Since its first appearance, artificial intelligence has been ensuring revolutionary outcomes in the context of real-world problems. At this point, it has strong relations with biomedical and today’s intelligent systems compete with human capabilities in medical tasks. However, advanced use of artificial intelligence causes intelligent systems to be black-box. That situation is not good for building trustworthy intelligent systems in medical applications. For a remarkable amount of time, researchers have tried to solve the black-box issue by using modular additions, which have led to the rise of the term: interpretable artificial intelligence. As the literature matured (as a result of, in particular, deep learning), that term transformed into explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). This book provides an essential edited work regarding the latest advancements in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) for biomedical applications. It includes not only introductive perspectives but also applied touches and discussions regarding critical problems as well as future insights. Topics discussed in the book include: XAI for the applications with medical images XAI use cases for alternative medical data/task Different XAI methods for biomedical applications Reviews for the XAI research for critical biomedical problems. Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Biomedical Applications is ideal for academicians, researchers, students, engineers, and experts from the fields of computer science, biomedical, medical, and health sciences. It also welcomes all readers of different fields to be informed about use cases of XAI in black-box artificial intelligence. In this sense, the book can be used for both teaching and reference source purposes.

This book proposes a theoretical framework identifying external and internal factors that influence internationalization strategy of Chinese brands and brand performance. It explores several key strategies e.g. standardization versus adaptation, price leadership versus branding, OBM export versus OEM export, and incremental versus leap-forward internationalization model. The relationships are examined between various international marketing mix e.g. distribution channel and pricing strategies, and brand performance. Through case studies the text also analyses the internationalization of contract-based firms.

This book proposes a theoretical framework identifying external and internal factors that influence internationalization strategy of Chinese brands and brand performance. It explores several key strategies e.g. standardization versus adaptation, price leadership versus branding, OBM export versus OEM export, and incremental versus leap-forward internationalization model. The relationships are examined between various international marketing mix e.g. distribution channel and pricing strategies, and brand performance. Through case studies the text also analyses the internationalization of contract-based firms.

Reading in a Second Language offers a comprehensive survey of the phenomenon and process of reading in a second language, with graduate and upper-level undergraduate students in second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and applied psychology as its primary audience. The book explores reading processes from a number of complementary standpoints, integrating perspectives from fields such as first and second language reading, second language acquisition, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. The first half examines major factors in second language reading: types of scripts, the cognitive and neural substrates of reading; metalinguistic awareness, word recognition, language transfer, and lexical knowledge. The second part of the book discusses the social and educational contexts in which reading development occurs, including issues related to pedagogy, the use of technology in the classroom, reading disorders, and policy making. Reading in a Second Language provides students with a full, logically organized overview of the primary factors that shape reading development and processes in a second language.

This book aims to identify the impact of tourism on social and economic development in the Issyk-Kul region of Kyrgyzstan, and to predict the development of the tourism industry and identify any limiting factors for the development of the tourism industry in the Republic as a whole. The impacts of tourism on the region have been poorly understood since the country gained independence in 1991, and so improved methods for identifying and increasing the contribution of the tourism industry to the economic and social development of the region are needed. The book assesses the impact of tourism on the socio-economic situation in the Issyk-Kul region is assessed on the basis of statistical modelling and GIS mapping, provides a comparative analysis of the categories and types of tourism in the regions of the Republic, in particular in the Issyk-Kul region, and identifies factors that have a negative impact on the country's tourism potential, as well as the shortcomings and prospects for future development. The book's primary audience will be scholars and researchers whose research focuses on the socio-economic impacts of tourism, as well as students and planners. It is expected that it will become a source of information and inspiration for all readers who feel responsible for initiating sustainable development and sustainable use of tourism resources in Kyrgyzstan and other countries.

This book systematically introduces electromagnetic theories and their applications in practice: electrostatic energy, Poynting theorem, the polarization of waves, the conservation law, the electromagnetic symmetry, the conformal mapping method, the electromagnetic loss. The parameters and theorems of electromagnetic theories are discussed in detail, making the book an essential reference for researchers, and engineers in electromagnetics field.

