The continuous search for efficiency gains and the goal of attaining a sustainable competitive advantage have steadily increased the volume of goods and services procured globally from third party vendors. In this context, named as “the next wave of globalization”, the offshoring phenomenon has stimulated research and political...

Fuel cells are one of the most promising clean energy conversion devices that can solve the environmental and energy problems in our society. However, the high platinum loading of fuel cells - and thus their high cost - prevents their commercialization.  Non- or low- platinum electrocatalysts are needed to lower the fuel cell...

This work focuses on central catadioptric systems, from the early step of calibration to high-level tasks such as 3D information retrieval. The book opens with a thorough introduction to the sphere camera model, along with an analysis of the relation between this model and actual central catadioptric systems. Then, a new approach to calibrate...

This book introduces the statistical software R to the image processing community in an intuitive and practical manner. R brings interesting statistical and graphical tools which are important and necessary for image processing techniques. Furthermore, it has been proved in the literature that R is among the most reliable, accurate and...

As industrial, commercial, and residential demands increase and with the rise of privatization and deregulation of the electric energy industry around the world, it is necessary to improve the performance of electric operational management. Intelligent Energy Demand Forecasting offers approaches and methods to calculate optimal...

In an age of increasing complexity, diversification and change, customers expect services that cater to their needs and to their tastes. Emotional Engineering vol 2. describes how their expectations can be satisfied and managed throughout the product life cycle, if producers focus their attention more on emotion. Emotional engineering...

This text represents state-of-the-art trends and developments in the emerging field of engineering asset management as presented at the Sixth World Congress on Engineering Asset Management (WCEAM) held in Cincinnati, OH, USA from October 3-5, 2011

The Proceedings of the WCEAM 2011 is an excellent reference for practitioners,...

Transformation electromagnetics is a systematic design technique for optical and electromagnetic devices that enables novel wave-material interaction properties. The associated metamaterials technology for designing and realizing optical and electromagnetic devices can control the behavior of light and electromagnetic waves in ways that have...

Autonomic computing seeks to render computing systems as self-managed. In other words, its objective is to enable computer systems to manage themselves so as to minimise the need for human input. Autonomic computing as an approach is guaranteed to change the way software systems are developed. Indeed, this new fi eld is addressing some of the...

In recent years, cryptographic techniques for protecting and hiding secret information have been included in directions of research on intelligent information management. Data can be managed securely due to the use of algorithms for ensuring the confidentiality of data, information splitting techniques as well as protocols for sharing...

There is a significant difference between designing a new algorithm, proving its correctness, and teaching it to an audience. When teaching algorithms, the teacher's main goal should be to convey the underlying ideas and to help the students form correct mental models related to the algorithm. This process can often be facilitated by...