This book starts from the application of technologies in financial institutions and financial regulators in China, and defines the concept and connotation of FinTech and SupTech in the form of topics, analyses the main problems in the development process, and discusses in depth the future development and regulatory tendency of FinTech and SupTech. In recent years, with the in-depth application and cross-domain integration of information technology in the financial world, FinTech has rapidly developed and has been widely applied, which brings us an important enlightenment: technical factors will bring fundamental changes for the development of the modern financial industry. While improving financial efficiency, it has an impact on the core financial problems such as information matching and mutual trust solving, making it urgent to improve financial supervision capacity and regulatory efficiency through information technology to effectively guarantee financial security. At present, many Chinese financial institutions have applied technologies to their daily operations and management, such as accurate customer identification, enhanced process tracking, intelligent marketing, and product process transformation, so as to simplify financial service processes and shorten service cycles. Meanwhile, the financial regulators in China, such as PBOC, CBIRC, CSRC, have also applied technologies to the area of financial regulation, in order to reduce the cost of regulation, and promote the efficiency and effectiveness of regulation. In General, this book both pays attention to practical application and theoretical, which is a useful reference book for theoretical research and practical work, and also helps readers to understand the application of technologies in financial institutions and financial regulators in China.

This book elaborates on the physical principles of polarization remote sensing. It explains the reflective characteristics of surface objects and atmosphere separately, including theory, experiment, instrument and application. In addition, it introduces how polarization remote sensing works in advanced research programs as it can be used in aviation, astronomy, disaster risk prevention and navigation fields. This book serves as a fundamental and comprehensive reference for researchers and students.

Neonatal monitoring refers to the monitoring of vital physiological parameters of premature infants and full-term infants that are critically ill. In the last decades, several important treatment modalities emerged that had a substantial impact on the mortality of prematurely born infants. However, there is a concomitant increase of neurobehavioral problems on long-term follow-up. Neonatal Monitoring Technologies: Design for Integrated Solutions presents a unique integration of knowledge from multidisciplinary fields of engineering, industrial design, and medical science for the healthcare of a specific user group. This comprehensive collection will support audiences ranging from clinical and medical professionals, academic researchers and students, technical professionals and managers, and policymakers of different sectors.

This book introduces readers to basic studies on and applied techniques involving lactic acid bacteria, including their bioengineering and industrial applications. It summarizes recent biotechnological advances in lactic acid bacteria for food and health, and provides detailed information on the applications of these bacteria in fermented foods. Accordingly, it offers a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students in the fields of food microbiology, bioengineering, fermentation engineering, food science, nutrition and health.

This volume focuses on smart medical and healthcare systems (modern intelligent systems for medicine and healthcare) and includes 31 papers presenting recent trends and innovations in medicine and healthcare, including biomedical engineering research and technologies; machine learning and labeling for biomedical visual data analysis and understanding; advanced ICT for medicine and healthcare; and healthcare support systems. Innovation in medicine and healthcare is an interdisciplinary research area, which combines advanced technologies and problem-solving skills with medical and biological science, and smart medical and healthcare systems can provide efficient and accurate solution to problems faced by healthcare and medical practitioners today by using advanced information communication techniques, computational intelligence, mathematics, robotics and other advanced technologies. Discussing the techniques developed in this area, which will have a significant effect on future medicine and healthcare, the book is a valuable resource for researchers, students, engineers, and professionals working in the fields of medical systems, medical technology, and intelligent systems.

This book contains the proceedings of the KES International conferences on Innovation in Medicine and Healthcare (KES-InMed-19) and Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services (KES-IIMSS-19), held on 17-19 June 2019 and co-located in St. Julians, on the island of Malta, as part of the KES Smart Digital Futures 2019 multi-theme conference. The major areas covered by KES-InMed-19 include: Digital IT Architecture in Healthcare; Advanced ICT for Medical and Healthcare; Biomedical Engineering, Trends, Research and Technologies and Healthcare Support System. The major areas covered by KES-IIMSS-19 were: Interactive Technologies; Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics; Intelligent Services and Architectures and Applications. This book is of use to researchers in these vibrant areas, managers, industrialists and anyone wishing to gain an overview of the latest research in these fields.

This book presents the proceedings of the KES International Conferences on Innovation in Medicine and Healthcare (KES-InMed-19), held in Split, Croatia, on June 17-19, 2020. Covering a number of key areas, including digital IT architecture in healthcare; advanced ICT for medicine and healthcare; biomedical engineering, trends, research and technologies; and healthcare support systems, this book is a valuable resource for researchers, managers, industrialists and anyone wishing to gain an overview of the latest research in these fields.

