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The cooperation and contamination between mathematicians, statisticians and econometricians working in actuarial sciences and finance is improving the research on these topics and producing numerous meaningful scientific results. This volume presents new ideas, in the form of four- to six-page papers, presented at the International Conference eMAF2020 ¿ Mathematical and Statistical Methods for Actuarial Sciences and Finance. Due to the now sadly famous COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was held remotely through the Zoom platform offered by the Department of Economics of the Cä Foscari University of Venice on September 18, 22 and 25, 2020.eMAF2020 is the ninth edition of an international biennial series of scientific meetings, started in 2004 at the initiative of the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Salerno. The effectiveness of this idea has been proven by wide participation in all editions, which have been held in Salerno (2004, 2006, 2010 and 2014), Venice (2008, 2012 and 2020), Paris (2016) and Madrid (2018).This book covers a wide variety of subjects: artificial intelligence and machine learning in finance and insurance, behavioral finance, credit risk methods and models, dynamic optimization in finance, financial data analytics, forecasting dynamics of actuarial and financial phenomena, foreign exchange markets, insurance models, interest rate models, longevity risk, models and methods for financial time series analysis, multivariate techniques for financial markets analysis, pension systems, portfolio selection and management, real-world finance, risk analysis and management, trading systems, and others.This volume is a valuable resource for academics, PhD students, practitioners, professionals and researchers. Moreover, it is also of interest to other readers with quantitative background knowledge.

This book is based on the work of the YEEES Research Centre, an international network of scientists from partner universities in Germany, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa. It presents inter- and transdisciplinary research that explores different ways of understanding resilience, an essential characteristic for systems, organizations and people ¿ providing them with strength in the face of attacks and challenges, and both enabling and fostering constant adaptation and improvement.Building resilience to face today¿s ever-changing societal and environmental realities requires unbiased research activities that transcend the borders of countries and academic disciplines alike. The research addressed in this book, thus, is multidisciplinary and includes contributions to areas such as sustainable agriculture, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and smart communities, as well as groundbreaking work on skills development and ICT education. Highlighting the variety of research activities and their outcomes, this book offers a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in the fields of sustainable resilience development.

Plasmonic nanoparticles are a special type of metallic nanoparticles that has received great interest due to their enhanced optical and electromagnetic properties and their superior capacity to convert photon energy into heat for selective photothermal therapy at the nanoscale level.

Landraces possess a very large genetic base in population structure and are dynamic populations of cultivated plants with historical origin, distinct identity, and without any formal crop improvement.

This is a book on optimal control problems (OCPs) for partial differential equations (PDEs) that evolved from a series of courses taught by the authors in the last few years at Politecnico di Milano, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

This volume is dedicated to Hiroakira Ono life¿s work on substructural logics. Chapters, written by well-established academics, cover topics related to universal algebra, algebraic logic and the Full Lambek calculus; the book includes a short biography about Hiroakira Ono. The book starts with detailed surveys on universal algebra, abstract algebraic logic, topological dualities, and connections to computer science.It further contains specialised contributions on connections to formal languages (recognizability in residuated lattices and connections to the finite embedding property), covering systems for modal substructural logics, results on the existence and disjunction properties and finally a study of conservativity of expansions. This book will be primarily of interest to researchers working in algebraic and non-classical logic.

Lyapunov methods have been and are still one of the main tools to analyze the stability properties of dynamical systems. As a final result, ideas combining control Lyapunov and control Chetaev functions to simultaneously guarantee stability, i.e., convergence, and instability, i.e., avoidance, are outlined.

This book proposes some novel approaches for finding unmanned aerial vehicle trajectories to reach targets with unknown location in minimum time.

This book presents a comprehensive study covering the design and application of microwave sensors for glucose concentration detection, with a special focus on glucose concentration tracking in watery and biological solutions.

This book examines key issues in gender equality and corporate social responsibility in Japan. Legal compliance, the business case and social regulation are examined as driving factors for enhancing gender equality in corporations.

