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Healthy Urbanism: Designing and Planning Equitable, Sustainable and Inclusive Places (Planning, Environment, Cities)
by Helen PineoThe globally distributed health impacts of environmental degradation and widening inequalities require a fundamental shift in understandings of healthy urbanism. This book redefines the meaning and form of healthy urban environments, urging planners and design professionals to consider how their work impacts population health and wellbeing at multiple spatial and temporal scales. The concepts of equity, inclusion and sustainability are central to this framing, reversing the traditional focus on individuals, their genes and ‘lifestyle choices’ to one of structural factors that affect health. Integrating theory and concepts from social epidemiology, sustainable development and systems thinking with practical case studies, this book will be of value for students and practitioners.
Control of Smart Buildings: An Integration to Grid and Local Energy Communities (Studies in Infrastructure and Control)
by Anuradha Tomar Phuong H. Nguyen Sukumar MishraThis book provides an overview of how efficient building energy management can be done, considering the increasing importance of renewable energy integration. It also includes the grid-interactive building, their control, energy management, and optimization techniques to promote better understanding among researchers and business professionals in the utility sector and across industries. This book is written and edited by leading specialists active in concurrent developments in smart building management, renewable energy research, and application-driven R&D. The experiences and research work shared help the readers in enhancing their knowledge in the field of renewable energy, power engineering, building energy management, demand, and supply management and learn the technical analysis of the same in an insightful manner. Additionally, established and emerging applications related to applied areas like smart cities, the Internet of things, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc., are developed and utilized to demonstrate recent innovations in smart building energy management.
Advances in Urban Design and Engineering: Perspectives from India (Design Science and Innovation)
by Pradipta Banerji Arnab JanaThis volume discusses a combination of topics dealing with the wide variety of urban planning, authored by well reputed scholars in India mastering disciplines such as architecture, urban design, transportation planning, public policy, urban planning, urban engineering and civil engineering. It focuses on contemporary problems in metro cities like New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, etc. This book also highlights critical aspects of urban developments while considering the aspects of mega infrastructure projects especially related to water, waste water treatment and environmental issues.
Innovations in Computational Intelligence and Computer Vision: Proceedings of ICICV 2021 (Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing #1424)
by Satyabrata Roy Deepak Sinwar Thinagaran Perumal Adam Slowik João Manuel R. S. TavaresThis book presents high-quality, peer-reviewed papers from the International Conference on “Innovations in Computational Intelligence and Computer Vision (ICICV 2021),” hosted by Manipal University Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, on August 5–6, 2021. Offering a collection of innovative ideas from researchers, scientists, academics, industry professionals and students, the book covers a variety of topics, such as artificial intelligence and computer vision, image processing and video analysis, applications and services of artificial intelligence and computer vision, interdisciplinary areas combining artificial intelligence and computer vision, and other innovative practices.
Principles of Innovative Design Thinking: Synergy of Extenics with Axiomatic Design Theory
by Wenjuan Li Zhenghe Song C. Steve SuhThe book presents a comprehensive treatment on a novel design theory that fosters innovative thinking and creativity essential for addressing wicked problems. Wicked problems are ill-defined, ambiguous in both aims and solutions, and complex with interconnected and intertwined (coupled) factors. While being ubiquitous and difficult, however, wicked problems share characteristics common to science and design in three regards, namely agent finitude, system complexity, and problem normativity. These fundamental attributes allow a core cognitive process common to design and science to be identified and a strategic problem-solving conception of methodology be formulated as a result. The theory facilitates new opportunities for synergetic cross-disciplinary research and practice by incorporating the essences of Extenics to axiomatic design. Innovative thinking is enabled by exploring Extenics for problem reframing, paradigm shift, and abductive reasoning and by engaging axiomatic design in the co-evolution (iteration) of the need and viable design concept. The theory is unique in that it is a framework for quantifying imprecise and vague design information available during the conceptual design stage as mathematical expression and algorithm early in the design effort and enables the objective evaluation and emergence of an optimal design concept from among multitude of viable ones. The book is conceived for students and real-world practitioners in engineering, natural and social sciences, business, and fine arts who seek to develop powerful design thinking for solving problems in a creative and innovative way.