This book presents new and advanced concepts, theories and methodologies in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) target scattering mechanism modeling and interpretation, which is dedicated to bridge the gap between the acquired data and practical applications. It proposes adaptive and generalized polarimetric target decompositions, to precisely interpret the target scattering mechanisms. Further, it develops a uniform polarimetric matrix rotation theory and a polarimetric coherence pattern visualization and interpretation tool to completely explore and characterize the deep information and target signatures in the rotation domain. Finally, it demonstrates land cover classification, target detection, natural disaster damage investigation and mapping applications which use the novel scattering mechanism investigation tools. The book is a valuable resource for senior undergraduate and postgraduate students, teachers, engineers and researchers in the field of microwave remote sensing, radar polarimetry, imaging radar, and environmental studies.

This illuminating text/reference presents a review of the key aspects of the modeling and simulation (M&S) life cycle, and examines the challenges of M&S in different application areas. The authoritative work offers valuable perspectives on the future of research in M&S, and its role in engineering complex systems. Topics and features: reviews the challenges of M&S for urban infrastructure, healthcare delivery, automated vehicle manufacturing, deep space missions, and acquisitions enterprise; outlines research issues relating to conceptual modeling, covering the development of explicit and unambiguous models, communication and decision-making, and architecture and services; considers key computational challenges in the execution of simulation models, in order to best exploit emerging computing platforms and technologies; examines efforts to understand and manage uncertainty inherent in M&S processes, and how these can be unified under a consistent theoretical and philosophical foundation; discusses the reuse of models and simulations to accelerate the simulation model development process. This thought-provoking volume offers important insights for all researchers involved in modeling and simulation across the full spectrum of disciplines and applications, defining a common research agenda to support the entire M&S research community.

This book discusses the latest research and new techniques in the field of lactic acid bacteria, including comparative genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics. It also introduces the omics and functional evaluation in detail and shows the links between lactic acid bacteria and gut health and host immunity. Summarizing the biotechnological advances in lactic acid bacteria for food and health, it is a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students in the fields of food microbiology, bioengineering, food science, nutrition and health.

This research book provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art subspace learning methods for pattern recognition in intelligent environment. With the fast development of internet and computer technologies, the amount of available data is rapidly increasing in our daily life. How to extract core information or useful features is an important issue. Subspace methods are widely used for dimension reduction and feature extraction in pattern recognition. They transform a high-dimensional data to a lower-dimensional space (subspace), where most information is retained. The book covers a broad spectrum of subspace methods including linear, nonlinear and multilinear subspace learning methods and applications. The applications include face alignment, face recognition, medical image analysis, remote sensing image classification, traffic sign recognition, image clustering, super resolution, edge detection, multi-view facial image synthesis.

This thesis is devoted to the study of the Bohman-Frieze-Wormald percolation model, which exhibits a discontinuous transition at the critical threshold, while the phase transitions in random networks are originally considered to be robust continuous phase transitions. The underlying mechanism that leads to the discontinuous transition in this model is carefully analyzed and many interesting critical behaviors, including multiple giant components, multiple phase transitions, and unstable giant components are revealed. These findings should also be valuable with regard to applications in other disciplines such as physics, chemistry and biology.

This book presents the proceedings of the KES International Conferences on Innovation in Medicine and Healthcare (KES-InMed-21), held virtually on June 14-16, 2021. Covering a number of key areas, including digital IT architecture in healthcare; advanced ICT for medicine and healthcare; biomedical engineering, trends, research and technologies; and healthcare support systems, this book is a valuable resource for researchers, managers, industrialists and anyone wishing to gain an overview of the latest research in these fields.

Building upon the fundamental principles of decision theory, Decision-Based Design: Integrating Consumer Preferences into Engineering Design presents an analytical approach to enterprise-driven Decision-Based Design (DBD) as a rigorous framework for decision making in engineering design. Once the related fundamentals of decision theory, economic analysis, and econometrics modelling are established, the remaining chapters describe the entire process, the associated analytical techniques, and the design case studies for integrating consumer preference modeling into the enterprise-driven DBD framework. Methods for identifying key attributes, optimal design of human appraisal experiments, data collection, data analysis, and demand model estimation are presented and illustrated using engineering design case studies. The scope of the chapters also provides: A rigorous framework of integrating the interests from both producer and consumers in engineering design, Analytical techniques of consumer choice modelling to forecast the impact of engineering decisions, Methods for synthesizing business and engineering models in multidisciplinary design environments, and Examples of effective application of Decision-Based Design supported by case studies. No matter whether you are an engineer facing decisions in consumer related product design, an instructor or student of engineering design, or a researcher exploring the role of decision making and consumer choice modelling in design, Decision-Based Design: Integrating Consumer Preferences into Engineering Design provides a reliable reference over a range of key topics.

