Intelligent Multimedia Multi-Agent Systems focuses on building intelligent successful systems. The book adopts a human-centered approach and considers various pragmatic issues and problems in areas like intelligent systems, software engineering, multimedia databases, electronic commerce, data mining, enterprise modeling and human-computer interaction for developing a human-centered virtual machine. The authors describe an ontology of the human-centered virtual machine which includes four components: activity-centered analysis component, problem solving adapter component, transformation agent component, and multimedia based interpretation component. These four components capture the external and internal planes of the system development spectrum. They integrate the physical, social and organizational reality on the external plane with stakeholder goals, tasks and incentives, and organization culture on the internal plane. The human-centered virtual machine and its four components are used for developing intelligent multimedia multi-agent systems in areas like medical decision support and health informatics, medical image retrieval, e-commerce, face detection and annotation, internet games and sales recruitment. The applications in these areas help to expound various aspects of the human-centered virtual machine including, human-centered domain modeling, distributed intelligence and communication, perceptual and cognitive task modeling, component based software development, and multimedia based data modeling. Further, the applications described in the book employ various intelligent technologies like neural networks, fuzzy logic and knowledge based systems, software engineering artifacts like agents and objects, internet technologies like XML and multimedia artifacts like image, audio, video and text.

In spite of the impressive predictive power and strong mathematical structure of quantum mechanics, the theory has always suffered from important conceptual problems. Some of these have never been solved. Motivated by this state of affairs, a number of physicists have worked together for over thirty years to develop stochastic electrodynamics, a physical theory aimed at finding a conceptually satisfactory, realistic explanation of quantum phenomena. This is the first book to present a comprehensive review of stochastic electrodynamics, from its origins to present-day developments. After a general introduction for the non-specialist, a critical discussion is presented of the main results of the theory as well as of the major problems encountered. A chapter on stochastic optics and some interesting consequences for local realism and the Bell inequalities is included. In the final chapters the authors propose and develop a new version of the theory that brings it in closer correspondence with quantum mechanics and sheds some light on the wave aspects of matter and the linkage with quantum electrodynamics. Audience: The volume will be of interest to scholars and postgraduate students of theoretical and mathematical physics, foundations and philosophy of physics, and teachers of theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, electromagnetic theory, and statistical physics (stochastic processes).

The aim of this NATO ASI has been to present an up-to-date overview of current areas of interest in amorphous materials. In order to limit the material to a manageable amount, the meeting was concerned exclusively with insulating and semiconducting materials. The lectures and seminars fill the gap between graduate courses and research seminars. The lecturers and seminar speakers were chosen as experts in their respective areas and the lectures and seminars that were given are presented in this volume. During the first week of the meeting. an emphasis was placed on introductory lectures, mainly associated with questions relating to the glass-formation and the structure of glasses. The second week focused more on research seminars. Each day of the meeting. about four posters were presented during the coffee breaks, and these formed an important focus for discussions. The posters are not reproduced in this volume as the editors wanted to have only larger contributions to make this volume more coherent. This volume is organized into four sections, starting with general considerations of the glass forming ability and techniques for the preparation of different kinds of glasses.

2 But already he had done important work on thermal equilibrium which helped generalize Maxwell's distribution law. Indeed, there is part of a letter by James Clerk Maxwell to Loschmidt from this period which runs: "I am very pleased over the outstanding work of your student; in England experi mental physics is much neglected. Sir William Thomson has done the most in this connection, but you in Austria] are ahead of us with your good example. "2 But while praise was fine, Boltzmann lusted after further travel. He wanted to know what other physicists were doing first hand. In 1870 he attended lectures by Bunsen and Konigsberger in Heid elberg, and in the same year went to Berlin only to scurry back to Vienna with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, but Boltzmann was back in Berlin the next year attending lectures, visiting laboratories, and working on dielectricity more or less under the direction of Kirchhhoff and Helmholtz."