Learning and Teaching in the Music Studio: A Student-Centred Approach (Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education #31)
by Juan Ignacio Pozo María Puy Pérez Echeverría Guadalupe López-Íñiguez José Antonio TorradoThis book advocates for a radical change in music teaching and learning methods, allowing for a break from the traditional conservatory model still in use in many classrooms. The product of twenty years of interdisciplinary work by musicians, music teachers, and psychologists, the book proposes to place the focus of music education on the students themselves and on their mental and physical activity, with the aim of helping them to manage their own goals and emotions. This alternative is based on a new theoretical framework, as well as numerous real, concrete examples of how to put it into practice with students of different ages and in different environments. This book focuses primarily on teaching instrumental music, but its content will be useful for any teacher, student, musician, or researcher interested in improving music education in any environment, whether formal or informal, in which it takes placeChapters 3, 4, 6 and 18 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Restructuring Cultural Landscapes in Metropolitan Areas: Characterization, Typology and Design Research (The Urban Book Series)
by Yuting XieThis book introduces a ten-year-long design research project in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), China, based on international cooperation studios, design workshops, a Ph.D. thesis, and concrete practice in China, Germany, and the Netherlands. This research adapts the existing methods of Landscape Character Assessment (UK), Historic Cultural Landscape Elements (Germany), and Dutch Polder Typology to mapping, describing, and classifying landscape character areas and types at the three scales of regional, municipal, and local. Furthermore, to connect research with design, we developed a typological approach of generating specific measures for the networked polder landscape. This research bridges the gap of a missing landscape characterization method for the conservation, transformation, and critical reconstruction of historic cultural landscapes in a metropolitan context. The book is intended for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners interested in the topics of cultural landscape in transition, methods for landscape characterization and typology, and a research-by-design approach in interdisciplinary projects of landscape architecture, urbanism, and regional planning.
Contemporary Urban Design Thoughts in China
by Jin Duan Jinhua LiuThis book proposes and systematically discusses four trends of thoughts in contemporary Chinese urban design. As the first book to systematically introduce contemporary Chinese urban design thoughts, this book objectively displays the macroscopic picture of contemporary urban design development of China from the time dimension, sorting out seven historical stages and three disputes. This book is mainly divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the vertical description, taking the major events in the seven historical stages as the context, combing the macro picture of the development of contemporary urban design in China in the last 100 years, and describing the three controversies in this process: contention, subject, and legalization. The second part focuses on horizontal observations, puts forward and systematically discusses the four trends of thought formed in the development of contemporary urban design in China, including “Design of Form,” “Synthesis of Design,” “Control of Design,” and “Design of Rule”. This part discusses their development background, theoretical support, and key concepts in detail and finally conducts critical thinking. The whole book is based on historical events, archives, and papers published in Chinese academic journals. While sorting out, summarizing, and objectively discussing, it also makes a critique of urban design activities and academic thinking in China, which will greatly benefit scholars and readers who are interested in urban design history of contemporary China.
Visual Question Answering: From Theory to Application (Advances in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition)
by Qi Wu Peng Wang Xin Wang Xiaodong He Wenwu ZhuVisual Question Answering (VQA) usually combines visual inputs like image and video with a natural language question concerning the input and generates a natural language answer as the output. This is by nature a multi-disciplinary research problem, involving computer vision (CV), natural language processing (NLP), knowledge representation and reasoning (KR), etc. Further, VQA is an ambitious undertaking, as it must overcome the challenges of general image understanding and the question-answering task, as well as the difficulties entailed by using large-scale databases with mixed-quality inputs. However, with the advent of deep learning (DL) and driven by the existence of advanced techniques in both CV and NLP and the availability of relevant large-scale datasets, we have recently seen enormous strides in VQA, with more systems and promising results emerging. This book provides a comprehensive overview of VQA, covering fundamental theories, models, datasets, and promising future directions. Given its scope, it can be used as a textbook on computer vision and natural language processing, especially for researchers and students in the area of visual question answering. It also highlights the key models used in VQA.
Bio-Inspired Computing: 16th International Conference, BIC-TA 2021, Taiyuan, China, December 17–19, 2021, Revised Selected Papers, Part II (Communications in Computer and Information Science #1566)
by Linqiang Pan Zhihua Cui Jianghui Cai Lianghao LiThis two-volume set (CCIS 1565 and CCIS 1566) constitutes selected and revised papers from the 16th International Conference on Bio-Inspired Computing: Theories and Applications, BIC-TA 2021, held in Taiyuan, China, in December 2021. The 67 papers presented were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 211 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: evolutionary computation and swarm intelligence; DNA and molecular computing; machine learning and computer vision.