This richly illustrated book describes statistical extreme value theory for the quantification of natural hazards, such as strong winds, floods and rainfall, and discusses an interdisciplinary approach to allow the theoretical methods to be applied. The approach consists of a number of steps: data selection and correction, non-stationary theory (to account for trends due to climate change), and selecting appropriate estimation techniques based on both decision-theoretic features (e.g., Bayesian theory), empirical robustness and a valid treatment of uncertainties. It also examines and critically reviews alternative approaches based on stochastic and dynamic numerical models, as well as recently emerging data analysis issues and presents large-scale, multidisciplinary, state-of-the-art case studies. Intended for all those with a basic knowledge of statistical methods interested in the quantification of natural hazards, the book is also a valuable resource for engineers conducting risk analyses in collaboration with scientists from other fields (such as hydrologists, meteorologists, climatologists).

This thesis explores two distinct applications of laser spectroscopy: the study of nuclear ground state properties, and element selective radioactive ion beam production. It also presents the methods and results of an investigation into isotope shifts in the mercury isotopic chain. These Resonance Ionization Laser Ion Source (RILIS) developments are detailed, together with an RILIS ionization scheme that allowed laser ionized ion beams of chromium, germanium, radium and tellurium to be generated at the Isotope Mass Separator On-Line (ISOLDE) facility. A combination of laser spectroscopy with decay spectroscopy and mass spectrometry unambiguously demonstrated a cessation of the extreme shape staggering first observed in the 1970s and revealed the characteristic kink at the crossing of the N=126 shell closure. A series of RILIS developments were required to facilitate this experiment, including mercury ¿ionization scheme¿ development and the coupling of the RILIS with an arc discharge ion source. Laser spectroscopy has since become a powerful tool for nuclear physics and the Resonance Ionization Laser Ion Source (RILIS), of the ISOLDE facility at CERN, is a prime example. Highlighting important advances in this field, the thesis offers a unique and revealing resource.

This thesis presents several important aspects of the plasma dynamics in extremely high intensity electromagnetic fields when quantum electrodynamics effects have to be taken into account.

Merging notions from passivity theory and network optimization, it describes a novel network optimization approach that can be applied to the synthesis of controllers for diffusively-coupled networks of passive (or passivity-short) dynamical systems.

The purpose of this book is to study the association of corporate environmental responsibility (CER) with financial performance, capital structure, innovative activities, corporate risk, working capital management and accounting quality.

This book is the first in the world to provide a cross-national, comparative exploration of omnibus legislation.

The contents combine data-driven solutions with qualitative management frameworks for the strategic optimization of international manufacturing networks.In the first part, the book addresses the foundation of manufacturing network management and further describes the St. Gallen Operational Excellence approaches to manage plant performance.

This book analyses and quantifies how and where energy and water are consumed by the ceramic sanitary-ware industry and provides solutions as to how to reduce this.

This book is aimed at description of recent progress in radiative transfer, atmospheric remote sensing, snow optics, and light scattering. Light scattering/ radiative transfer and atmospheric optics research community will greatly benefit from the publication of this book.

This new edition captures the advances made in the field of evolutionary systems biology since the publication of the first edition.

This book shows how Industry 4.0 is a strategic approach for integrating advanced control systems with Internet technology enabling communication between people, products and complex systems. It includes processes such as machining features, machining knowledge, execution control, operation planning, machine tool selection and cutting tool.

