, an array of healthcare management models, techniques, and integrative solutions are presented, drawing on econometric, system dynamics, and agent-based models as well as state-of-the-art empirical studies. As total healthcare spending (both total expenditures on health as a percentage of GDP and average spending on per capita) increases across most of the world's economies, healthcare systems continue to face challenges in terms of cost, quality, and access, as a result of its fragmented nature. Consequently, healthcare managers and policy makers require innovative integrative approaches and solutions to better manage complex, dynamic healthcare systems. This volume offers researchers and policy makers an insightful and critical review of the state of the art in healthcare modeling, with a particular focus on system dynamics, agent-based models, and modern empirical studies. It will be of interest to those in the fields of health, business management, and information systems.

This book discusses recent developments in mathematical programming and game theory, and the application of several mathematical models to problems in finance, games, economics and graph theory. All contributing authors are eminent researchers in their respective fields, from across the world. This book contains a collection of selected papers presented at the 2017 Symposium on Mathematical Programming and Game Theory at New Delhi during 9-11 January 2017. Researchers, professionals and graduate students will find the book an essential resource for current work in mathematical programming, game theory and their applications in finance, economics and graph theory. The symposium provides a forum for new developments and applications of mathematical programming and game theory as well as an excellent opportunity to disseminate the latest major achievements and to explore new directions and perspectives.

The present book provides guidance to understanding complicated coupled processes based on the experimental data available and implementation of developed algorithms in numerical codes. Results of selected test cases in the fields of closed-form solutions (e.g., deformation processes), single processes (such as groundwater flow) as well as coupled processes are presented. It is part of the OpenGeoSys initiative - an open source project to share knowledge and experience in environmental analysis and scientific computation with the community.

The advent of fast and sophisticated computer graphics has brought dynamic and interactive images under the control of professional mathematicians and mathematics teachers. This volume in the NATO Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology takes a comprehensive and critical look at how the computer can support the use of visual images in mathematical problem solving. The contributions are written by researchers and teachers from a variety of disciplines including computer science, mathematics, mathematics education, psychology, and design. Some focus on the use of external visual images and others on the development of individual mental imagery. The book is the first collected volume in a research area that is developing rapidly, and the authors pose some challenging new questions.

Parallel CFD 2000, the Twelfth in an International series of meetings featuring computational fluid dynamics research on parallel computers, was held May 22-25, 2000 in Trondheim, Norway.
Following the trend of the past conferences, areas such as numerical schemes and algorithms, tools and environments, load balancing, as well as interdisciplinary topics and various kinds of industrial applications were all well represented in the work presented. In addition, for the first time in the Parallel CFD conference series, the organizing committee chose to draw special attention to certain subject areas by organizing a number of special sessions.
We feel the emphasis of the papers presented at the conference reflect the direction of the research within parallel CFD at the beginning of the new millennium. It seems to be a clear tendency towards increased industrial exploitation of parallel CFD. Several presentations also demonstrated how new insight is being achieved from complex simulations, and how powerful parallel computers now make it possible to use CFD within a broader interdisciplinary setting.
Obviously, successful application of parallel CFD still rests on the underlying fundamental principles. Therefore, numerical algorithms, development tools, and parallelization techniques are still as important as when parallel CFD was in is infancy. Furthermore, the novel concepts of affordable parallel computing as well as metacomputing show that exciting developments are still taking place.
As is often pointed out however, the real power of parallel CFD comes from the combination of all the disciplines involved: Physics, mathematics, and computer science. This is probably one of the principal reasons for the continued popularity of the Parallel CFD Conferences series, as well as the inspiration behind much of the excellent work carried out on the subject. We hope that the papers in this book, both on an individual basis and as a whole, will contribute to that inspiration. Further details of Parallel CFD'99, as well as other conferences in this series, are available at http: //www.parcfd.org