Fire Evacuation and Exit Design in Heritage Cultural Centres (SpringerBriefs in Architectural Design and Technology)
by John Gales René Champagne Georgette Harun Hannah Carton Michael KinseyThis book highlights human behaviour and architectural considerations for prescriptive code requirements for emergency exits in heritage cultural centers. Closed circuit television camera (CCTV) footage from a Canadian heritage cultural centre was analyzed from three separate unannounced evacuations, where recommendations based on the first two evacuations were implemented for the third. This study aims to (1) develop a baseline for the behaviour and actions of people during the pre-movement and movement stages of emergency egress and evacuation situations and (2) collect behavioural and movement data to aid the fire safety community with the decision process for egress and evacuation strategies and (3) interrogate and highlight architectural barriers in heritage structures with respect to emergency evacuation. The discussion of findings includes occupant behaviour, architectural implications and evacuation modelling and considers the often-conflicting intersection between architectural conservation and fire safety.
Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism: An Analytical Approach to Space
by Java SinghFeminist Literary and Cultural Criticism explores inter-disciplinary connections across Cultural Anthropology, Geography, Psychology, and feminist literary criticism to develop a theoretical framework for spatial criticism. Using the spatial gynocritics framework developed in the book, it analyzes selected texts from five different genres–short-story, novel, film, cartoons, and OTT series, created by women. The creators discussed in the book constitute a transnational collectivity of women that shares common concerns about gender, environment, technology, and social hierarchies. They comprise a geographically and linguistically diverse group from India, Uruguay, Spain, Argentina, and the USA. The book offers immense potential for a comparative study on numerous aspects, among which the present work concentrates on the treatment of Space, demonstrating that spatial logic and grammar are essential elements of the feminist praxis. The book reveals the unexamined potential in the women creators’ praxis of destabilizing, decentring, and destroying the ascribed centres around which social arrangements are structured. Moreover, the book offers valuable analytic tools that add to scholarship in literary theory, comparative cultural studies, comparative literature, gender studies, feminist criticism, and interdisciplinary humanities. It is an indispensable aid to students and faculty in these areas of study, enabling them to critique texts from a fresh perspective.
Performing Against Annihilation: Identity and Consciousness in J.R.R. Tolkien, Richard Wagner and George R.R. Martin
by Lukas ScheppThis book outlines how the protagonists in The Nibelung's Ring, The Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones attempt to construct identities and expand their consciousness manifestations. As the characters in the three works face the ends of their respective worlds, they must find answers to their mortality, and to the threat it implies: the loss of identity and consciousness. Moreover, it details how this process is depicted performatively. In a hands-on and interdisciplinary approach, this book seeks to unveil the underlying philosophical concepts of identity and consciousness in the three works as they are represented audio-visually on stage and screen. Through the use of many practical examples, this book offers both academic scholars and any interested readers a completely new perspective on three enduringly popular and interrelated works.
Eco-Urbanism and the South East Asian City: Climate, Urban-Architectural Form and Heritage
by Shireen Jahn Kassim Noor Hanita Abdul Majid Dzulkifli Abdul RazakThis book traces the history of urban design in tropical South East Asia with a view to offering solutions to contemporary architectural and urban problems. The book examines how pre-colonial forms and patterns from South East Asian traditional cities, overlaid by centuries of change, recall present notions of ecological and organic urbanism. These may look disorganised, yet they reflect and suggest certain common patterns that inform eco-urban design paradigms for the development of future cities.Taking a thematic approach, the book examines how such historical findings, debates and discussions can assist designers and policy makers to interpret and then instil identities in urban design across the Asian region. The book weaves a discourse across planning, urban design, architecture and ornamentation dimensions to reconstruct forgotten forms that align with the climate of place and resynchronise with the natural world, unearthing an ecologically benign urbanism that can inform the future.Written in an accessible style, this book will be an invaluable reference for researchers and students within the fields of cultural geography, urban studies and architecture.
Smart Cities in Asia: Regulations, Problems, and Development (SpringerBriefs in Geography)
by Thanh Phan Daniela DamianThis open access book examines different aspects of smart cities, including technology, urban development, sustainable development, finance, and privacy and data protection. It also covers a wide range of jurisdictions in Asia-Pacific: Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The book consists of two main parts. The first part includes general chapters that conceptualize smart cities and provide an overview of these cities’ problems such as privacy and data protection concern. The general chapters also discuss the role of public and private sectors in developing and governing smart cities. The second part encompasses country-specific chapters that examine the concepts addressed in the general chapters in practice by analyzing several specific smart city projects.This book provides researchers and practitioners with some knowledge of a smart city and its implication in the Asia context. The book is designed with some general chapters updating the literature on smart cities for readers who are interested in an overview of this concept. Audiences who are curious about how smart cities are perceived and implemented in some Asian jurisdictions are benefited from country-specific chapters. The book is also helpful to general audiences whose interests lay at the intersection of law, governance, and technology.