We are often told that quantum phenomena demand radical revisions of our scientific world view and that no physical theory describing well defined objects, such as particles described by their positions, evolving in a well defined way, let alone deterministically, can account for such phenomena. The great majority of physicists continue to subscribe to this view, despite the fact that just such a deterministic theory, accounting for all of the phe nomena of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, was proposed by David Bohm more than four decades ago and has arguably been around almost since the inception of quantum mechanics itself. Our purpose in asking colleagues to write the essays for this volume has not been to produce a Festschrift in honor of David Bohm (worthy an undertaking as that would have been) or to gather together a collection of papers simply stating uncritically Bohm's views on quantum mechanics. The central theme around which the essays in this volume are arranged is David Bohm's version of quantum mechanics. It has by now become fairly standard practice to refer to his theory as Bohmian mechanics and to the larger conceptual framework within which this is located as the causal quantum theory program. While it is true that one can have reservations about the appropriateness of these specific labels, both do elicit distinc tive images characteristic of the key concepts of these approaches and such terminology does serve effectively to contrast this class of theories with more standard formulations of quantum theory."

This EMS volume, the first edition of which was published as Dynamical Systems II, EMS 2, familiarizes the reader with the fundamental ideas and results of modern ergodic theory and its applications to dynamical systems and statistical mechanics. The enlarged and revised second edition adds two new contributions on ergodic theory of flows on homogeneous manifolds and on methods of algebraic geometry in the theory of interval exchange transformations.

In this book, we approach neurophysiology at the interface of neurology and clinical neurophysiology. The medical disciplines of the nervous system, n- rology and clinical neurophysiology, rest heavily on other sciences, notably cellular biology, neuro-anatomy, neuro-physiology, applied physics and ma- ematical biology. Existing medical textbooks on neurophysiology, neurology and clinical neurophysiology are an excellent source of the phenomenology of various principles and diseases. Here, we choose to elucidate some of the under- ing physiological, physical processes and experimental methods, intended for a broad audience - medical residents and students, as well as students in the emerging area of medical technical sciences. We feel that a good understanding of fundamentals may signi?cantly - hance insight into various aspects of clinical neurology and clinical neu- physiology. This book, therefore, is focused on a selection of clinical signs and symptoms to highlight basic principles of neurology, (neuro-)physiology and neuroanatomy. While we believe this text to be of interest to medical students or residents in neurology or clinical neurophysiology, we speci?cally aim at students - terested in contributing to new developments and innovations in neurology and clinical neurophysiology. These students are involved with patients, even though they are not trained for routine patient care.

Selected modern aspects of artificially layered structures and bulk materials involving antiferromagnetic long-range order are the main themes of this book. Special emphasis is laid on the prototypical behavior of Ising-type model systems. They play a crucial role in the field of statistical physics and, in addition, contribute to the basic understanding of the exchange bias phenomenon in MBE-grown magnetic heterosystems. Throughout the book, particular attention is given to the interplay between experimental results and their theoretical description, ranging from the famous Lee-Yang theory of phase transitions to novel mechanisms of exchange bias.

The theory and applications of infinite dimensional dynamical systems have attracted the attention of scientists for quite some time. Dynamical issues arise in equations which attempt to model phenomena that change with time, and the infinite dimensional aspects occur when forces that describe the motion depend on spatial variables. This book may serve as an entree for scholars beginning their journey into the world of dynamical systems, especially infinite dimensional spaces. The main approach involves the theory of evolutionary equations. It begins with a brief essay on the evolution of evolutionary equations and introduces the origins of the basic elements of dynamical systems, flow and semiflow.

Quantum Networks is focused on density matrix theory cast into a product operator representation, particularly adapted to describing networks of finite state subsystems. This approach is important for understanding non-classical aspects such as single subsystem and multi-subsystem entanglement. An intuitive picture evolves of how these features are generated and destroyed by interactions with the environment. This second edition has been revised and enlarged. For better clarity the text has been partly reorganized and figures and formulae are presented in a more attractive way.

