Many everyday dilemmas existing in the real world are complex and difficult to solve or fix, ranging from tax evasion to dispatching taxis to scheduling patient visits in hospitals, and much more. Within these complicated problems, however, lies the potential to be simplified or solved by intelligent agents and multi-agent systems. Theoretical and Practical Frameworks for Agent-Based Systems tackles these real problems and many more, bringing the theoretical research of intelligent agents to researchers and practitioners in academia, government, and innumerable industries. Professionals and experts in every field ranging from education to healthcare and beyond will find this reference to be essential in the understanding of agents, and researchers currently working in the field of intelligent agents will benefit from this exciting examination of practical applications.

This book introduces the state-of-the-art research progress of system-level EMC, including theories, design technologies, principles and applications in practice. The engineering design, simulation, prediction, analysis, test, stage control as well as effectiveness evaluation are discussed in detail with extensive project experiences, making the book an essential reference for researchers and industrial engineers.

This book brings audiences the enchanting melodies passing down from generation to generation in the Zhuang community, which are on the brink of extinction. Specifically, it sheds light on the origin, evolution and artistic features of Zhuang folk song in the first place, and then it shifts to their English translation based on meta-functional equivalence, through which the multi-aesthetics of Zhuang folk song have been represented. At length, forty classic Zhuang folk songs have been selected, and each could be sung bilingually in line with the stave. This book benefits researchers and students who are interested in music translation as well as the Zhuang ethnic music, culture and literature. It also gives readers an insight into musicology, anthropology and intercultural study.

Written by respected experts, this book highlights the latest findings on the electromagnetic ultrasonic guided wave (UGW) imaging method. It introduces main topics as the Time of Flight (TOF) extraction method for the guided wave signal, tomography and scattering imaging methods which can be used to improve the imaging accuracy of defects. Further, it offers essential insights into how electromagnetic UGW can be used in nondestructive testing (NDT) and defect imaging. As such, the book provides valuable information, useful methods and practical experiments that will benefit researchers, scientists and engineers in the field of NDT.

This book provides readers with the latest research on the affective aspect of online interactions between doctors and e-patients in the context of China from a poststructuralist discourse analysis perspective. At the heart of this book is the presentation of four chapters which address (1) indirect negative emotional acts by e-patients and empathic acts by doctors (constituting "affective practice"), (2) the interactional discursive features involved in the affective practice, (3) discursive positions of e-patients and doctors within the affective practice context, and (4) power relations that are reflected in the positionings. This book sheds light on the importance of examining the affective facet of medical consultation, when it comes to identifying non-traditional positions and power relations in doctor-patient communication. It also provides the implication that e-healthcare platforms, especially those with an e-commercialized model for healthcare services, have potential to produce a type of neo-liberal discourse-the e-commercialized medical consultation discourse-in which patients and caregivers, who are acknowledged as the less powerful group in the traditional healthcare activities, are empowered and privileged.

Structural Seismic and Civil Engineering focuses on civil engineering research, anti-seismic technology and engineering structure. These proceedings gather the most cutting-edge research and achievements, aiming to provide scholars and engineers with preferable research directions and engineering solutions as reference. Subjects in these proceedings include: Engineering Structure Materials of Civil Engineering Structural Seismic Resistance Monitoring and Testing The works in these proceedings aim to promote the development of civil engineering and earthquake engineering. Thereby, promoting scientific information interchange between scholars from top universities, research centers and high-tech enterprises working all around the world.

Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this is the first monograph to frame three once widely-read tanci fiction (a type of lyrical narrative) from nineteenth-century China, Meng ying yuan (1843), Yu xuan cao (1894), and Jing zhong zhuan (1895), as interrelated texts composed by three generation of members from one extended gentry family in South China. Based on the framework of family bonds, this book uses the three tanci works, authored by a mother, her daughter, and a nephew, to examine the history of how the changing aesthetics of tanci developed over China's turbulent nineteenth century. It also demonstrates how the three writers used the genre of tanci to blur the boundaries of orthodox Confucian norms, in order to depict the evolving nature of gendered power relations at the dawn of China's modernity.

- Presents the first research by a major Asian university on the seismic shift to online learning in higher education due to the pandemic - Offers insights direct from global university leaders on the leadership of higher education institutes through the pandemic - Provides students, academics and policy makers with research and policy implications for the wider higher education sector.

- Presents the first research by a major Asian university on the seismic shift to online learning in higher education due to the pandemic - Offers insights direct from global university leaders on the leadership of higher education institutes through the pandemic - Provides students, academics and policy makers with research and policy implications for the wider higher education sector.