With the growing popularity of "big data", the potential value of personal data has attracted more and more attention. Applications built on personal data can create tremendous social and economic benefits. Meanwhile, they bring serious threats to individual privacy. The extensive collection, analysis and transaction of personal data make it difficult for an individual to keep the privacy safe. People now show more concerns about privacy than ever before. How to make a balance between the exploitation of personal information and the protection of individual privacy has become an urgent issue. In this book, the authors use methodologies from economics, especially game theory, to investigate solutions to the balance issue. They investigate the strategies of stakeholders involved in the use of personal data, and try to find the equilibrium. The book proposes a user-role based methodology to investigate the privacy issues in data mining, identifying four different types of users, i.e. four user roles, involved in data mining applications. For each user role, the authors discuss its privacy concerns and the strategies that it can adopt to solve the privacy problems. The book also proposes a simple game model to analyze the interactions among data provider, data collector and data miner. By solving the equilibria of the proposed game, readers can get useful guidance on how to deal with the trade-off between privacy and data utility. Moreover, to elaborate the analysis on data collector's strategies, the authors propose a contract model and a multi-armed bandit model respectively. The authors discuss how the owners of data (e.g. an individual or a data miner) deal with the trade-off between privacy and utility in data mining. Specifically, they study users' strategies in collaborative filtering based recommendation system and distributed classification system. They built game models to formulate the interactions among data owners, and propose learning algorithms to find the equilibria.

The Destiny Comic Collection Vol. One is an essential collection of comic stories for Destiny fans. This 144 page volume includes Bungie's comic collection plus never before seen stories, behind the scenes galleries, and exclusive content from featured artists! From Osiris's exile to Ana Bray's homecoming on Mars, uncover the legends behind Destiny 2's iconic characters. Featuring stories written and illustrated in collaboration with Bungie by Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics, Marvel's The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl), Kris Anka (Marvel's X-Men and Star-Lord), Mark Waid (DC Comics' The Flash and Marvel's Captain America) plus a special introduction by Gerry Duggan (Marvel's Deadpool).

Content-based 3-D object retrieval has attracted extensive attention recently and has applications in a variety of fields, such as, computer-aided design, tele-medicine,mobile multimedia, virtual reality, and entertainment. The development of efficient and effective content-based 3-D object retrieval techniques has enabled the use of fast 3-D reconstruction and model design. Recent technical progress, such as the development of camera technologies, has made it possible to capture the views of 3-D objects. As a result, view-based 3-D object retrieval has become an essential but challenging research topic. View-based 3-D Object Retrieval introduces and discusses the fundamental challenges in view-based 3-D object retrieval, proposes a collection of selected state-of-the-art methods for accomplishing this task developed by the authors, and summarizes recent achievements in view-based 3-D object retrieval. Part I presents an Introduction to View-based 3-D Object Retrieval, Part II discusses View Extraction, Selection, and Representation, Part III provides a deep dive into View-Based 3-D Object Comparison, and Part IV looks at future research and developments including Big Data application and geographical location-based applications.

Data engineering has grown rapidly in the past decade, leaving many software engineers, data scientists, and analysts looking for a comprehensive view of this practice. With this practical book, you will learn how to plan and build systems to serve the needs of your organization and customers by evaluating the best technologies available in the framework of the data engineering lifecycle. Authors Joe Reis and Matt Housley walk you through the data engineering lifecycle and show you how to stitch together a variety of cloud technologies to serve the needs of downstream data consumers. You will understand how to apply the concepts of data generation, ingestion, orchestration, transformation, storage, governance, and deployment that are critical in any data environment regardless of the underlying technology. This book will help you: Assess data engineering problems using an end-to-end data framework of best practices Cut through marketing hype when choosing data technologies, architecture, and processes Use the data engineering lifecycle to design and build a robust architecture Incorporate data governance and security across the data engineering lifecycle

Corporations and governmental agencies of all sizes are embracing a new generation of enterprise-scale business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW), and very often appoint a single senior-level individual to serve as the Enterprise BI/DW Program Manager. This book is the essential guide to the incremental and iterative build-out of a successful enterprise-scale BI/DW program comprised of multiple underlying projects, and what the Enterprise Program Manager must successfully accomplish to orchestrate the many moving parts in the quest for true enterprise-scale business intelligence and data warehousing. Author Alan Simon has served as an enterprise business intelligence and data warehousing program management advisor to many of his clients, and spent an entire year with a single client as the adjunct consulting director for a $10 million enterprise data warehousing (EDW) initiative. He brings a wealth of knowledge about best practices, risk management, organizational culture alignment, and other Critical Success Factors (CSFs) to the discipline of enterprise-scale business intelligence and data warehousing.