In four chapters and an introduction, this book systematically helps readers understand the development of the Geographical Sciences both in China and in the world during the past 30 years. Through data analysis of methodologies including CiteSpace, TDA, qualitative analysis, questionnaires, data mining and mathematical statistics, the book explains the evolution of research topics and their driving factors in the Geographical Sciences and its four branches, namely Physical Geography, Human Geography, Geographical Information Science and Environmental Geography. It also identifies the role of the Geographical Sciences in the analysis of strategic issues such as global change and terrestrial ecosystems, terrestrial water cycle and water resources, land change, global cryosphere evolution and land surface processes on the Tibetan Plateau, economic globalization and local responses, regional sustainable development, remote sensing modelling and parameter inversion, spatial analysis and simulation, and tempo-spatial processes and modelling of environmental pollutants. It then discusses research development and inadequacy of Chinese Geographical Sciences in the above-mentioned topics, as well as in the fields including Geomorphology and Quaternary environmental change, Ecohydrology, ecosystem services, the urbanization process and mechanism, medical and health geography, international rivers and transboundary environment and resources, detection and attribution of changes in land surface sensitive components, and uncertainty of spatial information and spatial analysis. It shows that the NSFC has driven the development in all these topics and fields. In addition, the book summarises trends of the Geographical Sciences in China and the research level in major countries of the world through an overview of geographical education in colleges and universities, the analysis of publications, citations and author networks of SCI/SSCI and CSCD indexed articles, and the description of Sino-USA, Sino-UK and Sino-German cooperation. This book serves as an important reference to anyone interested in geographical sciences and related fields.

Xi Chen explores the question of why there has been a dramatic rise in and routinization of social protests in China since the early 1990s. Drawing on case studies, in-depth interviews, and a unique data set of about 1,000 government records of collective petitions, this book examines how the political structure in Reform China has encouraged Chinese farmers, workers, pensioners, disabled people, and demobilized soldiers to pursue their interests and claim their rights by staging collective protests. Chen suggests that routinized contentious bargaining between the government and ordinary people has remedied the weaknesses of the Chinese political system and contributed to the regime's resilience. Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China challenges the conventional wisdom that authoritarian regimes always repress popular collective protest and that popular collective action tends to destabilize authoritarian regimes.

Mechanical Self-Assembly: Science and Applications introduces a novel category of self-assembly driven by mechanical forces. This book discusses self-assembly in various types of small material structures including thin films, surfaces, and micro- and nano-wires, as well as the practice's potential application in micro and nanoelectronics, MEMS/NEMS, and biomedical engineering. The mechanical self-assembly process is inherently quick, simple, and cost-effective, as well as accessible to a large number of materials, such as curved surfaces for forming three-dimensional small structures. Mechanical self-assembly is complementary to, and sometimes offer advantages over, the traditional micro- and nano-fabrication.

"Mechanical Self-Assembly: Science and Applications" introduces a novel category of self-assembly driven by mechanical forces. This book discusses self-assembly in various types of small material structures including thin films, surfaces, and micro- and nano-wires, as well as the practice's potential application in micro and nanoelectronics, MEMS/NEMS, and biomedical engineering. The mechanical self-assembly process is inherently quick, simple, and cost-effective, as well as accessible to a large number of materials, such as curved surfaces for forming three-dimensional small structures. Mechanical self-assembly is complementary to, and sometimes offer advantages over, the traditional micro- and nano-fabrication.

This book focuses on global economic governance covering the following five areas: the theoretical and historical evolution of global economic governance, international financial governance, international trade and investment governance, global climate change and sustainable development governance, and international macroeconomic policy coordination. On the one hand, this book aims to provide a general analytical framework for studying global economic governance. On the other hand, the study on global economic governance involves understanding its historical development, exploring its emergence and evolution, analyzing what challenges global economic governance faces in the context of a new globalization, looking into its future development trends, and proposing the direction of the reform of global economic governance system on the above basis, and finally providing theoretical references and policy advice for China's better participation in global economic governance.

This book focuses on global economic governance covering the following five areas: the theoretical and historical evolution of global economic governance, international financial governance, international trade and investment governance, global climate change and sustainable development governance, and international macroeconomic policy coordination. On the one hand, this book aims to provide a general analytical framework for studying global economic governance. On the other hand, the study on global economic governance involves understanding its historical development, exploring its emergence and evolution, analyzing what challenges global economic governance faces in the context of a new globalization, looking into its future development trends, and proposing the direction of the reform of global economic governance system on the above basis, and finally providing theoretical references and policy advice for China’s better participation in global economic governance. 

This book intends to report the new results of the efforts on the study of Layered Intelligence of the Machine Brain (LIMB). The book collects novel research ideas in LIMB and summarizes the current machine intelligence level as “five layer intelligence�- environments sensing, active learning, cognitive computing, intelligent decision making and automatized execution. The book is likely to be of interest to university researchers, R&D engineers and graduate students in computer science and electronics who wish to learn the core principles, methods, algorithms, and applications of LIMB.