Most of the interesting and difficult problems in statistical mechanics arise when the constituent particles of the system interact with each other with pair or multipartiele energies. The types of behaviour which occur in systems because of these interactions are referred to as cooperative phenomena giving rise in many cases to phase transitions. This book and its companion volume (Lavis and Bell 1999, referred to in the text simply as Volume 1) are princi pally concerned with phase transitions in lattice systems. Due mainly to the insights gained from scaling theory and renormalization group methods, this subject has developed very rapidly over the last thirty years. ' In our choice of topics we have tried to present a good range of fundamental theory and of applications, some of which reflect our own interests. A broad division of material can be made between exact results and ap proximation methods. We have found it appropriate to inelude some of our discussion of exact results in this volume and some in Volume 1. Apart from this much of the discussion in Volume 1 is concerned with mean-field theory. Although this is known not to give reliable results elose to a critical region, it often provides a good qualitative picture for phase diagrams as a whole. For complicated systems some kind of mean-field method is often the only tractable method available. In this volume our main concern is with scaling theory, algebraic methods and the renormalization group."

From the reviews: "This book is very well written and contains many important and new original results that certainly play an important role in today 's nonlinear optics." Physicalia

This monograph is devoted to nonlinear dynamics of thin plates and shells with thermosensitive excitation. Because of the variety of sizes and types of mathematical models in current use, there is no prospect of solving them analytically. However, the book emphasizes a rigorous mathematical treatment of the obtained differential equations, since it helps efficiently in further developing of various suitable numerical algorithms to solve the stated problems.

The state-of-the-art of quantum transport and quantum kinetics in semiconductors, plus the latest applications, are covered in this monograph. Since the publishing of the first edition in 1996, the nonequilibrium Green function technique has been applied to a large number of new research topics, and the revised edition introduces the reader to many of these areas. This book is both a reference work for researchers and a self-tutorial for graduate students.

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards.

Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem.

The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students.

The present third edition of The Statistical Mechanics of Financial Markets is published only four years after the ?rst edition. The success of the book highlights the interest in a summary of the broad research activities on the application of statistical physics to ?nancial markets. I am very grateful to readers and reviewers for their positive reception and comments. Why then prepare a new edition instead of only reprinting and correcting the second edition? The new edition has been signi?cantly expanded, giving it a more pr- tical twist towards banking. The most important extensions are due to my practical experience as a risk manager in the German Savings Banks' As- ciation (DSGV): Two new chapters on risk management and on the closely related topic of economic and regulatory capital for ?nancial institutions, - spectively, have been added. The chapter on risk management contains both the basics as well as advanced topics, e. g. coherent risk measures, which have not yet reached the statistical physics community interested in ?nancial m- kets. Similarly, it is surprising how little research by academic physicists has appeared on topics relating to Basel II. Basel II is the new capital adequacy framework which will set the standards in risk management in many co- tries for the years to come. Basel II is responsible for many job openings in banks for which physicists are extemely well quali?ed. For these reasons, an outline of Basel II takes a major part of the chapter on capital.

Recently, increasing interest has been shown in applying the concept of Pareto-optimality to machine learning, particularly inspired by the successful developments in evolutionary multi-objective optimization. It has been shown that the multi-objective approach to machine learning is particularly successful to improve the performance of the traditional single objective machine learning methods, to generate highly diverse multiple Pareto-optimal models for constructing ensembles models and, and to achieve a desired trade-off between accuracy and interpretability of neural networks or fuzzy systems. This monograph presents a selected collection of research work on multi-objective approach to machine learning, including multi-objective feature selection, multi-objective model selection in training multi-layer perceptrons, radial-basis-function networks, support vector machines, decision trees, and intelligent systems.

