It has taken platforms only twenty years to become digital economy hubs. They have changed markets, enterprises, and society. They have expedited communication, collaboration, and trade for consumers, winning their attention and collecting their data. In doing so, they have made processes, products, and industries obsolete, and disrupted the expectations and behaviours of market players. This raises the question, are digital platforms global innovators or disruptive monopolists? Are they a solution to problems of the past or emissaries of a problematic future? This book provides a multi-faceted approach to platforms and their profound impact on markets and ecosystems. Economic, managerial, social, and political aspects are analysed, and the differentiation of platforms and their disruptive potential is reviewed. The book also examines the mechanism of achieving a monopolistic position, including in the international supply chain, and the greater influence of platforms on political activity and contemporary democracy. With examples from Poland, USA, and China, the contributions offer an international evaluation of disruptive platforms across a multitude of industries. The edited collection, prepared by scholars from the SGH Warsaw School of Economics, will be valuable to researchers and academics across the fields of strategic management, marketing, innovations, international business, and the digital economy.

Interest in control of climbing and walking robots has remarkably increased over the years. Novel solutions of complex mechanical systems such as climbing, walking, flying and running robots with different kinds of locomotion and the technologies that support them and their applications are the evidence of significant progress in the area of robotics. Supporting technologies include the means by which robots use to sense, model, and navigate through their environments and, of course, actuation and control technologies. Human interaction including exoskeletons, prostheses and orthoses, as well as service robots, are increasingly active important pertinent areas of research. In addition, legged machines and tracked platforms with software architecture seem to be currently the research idea of most interest to the robotics community.

Robot Motion Control 2011 presents very recent results in robot motion and control. Forty short papers have been chosen from those presented at the sixth International Workshop on Robot Motion and Control held in Poland in June 2011. The authors of these papers have been carefully selected and represent leading institutions in this field. The following recent developments are discussed: Design of trajectory planning schemes for holonomic and nonholonomic systems with optimization of energy, torque limitations and other factors. New control algorithms for industrial robots, nonholonomic systems and legged robots. Different applications of robotic systems in industry and everyday life, like medicine, education, entertainment and others. Multiagent systems consisting of mobile and flying robots with their applications The book is suitable for graduate students of automation and robotics, informatics and management, mechatronics, electronics and production engineering systems as well as scientists and researchers working in these fields.

9 papers from the session on Mesolithic/Neolithic Interactions in the Balkans and in the Middle Danube Basin held at the 15th UISPP Congress in Lisbon in September 2006. Contents: 1) Mesolithic/Neolithic interactions in the Balkan Peninsula and the Carpathian Basin: an introduction (Marek Nowak); 2) The chipped stone assemblages of Mentese and the problem of the earliest occupation of Marmara region (Ivan Gatsov, Petranka Nedelcheva); 3) Late Mesolithic of Serbia and Montenegro (Duan Mihailoviae); 4) Mesolithic-Neolithic interactions in the Danube Gorges (Duan Boric); 5) Palaeogeographical background of the Mesolithic and Early Neolithic settlement in the Carpathian Basin (Pal Suemegi); 6) Mesolithic foragers and the spread of agriculture in Western Hungary by (Eszter Banffy, William J. Eichmann, Tibor Marton); 7) Early Neolithic raw material economies in the Carpathian Basin (Katalin T. Biro); 8) Neolithisation of the upper Tisza basin (Janusz K. Kozlowski, Marek Nowak); 9) Problems in reading MesolithicNeolithic relations in South-Eastern Europe (Janusz K. Kozlowski, Marek Nowak)."