This book uses the monographic study of litigation subjects, prosecution, trial, and enforcement to reveal the formation, operation, and development of criminal proceeding conventions in the Tang Dynasty. It also outlines the combination, coordination, and interaction of rules, conventions, and ideas in the traditional Chinese legal system, and presents an overview of the evolution and development of traditional litigation in China. This book is intended mainly for scholars and graduate and undergraduate students in the fields of law and Chinese history.

This book aims to identify the impact of tourism on social and economic development in the Issyk-Kul region of Kyrgyzstan, and to predict the development of the tourism industry and identify any limiting factors for the development of the tourism industry in the Republic as a whole. The impacts of tourism on the region have been poorly understood since the country gained independence in 1991, and so improved methods for identifying and increasing the contribution of the tourism industry to the economic and social development of the region are needed. The book assesses the impact of tourism on the socio-economic situation in the Issyk-Kul region is assessed on the basis of statistical modelling and GIS mapping, provides a comparative analysis of the categories and types of tourism in the regions of the Republic, in particular in the Issyk-Kul region, and identifies factors that have a negative impact on the country's tourism potential, as well as the shortcomings and prospects for future development. The book's primary audience will be scholars and researchers whose research focuses on the socio-economic impacts of tourism, as well as students and planners. It is expected that it will become a source of information and inspiration for all readers who feel responsible for initiating sustainable development and sustainable use of tourism resources in Kyrgyzstan and other countries.

This book examines recent developments in Operations Management, and focuses on four major application areas: dynamic pricing, assortment optimization, supply chain and inventory management, and healthcare operations. Data-driven optimization in which real-time input of data is being used to simultaneously learn the (true) underlying model of a system and optimize its performance, is becoming increasingly important in the last few years, especially with the rise of Big Data.

This book intends to report the new results of the efforts on the study of Layered Intelligence of the Machine Brain (LIMB). The book collects novel research ideas in LIMB and summarizes the current machine intelligence level as "five layer intelligence"- environments sensing, active learning, cognitive computing, intelligent decision making and automatized execution. The book is likely to be of interest to university researchers, R&D engineers and graduate students in computer science and electronics who wish to learn the core principles, methods, algorithms, and applications of LIMB.

Xi Chen explores the question of why there has been a dramatic rise in and routinization of social protests in China since the early 1990s. Drawing on case studies, in-depth interviews, and a unique data set of about 1,000 government records of collective petitions, this book examines how the political structure in Reform China has encouraged Chinese farmers, workers, pensioners, disabled people, and demobilized soldiers to pursue their interests and claim their rights by staging collective protests. Chen suggests that routinized contentious bargaining between the government and ordinary people has remedied the weaknesses of the Chinese political system and contributed to the regime's resilience. Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China challenges the conventional wisdom that authoritarian regimes always repress popular collective protest and that popular collective action tends to destabilize authoritarian regimes.

This book analyses climate change influences on rainfall erosivity and soil erosion across Central Asia, provides an overview (past and projections) on the Central Asian countries where projected changes in rainfall erosivity and erosivity density are the greatest, and discusses the potential impacts on the environment across the region. This analysis is accomplished primarily using the RUSLE model with past and future climate projections, spatiotemporal variations of rainfall erosivity and soil erosion based on WorldClim, and Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) climate models (for Central Asia and separately Kazakhstan). The relationship between precipitation characteristics and erosion has been well established, but spatial and temporal projections of future rainfall erosivity in a changing climate in Central Asia have not been published significantly. Therefore, assessing rainfall erosivity and its consequences can assist specialists and researchers in achieving the best practices for soil conservation. The result of this type of research is all-encompassing, and may reflect normal variations in other parts of the world (for example, the arid and semi-arid regions) and is inherently limited to the Central Asian region.

Wireless sensor networks have a range of applications, including military uses and in environmental monitoring. When an area of interest is inaccessible by conventional means, such a network can be deployed in ways resulting in a random distribution of the sensors. Randomly Deployed Wireless Sensor Networks offers a probabilistic method to model and analyze these networks. The book considers the network design, coverage, target detection, localization and tracking of sensors in randomly deployed wireless networks, and proposes a stochastic model. It quantifies the relationship between parameters of the network and its performance, and puts forward a communication protocol. The title provides analyses and formulas, giving engineering insight into randomly deployed wireless sensor networks. Five chapters consider the analysis of coverage performance; working modes and scheduling mechanisms; the relationship between sensor behavior and network performance properties; probabilistic forwarding routing protocols; localization methods for multiple targets and target number estimation; and experiments on target localization and tracking with a Mica sensor system.