Psychodrama in Brazil: Contemporary Applications in Mental Health, Education, and Communities (Psychodrama in Counselling, Coaching and Education #3)
by Heloisa Junqueira Fleury Marlene Magnabosco Marra Oriana Holsbach HadlerThis book approaches contemporary psychodrama from many contexts and population application from different regions of Brazil. It presents the diversity of local culture, the originality with which psychodramatic philosophy emerges in the Brazilian scenario. It introduces the theoretical-methodological procedures that reaffirm psychodrama as a scientific instrument of social action. The chapters cover the philosophical and theoretical foundations and the new socio-psycho-educational methodologies applied in clinical practices, sociotherapy, politics and society. It is a helpful resource for professionals and academics interested in the development of innovative applications of Psychodrama.
New Technologies in Building and Construction: Towards Sustainable Development (Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering #258)
by David Bienvenido-Huertas Juan Moyano-CamposThis book presents contributions on new technologies in building and construction. Buildings are complex elements that impact environment significantly. The sustainability of this sector requires a holistic and multidisciplinary approach that allows adequate strategies to be established to reduce its environmental impact. This heterogeneity is represented in these chapters, which have been developed by researchers from different countries. The book is divided into three sections: (i) analysis, (ii) design and modeling, and (iii) solutions. The book chapters together represent an advance in current knowledge about new technologies in building and construction, crucial for researchers, engineers, architects, policy makers, and stakeholders.
The AUN/SEED-Net Joint Regional Conference in Transportation, Energy, and Mechanical Manufacturing Engineering: Proceeding of RCTEMME2021, Hanoi, Vietnam (Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering)
by Anh-Tuan Le Van-Sang Pham Minh-Quy Le Hoang-Luong PhamThis book (The AUN/SEED-Net Joint Regional Conference in Transportation, Energy, and Mechanical Manufacturing Engineering) gathers selected papers submitted to the 14th Regional Conference in Energy Engineering and the 13th Regional Conference in Mechanical Manufacturing Engineering in the fields related to intelligent equipment, automotive engineering, mechanical systems and sustainable manufacturing, renewable energy, heat and mass transfer. Under the theme of “Integration and Innovation for Sustainable Development,” This book consists of papers in the aforementioned fields presented by researchers and scientists from universities, research institutes, and industry showcasing their latest findings and discussions with an emphasis on innovations and developments in embracing the new norm, resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Large-Scale Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (Cognitive Intelligence and Robotics)
by Janusz BędkowskiThis book is dedicated for engineers and researchers who would like to increase the knowledge in area of mobile mapping systems. Therefore, the flow of the derived information is divided into subproblems corresponding to certain mobile mapping data and related observations’ equations. The proposed methodology is not fulfilling all SLAM aspects evident in the literature, but it is based on the experience within the context of the pragmatic and realistic applications. Thus, it can be supportive information for those who are familiar with SLAM and would like to have broader overview in the subject.The novelty is a complete and interdisciplinary methodology for large-scale mobile mapping applications. The contribution is a set of programming examples available as supportive complementary material for this book. All observation equations are implemented, and for each, the programming example is provided. The programming examples are simple C++ implementations that can be elaborated by students or engineers; therefore, the experience in coding is not mandatory.Moreover, since the implementation does not require many additional external programming libraries, it can be easily integrated with any mobile mapping framework. Finally, the purpose of this book is to collect all necessary observation equations and solvers to build computational system capable providing large-scale maps.
Foundations of Robotics: A Multidisciplinary Approach with Python and ROS
by Damith Herath David St-OngeThis open access book introduces key concepts in robotics in an easy to understand language using an engaging project-based approach. It covers contemporary topics in robotics, providing an accessible entry point to fundamentals in all the major domains. A section is dedicated to introducing programming concepts using Python, which has become a language of choice in robotics and AI. The book also introduces the reader to the Robot Operating System (ROS), the ubiquitous software and algorithmic framework used by researchers and the industry. The book provides an inspired, up-to-date and multidisciplinary introduction to robotics in its many forms, including emerging topics related to robotics on Machine Learning, ethics, Human-Robot Interaction, and Design Thinking. The book also includes interviews with industry experts, providing an additional layer of insight into the world of robotics. The book is made open access through the generous support from Kinova Robotics. The book is suitable as an undergraduate textbook in a relevant engineering course. It is also suitable for students in art and design, high school students, and self-learners who would like to explore foundational concepts in robotics. “This book provides the ‘foundation’ for understanding how robots work. It is the accessible introduction that artists and engineers have been waiting for.” - Ken Goldberg, William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering, UC Berkeley.
