Xinjiang, named in 1759 by Emperor Qianlong (乾隆 1711-1799) of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty of China, was ruled by the Qing from the final phase of the Dzungar-Qing Wars when the Dzungar Khanate was conquered, and lasted until the fall of the imperial dynasty in 1912. Based on rare ancient maps and historical archives, the book tells stories of Xinjiang during the Qing. It involves Emperor Qianlong, Fragrant concubine (xiangfei 香妃, Uyghur concubine married with Emperor Qianlong), Lady Catherine (the wife of the British consul-general in Kashgar at the end of the 19th century, and lived in Xinjiang for nearly two decades), Swedish missionaries (persisted in spreading Christianity for 38 years among Uyghurs who believed in Islam), Guan Gong temples (the belief in Lord Guan, a religious tradition of the Han and Manchus) and so on.

The collective and cooperation behaviour of living beings, such as flocks of bird, shoals of fish, herds of wildebeest has certain advantages, including avoiding predators, increasing the chance of finding food, saving energy. This book introduces how to build a robot flocking system with similar behaviour to biological flocking. You can learn how to control the robots to move like a group, cohesively avoid obstacles and cooperatively track a target. The flocking system is analysed with control theory and tested via realistic simulations and real robots experiments. You will see a group of wifibots using wifi-cameras to track a moving target and sixty UAVs flying like a swarm.

Application of parallel manipulator has received lots of attention recently in the industry and the robotic community due to its high accuracy, high rigidity, high operation speed, high load capacity and high stiffness. Despite these advantages, the kinematic and dynamic analyses of parallel manipulators are extremely complicated. However, such models are important in terms of qualitative analysis of the required actuator forces to realize certain end- effector task (inverse dynamics), and computing the corresponding end-effector task based on certain input to the system (forward dynamics). Till date, not much general symbolic solution is reported to aid the above process. Most of the prior work required some form of heuristic, or introduction of extra spring/damper elements to approximate the solutions. This book addresses the possibility in using the state-of-the-art symbolic manipulation software tool DynaFlexPro to derive the general kinematic and dynamic equation of motion so that more accurate and convenient solution can be computed. We address these issues using the example of Stewart Platform and highlight the solution to the corresponding challenges.

Being aware of others' activities plays a vital role in the success of online collaboration. As a result, many groupware systems nowadays provide information about collaboration activities in various forms. However, all of them tend to overburden the user with large amounts of unnecessary information. This happens because most of the time users are only interested in certain pieces of information for limited duration, while presently there exist no efficient mechanism for automatically following a user's focus and adjusting the information flow directed at him. In this book the author presents as a practical solution to this problem the dynamic awareness system (DAS), which extends the functionality of the BSCW shared workspace system. A key element of the DAS is its rule-based inference mechanism for adjusting the notification intensity, thus reducing the overall information overload. This indirectly allows users to both keep better track of relevant events and manage the shared data more efficiently. The effectiveness of the DAS was tested under real-life circumstances and the evaluation results are also described in this book.

This book exposes the internal structure of non-self-adjoint operators acting on complex separable infinite dimensional Hilbert space, by analyzing and studying the commutant of operators. A unique presentation of the theorem of Cowen?Douglas operators is given. The authors take the strongly irreducible operator as a basic model, and find complete similarity invariants of Cowen?Douglas operators by using K-theory, complex geometry and operator algebra tools.