Ideal for classroom or independent study, this Revision Guide is the smart choice for learners studying for the externally assessed units of the 2012 BTEC First in Information and Creative Technology. * The one topic-per-page format provides hassle-free revision for learners with no lengthy set-up time and no complex revision concepts. * Written with learners in mind - in an informal voice that talks directly to them. * Visually engaging pages break the content down into easily-digestible points, with revision activities and worked examples that prepare learners for the test. * Designed to be used alongside the BTEC First in Information and Creative Technology Revision Workbook with one-to-one page correspondence to make it easy to use the books together. * Covers both externally assessed Units for 2012 BTEC First in Information and Creative Technology (Units 1 and 2).

Originating from papers presented at the 18th International Conference on Railway Engineering Design and Operation, this book provides up-to-date research on the use of advanced systems, promoting their general awareness throughout the management, design, manufacture and operation of railways and other emerging passenger, freight and transit systems. A key emphasis is placed on the use of computer systems in advanced railway engineering. The included works are compiled from a variety of specialists interested in the development of railways, including managers, consultants, railway engineers, designers of advanced train control systems and computer specialists. Topics covered include: Traffic safety, security and monitoring; Train and railways analysis; Operation of rail networks; Advanced train control; Energy-efficient design; Traffic modelling and simulation.

Advances in Computers, Volume 126 presents innovations in computer hardware, software, theory, design and applications, with this updated volume including new chapters on VLSI for Super-Computing: Creativity in R+D from Applications and Algorithms to Masks and Chips, Bulk Bitwise Execution Model in Memory: Mechanisms, Implementation, and Evaluation, Embracing the Laws of Physics: Three Reversible Models of Computation, WSNs in Environmental Monitoring: Data Acquisition and Dissemination Aspects, Energy efficient implementation of tensor operations using dataflow paradigm for machine learning, and A Run-Time Job Scheduling Algorithm for Cluster Architectures with DataFlow Accelerators.

The digital transformation of the 21st century has affected all facets of society and has been highly advantageous in many industries, including urban planning and regional development. The practices, strategies, and developments surrounding urban e-planning in particular have been constantly shifting and adapting to new innovations as they arrive. Trends and Innovations in Urban E-Planning provides an updated panorama of the main trends, challenges, and recent innovations in the field of e-planning through the critical perspectives of diverse experts. This book adds new and updated evidence on recent changes in this field and provides critical insights on these innovations. Covering topics such as citizen engagement, land property management, and spatial planning, this book is an essential resource for students and educators of higher education, researchers, urban planners, engineers, public officials, community groups, and academicians.

Affective computing is a nascent field situated at the intersection of artificial intelligence with social and behavioral science. It studies how human emotions are perceived and expressed, which then informs the design of intelligent agents and systems that can either mimic this behavior to improve their intelligence or incorporate such knowledge to effectively understand and communicate with their human collaborators. Affective computing research has recently seen significant advances and is making a critical transformation from exploratory studies to real-world applications in the emerging research area known as applied affective computing. This book offers readers an overview of the state-of-the-art and emerging themes in affective computing, including a comprehensive review of the existing approaches to affective computing systems and social signal processing. It provides in-depth case studies of applied affective computing in various domains, such as social robotics and mental well-being. It also addresses ethical concerns related to affective computing and how to prevent misuse of the technology in research and applications. Further, this book identifies future directions for the field and summarizes a set of guidelines for developing next-generation affective computing systems that are effective, safe, and human-centered. For researchers and practitioners new to affective computing, this book will serve as an introduction to the field to help them in identifying new research topics or developing novel applications. For more experienced researchers and practitioners, the discussions in this book provide guidance for adopting a human-centered design and development approach to advance affective computing.

As technology continues to develop, the healthcare industry must adapt and implement new technologies and services. Recent advancements, opportunities, and challenges for bio-medical image processing and authentication in telemedicine must be considered to ensure patients receive the best possible care. Advancements in Bio-Medical Image Processing and Authentication in Telemedicine introduces recent advancements, opportunities, and challenges for bio-medical image processing and authentication in telemedicine and discusses the design of high-accuracy decision support systems. Covering key topics such as artificial intelligence, medical imaging, telemedicine, and technology, this premier reference source is ideal for medical professionals, nurses, policymakers, researchers, scholars, academicians, practitioners, instructors, and students.

Information retrieval (IR) is a fundamental task in many real-world applications such as Web search, question answering systems, and digital libraries. The core of IR is to identify information resources relevant to user's information need. Since there might be more than one relevant resource, the returned result is often organized as a ranked list of documents according to their relevance degree against the information need. The ranking property of IR makes it different from other tasks, and researchers have devoted substantial efforts to develop a variety of ranking models in IR. In recent years, the resurgence of deep learning has greatly advanced this field and led to a hot topic named NeuIR (neural information retrieval), especially the paradigm of pre-training methods (PTMs). Owing to sophisticated pre-training objectives and huge model size, pre-trained models can learn universal language representations from massive textual data that are beneficial to the ranking task of IR. Considering the rapid progress of this direction, this survey provides a systematic review of PTMs in IR. The authors present an overview of PTMs applied in different components of an IR system, including the retrieval component and the re-ranking component. In addition, they introduce PTMs specifically designed for IR, and summarize available datasets as well as benchmark leaderboards. Lastly, they discuss some open challenges and highlight several promising directions with the hope of inspiring and facilitating more works on these topics for future research.

Emerging technologies in education are dramatically reshaping the way we teach, learn, and create meaning-both formally and informally. The use of emerging technologies within educational contexts requires new methodological approaches to teaching, learning, and educational research. This leads educational technology developers, researchers, and practitioners to engage in the creation of diverse digital learning tools that can be used in a wide range of learning situations and scenarios. Ultimately, the goal of today's digital learning experiences includes situational experiences wherein learners and teachers symbiotically enroll in meaning-making processes. Discussion, critical reflection, and critique of these emerging technologies, tools, environments, processes, and practices require scholars to involve themselves in critical conversation about the challenges and promises afforded by emerging technologies and to engage in deliberate thinking about the critical aspects of these emerging technologies that are drastically reshaping education. Global Education and the Impact of Institutional Policies on Educational Technologies deepens this discussion of emerging technologies in educational contexts and is centered at the intersection of educational technology, learning sciences, and socio-cultural theories. This book engages a critical conversation that will further the discussion about the pedagogical potential of emerging technologies in contemporary classrooms. Covering topics such as communication networks, online learning environments, and preservice teacher education, this text is an essential resource for educational professionals, preservice teachers, professors, teachers, students, and academicians.