Civil engineering structures such as buildings, bridges, stadiums, and offshore structures play an import role in our daily life. However, constructing these structures requires lots of budget. Thus, how to cost-efficiently design structures satisfying all required design constraints is an important factor to structural engineers. Traditionally, mathematical gradient-based optimal techniques have been applied to the design of optimal structures. While, many practical engineering optimal problems are very complex and hard to solve by traditional method. In the past few decades, swarm intelligence algorithms, which were inspired by the social behaviour of natural animals such as fish schooling and bird flocking, were developed because they do not require conventional mathematical assumptions and thus possess better global search abilities than the traditional optimization algorithms and have attracted more and more attention. These intelligent based algorithms are very suitable for continuous and discrete design variable problems such as ready-made structural members and have been vigorously applied to various structural design problems and obtained good results. This book gathers the authors' latest research work related with particle swarm optimizer algorithm and group search optimizer algorithm as well as their application to structural optimal design. The readers can understand the full spectrum of the algorithms and apply the algorithms to their own research problems.

"

This book contains papers presented at the 6th Global Workshop on Digital Soil Mapping, held 11-14 November 2014 at the Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences of Nanjing, China. Digital soil mapping is advancing on different fronts at different paces throughout the world. The researches and applications on DSM are moving from method development to realizations in different scales and regions, serving the generation of national and continental to global soil grids. Meanwhile, new ideas and insights on mapping complex soil-landscapes such as flat plains,anthropogenically altered agriculture and urban spaces are emerging, with the help of new paradigms and models.The goal of the sixth workshop was to review and discuss the state of the art in digital soil mapping, and to explore strategies for bridging research, production, and environmental applications. This book provides a very useful and comprehensive overview of the status of digital soil mapping, in which graduate students, scientists and specialists working within the field of geography can find the spatial prediction approaches and related theory.

Is the environmental justice debate solely an economic issue? Is it a social issue as well as a moral, political, or science issue? In Environmental Justice Analysis: Theories, Methods, and Practice author Feng Liu suggests it is all of them. He presents a multi-perspective, multi-disciplinary, and inter-disciplinary approach to analyzing environmental justice issues.
Liu demonstrates how cutting-edge technologies and methods such as the Internet, Geographic Information Systems, and modeling tools can contribute to better equity analysis and policy evaluations. He focuses on the various methods of environmental justice research, providing you with an integrated framework for conducting rigorous equity analysis.
Environmental Justice has just been placed at the head of the environmental policy agenda. Federal governments have a mandate to analyze the impacts of federal policies, programs, and projects on groups and communities. Carefully and critically examining all aspects of the issue, Environmental Justice Analysis: Theories, Methods, and Practice provides you with a comprehensive and analytical treatment of theories and methods for analyzing and assessing environmental justice and equity issues.

Is the environmental justice debate solely an economic issue? Is it a social issue as well as a moral, political, or science issue? In Environmental Justice Analysis: Theories, Methods, and Practice author Feng Liu suggests it is all of them. He presents a multi-perspective, multi-disciplinary, and inter-disciplinary approach to analyzing environmental justice issues. Liu demonstrates how cutting-edge technologies and methods such as the Internet, Geographic Information Systems, and modeling tools can contribute to better equity analysis and policy evaluations. He focuses on the various methods of environmental justice research, providing you with an integrated framework for conducting rigorous equity analysis. Environmental Justice has just been placed at the head of the environmental policy agenda. Federal governments have a mandate to analyze the impacts of federal policies, programs, and projects on groups and communities. Carefully and critically examining all aspects of the issue, Environmental Justice Analysis: Theories, Methods, and Practice provides you with a comprehensive and analytical treatment of theories and methods for analyzing and assessing environmental justice and equity issues.

This book contains papers presented at the 6th Global Workshop on Digital Soil Mapping, held 11-14 November 2014 at the Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences of Nanjing, China. Digital soil mapping is advancing on different fronts at different paces throughout the world. The researches and applications on DSM are moving from method development to realizations in different scales and regions, serving the generation of national and continental to global soil grids. Meanwhile, new ideas and insights on mapping complex soil-landscapes such as flat plains,anthropogenically altered agriculture and urban spaces are emerging, with the help of new paradigms and models.The goal of the sixth workshop was to review and discuss the state of the art in digital soil mapping, and to explore strategies for bridging research, production, and environmental applications. This book provides a very useful and comprehensive overview of the status of digital soil mapping, in which graduate students, scientists and specialists working within the field of geography can find the spatial prediction approaches and related theory.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the First International Conference on Science of Cyber Security, SciSec 2018, held in Beijing, China, in August 2018. The 11 full papers and 6 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. The papers focus on science of security; cybersecurity dynamics; attacks and defenses; network security; security metrics and measurements; and performance enhancements.

This book addresses the fundamental concepts in the theory and practice of visual cryptography. The design, construction, analysis, and application of visual cryptography schemes (VCSs) are discussed in detail. Original, cutting-edge research is presented on probabilistic, size invariant, threshold, concolorous, and cheating immune VCS. This updated second edition has also been expanded with new content on braille and 2D barcode authentication of visual cryptography shares. Features: contains review exercises at the end of each chapter, as well as a helpful glossary; examines various common problems in visual cryptography, including the alignment, flipping, cheating, distortion, and thin line problems; reviews a range of VCSs, including XOR-based visual cryptography and security enriched VCS; describes different methods for presenting color content using visual cryptographic techniques; covers such applications of visual cryptography as watermarking, resolution variant VCS, and multiple resolution VCS.

