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 presents the conference proceedings of the 25th edition of the International Joint Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management. The conference is organized by 6 institutions (from different countries and continents) that gather a large number of members in the field of operational management, industrial engineering and engineering management. This edition of the conference had the title: THE NEXT GENERATION OF PRODUCTION AND SERVICE SYSTEMS in order to emphasis unpredictable and very changeable future. This conference is aimed to enhance connection between academia and industry and to gather researchers and practitioners specializing in operation management, industrial engineering, engineering management and other related disciplines from around the world.

This proceedings volume highlights the role and importance of Operational Research (OR) in the digital era and the underlying ICT challenges. The selected papers cover recent advances in all branches of operational research, mathematical modeling and decision making. It covers a wide range of key areas from digital economy, to supply chain management, and also finance. The book adopts an applied perspective that covers the contributions of OR in the broad field of business and economics linked with the discipline of computer science. The chapters are based on papers presented at the 6th International Symposium & 28th National Conference on Operational Research. Although the conference is organized by the Hellenic Operational Research Society (HELORS), the contributions in this book promotes international co-operation among researchers and practitioners working in the field.

This book describes new theories and applications of artificial neural networks, with a special focus on addressing problems in neuroscience, biology and biophysics and cognitive research. It covers a wide range of methods and technologies, including deep neural networks, large-scale neural models, brain–computer interface, signal processing methods, as well as models of perception, studies on emotion recognition, self-organization and many more. The book includes both selected and invited papers presented at the XX International Conference on Neuroinformatics, held in Moscow, Russia on October 8–12, 2018.

Dimensionality reduction, also known as manifold learning, is an area of machine learning used for extracting informative features from data for better representation of data or separation between classes. This book presents a cohesive review of linear and nonlinear dimensionality reduction and manifold learning. Three main aspects of dimensionality reduction are covered: spectral dimensionality reduction, probabilistic dimensionality reduction, and neural network-based dimensionality reduction, which have geometric, probabilistic, and information-theoretic points of view to dimensionality reduction, respectively. The necessary background and preliminaries on linear algebra, optimization, and kernels are also explained to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the algorithms. The tools introduced in this book can be applied to various applications involving feature extraction, image processing, computer vision, and signal processing. This book is applicable to a wide audience who would like to acquire a deep understanding of the various ways to extract, transform, and understand the structure of data. The intended audiences are academics, students, and industry professionals. Academic researchers and students can use this book as a textbook for machine learning and dimensionality reduction. Data scientists, machine learning scientists, computer vision scientists, and computer scientists can use this book as a reference. It can also be helpful to statisticians in the field of statistical learning and applied mathematicians in the fields of manifolds and subspace analysis. Industry professionals, including applied engineers, data engineers, and engineers in various fields of science dealing with machine learning, can use this as a guidebook for feature extraction from their data, as the raw data in industry often require preprocessing. The book is grounded in theory but provides thorough explanations and diverse examples to improve the reader’s comprehension of the advanced topics. Advanced methods are explained in a step-by-step manner so that readers of all levels can follow the reasoning and come to a deep understanding of the concepts. This book does not assume advanced theoretical background in machine learning and provides necessary background, although an undergraduate-level background in linear algebra and calculus is recommended.

This book presents papers from an international conference, held in Bonn, Germany in February 2005, that dealt with integrated water resources management in industrialized and developing countries. The papers detail such emerging concepts as blue and green water, virtual water, the water footprints of nations, multi-agent modeling, linkages between water and biodiversity, and social learning and adaptive management.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Games and Learning Alliance, GALA 2016, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in December 2016. The 27 revised regular papers presented together with 14 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 55 submissions. The papers cover topics such as games and sustainability; games for math and programming; games and health; games and soft skills; games and management; games and learning; game development and assessment; and mobile games.

Due to its societal and economic relevance, Project Management (PM) has become an important discipline and a concept critical to modern organizations, public and private. PM as an academic discipline is discussed both in Management Science and in Operations Research. Management Science tends to focus on quantitative tools and the soft skills necessary to manage projects successfully. Operations Research gives the essential scientific contribution to the success of project management through the development of models and algorithms. In Management Science, Operations Research and Project Management, José Ramón San Cristóbal Mateo fills the gap between scientific research and the practical application of that research. Project managers need formal training in decision-making but sometimes, they do not have an in-depth knowledge of Operations Research or they lack the necessary theoretical background. This book, with its focus on the quantitative models of Operations Research and Management Science applied to Project Management, provides project managers with the tools and methods necessary to manage projects successfully. Project managers operate in a complex global environment, in which numerous factors need to be considered, such as minimizing total project costs, meeting contracted dates, and ensuring that activities achieve certain quality levels. The focus here on the application of quantitative models of Operations Research and Management Science applied to Project Management provides them with the tools and methods necessary to make sound decisions.