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This book presents the latest in decision-making tools, techniques, and solutions for policy makers to utilize in overcoming the challenges faced by healthcare systems. With contributions from experts world-wide, an array of healthcare management models, techniques, and integrative solutions are presented, drawing on econometric, system dynamics, and agent-based models as well as state-of-the-art empirical studies. As total healthcare spending (both total expenditures on health as a percentage of GDP and average spending on per capita) increases across most of the world's economies, healthcare systems continue to face challenges in terms of cost, quality, and access, as a result of its fragmented nature. Consequently, healthcare managers and policy makers require innovative integrative approaches and solutions to better manage complex, dynamic healthcare systems.This volume offers researchers and policy makers an insightful and critical review of the state of the art in healthcare modeling, with a particular focus on system dynamics, agent-based models, and modern empirical studies. It will be of interest to those in the fields of health, business management, and information systems.

Using the O.D.D. (Overview, Design concepts, Detail) protocol, this title explores the role of agent-based modeling in predicting the feasibility of various approaches to sustainability. The chapters incorporated in this volume consist of real case studies to illustrate the utility of agent-based modeling and complexity theory in discovering a path to more efficient and sustainable lifestyles. The topics covered within include: households' attitudes toward recycling, designing decision trees for representing sustainable behaviors, negotiation-based parking allocation, auction-based traffic signal control, and others.This selection of papers will be of interest to social scientists who wish to learn more about agent-based modeling as well as experts in the field of agent-based modeling.

The overall aim of this book, an outcome of the European FP7 FET Open NESS project, is to contribute to the ongoing effort to put the quantitative social sciences on a proper footing for the 21st century. A key focus is economics, and its implications on policy making, where the still dominant traditional approach increasingly struggles to capture the economic realities we observe in the world today - with vested interests getting too often in the way of real advances.Insights into behavioral economics and modern computing techniques have made possible both the integration of larger information sets and the exploration of disequilibrium behavior. The domain-based chapters of this work illustrate how economic theory is the only branch of social sciences which still holds to its old paradigm of an equilibrium science - an assumption that has already been relaxed in all related fields of research in the light of recent advances in complex and dynamical systems theory and related data mining.The other chapters give various takes on policy and decision making in this context. Written in nontechnical style throughout, with a mix of tutorial and essay-like contributions, this book will benefit all researchers, scientists, professionals and practitioners interested in learning about the 'thinking in complexity' to understand how socio-economic systems really work.

This book provides the state-of-the art of the present understanding of avalanche phenomena in both functional materials and geophysics.

This first monograph of its kind introduces the reader to fundamental definitions, key concepts and case studies addressing the following issues of rapidly growing relevance for online communities: What are emotions? How do they emerge, how are they transmitted? How can one measure emotional states? What are cyberemotions? When do emotions and cyberemotions become collective phenomena? How can one model emotions and their changes? What role do emotions play for on-line communities?Edited and authored by leading scientists in this field, this book is a comprehensive reference for anyone working on applications of complex systems methods in the social sciences, as well as for social scientists, psychologists, experts in on-line communities and computer scientists.This book provides an excellent overview of the current state-of-art in research on collective emotional interactions mediated by the Internet. It introduces a reader in social phenomena occurring in cyberspace, algorithms needed for automatic sentiment detection and data driven modeling of emotional patterns observed in on-line groups.Eugene Stanley, Professor, Boston UniversityWith the explosive hyper-exponential growth of the internet suddenly new ways of communication are emerging that give rise to a digital 'Homo empathicus', each of us suddenly being able to share thoughts and feelings with millions if not billions of others. This book is a true treat, a timely milestone that gives us insight in the co-evolution of the way we interact with each other and the communication technology provided through this new seemingly endless flexible digital world. Prof. Holyst did a great job bringing together real experts in the field of cyber emotions.Peter M.A. Sloot, Professor, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Nanyang University, SingaporeThe book Cyberemotions embraces the topic of emotion studies in cyberspace from a very rich spectrum of points of view and applications. It is particularly interesting reading the theoretical foundations underlying the concepts of cyberemotions and how these concepts can be captured, modeled and implemented in real-time applications.Catherine Pelachaud, Director of Research CNRS at LTCI, TELECOM ParisTechLogical machines give us a chance to analyze our often illogical behaviors, especially in the vast meadows of the cyberspace. In this important book, authors of different backgrounds present a wide and deep image, not only of methods of analyzing our emotional behavior online but also how the computers can help to break communicational walls the same technology had built.Rafal Rzepka, Professor, Hokkaido University

With contributions from a number of pioneeringresearchers in the field, this collection is aimed not only at researchers andscientists in nonlinear dynamics but also at a broader audience interested inunderstanding and exploring how modern chaos theory has developed since thedays of Poincaré. This book was motivated by and isan outcome of the CHAOS 2015 meeting held at the Henri Poincaré Institute inParis, which provided a perfect opportunity to gain inspiration and discuss newperspectives on the history, development and modern aspects of chaos theory. HenriPoincaré is remembered as a great mind in mathematics, physics and astronomy.His works, well beyond their rigorous mathematical and analytical style, areknown for their deep insights into science and research in general, and thephilosophy of science in particular. The Poincaré conjecture (only proved in2006) along with his work on the three-body problem are considered to be thefoundation of modern chaos theory.