We Piano Teachers and Our Demons: Socio-psychological Obstacles on the Road to Inspired and Secure Performance (Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education #32)
by Zecharia PlavinThis book focuses on piano teachers and the many pains they encounter in their careers. These pains play an essential role in blocking the musical inspiration of their students. The author identifies with the sensitivities of the teachers, aiming at the inspiration permeated and safer playing of their students.The book penetrates the protective mechanisms of the teachers that, on the one hand, maintain their professional functioning, while on the other hand, block refreshing ideas. It combines exploration of secure and culturally informed inspired playing, coping with exaggerated anxiety and understanding the interaction of piano actions with pianist’s physiology.This book helps to open teachers’ perceptions of the ways to enable more secure and more inspired performances while remembering the inner feelings of the piano teachers.
Digital TV and Wireless Multimedia Communications: 18th International Forum, IFTC 2021, Shanghai, China, December 3–4, 2021, Revised Selected Papers (Communications in Computer and Information Science #1560)
by Guangtao Zhai Jun Zhou Hua Yang Ping An Xiaokang YangThis book presents revised selected papers from the 18th International Forum on Digital TV and Wireless Multimedia Communication, IFTC 2021, held in Shanghai, China, in December 2021.The 41 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 110 submissions. They were organized in topical sections on image analysis; quality assessment; target detection; video processing; big data.
Vision-Based Human Activity Recognition (SpringerBriefs in Intelligent Systems)
by Zhongxu Hu Chen LvThis book offers a systematic, comprehensive, and timely review on V-HAR, and it covers the related tasks, cutting-edge technologies, and applications of V-HAR, especially the deep learning-based approaches. The field of Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has become one of the trendiest research topics due to the availability of various sensors, live streaming of data and the advancement in computer vision, machine learning, etc. HAR can be extensively used in many scenarios, for example, medical diagnosis, video surveillance, public governance, also in human–machine interaction applications. In HAR, various human activities such as walking, running, sitting, sleeping, standing, showering, cooking, driving, abnormal activities, etc., are recognized. The data can be collected from wearable sensors or accelerometer or through video frames or images; among all the sensors, vision-based sensors are now the most widely used sensors due to their low-cost, high-quality, and unintrusive characteristics. Therefore, vision-based human activity recognition (V-HAR) is the most important and commonly used category among all HAR technologies.The addressed topics include hand gestures, head pose, body activity, eye gaze, attention modeling, etc. The latest advancements and the commonly used benchmark are given. Furthermore, this book also discusses the future directions and recommendations for the new researchers.
Picturing Ecology: Photography and the birth of a new science
by Damian HughesThis book examines the role of photography and visual culture in the emergence of ecological science between 1895 and 1939.
Deep Learning in Solar Astronomy (SpringerBriefs in Computer Science)
by Long Xu Yihua Yan Xin HuangThe volume of data being collected in solar astronomy has exponentially increased over the past decade and we will be entering the age of petabyte solar data. Deep learning has been an invaluable tool exploited to efficiently extract key information from the massive solar observation data, to solve the tasks of data archiving/classification, object detection and recognition. Astronomical study starts with imaging from recorded raw data, followed by image processing, such as image reconstruction, inpainting and generation, to enhance imaging quality. We study deep learning for solar image processing. First, image deconvolution is investigated for synthesis aperture imaging. Second, image inpainting is explored to repair over-saturated solar image due to light intensity beyond threshold of optical lens. Third, image translation among UV/EUV observation of the chromosphere/corona, Ha observation of the chromosphere and magnetogram of the photosphere is realized by using GAN, exhibiting powerful image domain transfer ability among multiple wavebands and different observation devices. It can compensate the lack of observation time or waveband. In addition, time series model, e.g., LSTM, is exploited to forecast solar burst and solar activity indices. This book presents a comprehensive overview of the deep learning applications in solar astronomy. It is suitable for the students and young researchers who are major in astronomy and computer science, especially interdisciplinary research of them.