The construction of a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem is critical for every country in the world, with Silicon Valley an example of a successful entrepreneurial ecosystem that determines the level of national innovation capability and sustainable global competitiveness for the United States. However, at present, the research on entrepreneurial ecosystems in academia is still in its primary stage with few scholars studying the characteristics, composition, and sustainability of the ecosystem. Sustainability in the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: Operating Mechanisms and Enterprise Growth is a collection of innovative research that systematically explores the operation mechanism of sustainable entrepreneurship ecosystem from macro and micro aspects so as to provide value for promoting economic vitality and regional economic development. Covering a broad range of topics including sustainability, economic development, and stakeholder management, this book is ideally designed for entrepreneurs, managers, investors, analysts, academicians, researchers, and students.

Nonsmoothness and nonconvexity arise in numerous applications of mechan- ics and modeling due to the need for studying more and more complicated phe- nomena and real life applications. Mathematicians have started to provide the necessary tools and theoretical results underpinning these applications. Ap- plied mathematicians and engineers have begun to realize the benefits of this new area and are adopting, increasingly, these new tools in their work. New computational tools facilitate numerical applications and enable the theory to be tested, and the resulting feedback poses new theoretical questions. Because of the upsurge in activity in the area of nonsmooth and noncon- vex mechanics, Professors Gao and Ogden, together with the late Professor P.D. Panagiotopoulos, had planned to organize a Minisymposium with the title Nonsmooth and Nonconvex Mechanics within the ASME 1999 Mechanics & Materials Conference, June 27-30 1999, Blacksburg, Virginia. After the unex- pected death of Professor Panagiotopoulos the first two editors invited the third editor (Professor Stavroulakis) to join them. A large number of mathematical and engineering colleagues supported our efforts by presenting lectures at the Minisymposium in which the available mathematical methods were described and many problems of nonsmooth and nonconvex mechanics were discussed. The interest of the many participants encourages us all to continue our research efforts.

This book on canonical duality theory provides a comprehensive review of its philosophical origin, physics foundation, and mathematical statements in both finite- and infinite-dimensional spaces. A ground-breaking methodological theory, canonical duality theory can be used for modeling complex systems within a unified framework and for solving a large class of challenging problems in multidisciplinary fields in engineering, mathematics, and the sciences. This volume places a particular emphasis on canonical duality theory's role in bridging the gap between non-convex analysis/mechanics and global optimization. With 18 total chapters written by experts in their fields, this volume provides a nonconventional theory for unified understanding of the fundamental difficulties in large deformation mechanics, bifurcation/chaos in nonlinear science, and the NP-hard problems in global optimization. Additionally, readers will find a unified methodology and powerful algorithms for solving challenging problems in complex systems with real-world applications in non-convex analysis, non-monotone variational inequalities, integer programming, topology optimization, post-buckling of large deformed structures, etc. Researchers and graduate students will find explanation and potential applications in multidisciplinary fields.

Motivated by practical problems in engineering and physics, drawing on a wide range of applied mathematical disciplines, this book is the first to provide, within a unified framework, a self-contained comprehensive mathematical theory of duality for general non-convex, non-smooth systems, with emphasis on methods and applications in engineering mechanics. Topics covered include the classical (minimax) mono-duality of convex static equilibria, the beautiful bi-duality in dynamical systems, the interesting tri-duality in non-convex problems and the complicated multi-duality in general canonical systems. A potentially powerful sequential canonical dual transformation method for solving fully nonlinear problems is developed heuristically and illustrated by use of many interesting examples as well as extensive applications in a wide variety of nonlinear systems, including differential equations, variational problems and inequalities, constrained global optimization, multi-well phase transitions, non-smooth post-bifurcation, large deformation mechanics, structural limit analysis, differential geometry and non-convex dynamical systems. With exceptionally coherent and lucid exposition, the work fills a big gap between the mathematical and engineering sciences. It shows how to use formal language and duality methods to model natural phenomena, to construct intrinsic frameworks in different fields and to provide ideas, concepts and powerful methods for solving non-convex, non-smooth problems arising naturally in engineering and science. Much of the book contains material that is new, both in its manner of presentation and in its research development. A self-contained appendix provides some necessary background from elementary functional analysis. Audience: The book will be a valuable resource for students and researchers in applied mathematics, physics, mechanics and engineering. The whole volume or selected chapters can also be recommended as a text for both senior undergraduate and graduate courses in applied mathematics, mechanics, general engineering science and other areas in which the notions of optimization and variational methods are employed.