In line with advances in digital and computing systems, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies have transformed many aspects of medical and healthcare services, delivering tangible benefits to patents and the general public. This book is a sequel of the edition on "Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Healthcare". The first volume is focused on utilization of AI and ML for image and data analytics in the medical and healthcare domains. In this second volume, emerging methodologies and future trends in AI and ML for advancing medical treatments and healthcare services are presented. The selected studies in this book provide readers a glimpse on current progresses in AI and ML for undertaking a variety of healthcare-related tasks. The advances in AI and ML technologies for future healthcare are also discussed, shedding light on the potential of AI and ML to realize the next-generation medical treatments and healthcare services for the betterment of our global society.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of deep learning (DL) in medical and healthcare applications, including the fundamentals and current advances in medical image analysis, state-of-the-art DL methods for medical image analysis and real-world, deep learning-based clinical computer-aided diagnosis systems. Deep learning (DL) is one of the key techniques of artificial intelligence (AI) and today plays an important role in numerous academic and industrial areas. DL involves using a neural network with many layers (deep structure) between input and output, and its main advantage of is that it can automatically learn data-driven, highly representative and hierarchical features and perform feature extraction and classification on one network. DL can be used to model or simulate an intelligent system or process using annotated training data. Recently, DL has become widely used in medical applications, such as anatomic modelling, tumour detection, disease classification, computer-aided diagnosis and surgical planning. This book is intended for computer science and engineering students and researchers, medical professionals and anyone interested using DL techniques.

This book examines China’s fertility transition over the past seven decades and explores the socioeconomic impacts of the two-child policy. The first half of this book highlights the characteristics of China’s low fertility and the risk of falling to an ultra-low state, aiming to answer the question: How China’s fertility is changing and evolving? How low is China’s fertility? What are the demographic structure, driving forces and institutional characteristics of China’s low fertility? The second half models the impacts of the two-child policy on China’s population trends and demands for women, infant and child health services, and education resources for preschool, compulsive education, addressing the questions of how the two-child policy affects fertility behaviours of Chinese women, particularly the second-child fertility? How would the two-child policy impact China’s future population trends, particularly labour supply and population aging? What are the consequences for obstetrics and gynaecological services, paediatrics and childcare services; and for school capacity and demand for teachers over compulsory education? The book will be an essential read for students and scholars of Chinese studies, population and demography studies, and those interested in contemporary China.

This book offers an overview of power electronic applications in the study of power integrated circuit (IC) design, collecting novel research ideas and insights into fast transient response to prevent the output voltage from dropping significantly at the undershoot. It also discusses techniques and training to save energy and increase load efficiency, as well as fast transient response and high efficiency, which are the most important factors for consumer products that implement power IC. Lastly, the book focuses on power electronics for system loop analysis and optimal compensation design to help users and engineers implement their applications. The book is a valuable resource for university researchers, power IC R&D engineers, application engineers and graduate students in power electronics who wish to learn about the power IC design principles, methods, system behavior, and applications in consumer products.

China's economic rise and influence has been one of the most significant developments in the global economy of recent times. A driving force behind this expansion has been the private entrepreneurs and companies of China, some of which have literally redefined the economic and business landscape, both inside and outside of China. Jack Ma (Ma Yun) is one such entrepreneur. Together with his company, Alibaba, Ma has become one of the giants of the Internet world and Alibaba, one of the world's largest e-commerce platforms. This book presents Ma's experiences, entrepreneurial career and the whole process of Alibaba's creation. The authors show how Ma subverted traditions and built Alibaba into a behemoth, that set a world record as the largest public stock offering ever during its IPO in New York in 2014.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed many aspects of our daily activities. Health and well-being of humans stand as one of the key domains where AI has achieved significant progresses, saving time, costs, and potentially lives, as well as fostering economic resilience, particularly under the COVID-19 pandemic environments. This book is a sequel of the Handbook of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare. The first volume of the Handbook is dedicated to present advances and applications of AI methodologies in several specific areas, i.e., signal, image, and video processing as well as information and data analytics. In this second volume of the Handbook, general practicality challenges and future prospects of AI methodologies pertaining to healthcare and related domains are presented in Part 1 and Part 2, respectively. It is envisaged that the selected studies will provide readers a general perspective on the issues, challenges, and opportunities in designing, developing, and implementing AI-based tools and solutions in the healthcare sector, bringing benefits to transform and advance health and well-being development of humans..

