Developments in the interrelated industries surrounding air transportation and space exploitation continue to give rise to new and challenging problems in international law. As more and more countries and private entities use outer space for satellite-based systems of air navigation, telecommunications, and surveillance, significant economic and environmental issues loom ever larger. Moreover, the ongoing exploration of space and celestial bodies in search of commercial possibilities poses new questions, ranging in substance from the proliferation of space debris to intellectual property rights. The Warsaw System of intercarrier liability, although still serviceable, is severely strained by such developments as the products liability of aircraft and satellite manufacturers and the liability involved in the construction and launching of space stations and multipurpose satellites. Aware of the massive convergence of these legal and political challenges, over 200 air and space experts - from the airlines and aerospace industries, from law practice and law faculties, and from civil aviation authorities at national, regional, and international levels - met in Seoul, in June 1997, to search for solutions and to promote and strengthen international co-operation in this crucial sphere. Twenty-three countries were represented. This book is the record of their presentations, discussions, recommendations, and conclusions. The many specific issues and topics raised and analyzed include the phenomenon of trade in launch services; the interdependence of military and satellite systems; new remote sensing technologies and the challenges they present to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967; new airports; the transfer of air traffic control functions; the transnational co-production of aircraft; regional and bilateral air transport agreements; and a great deal more. Numerous cases from a variety of jurisdictions are cited, so that the reader may gain a sense of jurisprudential trends in air and space law as we proceed into the 21st Century.

This book covers graphene reinforced polymers, which are useful in electronic applications, including electrically conductive thermoplastics composites, thermosets and elastomers. It systematically introduces the reader to fundamental aspects and leads over to actual applications, such as sensor fabrication, electromagnetic interference shielding, optoelectronics, superconductivity, or memory chips. The book also describes dielectric and thermal behaviour of graphene polymer composites - properties which are essential to consider for the fabrication and production of these new electronic materials. The contributions in this book critically discuss the actual questions in the development and applications of graphene polymer composites. It will thus appeal to chemists, physicists, materials scientists as well as nano technologists, who are interested in the properties of graphene polymer composites.

This monograph is a comprehensive introduction to the field of soccer robotics. Soccer robotics has become an important research area integrating mechatronics, computer science and artificial intelligence techniques to create real-world autonomous systems. It also serves as a popular test arena in which to compare the different approaches, in diverse types of competition and with varying levels of distributed perception and collaboration. The focus of this monograph is the FIRA framework of Soccer Robotics, in particular MiroSot, which uses a central overhead camera to overview the whole soccer field and a central control of the robots. "Soccer Robotics" completely describes the different requirements to create a soccer team and details the hardware aspects, the computer vision needed, navigation, action selection, basic skills and game strategy. These aspects are described at an undergraduate level, resulting in a book not only useful as a text for courses but also indispensable for everyone who wants to participate in MiroSot robotics.

This book presents new insights and successful solutions to the operational problems of automated container terminals and cargo systems. It comprises reports on the state of the art, applications of quantitative methods, as well as case studies and simulation results. Its contributions are written by leading experts from academia and business and address practitioners and researchers in logistics, transportation, and management.

The United Nations currently has five effective international space treaties, namely the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, Space Rescue Agreement of 1968, Space Liability Convention of 1972, Space Registration Convention of 1975, and Moon Agreement of 1979. However, with recent competition and movements to mine and exploit natural resources from such entities as the moon, asteroids, etc., these outdated treaties no longer address current advancements. It is imperative that new research is undertaken to urge and progress new space laws and policies that strengthen international cooperation and joint undertakings into the exploitation of natural resources from outer space. Global Issues Surrounding Outer Space Law and Policy grants a general understanding for the current issues and methods of solution in the field of outer space law and policy in the global society. It suggests a revision of the five international space treaties and presents a new International Space Agency (ISA) that would use international cooperation and an International Court of Air and Space Law to promote the speed of work and fairness in trials of air and space law cases. Additionally, solutions for the cooperation of the global community towards joint undertakings and exploitation of natural resources in celestial bodies is explored. This book is ideal for lawyers, professors, government officials, space agencies, academicians, researchers, students, and anyone looking to understand the complicated problems and methods of solution in international space law and policy.