Mechanics and mathematics have been complementary partners since Newton's time and the history of science shows much evidence of the beneficial influence of these disciplines on each other. Driven by increasingly elaborate modern technological applications the symbiotic relationship between mathematics and mechanics is continually growing. However, the increasingly large number of specialist journals has generated a duality gap between the two partners, and this gap is growing wider.
Advances in Mechanics and Mathematics (AMMA) is intended to bridge the gap by providing multi-disciplinary publications. This volume, AMMA 2002, includes two parts with three articles by four subject experts. Part 1 deals with nonsmooth static and dynamic systems. A systematic mathematical theory for multibody dynamics with unilateral and frictional constraints and a brief introduction to hemivariational inequalities together with some new developments in nonsmooth semi-linear elliptic boundary value problems are presented. Part 2 provides a comprehensive introduction and the latest research on dendritic growth in fluid mechanics, one of the most profound and fundamental subjects in the area of interfacial pattern formation, a commonly observed phenomenon in crystal growth and solidification processes.
Audience: Scientists and mathematicians, including advanced students (doctoral and post-doctoral level) at universities and in industry interested in mechanics and applied mathematics.

Complementarity, duality, and symmetry are closely related concepts, and have always been a rich source of inspiration in human understanding through the centuries, particularly in mathematics and science. The Proceedings of IUTAM Symposium on Complementarity, Duality, and Symmetry in Nonlinear Mechanics brings together some of world's leading researchers in both mathematics and mechanics to provide an interdisciplinary but engineering flavoured exploration of the field's foundation and state of the art developments. Topics addressed in this book deal with fundamental theory, methods, and applications of complementarity, duality and symmetry in multidisciplinary fields of nonlinear mechanics, including nonconvex and nonsmooth elasticity, dynamics, phase transitions, plastic limit and shakedown analysis of hardening materials and structures, bifurcation analysis, entropy optimization, free boundary value problems, minimax theory, fluid mechanics, periodic soliton resonance, constrained mechanical systems, finite element methods and computational mechanics. A special invited paper presented important research opportunities and challenges of the theoretical and applied mechanics as well as engineering materials in the exciting information age. Audience: This book is addressed to all scientists, physicists, engineers and mathematicians, as well as advanced students (doctoral and post-doctoral level) at universities and in industry.