Special topics reflecting the active research in the field are the analysis and control of chimera states in classical networks and in quantum systems, the mathematical treatment of multiscale systems, the control of colloidal and quantum transport, the control of epidemics and of neural network dynamics.

This volume provides an introduction to and overview of the emerging field of interconnected networks which include multilayer or multiplex networks, as well as networks of networks.

This book presents a broad, multidisciplinary review of the factors that have been shown to or might influence sharing information on social media, regardless of its veracity.

This proceedings volume contains talks and poster presentations from the International Symposium "Self-Organization in Complex Systems: The Past, Present, and Future of Synergetics", which took place at Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, an Institute of Advanced Studies, in Delmenhorst, Germany, during the period November 13 - 16, 2012.

This edited volume presents chapters on the dynamics of global climate change and global warming in the Middle East. The audience for this volume includes policy makers, researchers, and students unified by the common goal of making better decisions in the sustainable production and consumption of energy.

It provides a unified view of nonlinear properties in many different systems and highlights many new developments.While volume 1 concentrates on mathematical theory and computational techniques and challenges, which are essential for the study of nonlinear science, this second volume deals with nonlinear excitations in several fields.

This book presents collaborative research presented by experts in the field of nonlinear science provides the reader with contemporary, cutting-edge, research works that bridge the gap between theory and device realizations of nonlinear phenomena.

This book gives the definitive mathematical answer to what thermodynamics really is: a variational calculus applied to probability distributions. Extending Gibbs's notion of ensemble, the Author imagines the ensemble of all possible probability distributions and assigns probabilities to them by selection rules that are fairly general. The calculus of the most probable distribution in the ensemble produces the entire network of mathematical relationships we recognize as thermodynamics. The first part of the book develops the theory for discrete and continuous distributions while the second part applies this thermodynamic calculus to problems in population balance theory and shows how the emergence of a giant component in aggregation, and the shattering transition in fragmentation may be treated as formal phase transitions.While the book is intended as a research monograph, the material is self-contained and the style sufficiently tutorial to be accessible for self-paced study by an advanced graduate student in such fields as physics, chemistry, and engineering.

With an emphasis on exploring measurable aspects of ancient narratives, Maths Meets Myths sets out to investigate age-old material with new techniques. This book collects, for the first time, novel quantitative approaches to studying sources from the past, such as chronicles, epics, folktales, and myths. It contributes significantly to recent efforts in bringing together natural scientists and humanities scholars in investigations aimed at achieving greater understanding of our cultural inheritance.Accordingly, each contribution reports on a modern quantitative approach applicable to narrative sources from the past, or describes those which would be amenable to such treatment and why they are important.This volume is a unique state-of-the-art compendium on an emerging research field which also addresses anyone with interests in quantitative approaches to humanities.

This book introduces and reviews recent advances inthe field in a comprehensive and non-technical way by focusing on the potentialof emerging citizen-science and social-computation frameworks, coupled with thelatest theoretical and modeling tools developed by physicists, mathematicians,computer and social scientists to analyse, interpret and visualize complex datasets.There is overwhelming evidence that the currentorganisation of our economies and societies is seriously damaging biologicalecosystems and human living conditions in the short term, with potentiallycatastrophic effects in the long term. The need to re-organise the dailyactivities with the greatest impact - energy consumption, transport, housing -towards a more efficient and sustainable development model has recently beenraised in the public debate on several global, environmental issues. Above all,this requires the mismatch between global, societal and individual needs to beaddressed. Recent advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)can trigger important transitions at the individual and collective level toachieve this aim.Based on the findings of the collaborative researchnetwork EveryAware the following developments among the emerging ICTtechnologies are discussed in depth in this volume:. Participatory sensing - where ICT development ispushed to the level where it can supportinformed action at the hyperlocal scale, providing capabilities forenvironmental monitoring, data aggregation and mining, as well as informationpresentation and sharing.. Web gaming, social computing and internet-mediatedcollaboration - where the Web will continue to acquire the status of aninfrastructure for social computing, allowing users' cognitive abilities to becoordinated in online communities, and steering the collective action towardspredefined goals.. Collective awareness and decision-making - where theaccess to both personal and community data, collected by users, processed withsuitable analysis tools, and re-presented in an appropriate format by usablecommunication interfaces leads to a bottom-up development of collective socialstrategies.

After a short introduction to the fundamentals, this book provides a detailed account of major advances in applying fractional calculus to dynamical systems. Fractional order dynamical systems currently continue to gain further importance in many areas of science and engineering.As with many other approaches to mathematical modeling, the first issue to be addressed is the need to couple a definition of the fractional differentiation or integration operator with the types of dynamical systems that are analyzed. As such, for the fundamentals the focus is on basic aspects of fractional calculus, in particular stability analysis, which is required to tackle synchronization in coupled fractional order systems, to understand the essence of estimators for related integer order systems, and to keep track of the interplay between synchronization and parameter observation. This serves as the common basis for the more advanced topics and applications presented in the subsequent chapters, which include an introduction to the 'Immersion and Invariance' (I&I) methodology, the masterslave synchronization scheme for partially known nonlinear fractional order systems, Fractional Algebraic Observability (FAO) and Fractional Generalized quasi-Synchronization (FGqS) to name but a few.This book is intended not only for applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists, but also for anyone in applied science dealing with complex nonlinear systems.