Container transportation is the predominant mode of inter-continental cargo traffic. Since container ships and port terminals involve a huge capital investment and significant daily operating costs, it is of crucial importance to efficiently utilize the internal resources of container terminals and transportation systems. Today there is an ongoing trend to use automated container handling and transportation technology, in particular, in countries with high labour costs. This in turn requires highly sophisticated control strategies in order to meet the desired performance measures. The primary objective of this book is to reflect these recent developments and to present new insights and successful solutions to operational problems of automated container terminals and transportation systems. It comprises reports on the state of the art, applications of quantitative methods, as well as case studies and simulation results. Its contributions are written by leading experts from academia and business. The book addresses practitioners as well as academic researchers in logistics, transportation, and management.

This book gathers the Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications (RITA 2020). The areas covered include: Instrumentation and Control, Automation, Autonomous Systems, Biomechatronics and Rehabilitation Engineering, Intelligent Systems, Machine Learning, Mobile Robotics, Social Robotics and Humanoid Robotics, Sensors and Actuators, and Machine Vision, as well as Signal and Image Processing. As a valuable asset, the book offers researchers and practitioners a timely overview of the latest advances in robot intelligence technology and its applications.

Elastomeric Nanocellulose Composites provides an in-depth study of recent developments in this fast-evolving research field. This book covers diverse aspects of materials engineering, surface treatments, and fabrication of green nanocomposites. It consolidates recent studies and qualitative findings on the incorporation of a myriad of nanocellulose variants into various types of elastomer matrices with the main goal of enhancing its mechanical integrity and potentially phasing out conventional elastomer fillers. The current market is likewise discussed in detail. This book will provide an in-depth study of current developments of nanocellulose incorporated elastomer composites and their applications. The book will be an essential reference resource for material scientists, academic and industrial researchers, and technologists covering all aspects in the field. Carbon black and silica are currently used as fillers in elastomer-based composites, but the use of these reinforcing agents is not sustainable or eco-friendly. Therefore there is a need to look for more sustainable filler materials for elastomers.

Planning and Operation of Container Terminals provides methodologies to optimize the design of container handling systems. The book offers various optimization models and details how to apply the models. In addition, it captures key points of academic research to provide a thorough and up-to-date guide on this rapidly changing field. Sections cover various aspects of terminal operation and propose key issues for their optimization. In addition, the relationships among various operational problems are described, along with tactics for the efficient utilization of resources. Students and professionals alike will find this a useful resource for getting up-to-speed in this dynamic field. The efficiency of a container terminal highly depends on the design of handling systems and operation methods of the terminal. In recent decades, the development of ports has become large-scale, modern and automatic, so it is necessary to learn about the design and operation of modern ports quickly and to understand the research hotspots, research frontiers and research status in the current field, as well as the use and innovation of research methods.

Biopolymer Composites in Electronics examines the current state-of-the-art in the electronic application based on biopolymer composites. Covering the synthesis, dispersion of fillers, characterization and fabrication of the composite materials, the book will help materials scientists and engineers address the challenges posed by the increased use of biopolymeric materials in electronic applications. The influence of preparation techniques on the generation of micro, meso, and nanoscale fillers, and the effect of filler size and dispersion on various biopolymers are discussed in detail. Applications covered include sensors, actuators, optics, fuel cells, photovoltaics, dielectrics, electromagnetic shielding, piezoelectrics, flexible displays, and microwave absorbers. In addition, characterization techniques are discussed and compared, enabling scientists and engineers to make the correct choice of technique. This book is a 'one-stop' reference for researchers, covering the entire state-of-the-art in biopolymer electronics. Written by a collection of expert worldwide contributors from industry, academia, government, and private research institutions, it is an outstanding reference for researchers in the field of biopolymer composites for advanced technologies.