Space robotics and autonomous systems (Space RAS) play a critical role in the current and future development of mission-defined machines that can survive in space while performing exploration, assembly, construction, maintenance and servicing tasks. They represent a multi-disciplinary emerging field at the intersection of space engineering, terrestrial robotics, computer science and materials. The field is essential to humankind's ability to explore or operate in space; providing greater access beyond human spaceflight limitations in the harsh environment of space, and offering greater operational handling that extends astronauts' capabilities. Space RAS covers all types of robotics for the exploration of planet surfaces as well as robotics used in orbit around the Earth and the sensors needed by the platform for navigation or control. Written by a team of International experts on space RAS, this book covers advanced research, technologies and applications including: sensing and perception to provide situational awareness for space robotic agents, explorers and assistants; mobility to reach and operate at sites of scientific interest on extra-terrestrial surfaces or free space environments using locomotion; manipulations to make intentional changes in the environment or objects using locomotion such as placing, assembling, digging, trenching, drilling, sampling, grappling and berthing; high-level autonomy for system and sub-systems to provide robust and safe autonomous navigation, rendezvous and docking capabilities and to enable extended-duration operations without human interventions to improve overall performance of human and robotic missions; human-robot interaction and multi-modal interaction; system engineering to provide a framework for understanding and coordinating the complex interactions of robots and achieving the desired system requirements; verification and validation of complex adaptive systems; modelling and simulation; and safety and trust.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17 International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, IDEAL 2016, held in Yangzhou, China, in October 2016. The 68 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 115 submissions. They provide a valuable and timely sample of latest research outcomes in data engineering and automated learning ranging from methodologies, frameworks, and techniques to applications including various topics such as evolutionary algorithms; deep learning; neural networks; probabilistic modeling; particle swarm intelligence; big data analysis; applications in regression, classification, clustering, medical and biological modeling and predication; text processing and image analysis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, IDEAL 2013, held in Hefei, China, in October 2013. The 76 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 130 submissions. These papers provided a valuable collection of latest research outcomes in data engineering and automated learning, from methodologies, frameworks and techniques to applications. In addition to various topics such as evolutionary algorithms, neural networks, probabilistic modelling, swarm intelligent, multi-objective optimisation, and practical applications in regression, classification, clustering, biological data processing, text processing, video analysis, including a number of special sessions on emerging topics such as adaptation and learning multi-agent systems, big data, swarm intelligence and data mining, and combining learning and optimisation in intelligent data engineering.

Complementarity, duality, and symmetry are closely related concepts, and have always been a rich source of inspiration in human understanding through the centuries, particularly in mathematics and science. The Proceedings of IUTAM Symposium on Complementarity, Duality, and Symmetry in Nonlinear Mechanics brings together some of world's leading researchers in both mathematics and mechanics to provide an interdisciplinary but engineering flavoured exploration of the field's foundation and state of the art developments. Topics addressed in this book deal with fundamental theory, methods, and applications of complementarity, duality and symmetry in multidisciplinary fields of nonlinear mechanics, including nonconvex and nonsmooth elasticity, dynamics, phase transitions, plastic limit and shakedown analysis of hardening materials and structures, bifurcation analysis, entropy optimization, free boundary value problems, minimax theory, fluid mechanics, periodic soliton resonance, constrained mechanical systems, finite element methods and computational mechanics. A special invited paper presented important research opportunities and challenges of the theoretical and applied mechanics as well as engineering materials in the exciting information age. Audience: This book is addressed to all scientists, physicists, engineers and mathematicians, as well as advanced students (doctoral and post-doctoral level) at universities and in industry.

Nonsmoothness and nonconvexity arise in numerous applications of mechan- ics and modeling due to the need for studying more and more complicated phe- nomena and real life applications. Mathematicians have started to provide the necessary tools and theoretical results underpinning these applications. Ap- plied mathematicians and engineers have begun to realize the benefits of this new area and are adopting, increasingly, these new tools in their work. New computational tools facilitate numerical applications and enable the theory to be tested, and the resulting feedback poses new theoretical questions. Because of the upsurge in activity in the area of nonsmooth and noncon- vex mechanics, Professors Gao and Ogden, together with the late Professor P.D. Panagiotopoulos, had planned to organize a Minisymposium with the title Nonsmooth and Nonconvex Mechanics within the ASME 1999 Mechanics & Materials Conference, June 27-30 1999, Blacksburg, Virginia. After the unex- pected death of Professor Panagiotopoulos the first two editors invited the third editor (Professor Stavroulakis) to join them. A large number of mathematical and engineering colleagues supported our efforts by presenting lectures at the Minisymposium in which the available mathematical methods were described and many problems of nonsmooth and nonconvex mechanics were discussed. The interest of the many participants encourages us all to continue our research efforts.