This book provides developers, engineers, researchers and students with detailed knowledge about the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. HEVC is the successor to the widely successful H.264/AVC video compression standard, and it provides around twice as much compression as H.264/AVC for the same level of quality. The applications for HEVC will not only cover the space of the well-known current uses and capabilities of digital video they will also include the deployment of new services and the delivery of enhanced video quality, such as ultra-high-definition television (UHDTV) and video with higher dynamic range, wider range of representable color, and greater representation precision than what is typically found today. HEVC is the next major generation of video coding design a flexible, reliable and robust solution that will support the next decade of video applications and ease the burden of video on world-wide network traffic. This book provides a detailed explanation of the various parts of the standard, insight into how it was developed, and in-depth discussion of algorithms and architectures for its implementation."

"Social Data Analytics" is the first practical guide for professionals who want to employ social data for analytics and business intelligence (BI). This book provides a comprehensive overview of the technologies and platforms and shows you how to access and analyze the data. You'll explore the five major types of social data and learn from cases and platform examples to help you make the most of sentiment, behavioral, social graph, location, and rich media data. A four-step approach to the social BI process will help you access, evaluate, collaborate, and share social data with ease.

You'll learn everything you need to know to monitor social media and get an overview of the leading vendors in a crowded space of BI applications. By the end of this book, you will be well prepared for your organization s next social data analytics project.
Provides foundational understanding of new and emerging technologies-social data, collaboration, big data, advanced analyticsIncludes case studies and practical examples of success and failuresWill prepare you to lead projects and advance initiatives that will benefit you and your organization"

Architecting High Performing, Scalable and Available Enterprise Web Applications provides in-depth insights into techniques for achieving desired scalability, availability and performance quality goals for enterprise web applications. The book provides an integrated 360-degree view of achieving and maintaining these attributes through practical, proven patterns, novel models, best practices, performance strategies, and continuous improvement methodologies and case studies. The author shares his years of experience in application security, enterprise application testing, caching techniques, production operations and maintenance, and efficient project management techniques.

Cyberculture is a particularly complex issue. It is seen as a fantastic meeting point of classic philosophers with postmodern theorists, politicians with community engineers, contemporary sophists with software engineers, and artists with rhetoricians. Today, cyberculture is identified highly with new media and digital rhetoric and could be used to create a comprehensive map of modern culture. Present and Future Paradigms of Cyberculture in the 21st Century is a comprehensive research publication that explores the influence of the internet and internet culture on society as a whole. Highlighting a wide range of topics such as digital media, activism, and psychology, this book is ideal for academicians, researchers, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and students.

This book provides a comprehensive guide to Industry 4.0 applications, not only introducing implementation aspects but also proposing a conceptual framework with respect to the design principles. In addition, it discusses the effects of Industry 4.0, which are reflected in new business models and workforce transformation. The book then examines the key technological advances that form the pillars of Industry 4.0 and explores their potential technical and economic benefits using examples of real-world applications. The changing dynamics of global production, such as more complex and automated processes, high-level competitiveness and emerging technologies, have paved the way for a new generation of goods, products and services. Moreover, manufacturers are increasingly realizing the value of the data that their processes and products generate. Such trends are transforming manufacturing industry to the next generation, namely Industry 4.0, which is based on the integration of information and communication technologies and industrial technology.The book provides a conceptual framework and roadmap for decision-makers for this transformation

This book is suitable for undergraduate students in computer science and engineering, for students in other disciplines who have good programming skills, and for professionals. Computer animation and graphics are now prevalent in everyday life from the computer screen, to the movie screen, to the smart phone screen. The growing excitement about WebGL applications and their ability to integrate HTML5, inspired the authors to exclusively use WebGL in the 7th Edition of Interactive Computer Graphics with WebGL. This is the only introduction to computer graphics text for undergraduates that fully integrates WebGL and emphasises application-based programming. The top-down, programming-oriented approach allows for coverage of engaging 3D material early in the course so students immediately begin to create their own 3D graphics. Teaching and Learning Experience This program will provide a better teaching and learning experience-for you and your students. It will help: Engage Students Immediately with 3D Material: A top-down, programming-oriented approach allows for coverage of engaging 3D material early in the course so students immediately begin to create their own graphics. Introduce Computer Graphics Programming with WebGL and JavaScript: WebGL is not only fully shader-based-each application must provide at least a vertex shader and a fragment shader-but also a version that works within the latest web browsers.

This book is an important outcome of the Fifth World Internet Conference. It provides a comprehensive review of China's Internet development, especially the new practice and achievement in 2018. And it offers a systematic account of China's experience in Internet development and governance. This year, the book improves China's Internet Development Index System, optimizes the algorithm model, and enhances data collection, to assess and reflect Internet development more comprehensively, objectively and scientifically.