Sensors for measuring and detecting chemical and biological substances are comprehensively used and are, for the most part, unobtrusive. They can help monitor our health through alerting us to chemical or biological changes in our bodies, our environment through checking air quality or pollution levels and they can contribute towards a more sustainable future. Polymer-based sensors are the subject of much attention due to their ability to collect molecules on their flexible sensory surfaces. However, most petroleum-based polymers are not renewable, leading to problems of waste-disposal. By using renewable materials, such as paper, cotton or starch, these problems can be overcome. This book reviews the current state-of-play in renewable-material-based chemical sensors and biosensors, and suggests applications in industry, environment and biomedicine.

Since the 1980s the Korean peninsula has been in a state of transition. Forged by the Cold War, the politico-economic systems of North and South Korea as well as the international system of Northeast Asia are in a state of flux. Apart from identifying the main aspects of the transition taking place, this volume explains the sources of change and continuity, and relates the empirical trends from Korea to the contemporary debates in the social sciences.

This book gathers the Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications (RITA 2020). The areas covered include: Instrumentation and Control, Automation, Autonomous Systems, Biomechatronics and Rehabilitation Engineering, Intelligent Systems, Machine Learning, Mobile Robotics, Social Robotics and Humanoid Robotics, Sensors and Actuators, and Machine Vision, as well as Signal and Image Processing. As a valuable asset, the book offers researchers and practitioners a timely overview of the latest advances in robot intelligence technology and its applications.

The classic guide that taught a generation of institutional investors how to construct and manage high-yield quant portfolios-now updated for the new generation Quantitative Equity Portfolio Management is a comprehensive guide to the entire process of constructing and managing a high-yield quantitative equity portfolio. This detailed handbook begins with the basic principles of quantitative active management and then clearly outlines how to build an equity portfolio using those powerful concepts. This edition of the go-to guide for quant investing has been updated with critical new data, information, and insights, including: All table and graph data updated to 2020 The secret ingredients to building smart beta ETFs and mutual funds A new list of behavioral biases that lead to investment anomalies Entirely new factor definitions and test of their outperformance with real stock return data New labs using real data written in R, MATLAB, and STATA with new techniques to optimize professional portfolios New methods to deal with outlier data The author's new research on transaction cost problems Detailed uses of ESG data to create socially responsible portfolios Downloadable monthly factor returns from the authors Quantitative Equity Portfolio Management delivers a complete, easy-to-apply methodology for creating an equity portfolio that maximizes returns and minimizes risks. It covers every step of the process, including basic models, stock screening and ranking, fundamental and economic factor modelling, forecasting factor premiums and exposures, building market neutral portfolios, tax management, performance measurement and attribution, and backtesting. An essential reference for professional money managers and students taking advanced investment courses, Quantitative Equity Portfolio Management offers a full array of methods for effectively developing high-performance equity portfolios that deliver lucrative returns for clients.

This book includes papers from the 5th International Conference on Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications held at KAIST, Daejeon, Korea on December 13-15, 2017. It covers the following areas: artificial intelligence, autonomous robot navigation, intelligent robot system design, intelligent sensing and control, and machine vision. The topics included in this book are deep learning, deep neural networks, image understanding, natural language processing, speech/voice/text recognition, reasoning & inference, sensor integration/fusion/perception, multisensor data fusion, navigation/SLAM/localization, distributed intelligent algorithms and techniques, ubiquitous computing, digital creatures, intelligent agents, computer vision, virtual/augmented reality, surveillance, pattern recognition, gesture recognition, fingerprint recognition, animation and virtual characters, and emerging applications. This book is a valuable resource for robotics scientists, computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and professionals in universities, research institutes and laboratories.