Caching enables the storage of internet-based content, including web objects, videos and software updates. When web objects are downloaded from the internet or across WAN links, edge caching stores them at the edge of the network. Content can also be proactively cached at the edge based on its predicted popularity. When subsequent requests come for cached material, the content is quickly delivered from edge caching, without the need to download the data again over the WAN. The result is the ability to help save bandwidth, particularly at times of peak network load, increase content delivery, and provide users with a faster and better network experience. This also allows appliances to be forward proxies and decrypt content for caching. Content producers on the internet can add edge caching to their delivery models using content delivery networks (CDNs). In this comprehensive edited book, the editors and authors introduce edge caching from an information theoretic perspective and discuss its role in saving bandwidth. Many physical layer models and techniques, including interference alignment and beamforming are considered, as well as recent advances on intelligent and proactive communication systems capable of recommending content to users to improve quality of experience and spectrum efficiency. The book provides systematic and thorough coverage of edge caching for mobile networks for an audience of researchers, engineers and scientists from academia and the industry working in the fields of ICTs, data science, AI and machine learning.

International Hospitality Management: concepts and cases brings together the latest developments in global hospitality operations with contemporary management principles. It develops a critical view of the management practices and the traditional theories, analysing how appropriate they are to the hospitality and tourism industries in a multicultural context. International Hospitality Management is designed to instil a greater awareness of the cultural factors influencing the strategies and performances of hospitality organization. This approach focuses on a critical analysis of the relevance and application of general management theory and practice to the hospitality industry. Consisting of eleven chapters to meet with the average semester duration, each deals with a major topic of international management, with thoroughly developed with consistent learning features throughout, including: Specified learning outcomes for each chapter International case studies including major world events and issues such as the riots in Paris, fast food lawsuits, tipping, corporate social responsibility as well as studies of international corporations such as Marriott, Hilton, Intercontinental, McDonalds, Starbucks, Disney and many more Study questions and discussion questions to consolidate learning and understanding Links to relevant websites and consolidated list of further reading at the back of the book Online resources available for lecturers and students including downloadable figures from the book, PowerPoint slides, further cases and extra exercises and points for discussion. Visit the site at http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/9780750666756/

Although ceramics have been known to mankind literally for millennia, research has never ceased. Apart from the classic uses as a bulk material in pottery, construction, and decoration, the latter half of the twentieth century saw an explosive growth of application fields, such as electrical and thermal insulators, wear-resistant bearings, surface coatings, lightweight armour, or aerospace materials. In addition to plain, hard solids, modern ceramics come in many new guises such as fabrics, ultrathin films, microstructures and hybrid composites.
Built on the solid foundations laid down by the 20-volume series Materials Science and Technology, Ceramics Science and Technology picks out this exciting material class and illuminates it from all sides.
Materials scientists, engineers, chemists, biochemists, physicists and medical researchers alike will find this work a treasure trove for a wide range of ceramics knowledge from theory and fundamentals to practical approaches and problem solutions.

Global Strategic Management in the Service Industry: A Perspective of the New Era covers recent changes within the service industry during the COVID-19 Pandemic and new and emerging consumer trends, providing a holistic view of this new era within the service industry. Across a range of thematic chapters, issues in digital marketing, online retailing and experiential marketing are examined, as well as the challenges faced by small and large businesses in the service sector. Tabari and Chen provide a fresh view of changes in the strategic management and marketing strategies within the service industry, exchanging new ideas for both the mid and post-pandemic crisis. Global Strategic Management in the Service Industry illustrates how strategic managers in service industry appraise the sectors in which their organisations are involved; appraise their competitors; and reassess their strategy and fix goals to meet all the challenges presented. This is important particularly due to rapid growth and technological advancements developed in service sectors being applied to other industries.

This book presents the proceedings of the KES International Conferences on Innovation in Medicine and Healthcare (KES-InMed-21), held virtually on June 14-16, 2021. Covering a number of key areas, including digital IT architecture in healthcare; advanced ICT for medicine and healthcare; biomedical engineering, trends, research and technologies; and healthcare support systems, this book is a valuable resource for researchers, managers, industrialists and anyone wishing to gain an overview of the latest research in these fields.