This book discusses dynamical systems that are typically driven by stochastic dynamic noise. It is written by two statisticians essentially for the statistically inclined readers. It covers many of the contributions made by the statisticians in the past twenty years or so towards our understanding of estimation, the Lyapunov-like index, the nonparametric regression, and many others, many of which are motivated by their dynamical system counterparts but have now acquired a distinct statistical flavor.

Coherent Dynamics of Complex Quantum Systems is aimed at senior-level undergraduate students in the areas of atomic, molecular, and laser physics, physical chemistry, quantum optics and quantum informatics. It should help them put particular problems in these fields into a broader scientific context and thereby take advantage of the well-elaborated technique of the adjacent fields.

During the past ten years, there has been intensive development in theoretical and experimental research of solitons in periodic media. This book provides a unique and informative account of the state-of-the-art in the field. The volume opens with a review of the existence of robust solitary pulses in systems built as a periodic concatenation of very different elements. Among the most famous examples of this type of systems are the dispersion management in fiber-optic telecommunication links, and (more recently) photonic crystals. A number of other systems belonging to the same broad class of spatially periodic strongly inhomogeneous media (such as the split-step and tandem models) have recently been identified in nonlinear optics, and transmission of solitary pulses in them was investigated in detail. Similar soliton dynamics occurs in temporal-domain counterparts of such systems, where they are subject to strong time-periodic modulation (for instance, the Feshbach-resonance management in Bose-Einstein condensates). Basis results obtained for all these systems are reviewed in the book. This timely work will serve as a useful resource for the soliton community.

Juval Portugali The notion of complex artificial environments (CAE) refers to theories of c- plexity and self-organization, as well as to artifacts in general, and to artificial - vironments, such as cities, in particular. The link between the two, however, is not trivial. For one thing, the theories of complexity and self-organization originated in the "hard" science and by reference to natural phenomena in physics and bi- ogy. The study of artifacts, per contra, has traditionally been the business of the "soft" disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The notion of "complex artificial environments" thus implies the supposition that the theories of compl- ity and self-organization, together with the mathematical formalisms and meth- ologies developed for their study, apply beyond the domain of nature. Such a s- st position raises a whole set of questions relating to the nature of 21 century cities and urbanism, to philosophical issues regarding the natural versus the artificial, to the methodological legitimacy of interdisciplinary transfer of theories and me- odologies and to the implications that entail the use of sophisticated, state-of-t- art artifacts such as virtual reality (VR) cities and environments. The three-day workshop on the study of complex artificial environments that took place on the island of San Servolo, Venice, during April 1-3, 2004, was a gathering of scholars engaged in the study of the various aspects of CAE.

This volume offers of the EU-funded 5th Framework project, FLOMANIA (Flow Physics Modelling - An Integrated Approach). The book presents an introduction to the project, exhibits partners' methods and approaches, and provides comprehensive reports of all applications treated in the project. A complete chapter is devoted to a description of turbulence models used by the partners together with a section on lessons learned, accompanied by a comprehensive list of references.

Thank heavens for Jens Wittenburg, of the University of Karlsruhe in Germany. Anyone who 's been laboring for years over equation after equation will want to give him a great big hug. It is common practice to develop equations for each system separately and to consider the labor necessary for deriving all of these as inevitable. Not so, says the author. Here, he takes it upon himself to describe in detail a formalism which substantially simplifies these tasks.

Discover the many facets of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. The first part of this book describes the current thermodynamic formalism recognized as the classical theory. The second part focuses on different approaches. Throughout the presentation, the emphasis is on problem-solving applications. To help build your understanding, some problems have been analyzed using several formalisms to underscore their differences and their similarities.

This book examines the testing and modeling of materials and structures under dynamic loading conditions. Readers get an in-depth analysis of the current mathematical modeling and simulation tools available for a variety of materials, alongside discussions of the benefits and limitations of these tools in industrial design. Following a logical and well organized structure, this volume uniquely combines experimental procedures with numerical simulation, and provides many examples.