This book presents the latest research findings and state-of-the-art solutions on optimization techniques and provides new research direction and developments. Both the theoretical and practical aspects of the book will be much beneficial to experts and students in optimization and operation research community. It selects high quality papers from The International Conference on Optimization: Techniques and Applications (ICOTA2013). The conference is an official conference series of POP (The Pacific Optimization Research Activity Group; there are over 500 active members). These state-of-the-art works in this book authored by recognized experts will make contributions to the development of optimization with its applications.

The two volume set LNCS 6938 and LNCS 6939 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Visual Computing, ISVC 2011, held in Las Vegas, NV, USA, in September 2011. The 68 revised full papers and 46 poster papers presented together with 30 papers in the special tracks were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 240 submissions. The papers of part I (LNCS 6938) are organized in computational bioimaging, computer graphics, motion and tracking, segmentation, visualization; mapping modeling and surface reconstruction, biomedical imaging, computer graphics, interactive visualization in novel and heterogeneous display environments, object detection and recognition. Part II (LNCS 6939) comprises topics such as immersive visualization, applications, object detection and recognition, virtual reality, and best practices in teaching visual computing.

The Targeted Poverty Alleviation programme was proposed by President Xi in 2013 and aims to give poor people the resources to lift themselves out of poverty. No fewer than three million cadres have been sent to the least developed areas of the country to educate, inspire and help the most impoverished people with financial support, jobs and business opportunities. The authors of this series of books visited some of the villages that were previously very poor, to document how developments in education, agriculture, health and tourism had created positive change. The authors wrote about what they saw, what they heard, how they felt in these areas and rendered them into touching and vivid stories. The south of Jiangxi Province is the well-known red revolutionary base area. Wang Song mainly describes the five most representative counties of poverty alleviation with characteristics and outstanding achievements -Yudu County, Shicheng County, Xingguo County, Quannan County and Longnan County in his reportage Red, Red Azalea. This reportage is structured with scatters stories in panorama view and renders the poverty alleviation vividly together with the revolution in the past, full of specific details of stories and characters, making it remarkable by its profound thoughts and political speculations, as well as historical depth and global vision.

This book contains mostly the author's up-to-date research results in the area. Option pricing has attracted much attention in the past decade from applied mathematicians, statisticians, practitioners and educators. Many partial differential equation-based theoretical models have been developed for valuing various options. These models do not have any practical use unless their solutions can be found. However, most of these models are far too complex to solve analytically and numerical approximations have to be sought in practice. The contents of the book consist of three parts: (i) basic theory of stochastic control and formulation of various option pricing models, (ii) design of finite volume, finite difference and penalty-based algorithms for solving the models and (iii) stability and convergence analysis of the algorithms. It also contains extensive numerical experiments demonstrating how these algorithms perform for practical problems. The theoretical and numerical results demonstrate these algorithms provide efficient, accurate and easy-to-implement numerical tools for financial engineers to price options. This book is appealing to researchers in financial engineering, optimal control and operations research. Financial engineers and practitioners will also find the book helpful in practice.