This book covers graphene reinforced polymers, which are useful in electronic applications, including electrically conductive thermoplastics composites, thermosets and elastomers. It systematically introduces the reader to fundamental aspects and leads over to actual applications, such as sensor fabrication, electromagnetic interference shielding, optoelectronics, superconductivity, or memory chips. The book also describes dielectric and thermal behaviour of graphene polymer composites - properties which are essential to consider for the fabrication and production of these new electronic materials. The contributions in this book critically discuss the actual questions in the development and applications of graphene polymer composites. It will thus appeal to chemists, physicists, materials scientists as well as nano technologists, who are interested in the properties of graphene polymer composites.

This book covers all aspects of robot intelligence from perception at sensor level and reasoning at cognitive level to behavior planning at execution level for each low level segment of the machine. It also presents the technologies for cognitive reasoning, social interaction with humans, behavior generation, ability to cooperate with other robots, ambience awareness, and an artificial genome that can be passed on to other robots. These technologies are to materialize cognitive intelligence, social intelligence, behavioral intelligence, collective intelligence, ambient intelligence and genetic intelligence. The book aims at serving researchers and practitioners with a timely dissemination of the recent progress on robot intelligence technology and its applications, based on a collection of papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications (RiTA), held in Bucheon, Korea, December 14 - 16, 2015. For better readability, this edition has the total of 49 articles grouped into 3 chapters: Chapter I: Ambient, Behavioral, Cognitive, Collective, and Social Robot Intelligence, Chapter II: Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Design for Advanced Robotics, Chapter III: Applications of Robot Intelligence Technology .

This book covers all aspects of robot intelligence from perception at sensor level and reasoning at cognitive level to behavior planning at execution level for each low level segment of the machine. It also presents the technologies for cognitive reasoning, social interaction with humans, behavior generation, ability to cooperate with other robots, ambience awareness, and an artificial genome that can be passed on to other robots. These technologies are to materialize cognitive intelligence, social intelligence, behavioral intelligence, collective intelligence, ambient intelligence and genetic intelligence. The book aims at serving researchers and practitioners with a timely dissemination of the recent progress on robot intelligence technology and its applications, based on a collection of papers presented at the 3rd International Conference on Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications (RiTA), held in Beijing, China, November 6 - 8, 2014. For better readability, this edition has the total 74 papers grouped into 3 chapters: Chapter I: Ambient, Behavioral, Cognitive, Collective, and Social Robot Intelligence, Chapter II: Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Design for Advanced Robotics, Chapter III: Applications of Robot Intelligence Technology, where individual chapters, edited respectively by Peter Sincak, Hyun Myung, Jun Jo along with Weimin Yang and Jong-Hwan Kim, begin with a brief introduction written by the respective chapter editors.

We are facing a new technological challenge on how to store and retrieve knowledge and manipulate intelligence for autonomous services by intelligent systems which should be capable of carrying out real world tasks autonomously. To address this issue, robot researchers have been developing intelligence technology (InT) for "robots that think" which is in the focus of this book. The book covers all aspects of intelligence from perception at sensor level and reasoning at cognitive level to behavior planning at execution level for each low level segment of the machine. It also presents the technologies for cognitive reasoning, social interaction with humans, behavior generation, ability to cooperate with other robots, ambience awareness and an artificial genome that can be passed on to other robots. These technologies are to materialize cognitive intelligence, social intelligence, behavioral intelligence, collective intelligence, ambient intelligence and genetic intelligence. The book aims at serving researchers and practitioners with a timely dissemination of the recent progress on robot intelligence technology and its applications, based on a collection of papers presented at the at the 2nd International Conference on Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications (RiTA), held in Denver, USA, December 18-20, 2013.