This book addresses some of the challenges suffered by the well-known and robust sliding-mode control paradigm. The authors show how the fusion of fuzzy systems with sliding-mode controllers can alleviate some of these problems and promote applicability.Fuzzy systems used as soft switches eliminate high-frequency signal oscillations and can substantially lower the noise sensitivity of sliding-mode controllers. The amount of a priori knowledge required concerning the nominal structure and parameters of a nonlinear system is also shown to be much reduced by exploiting the general function-approximation property of fuzzy systems so as to use them as identifiers. The main features of this book include:¿ a review of various existing structures of sliding-mode fuzzy control;¿ a guide to the fundamental mathematics of sliding-mode fuzzy controllers and their stability analysis;¿ state-of-the-art procedures for the design of a sliding-mode fuzzy controller;¿ source codes including MATLAB® and Simulink® codes illustrating the simulation of these controllers, particularly the adaptive controllers;¿ a short bibliography for each chapter for readers interested in learning more on a particular subject; and¿ illustrative examples and simulation results to support the main claims made in the text.Academic researchers and graduate students interested in the control of nonlinear systems and particularly those working in sliding-mode controller design will find this book a valuable source of comparative information on existing controllers and ideas for the development of new ones.

This book addresses the status quo of Corporate Social Responsibility practices and their development since 2008. The book reports on an international set of cases and case studies on how CSR is practiced at business and organizations in various countries.

This book reviews the most significant advances in concepts, methods, and applications of quantum systems in a broad variety of problems in modern chemistry, physics, and biology. In particular, it discusses atomic, molecular, and solid structure, dynamics and spectroscopy, relativistic and correlation effects in quantum chemistry, topics of computational chemistry, physics and biology, as well as applications of theoretical chemistry and physics in advanced molecular and nano-materials and biochemical systems.The book contains peer-reviewed contributions written by leading experts in the fields and based on the presentations given at the Twenty-Fourth International Workshop on Quantum Systems in Chemistry, Physics, and Biology held in Odessa, Ukraine, in August 2019.This book is aimed at advanced graduate students, academics, and researchers, both in university and corporation laboratories, interested in state-of-the-art and novel trends in quantum chemistry, physics, biology, and their applications.

Fungi are an understudied, biotechnologically valuable group of organisms. Due to their immense range of habitats, and the consequent need to compete against a diverse array of other fungi, bacteria, and animals, fungi have developed numerous survival mechanisms. However, besides their major basic positive role in the cycling of minerals, organic matter and mobilizing insoluble nutrients, fungi have other beneficial impacts: they are considered good sources of food and active agents for a number of industrial processes involving fermentation mechanisms as in the bread, wine and beer industry. A number of fungi also produce biologically important metabolites such as enzymes, vitamins, antibiotics and several products of important pharmaceutical use; still others are involved in the production of single cell proteins. The economic value of these marked positive activities has been estimated as approximating to trillions of US dollars. The unique attributes of fungi thus herald great promise for their application in biotechnology and industry. Since ancient Egyptians mentioned in their medical prescriptions how they can use green molds in curing wounds as the obvious historical uses of penicillin, fungi can be grown with relative ease, making production at scale viable. The search for fungal biodiversity, and the construction of a living fungi collection, both have incredible economic potential in locating organisms with novel industrial uses that will lead to novel products. Fungi have provided the world with penicillin, lovastatin, and other globally significant medicines, and they remain an untapped resource with enormous industrial potential.Volume 1 of Industrially Important Fungi for Sustainable Development provides an overview to understanding fungal diversity from diverse habitats and their industrial application for future sustainability. It encompasses current advanced knowledge of fungal communities and their potential biotechnological applications in industry and allied sectors. The book will be useful to scientists, researchers, and students of microbiology, biotechnology, agriculture, molecular biology, and environmental biology.

Wrapped into a robust statistical framework to account for correlations, this methodology is employed to analyse individual stars, multiple systems, and clusters alike to demonstrate that chemical mixing has dramatic impact on stellar structure and evolution.

This volume gathers the latest advances, innovations, and applications in the field of structural health monitoring (SHM) and more broadly in the fields of smart materials and intelligent systems.

This book presents the proceedings of the Joint Conference of the Asian Council on Ergonomics and Design and Southeast Asian Network of Ergonomics Societies (ACED SEANES), held on December 2-4, 2020.