A comprehensive treatment of Chinese maritime law and judicial practice, this book covers both substantive law and procedure law of maritime law in mainland China. This is a professional book for both academics and practitioners in the field of maritime law. Including analysis of and comment on judicial practice from the Supreme People's Court, Higher People's Courts and ten maritime courts, as well as a whitepaper of Chinese maritime adjudication for 30 years (1984-2014), this brings to an English-speaking audience for the first time some of the most technical aspects of maritime law. It is therefore an invaluable resource for all those interested in maritime law in China.

This open access book presents a comprehensive and up-to-date collection of knowledge on the state of crowdfunding research and practice. It considers crowdfunding models and their different manifestations across a variety of geographies and sectors, and explores the perspectives of fundraisers, backers, platforms, and regulators. Gathering insights from a wide range of influential researchers in the field, the book balances concepts, theory, and case studies. Going beyond previous research on crowdfunding, the contributors also investigate issues of community, sustainability, education, and ethics. A vital resource for anyone researching crowdfunding, this book offers readers a deep understanding of the characteristics, business models, user-relations, and behavioural patterns of crowdfunding.

This book presents the features and advantages offered by complex networks in the machine learning domain. In the first part, an overview on complex networks and network-based machine learning is presented, offering necessary background material. In the second part, we describe in details some specific techniques based on complex networks for supervised, non-supervised, and semi-supervised learning. Particularly, a stochastic particle competition technique for both non-supervised and semi-supervised learning using a stochastic nonlinear dynamical system is described in details. Moreover, an analytical analysis is supplied, which enables one to predict the behavior of the proposed technique. In addition, data reliability issues are explored in semi-supervised learning. Such matter has practical importance and is not often found in the literature. With the goal of validating these techniques for solving real problems, simulations on broadly accepted databases are conducted. Still in this book, we present a hybrid supervised classification technique that combines both low and high orders of learning. The low level term can be implemented by any classification technique, while the high level term is realized by the extraction of features of the underlying network constructed from the input data. Thus, the former classifies the test instances by their physical features, while the latter measures the compliance of the test instances with the pattern formation of the data. We show that the high level technique can realize classification according to the semantic meaning of the data. This book intends to combine two widely studied research areas, machine learning and complex networks, which in turn will generate broad interests to scientific community, mainly to computer science and engineering areas.

This book presents the features and advantages offered by complex networks in the machine learning domain. In the first part, an overview on complex networks and network-based machine learning is presented, offering necessary background material. In the second part, we describe in details some specific techniques based on complex networks for supervised, non-supervised, and semi-supervised learning. Particularly, a stochastic particle competition technique for both non-supervised and semi-supervised learning using a stochastic nonlinear dynamical system is described in details. Moreover, an analytical analysis is supplied, which enables one to predict the behavior of the proposed technique. In addition, data reliability issues are explored in semi-supervised learning. Such matter has practical importance and is not often found in the literature. With the goal of validating these techniques for solving real problems, simulations on broadly accepted databases are conducted. Still in this book, we present a hybrid supervised classification technique that combines both low and high orders of learning. The low level term can be implemented by any classification technique, while the high level term is realized by the extraction of features of the underlying network constructed from the input data. Thus, the former classifies the test instances by their physical features, while the latter measures the compliance of the test instances with the pattern formation of the data. We show that the high level technique can realize classification according to the semantic meaning of the data. This book intends to combine two widely studied research areas, machine learning and complex networks, which in turn will generate broad interests to scientific community, mainly to computer science and engineering areas.

In practice, the design and architecture of a cloud varies among cloud providers. We present a generic evaluation framework for the performance, availability and reliability characteristics of various cloud platforms. We describe a generic benchmark architecture for cloud databases, specifically NoSQL database as a service. It measures the performance of replication delay and monetary cost.

