Interactivity is the catchword for a wide range of innovative solutions that concept designers and engineers are developing in every area of technology and culture. For the authors interaction is more than a technological or aesthetic concept, it is a new means to ally humans and technology in a dynamic and reciprocal form of “living in technology”. This publication gathers together scientists and contributors from diverse fields of activity, providing a fascinating, up-to-date survey of the technological and conceptual equipment of experts engaged in aesthetic disciplines and product design. The editor, Professor Gerhard M. Buurman, is Head of Interactiondesign at the University of Art, Media and Design (HGKZ) in Zurich.

The third edition of this handbook is designed to provide a broad coverage of the concepts, implementations, and applications in metaheuristics. The book’s chapters serve as stand-alone presentations giving both the necessary underpinnings as well as practical guides for implementation. The nature of metaheuristics invites an analyst to modify basic methods in response to problem characteristics, past experiences, and personal preferences, and the chapters in this handbook are designed to facilitate this process as well. This new edition has been fully revised and features new chapters on swarm intelligence and automated design of metaheuristics from flexible algorithm frameworks. The authors who have contributed to this volume represent leading figures from the metaheuristic community and are responsible for pioneering contributions to the fields they write about. Their collective work has significantly enriched the field of optimization in general and combinatorial optimization in particular.Metaheuristics are solution methods that orchestrate an interaction between local improvement procedures and higher level strategies to create a process capable of escaping from local optima and performing a robust search of a solution space. In addition, many new and exciting developments and extensions have been observed in the last few years. Hybrids of metaheuristics with other optimization techniques, like branch-and-bound, mathematical programming or constraint programming are also increasingly popular. On the front of applications, metaheuristics are now used to find high-quality solutions to an ever-growing number of complex, ill-defined real-world problems, in particular combinatorial ones. This handbook should continue to be a great reference for researchers, graduate students, as well as practitioners interested in metaheuristics.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce, AMEC IX, co-located with the Sixth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2007, held in Honolulu, Hawai, in May 2007, and the 5th Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis, TADA 2007, co-located with the Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2007, held in Vancouver, Canada, in July 2007. This volume presents 15 carefully revised and selected papers from these workshops. The primary and complementary goal of both workshops was to continue to bring together novel work from diverse fields on modeling, implementation and evaluation of computational trading institutions and/or agent strategies. The papers originating from AMEC focus on a large variety of issues on auctions, negotiation, and strategic behavior in electronic marketplaces. The papers originating from TADA reflect the effort of the community to design scenarios where trading agent designers and market designers can be pitched against one another.

This book introduces the way languages are used in Japanese-English interlingual families in Japan and explains what factors influence their language choice, with the aim of arriving at a predictive model of language use. It also proposes a taxonomy of interlingual family types and a typological model of language use.

Solvents and ionic liquids are ubiquitous within our whole life since ancient times and their effects are actually being studied through basic sciences like Chemistry, Physics and Biology as well as being researched by a large number of scientific disciplines.This book represents an attempt to present examples on the utility of old and new solvents and the effects they exercise on several fields of academic and industrial interest. The first section, Solvents, presents information on bio-solvents and their synthesis, industrial production and applications, about per and trichloroethylene air monitoring in dry cleaners in the city of Sfax (Tunsia) and on the synthesis of polyimides using molten benzoic acid as the solvent. The second section, Ionic Liquids, shows information about the synthesis, physicochemical characterization and exploration of antimicrobial activities of imidazolium ionic liquid-supported Schiff base and its transition metal complexes, the technology of heterogenization of transition metal catalysts towards the synthetic applications in an ionic liquid matrix, the progress in ionic liquids as reaction media, monomers, and additives in high-performance polymers, a pre-screening of ionic liquids as gas hydrate inhibitor via application of COSMO-RS for methane hydrate, the extraction of aromatic compounds from their mixtures with alkanes from ternary to quaternary (or higher) systems and a review on ionic liquids as environmental benign solvent for cellulose chemistry. The final section, Solvent Effects, displays interesting information on solvent effects on dye sensitizers derived from anthocyanidins for applications in photocatalysis, about the solvent effect on a model of SNAr reaction in conventional and non-conventional solvents, and on solvent effects in supramolecular systems.

This book addresses the properties of particles in colloidal suspensions. It has a focus on particle aggregates and the dependency of their physical behaviour on morphological parameters. For this purpose, relevant theories and methodological tools are reviewed and applied to selected examples. The book is divided into four main chapters. The first of them introduces important measurement techniques for the determination of particle size and interfacial properties in colloidal suspensions. A further chapter is devoted to the physico-chemical properties of colloidal particles—highlighting the interfacial phenomena and the corresponding interactions between particles. The book’s central chapter examines the structure-property relations of colloidal aggregates. This comprises concepts to quantify size and structure of aggregates, models and numerical tools for calculating the (light) scattering and hydrodynamic properties of aggregates, and a discussion on van-der-Waals and double layer interactions between aggregates. It is illustrated how such knowledge may significantly enhance the characterisation of colloidal suspensions. The final part of the book refers to the information, ideas and concepts already presented in order to address technical aspects of the preparation of colloidal suspensions—in particular the performance of relevant dispersion techniques and the stability of colloidal suspensions.

Focused on basic science, this book reviews experiments on metal clusters in two long pedagogically written articles. Interested readers will also find articles ranging from density functional theory to computer simulations of cluster dynamics.

Geographic information science (GIScience) is an emerging field that combines aspects of many different disciplines. Spatial literacy is rapidly becoming recognized as a new, essential pier of basic education, alongside grammatical, logical and mathematical literacy. By incorporating location as an essential but often overlooked characteristic of what we seek to understand in the natural and built environment, geographic information science (GIScience) and systems (GISystems) provide the conceptual foundation and tools to explore this new frontier. The Encyclopedia of Geographic Information Science covers the essence of this exciting, new, and expanding field in an easily understood but richly detailed style. In addition to contributions from some of the best recognized scholars in GIScience, this volume contains contributions from experts in GIS' supporting disciplines who explore how their disciplinary perspectives are expanded within the context of GIScienceâ€"what changes when consideration of location is added, what complexities in analytical procedures are added when we consider objects in 2, 3 or even 4 dimensions, what can we gain by visualizing our analytical results on a map or 3D display? Key Features Brings together GIScience literature that is spread widely across the academic spectrum Offers details about the key foundations of GIScience, no matter what their disciplinary origins Elucidates vocabulary that is an amalgam of all of these fields Key Themes Conceptual Foundations Cartography and Visualization Design Aspects Data Manipulation Data Modeling Geocomputation Geospatial Data Societal Issues Spatial Analysis Organizational and Institutional Aspects The Encyclopedia of Geographic Information Science is an important resource for academic and corporate libraries.

Recent developments in the field of urban analysis and management are investigated in this book. It is a wide-ranging collection of essays on the subject drawn from a long-term project and seminar, held in Italy, to review the state of the art and speculate on the future influence on the "sciences of the city" of the complexity concept. Of particular interest is the variety of points of view, often contrasting, and the attempt to go beyond the conventional approaches to the analysis, and the planning of the city. While focussing mainly on the European (and in particular Italian) context, the discussion is of general relevance and valuable to anyone concerned with the prospects for the city in the new millenium.