This book presents the latest tools, techniques, and solutions that decision makers use to overcome the challenges faced by their sustainable supply chains.

This book deals with artificial intelligence (AI) and its several applications. It is not an organic text that should be read from the first page onwards, but rather a collection of articles that can be read at will (or at need). The idea of this work is indeed to provide some food for thoughts on how AI is impacting few verticals (insurance and financial services), affecting horizontal and technical applications (speech recognition and blockchain), and changing organizational structures (introducing new figures or dealing with ethical issues).The structure of the chapter is very similar, so I hope the reader won't find difficulties in establishing comparisons or understanding the differences between specific problems AI is being used for. The first chapter of the book is indeed showing the potential and the achievements of new AI techniques in the speech recognition domain, touching upon the topics of bots and conversational interfaces. The second and thirds chapter tackle instead verticals that are historically data-intensive but not data-driven, i.e., the financial sector and the insurance one. The following part of the book is the more technical one (and probably the most innovative), because looks at AI and its intersection with another exponential technology, namely the blockchain. Finally, the last chapters are instead more operative, because they concern new figures to be hired regardless of the organization or the sector, and ethical and moral issues related to the creation and implementation of new type of algorithms.

This book describes the ontology structure, types of actors, their potential actions, and ways that actions can affect the things that are part of the conflict. An ontology of unconventional conflict supports the understanding of unconventional conflict in general.

It provides a unified view of nonlinear properties in many different systems and highlights many new developments.While volume 1 concentrates on mathematical theory and computational techniques and challenges, which are essential for the study of nonlinear science, this second volume deals with nonlinear excitations in several fields.

In particular, a general model for studying time evolution of transition networks, deflection routing in complex networks, recommender systems for social networks analysis and mining, strategy selection in networked evolutionary games, integration and methods in computational biology, are discussed in detail.

What makes this "social" is that it can represent an observed society.Social systems include all those systems where the components have individual agency but also interact with each other.

The book presents nonlinear, chaotic and fractional dynamics, complex systems and networks, together with cutting-edge research on related topics.The fifteen chapters ¿ written by leading scientists working in the areas of nonlinear, chaotic, and fractional dynamics, as well as complex systems and networks ¿ offer an extensive overview of cutting-edge research on a range of topics, including fundamental and applied research. These include but are not limited to, aspects of synchronization in complex dynamical systems, universality features in systems with specific fractional dynamics, and chaotic scattering.As such, the book provides an excellent and timely snapshot of the current state of research, blending the insights and experiences of many prominent researchers.

This book is part of a two volume set which presents the analysis of nonlinear phenomena as a long-standing challenge for research in basic and applied science as well as engineering.

The overall aim of this book, an outcome of the European FP7 FET Open NESS project, is to contribute to the ongoing effort to put the quantitative social sciences on a proper footing for the 21st century. A key focus is economics, and its implications on policy making, where the still dominant traditional approach increasingly struggles to capture the economic realities we observe in the world today - with vested interests getting too often in the way of real advances.Insights into behavioral economics and modern computing techniques have made possible both the integration of larger information sets and the exploration of disequilibrium behavior. The domain-based chapters of this work illustrate how economic theory is the only branch of social sciences which still holds to its old paradigm of an equilibrium science - an assumption that has already been relaxed in all related fields of research in the light of recent advances in complex and dynamical systems theory and relateddata mining.The other chapters give various takes on policy and decision making in this context. Written in nontechnical style throughout, with a mix of tutorial and essay-like contributions, this book will benefit all researchers, scientists, professionals and practitioners interested in learning about the 'thinking in complexity' to understand how socio-economic systems really work.

In particular, a general model for studying time evolution of transition networks, deflection routing in complex networks, recommender systems for social networks analysis and mining, strategy selection in networked evolutionary games, integration and methods in computational biology, are discussed in detail.

This book presents the latest in decision-making tools, techniques, and solutions for policy makers to utilize in overcoming the challenges faced by healthcare systems. With contributions from experts world-wide, an array of healthcare management models, techniques, and integrative solutions are presented, drawing on econometric, system dynamics, and agent-based models as well as state-of-the-art empirical studies. As total healthcare spending (both total expenditures on health as a percentage of GDP and average spending on per capita) increases across most of the world¿s economies, healthcare systems continue to face challenges in terms of cost, quality, and access, as a result of its fragmented nature. Consequently, healthcare managers and policy makers require innovative integrative approaches and solutions to better manage complex, dynamic healthcare systems.This volume offers researchers and policy makers an insightful and critical review of the state of the art in healthcare modeling, with a particular focus on system dynamics, agent-based models, and modern empirical studies. It will be of interest to those in the fields of health, business management, and information systems.