Service Level Agreements (SLA) represent the contract which captures the agreed upon guarantees between a service provider and its customers. The specifications of existing service level agreements (SLA) for cloud services are not designed to flexibly handle even relatively straightforward performance and technical requirements of consumer applications. We present a novel approach for SLA-based management of cloud-hosted databases from the consumer perspective and an end-to-end framework for consumer-centric SLA management of cloud-hosted databases. The framework facilitates adaptive and dynamic provisioning of the database tier of the software applications based on application-defined policies for satisfying their own SLA performance requirements, avoiding the cost of any SLA violation and controlling the monetary cost of the allocated computing resources. In this framework, the SLA of the consumer applications are declaratively defined in terms of goals which are subjected to a number of constraints that are specific to the application requirements. The framework continuously monitors the application-defined SLA and automatically triggers the execution of necessary corrective actions (scaling out/in the database tier) when required. The framework is database platform-agnostic, uses virtualization-based database replication mechanisms and requires zero source code changes of the cloud-hosted software applications.

Deep Learning models are at the core of artificial intelligence research today. It is well known that deep learning techniques are disruptive for Euclidean data, such as images or sequence data, and not immediately applicable to graph-structured data such as text. This gap has driven a wave of research for deep learning on graphs, including graph representation learning, graph generation, and graph classification. The new neural network architectures on graph-structured data (graph neural networks, GNNs in short) have performed remarkably on these tasks, demonstrated by applications in social networks, bioinformatics, and medical informatics. Despite these successes, GNNs still face many challenges ranging from the foundational methodologies to the theoretical understandings of the power of the graph representation learning. This book provides a comprehensive introduction of GNNs. It first discusses the goals of graph representation learning and then reviews the history, current developments, and future directions of GNNs. The second part presents and reviews fundamental methods and theories concerning GNNs while the third part describes various frontiers that are built on the GNNs. The book concludes with an overview of recent developments in a number of applications using GNNs. This book is suitable for a wide audience including undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, professors and lecturers, as well as industrial and government practitioners who are new to this area or who already have some basic background but want to learn more about advanced and promising techniques and applications.

Deep Learning models are at the core of artificial intelligence research today. It is well known that deep learning techniques are disruptive for Euclidean data, such as images or sequence data, and not immediately applicable to graph-structured data such as text. This gap has driven a wave of research for deep learning on graphs, including graph representation learning, graph generation, and graph classification. The new neural network architectures on graph-structured data (graph neural networks, GNNs in short) have performed remarkably on these tasks, demonstrated by applications in social networks, bioinformatics, and medical informatics. Despite these successes, GNNs still face many challenges ranging from the foundational methodologies to the theoretical understandings of the power of the graph representation learning. This book provides a comprehensive introduction of GNNs. It first discusses the goals of graph representation learning and then reviews the history, current developments, and future directions of GNNs. The second part presents and reviews fundamental methods and theories concerning GNNs while the third part describes various frontiers that are built on the GNNs. The book concludes with an overview of recent developments in a number of applications using GNNs. This book is suitable for a wide audience including undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, professors and lecturers, as well as industrial and government practitioners who are new to this area or who already have some basic background but want to learn more about advanced and promising techniques and applications.

This open access book presents a comprehensive and up-to-date collection of knowledge on the state of crowdfunding research and practice. It considers crowdfunding models and their different manifestations across a variety of geographies and sectors, and explores the perspectives of fundraisers, backers, platforms, and regulators. Gathering insights from a wide range of influential researchers in the field, the book balances concepts, theory, and case studies. Going beyond previous research on crowdfunding, the contributors also investigate issues of community, sustainability, education, and ethics. A vital resource for anyone researching crowdfunding, this book offers readers a deep understanding of the characteristics, business models, user-relations, and behavioural patterns of crowdfunding.

This book consists of papers on the recent progresses in the state of the art in natural computation, fuzzy systems and knowledge discovery. The book can be useful for researchers, including professors, graduate students, as well as R & D staff in the industry, with a general interest in natural computation, fuzzy systems and knowledge discovery. The work printed in this book was presented at the 2021 17th International Conference on Natural Computation, Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery (ICNC-FSKD 2021, 24-26 July 2021, Guiyang, China). All papers were rigorously peer-reviewed by experts in the areas.

A comprehensive treatment of Chinese maritime law and judicial practice, this book covers both substantive law and procedure law of maritime law in mainland China. This is a professional book for both academics and practitioners in the field of maritime law. Including analysis of and comment on judicial practice from the Supreme People's Court, Higher People's Courts and ten maritime courts, as well as a whitepaper of Chinese maritime adjudication for 30 years (1984-2014), this brings to an English-speaking audience for the first time some of the most technical aspects of maritime law. It is therefore an invaluable resource for all those interested in maritime law in China.