China's growth miracle over the past 30 years has propelled it to become the world's second largest economy and potentially the largest in the following years. This book examines China's experience on economic reform, trying to find the reasons for the sustainable and rapid development and provide insights into the study of economic theories. From the perspective of political economics, this book elaborates on China's socialist market economy which was officially confirmed as the goal of the country's economic reform in 1992. It expounds on China's economic model, the relationship between socialism and market economy, as well as the establishment and improvement of socialist market economy in China, deepening the studies in the laws governing China's economic development. Then, it explores the gradual reform, the reform of state-owned enterprises, and the relationship between governments and market, all of which are crucial to the success of China's economic reform. Finally, based on the analysis above, this book discusses the reasons for the constant and rapid development of China's economy. With detailed analysis on the reform experience and theoretical implications, this book will appeal to scholars and students studying China's economy, and contribute to the development of economic theories.

The field of control theory in PDEs has broadened considerably as more realistic models have been introduced and investigated. This book presents a broad range of recent developments, new discoveries, and mathematical tools in the field. The authors discuss topics such as elasticity, thermo-elasticity, aero-elasticity, interactions between fluids and elastic structures, and fluid dynamics and the new challenges that they present. Other control theoretic problems include parabolic systems, dynamical Lame systems, linear and nonlinear hyperbolic equations, and pseudo-differential operators on a manifold. This is a valuable tool authored by international specialists in the field.

The volume and complexity of biological and biomedical research continues to grow exponentially with cutting-edge technologies such as high-throughput sequencing. Unfortunately, bioinformatics analysis is often considered only after data have been generated, which significantly limits the ability to make sense of complex big data. This unique book introduces the idea of No-Boundary Thinking (NBT) in biological and biomedical research, which aims to access, integrate, and synthesize data, information, and knowledge from bioinformatics to define important problems and articulate impactful research questions. This interdisciplinary volume brings together a team of bioinformatics specialists who draw on their own experiences with NBT to illustrate the importance of collaborative science. It will help stimulate discussion and application of NBT, and will appeal to all biomedical researchers looking to maximize their use of bioinformatics for making scientific discoveries.

Transfer learning deals with how systems can quickly adapt themselves to new situations, tasks and environments. It gives machine learning systems the ability to leverage auxiliary data and models to help solve target problems when there is only a small amount of data available. This makes such systems more reliable and robust, keeping the machine learning model faced with unforeseeable changes from deviating too much from expected performance. At an enterprise level, transfer learning allows knowledge to be reused so experience gained once can be repeatedly applied to the real world. For example, a pre-trained model that takes account of user privacy can be downloaded and adapted at the edge of a computer network. This self-contained, comprehensive reference text describes the standard algorithms and demonstrates how these are used in different transfer learning paradigms. It offers a solid grounding for newcomers as well as new insights for seasoned researchers and developers.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth had often crossed the increasing gap between the city and the countryside, which made the act of "going to the countryside" a distinctively modern experience and a continuous practice in China. Such a spatial crossing eventually culminated in the socialist state program of "down to the villages" movements during the 1960s and 1970s. What, then, was the special significance of "going to the countryside" before that era? Going to the Countryside deals with the cultural representations and practices of this practice between 1915 and 1965, focusing on individual homecoming, rural reconstruction, revolutionary journeys to Yan'an, the revolutionary "going down to the people" as well as going to the frontiers and rural hometowns for socialist construction. As part of the larger discourses of enlightenment, revolution, and socialist industrialization, "going to the countryside" entailed new ways of looking at the world and ordinary people, brought about new experiences of space and time, initiated new means of human communication and interaction, generated new forms of cultural production, revealed a fundamental epistemic shift in modern China, and ultimately created a new aesthetic, social, and political landscape. As a critical response to the "urban turn" in the past few decades, this book brings the rural back to the central concern of Chinese cultural studies and aims to bridge the city and the countryside as two types of important geographical entities, which have often remained as disparate scholarly subjects of inquiry in the current state of China studies. Chinese modernity has been characterized by a dual process that created problems from the vast gap between the city and the countryside but simultaneously initiated constant efforts to cope with the gap personally, collectively, and institutionally. The process of "crossing" two distinct geographical spaces was often presented as continuous explorations of various ways of establishing the connectivity, interaction, and relationship of these two imagined geographical entities. Going to the Countryside argues that this new body of cultural productions did not merely turn the rural into a constantly changing representational space; most importantly, the rural has been constructed as a distinct modern experiential and aesthetic realm characterized by revolutionary changes in human conceptions and sentiments.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth had often crossed the increasing gap between the city and the countryside, which made the act of "going to the countryside" a distinctively modern experience and a continuous practice in China. Such a spatial crossing eventually culminated in the socialist state program of "down to the villages" movements during the 1960s and 1970s. What, then, was the special significance of "going to the countryside" before that era? Going to the Countryside deals with the cultural representations and practices of this practice between 1915 and 1965, focusing on individual homecoming, rural reconstruction, revolutionary journeys to Yan'an, the revolutionary "going down to the people" as well as going to the frontiers and rural hometowns for socialist construction. As part of the larger discourses of enlightenment, revolution, and socialist industrialization, "going to the countryside" entailed new ways of looking at the world and ordinary people, brought about new experiences of space and time, initiated new means of human communication and interaction, generated new forms of cultural production, revealed a fundamental epistemic shift in modern China, and ultimately created a new aesthetic, social, and political landscape. As a critical response to the "urban turn" in the past few decades, this book brings the rural back to the central concern of Chinese cultural studies and aims to bridge the city and the countryside as two types of important geographical entities, which have often remained as disparate scholarly subjects of inquiry in the current state of China studies. Chinese modernity has been characterized by a dual process that created problems from the vast gap between the city and the countryside but simultaneously initiated constant efforts to cope with the gap personally, collectively, and institutionally. The process of "crossing" two distinct geographical spaces was often presented as continuous explorations of various ways of establishing the connectivity, interaction, and relationship of these two imagined geographical entities. Going to the Countryside argues that this new body of cultural productions did not merely turn the rural into a constantly changing representational space; most importantly, the rural has been constructed as a distinct modern experiential and aesthetic realm characterized by revolutionary changes in human conceptions and sentiments.

