Quantitative Information Fusion For Hydrological Sciences

In this rapidly evolving world of knowledge and technology, do you ever wonder how hydrology is catching up? Here, two highly qualified scientists edit a volume that takes the angle of computational hydrology and envision one of the science’s future directions – namely, the quantitative integration of high-quality hydrologic field data with geologic, hydrologic, chemical, atmospheric, and biological information to characterize and predict natural systems in hydrological sciences.

In this rapidly evolving world of knowledge and technology, do you ever wonder how hydrology is catching up? Here, two highly qualified scientists edit a volume that takes the angle of computational hydrology and envision one of the science’s future directions – namely, the quantitative integration of high-quality hydrologic field data with geologic, hydrologic, chemical, atmospheric, and biological information to characterize and predict natural systems in hydrological sciences.

In this rapidly evolving world of knowledge and technology, do you ever wonder how hydrology is catching up? Here, two highly qualified scientists edit a volume that takes the angle of computational hydrology and envision one of the science’s future directions – namely, the quantitative integration of high-quality hydrologic field data with geologic, hydrologic, chemical, atmospheric, and biological information to characterize and predict natural systems in hydrological sciences.

Precipitation is a well-recognized pillar in global water and energy balances. An accurate and timely understanding of its characteristics at the global, regional, and local scales is indispensable for a clearer understanding of the mechanisms underlying the Earth’s atmosphere–ocean complex system. Precipitation is one of the elements that is documented to be greatly affected by climate change. In its various forms, precipitation comprises a primary source of freshwater, which is vital for the sustainability of almost all human activities. Its socio-economic significance is fundamental in managing this natural resource effectively, in applications ranging from irrigation to industrial and household usage. Remote sensing of precipitation is pursued through a broad spectrum of continuously enriched and upgraded instrumentation, embracing sensors which can be ground-based (e.g., weather radars), satellite-borne (e.g., passive or active space-borne sensors), underwater (e.g., hydrophones), aerial, or ship-borne.

Urban subsurface resources and particularly urban groundwater are vulnerable to environmental impacts, and their rational management is of major importance. In this book a multidisciplinary team of specialists and scientists presents innovative process-oriented approaches to the sustainable use of these resources. The included case studies from northwestern Switzerland describe representative environments and are relevant for urban areas in general. They illustrate the protection of groundwater; river restoration; engineering and hydrogeological questions related to urban infrastructure and management concepts; as well as monitoring, modeling and remediation strategies for contaminated sites; problems caused by karst in urban environments; the use of shallow geothermal energy; and natural hazards such as flood events and earthquakes. It is demonstrated that modern quantitative earth sciences can contribute significantly in finding solutions concerning the sustainable use of subsurface resources in urban environments. The book is an invaluable source of information for hydrogeologists, geologists, urban planners, water supply engineers, and environmental agencies.

Support vector machines (SVMs) are one of the most active research areas in machine learning. SVMs have shown good performance in a number of applications, including text and image classification. However, the learning capability of SVMs comes at a cost – an inherent inability to explain in a comprehensible form, the process by which a learning result was reached. Hence, the situation is similar to neural networks, where the apparent lack of an explanation capability has led to various approaches aiming at extracting symbolic rules from neural networks. For SVMs to gain a wider degree of acceptance in fields such as medical diagnosis and security sensitive areas, it is desirable to offer an explanation capability. User explanation is often a legal requirement, because it is necessary to explain how a decision was reached or why it was made. This book provides an overview of the field and introduces a number of different approaches to extracting rules from support vector machines developed by key researchers. In addition, successful applications are outlined and future research opportunities are discussed. The book is an important reference for researchers and graduate students, and since it provides an introduction to the topic, it will be important in the classroom as well. Because of the significance of both SVMs and user explanation, the book is of relevance to data mining practitioners and data analysts.

In a completely comprehensive and yet accessible text, a variety of hugely accomplished contributors address all aspects of negotiation mechanisms in multi-agent systems. These include multi-issue negotiations, concurrent negotiations, and strategy-proof mechanisms, as well as rational argumentation and topics, auctions and voting. The workshop from which this volume has arisen brought together researchers from these communities to learn about each others’ approaches.

This book presents hardware-efficient algorithms and FPGA implementations for two robotic tasks, namely exploration and landmark determination. The work identifies scenarios for mobile robotics where parallel processing and selective shutdown offered by FPGAs are invaluable. The book proceeds to systematically develop memory-driven VLSI architectures for both the tasks. The architectures are ported to a low-cost FPGA with a fairly small number of system gates.