In recent years, robots have been built based on cognitive architecture which has been developed to model human cognitive ability. The cognitive architecture can be a basis for intelligence technology to generate robot intelligence. In this edited book the robot intelligence is classified into six categories: cognitive intelligence, social intelligence, behavioral intelligence, ambient intelligence, collective intelligence and genetic intelligence. This classification categorizes the intelligence of robots based on the different aspects of awareness and the ability to act deliberately as a result of such awareness. This book aims at serving researchers and practitioners with a timely dissemination of the recent progress on robot intelligence technology and its applications, based on a collection of papers presented at the 1st International Conference on Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications (RiTA), held in Gwangju, Korea, December 16-18, 2012. For a better readability, this edition has the total 101 papers grouped into 3 chapters: Chapter I: Cognitive Intelligence, Social Intelligence and Behavioral Intelligence, Chapter II: Ambient Intelligence, Collective Intelligence and Genetic Intelligence, Chapter III: Intelligent Robot Technologies and Applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th Conference on Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems, TAROS 2012 and the 15th Robot World Congress, FIRA 2012, held as joint conference in Bristol, UK, in August 2012. The 36 revised full papers presented together with 25 extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 89 submissions. The papers cover various topics in the field of autonomous robotics.

This monograph is a comprehensive introduction to the field of soccer robotics. Soccer robotics has become an important research area integrating mechatronics, computer science and artificial intelligence techniques to create real-world autonomous systems. It also serves as a popular test arena in which to compare the different approaches, in diverse types of competition and with varying levels of distributed perception and collaboration. The focus of this monograph is the FIRA framework of Soccer Robotics, in particular MiroSot, which uses a central overhead camera to overview the whole soccer field and a central control of the robots. "Soccer Robotics" completely describes the different requirements to create a soccer team and details the hardware aspects, the computer vision needed, navigation, action selection, basic skills and game strategy. These aspects are described at an undergraduate level, resulting in a book not only useful as a text for courses but also indispensable for everyone who wants to participate in MiroSot robotics.

This book presents new insights and successful solutions to the operational problems of automated container terminals and cargo systems. It comprises reports on the state of the art, applications of quantitative methods, as well as case studies and simulation results. Its contributions are written by leading experts from academia and business and address practitioners and researchers in logistics, transportation, and management.

Container transportation is the predominant mode of inter-continental cargo traffic. Since container ships and port terminals involve a huge capital investment and significant daily operating costs, it is of crucial importance to efficiently utilize the internal resources of container terminals and transportation systems. Today there is an ongoing trend to use automated container handling and transportation technology, in particular, in countries with high labour costs. This in turn requires highly sophisticated control strategies in order to meet the desired performance measures. The primary objective of this book is to reflect these recent developments and to present new insights and successful solutions to operational problems of automated container terminals and transportation systems. It comprises reports on the state of the art, applications of quantitative methods, as well as case studies and simulation results. Its contributions are written by leading experts from academia and business. The book addresses practitioners as well as academic researchers in logistics, transportation, and management.

th This volume is an edition of the papers selected from the 12 FIRA RoboWorld C- gress, held in Incheon, Korea, August 16-18, 2009. The Federation of International Robosoccer Association (FIRA - www. fira. net) is a non-profit organization, which organizes robotic competitions and meetings around the globe annually. The RoboSoccer competitions started in 1996 and FIRA was - tablished on June 5, 1997. The Robot Soccer competitions are aimed at promoting the spirit of science and technology to the younger generation. The congress is a forum in which to share ideas and future directions of technologies, and to enlarge the human networks in robotics area. The objectives of the FIRA Cup and Congress are to explore the technical dev- opment and achievement in the field of robotics, and provide participants with a robot festival including technical presentations, robot soccer competitions and exhibits - der the theme "Where Theory and Practice Meet. " th Under the umbrella of the 12 FIRA RoboWorld Congress Incheon 2009, six int- national conferences were held for greater impact and scientific exchange: th * 6 International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Robotics and Autonomous Systems (CIRAS) th * 5 International Symposium on Autonomous Minirobots for Research and Edutainment (AMiRE) * International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR) * International Conference on Advanced Humanoid Robotics Research (ICAHRR) * International Conference on Entertainment Robotics (ICER) * International Robotics Education Forum (IREF) This volume consists of selected quality papers from the six conferences.