China's growth miracle over the past 30 years has propelled it to become the world's second largest economy and potentially the largest in the following years. This book examines China's experience on economic reform, trying to find the reasons for the sustainable and rapid development and provide insights into the study of economic theories. From the perspective of political economics, this book elaborates on China's socialist market economy which was officially confirmed as the goal of the country's economic reform in 1992. It expounds on China's economic model, the relationship between socialism and market economy, as well as the establishment and improvement of socialist market economy in China, deepening the studies in the laws governing China's economic development. Then, it explores the gradual reform, the reform of state-owned enterprises, and the relationship between governments and market, all of which are crucial to the success of China's economic reform. Finally, based on the analysis above, this book discusses the reasons for the constant and rapid development of China's economy. With detailed analysis on the reform experience and theoretical implications, this book will appeal to scholars and students studying China's economy, and contribute to the development of economic theories.

In 2009 the Chinese government put Liu Xiaobo, a celebrated poet, essayist, critic, activist, and thinker, into a cage. He was labeled as "an enemy of the state," charged with "inciting subversion of state power," and sentenced to 11 years' imprisonment. His insistence on individual liberty in his own 1000+ essays and 18 books, his relentless pursuit of ideas, and his last statement to the Chinese court: "I have no enemies, no hatred," had threatened the Chinese Communist Party and government in a way few other citizens had. The Journey of Liu Xiaobo explores, analyzes, and celebrates the life and legacy of Liu Xiaobo. The book presents a unique portrait of Liu Xiaobo from many who knew him during his life, from childhood to his final days. This collection of over eighty short essays and reflections are likely the largest gathering of writers from the Chinese Democracy Movement in one volume, and contribute basic texts to understanding the man who has been compared to Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, and Aung San Sui Kyi in his importance to the development and progress of China toward a free society. These rich offerings from leading Chinese writers and intellectuals within and outside the mainland as well as from noted China scholars and journalists and political leaders around the globe present a personal as well as an intellectual portrait. Most of the texts were written at a seminal moment - in the days, weeks and months right after the death of Liu Xiaobo. The essays in the book are arranged by chronological focus: Youth and University Days, Tiananmen Square, Prison, Independent Chinese PEN Center, Charter 08, Nobel Peace Prize, Death ... and Beyond. The reader is treated to a trove of original and poignant memories as well as insightful analyses of China's history and the period in which Liu lived and an evaluation of Liu's impact on his times.

Environmental remote sensing plays a critical role in observing key hydrological components such as precipitation, soil moisture, evapotranspiration and total water storage on a global scale. As water security is one of the most critical issues in the world, satellite remote sensing techniques are of particular importance for emerging regions which have inadequate in-situ gauge observations. This book reviews multiple remote sensing observations, the application of remote sensing in hydrological modeling, data assimilation and hydrological capacity building in emerging regions.