Tensor network is a fundamental mathematical tool with a huge range of applications in physics, such as condensed matter physics, statistic physics, high energy physics, and quantum information sciences. This open access book aims to explain the tensor network contraction approaches in a systematic way, from the basic definitions to the important applications. This book is also useful to those who apply tensor networks in areas beyond physics, such as machine learning and the big-data analysis. Tensor network originates from the numerical renormalization group approach proposed by K. G. Wilson in 1975. Through a rapid development in the last two decades, tensor network has become a powerful numerical tool that can efficiently simulate a wide range of scientific problems, with particular success in quantum many-body physics. Varieties of tensor network algorithms have been proposed for different problems. However, the connections among different algorithms are not well discussed or reviewed. To fill this gap, this book explains the fundamental concepts and basic ideas that connect and/or unify different strategies of the tensor network contraction algorithms. In addition, some of the recent progresses in dealing with tensor decomposition techniques and quantum simulations are also represented in this book to help the readers to better understand tensor network. This open access book is intended for graduated students, but can also be used as a professional book for researchers in the related fields. To understand most of the contents in the book, only basic knowledge of quantum mechanics and linear algebra is required. In order to fully understand some advanced parts, the reader will need to be familiar with notion of condensed matter physics and quantum information, that however are not necessary to understand the main parts of the book. This book is a good source for non-specialists on quantum physics to understand tensor network algorithms and the related mathematics.

Do our ideas about social movements travel successfully beyond the democratic West? Unrest in China, from the dramatic events of 1989 to more recent stirrings, offers a rare opportunity to explore this question and to consider how popular contention unfolds in places where speech and assembly are tightly controlled. The contributors to this volume, all prominent scholars of Chinese politics and society, argue that ideas inspired by social movements elsewhere can help explain popular protest in China.

Drawing on fieldwork in China, the authors consider topics as varied as student movements, protests by angry workers and taxi drivers, recruitment to Protestant house churches, cyberprotests, and anti-dam campaigns. Their work relies on familiar concepts such as political opportunity, framing, and mobilizing structures while interrogating the usefulness of these concepts in a country with a vastly different history of class and state formation than the capitalist West. The volume also speaks to silences in the study of contentious politics (for example, protest leadership, the role of grievances, and unconventional forms of organization), and shows that well-known concepts must at times be modified to square with the reality of an authoritarian, non-western state.

Reading in a Second Language offers a comprehensive survey of the phenomenon and process of reading in a second language, with graduate and upper-level undergraduate students in second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and applied psychology as its primary audience. The book explores reading processes from a number of complementary standpoints, integrating perspectives from fields such as first and second language reading, second language acquisition, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. The first half examines major factors in second language reading: types of scripts, the cognitive and neural substrates of reading; metalinguistic awareness, word recognition, language transfer, and lexical knowledge. The second part of the book discusses the social and educational contexts in which reading development occurs, including issues related to pedagogy, the use of technology in the classroom, reading disorders, and policy making. Reading in a Second Language provides students with a full, logically organized overview of the primary factors that shape reading development and processes in a second language.

Improvement of injection molding processes remains a topic of great interest in both industry and research institutions. This book introduces the analysis of the molding process from a systems technology point of view. It is divided into four parts: the first part provides general background to introduce the injection molding process, the second covers the control of the process, the third is on the monitoring technology, and the fourth is concerned with the optimization of the process. Most the results within are from real engineering implementations and experimental tests. With the purchase of this book, you also receive a free personal access code to download the eBook.

Reliability Based Aircraft Maintenance Optimization and Applications presents flexible and cost-effective maintenance schedules for aircraft structures, particular in composite airframes. By applying an intelligent rating system, and the back-propagation network (BPN) method and FTA technique, a new approach was created to assist users in determining inspection intervals for new aircraft structures, especially in composite structures. This book also discusses the influence of Structure Health Monitoring (SHM) on scheduled maintenance. An integrated logic diagram establishes how to incorporate SHM into the current MSG-3 structural analysis that is based on four maintenance scenarios with gradual increasing maturity levels of SHM. The inspection intervals and the repair thresholds are adjusted according to different combinations of SHM tasks and scheduled maintenance. This book provides a practical means for aircraft manufacturers and operators to consider the feasibility of SHM by examining labor work reduction, structural reliability variation, and maintenance cost savings.