Motivated by practical problems in engineering and physics, drawing on a wide range of applied mathematical disciplines, this book is the first to provide, within a unified framework, a self-contained comprehensive mathematical theory of duality for general non-convex, non-smooth systems, with emphasis on methods and applications in engineering mechanics. Topics covered include the classical (minimax) mono-duality of convex static equilibria, the beautiful bi-duality in dynamical systems, the interesting tri-duality in non-convex problems and the complicated multi-duality in general canonical systems. A potentially powerful sequential canonical dual transformation method for solving fully nonlinear problems is developed heuristically and illustrated by use of many interesting examples as well as extensive applications in a wide variety of nonlinear systems, including differential equations, variational problems and inequalities, constrained global optimization, multi-well phase transitions, non-smooth post-bifurcation, large deformation mechanics, structural limit analysis, differential geometry and non-convex dynamical systems. With exceptionally coherent and lucid exposition, the work fills a big gap between the mathematical and engineering sciences. It shows how to use formal language and duality methods to model natural phenomena, to construct intrinsic frameworks in different fields and to provide ideas, concepts and powerful methods for solving non-convex, non-smooth problems arising naturally in engineering and science. Much of the book contains material that is new, both in its manner of presentation and in its research development. A self-contained appendix provides some necessary background from elementary functional analysis. Audience: The book will be a valuable resource for students and researchers in applied mathematics, physics, mechanics and engineering. The whole volume or selected chapters can also be recommended as a text for both senior undergraduate and graduate courses in applied mathematics, mechanics, general engineering science and other areas in which the notions of optimization and variational methods are employed.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 9th CCF Conference on Big Data, BigData 2021, held in Guangzhou, China, in January 2022. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic BigData 2021 was postponed to 2022. The 21 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 66 submissions. They present recent research on theoretical and technical aspects on big data, as well as on digital economy demands in big data applications.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th CCF Conference on Big Data, BigData 2020, held in Chongqing, China, in October 2020. The 16 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. They present recent research on theoretical and technical aspects on big data, as well as on digital economy demands in big data applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Distributed Artificial Intelligence, DAI 2020, held in Nanjing, China, in October 2020. The 9 full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 22 submissions. DAI aims at bringing together international researchers and practitioners in related areas including general AI, multiagent systems, distributed learning, computational game theory, etc., to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of distributed AI. Due to the Corona pandemic this event was held virtually.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First CCF International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, CCF-ICAI 2018, held in Jinan, China in August, 2018. The 17 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 82 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on unsupervised learning, graph-based and semi-supervised learning, neural networks and deep learning, planning and optimization, AI applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, IDEAL 2017, held in Guilin, China, in October/November 2017. The 65 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 110 submissions. These papers provided a sample of latest research outcomes in data engineering and automated learning, from methodologies, frameworks and techniques to applications. In addition to various topics such as evolutionary algorithms, deep learning neural networks, probabilistic modelling, particle swarm intelligence, big data analytics, and applications in image recognition, regression, classification, clustering, medical and biological modelling and prediction, text processing and social media analysis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference on Towards Autonomous Robotics, TAROS 2017, held in Guildford, UK, in July 2017. The 43 revised full papers presented together with 13 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 66 submissions. The papers discuss robotics research drawn from a wide and diverse range of topics, such as swarm and multi-robotic systems; human-robot interaction; robotic learning and imitation; robot navigation, planning and safety; humanoid and bio-inspired robots; mobile robots and vehicles; robot testing and design; detection and recognition; learning and adaptive behaviours; interaction; soft and reconfigurable robots; and service and industrial robots.

The construction of a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem is critical for every country in the world, with Silicon Valley an example of a successful entrepreneurial ecosystem that determines the level of national innovation capability and sustainable global competitiveness for the United States. However, at present, the research on entrepreneurial ecosystems in academia is still in its primary stage with few scholars studying the characteristics, composition, and sustainability of the ecosystem. Sustainability in the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: Operating Mechanisms and Enterprise Growth is a collection of innovative research that systematically explores the operation mechanism of sustainable entrepreneurship ecosystem from macro and micro aspects so as to provide value for promoting economic vitality and regional economic development. Covering a broad range of topics including sustainability, economic development, and stakeholder management, this book is ideally designed for entrepreneurs, managers, investors, analysts, academicians, researchers, and students.