Since the mid 1990s, data hiding has been proposed as an enabling technology for securing multimedia communication and is now used in various applications including broadcast monitoring, movie fingerprinting, steganography, video indexing and retrieval and image authentication. Data hiding and cryptographic techniques are often combined to complement each other, thus triggering the development of a new research field of multimedia security. Besides, two related disciplines, steganalysis and data forensics, are increasingly attracting researchers and becoming another new research field of multimedia security. This journal, LNCS Transactions on Data Hiding and Multimedia Security, aims to be a forum for all researchers in these emerging fields, publishing both original and archival research results. The seven papers included in this special issue were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. They address the challenges faced by the emerging area of visual cryptography and provide the readers with an overview of the state of the art in this field of research.

Civil engineering structures such as buildings, bridges, stadiums, and offshore structures play an import role in our daily life. However, constructing these structures requires lots of budget. Thus, how to cost-efficiently design structures satisfying all required design constraints is an important factor to structural engineers. Traditionally, mathematical gradient-based optimal techniques have been applied to the design of optimal structures. While, many practical engineering optimal problems are very complex and hard to solve by traditional method. In the past few decades, swarm intelligence algorithms, which were inspired by the social behaviour of natural animals such as fish schooling and bird flocking, were developed because they do not require conventional mathematical assumptions and thus possess better global search abilities than the traditional optimization algorithms and have attracted more and more attention. These intelligent based algorithms are very suitable for continuous and discrete design variable problems such as ready-made structural members and have been vigorously applied to various structural design problems and obtained good results. This book gathers the authors' latest research work related with particle swarm optimizer algorithm and group search optimizer algorithm as well as their application to structural optimal design. The readers can understand the full spectrum of the algorithms and apply the algorithms to their own research problems.

"

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Science of Cyber Security, SciSec 2022, held in Matsu, Japan in August 2022. The 36 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 88 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: blockchain and applications; cryptography and applications; network security; cyber-physical system; malware; mobile system security; system and web security; security in financial industry; social engineering and personalized security; privacy and anonymity.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Science of Cyber Security, SciSec 2021, held in Shanghai, China, in August 2021.The 17 full papers and 5 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 submissions. These papers cover the following subjects: Cyber Security, Detection, Machine Learning and much more.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Science of Cyber Security, SciSec 2019, held in Nanjing, China, in August 2019. The 20 full papers and 8 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. These papers cover the following subjects: Artificial Intelligence for Cybersecurity, Machine Learning for Cybersecurity, and Mechanisms for Solving Actual Cybersecurity Problems (e.g., Blockchain, Attack and Defense; Encryptions with Cybersecurity Applications).

This book constitutes the revised post-conference proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Digital Forensics and Watermarking, IWDW 2016, held in Beijing, China, in September 2016. The 45 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. The contributions are organized in topical sections on digital forensics, visual cryptography, reversible data hiding, and steganography and steganalysis.

Urbanization and growing wealth in developing countries portend a large increase of demand for modern energy services in residential, commercial and public-service buildings in the coming decades. Pursuing energy efficiency in buildings is vital to energy security in developing countries and is identified by the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change as having the greatest potential for cost-effective reduction of CO2 emissions by 2030 among all energy-consuming sectors. Building energy efficiency codes (BEECs), along with energy efficiency standards for major appliances and equipment, are broadly recognized as a necessary government intervention to overcome persistent market barriers to capturing the economic potential of energy efficiency gains in the residential, commercial and public-service sectors. Implementation of BEECs help prevent costly energy wastes over the lifecycles of buildings in space heating, air conditioning, lighting, and other energy service requirements. Nonetheless, achieving the full potential of energy savings afforded by more energy-efficient buildings requires holding people who live or work in buildings accountable for the cost of energy services. Compliance enforcement has been the biggest challenge to implementing BEECs. This report summarizes the findings of an extensive literature survey of the experiences of implementing BEECs in developed countries, as well as those from case studies of China, Egypt, India, and Mexico. It also serves as a primer on the basic features and contents of BEECs and the commonly adopted compliance and enforcement approaches. This report highlights the key challenges to improving compliance enforcement in developing countries, including government commitment to energy efficiency, the effectiveness of government oversight of the construction sector, the compliance capacity of building supply chain, and financing constraints. The report notes that the process of transforming a country s building supply chain toward delivering increasingly more energy-efficient buildings takes time and requires persistent government intervention through uniformly enforced and regularly updated BEECs. The report recommends increased international support in strengthening the enforcement infrastructure for BEECs in middle-income developing countries. For low- and lower-middle-income countries, there is an urgent need to assist in improving the effectiveness of government oversight system for building construction, laying the foundation for the system to also cover BEECs."

In modern wireless communication systems, multiuser detection (MUD) is a good approach to achieve the highly reliable data transmissions. In the area of error control coding, the Chase algorithm, which takes advantage of the different reliabilities of the received symbols and focuses on correcting the error in the weakest symbols, can achieve a near maximum-likelihood (ML) performance and with significant complexity reduction. This book discusses the applications of the Chase algorithm in multiuser detection and proposes some novel detetors for the single-input single-output (SISO) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) code division multiple access (CDMA) systems. In the SISO-CDMA systems, the proposed multiuser detector is developed from the multistage parallel interference cancellation (PIC) detector. In the MIMO-CDMA systems, the proposed detector is based on the layered space-time multiuser detector (LAST-MUD). Both of them can achieve higher performance and lower complexity compared to the previous developed multiuser detectors. This book can be used as a reference for engineers, researchers and students working in the field of wireless communications.